An interim report published by the High Pay Commission, backed by Compass, the left-of-centre think tank, warns that if current trends continue we will soon return to levels of income inequality not seen since Victorian times. This comes as no great surprise. On many occasions recently, I have woken up to the latest announcements by the Conservative-led coalition and thought we were already there.
Back at the tail-end of the 19th century, when only the rich could dream of going to university, the Prime Minister of the day dressed in tails to fawn over the royal family, and an underclass existed to bolster the profits of the ruling class in exchange for a bowl of gruel and a pat on the back.
If the Government gets its way on National Health Service reforms, we may even see a return to the days when only those who can afford it are able to see the doctor. If you’re unlucky enough not to have a paid job, you will be made to work for nothing under plans published by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
Margaret Thatcher called this ideologically-driven nostalgia for an age that was frankly grim for most people born into it “rolling back the state”. David Cameron and George Osborne have plumped for the Big Society. For the vulnerable who face a very real drop in security, it matters not a hoot what you call it. Any return to an age of laissez-faire capitalism and self-reliance will only help those best placed to help themselves.
It’s little better than a Poor Law for the 21st century. Although nowadays it seems you no longer have the right to be simply be poor. Instead you must earn your place among the deserving poor.
If you doubt that Victorian England, a nation of sweat shops, workhouses and grim industrialisation that benefited only the rich, is what modern-day Tories hanker for, consider the attitude of Education Secretary Michael Gove. He once said: “For some of us, Victorian costume dramas are not merely agreeable ways to while away Sunday evening, but enactments of our inner fantasies. I don’t think there has been a better time in our history.”
This surprises me. Think how much easier Gove’s job would be if his Victorian idols had not insisted on universal education, at least for boys. Billions of pounds saved at a stroke.
In fact the Tory Party is keen to prescribe a romantic – well, moneyed – view of Victoriana as a cure for most modern-day ills. Whether dealing with out of control teens (beat ’em and bang ’em up) single mothers (take their benefits away, that’ll teach ’em) or the misuse of drugs (laudanum anyone?), their refusal to live in a post-Beveridge society beggars belief. Pretty soon it’ll be compulsory to don a frock coat before indulging in hanky-panky with our (married) partners.
Extraordinarily, Universities Minister David Willetts thinks he has identified the problem, if not the solution, to growing inequality. Bloody women. Or, in order not to misquote the minister, “feminism”. According to Willetts in a speech last month, feminism is “the biggest single factor in the decline in social mobility since the 1980s”. Perhaps he meant the 1880s.
“Feminism has trumped egalitarianism”, added Willetts with a perfectly straight face. One of the things which happened over this period was that the entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that, with the expansion of education in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the first beneficiaries were the “daughters of middle-class families”, whom Willetts, added, indulged in “assortative mating” with equally well-educated men. “It was this transformation of opportunities for women which ended up magnifying social divides rather than narrowing them.”
Good God. Next Conservatives will be reneging on universal suffrage and blaming penny dreadfuls for filling young ladies’ heads with nonsense. Who ever said two brains are better than one?
There was no muscular denunciation of Willetts’ views from the equalities minister, Liberal Democrat MP, Lynne Featherstone. Presumably she was at home peeling carrots while listening to Woman’s Hour on the wireless.
While Labour may have failed to close the income inequality gap, at least it lifted many children out of poverty through the progressive use of tax credits and the Child Trust Fund.
The Tories’ ideological assault on the welfare state and its dismissal of universal benefits is seen by the party as a moral end in itself. And that is nothing less than immoral.
In the 19th century, out-of-touch Tories were rescued from political oblivion by one nation Tory Benjamin Disraeli. In Sybil, his novel published in 1845, Disraeli offered this account of contemporary England. “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different foods, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
