A Year Of Living Joblessly

This posting started out being entitled 'Joining The Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed' to mark my year without a full-time job.  However, incredibly I have been offered a job which starts today, 12 months to the day from when I was laid off by my previous employer.  Whilst I have been incredibly fortunate, after 80 job applications and 29 interviews to have escaped unemployment (for now) and stop the sale of my house, I still feel it is worthwhile reflecting on the impact being unemployed for longer than all the combined previous periods of joblessness in my life has had on me.

The latest figures I can find for long-term unemployed people, i.e. those without work for 12 months or more, date back to summer 2010, so with the recession having continued since then, I imagine they are higher.  The figure in July 2010 was 787,000 people, with 50% of unemployed people over the age of 50 falling into this category, the suggestion being that they will never work again.  I have heard that current figures are over 900,000 people, though cannot find hard data to support that.   In addition, it is claimed possibly millions of people are in part-time work as they cannot get a full-time job and so there is also a category of long-term 'underemployed' who are not able to contribute as much to the economy as they could and would like to do.

Anyway, as of today, I suppose I can count as long-term unemployed.  The last time I had a full-time job was 12 months ago.  Strictly I suppose I am not counted because I worked for a couple of days per week for a period of six weeks around the start of 2011.  However, it did nothing much to raise my household income.  I guess I will also not count because I am not claiming jobseekers' allowance.  I exhausted my contributions based payments back in December 2010 and because the woman who lives in my house runs her own business and works more than 24 hours per week, I am excluded from claiming incomes-based jobseekers' allowance.  It is for reasons like this that there is always a discrepancy between the number of people claiming jobseekers' allowance, currently around 1.45 million and the actual number of unemployed people, now 2.48 million, according to BBC figures.  This is because benefits tend to look at the household income so an unemployed husband/wife (or co-resident lumped into that category) or grown-up child living in a house with a man or woman working will often not be entitled to any benefit, but still be without work.  If it had not been for HM Revenue and Customs realising that they had made a vast mistake in the tax I had paid, then by now I would have had my house repossessed and guess I would be begging friends to sleep on their floor.  I certainly count myself one of the lucky ones.

What does it signify being long-term unemployed?  Well, the first thing seems to be that people feel free to treat you as if you are feckless or lazy or an idiot.  As has been discussed before on this blog, I think this varies depending on the area you live in, as in areas of high unemployment, it has to be a fact of life for lots of people.  Living in southern England where the recession is only steadily biting, and especially in a district where most residents seem to be self-employed, the Thatcherite attitude that you are only unemployed because you want to be, persists.  Without any knowledge of the vacancies available or what qualifications you need to fill them  people insist that there is work.  As I know from trying to get jobs in local shops, these days it is not an issue of being qualified but having a whole array of industry-specific qualifications whether to work in a baker's or as a travel agent or an estate agent.  With unemployment high there are always lots of people around that have such qualifications that I do not have and so I got knocked out of the running at the application phase, especially these days when so much recruitment is about matching requirements to the applicant's statements as the first phase.  If you do not have a 100% match then you stand no chance.  So you get told that there is work and then bewildered questions about what you are doing wrong turn quickly to condemning you for being flawed in some major way.

Though less common than it used to be, there often comes the suggestion of setting up your own business.  Given that we are in a recession and established businesses are folding every day and 50% of new businesses collapse within 6 months, I do not see this as an escape from unemployment, just a way to quickly lose whatever money you may have remaining.  In addition, if we were all budding entrepreneurs, would we not all be doing it anyway?  As programmes like 'Dragon's Den' show, even many people who think they are entrepreneurs are often sadly deluded and many more people get rejected even on that show, than win funding.  Why should it be any different in real life?  The laziness comes in the assumption that that is the answer for everyone, when in fact it is only the answer for a small minority and then only with luck rather than skill.

Ironically, whilst long-term unemployment is usually seen as being your fault, people also treat it like an infectious disease.  Unemployment defines my life as it has for the past 12 months.  I go nowhere, I talk to few people, so being out of work and applying for work are the key elements of my life.  Yet the moment you start talking about them, you get the 'I don't want to hear that' attitude, almost as if it is a contagion that through talking you will somehow blight that person's job.  This myth is one the government and employers like to perpetuate, that unemployment is the consequence of your personal actions.  If you have been dismissed for inappropriate behaviour, then, yes, that is acceptable.  However, very many unemployed people have been made redundant as a result of lay-offs affecting hundreds if not thousands of people.

We have minimal control over our working lives these days.  Unless we can go back in time and change which career path we went down.  When I started in my industry back in 1994 it was seen as a secure one which was going through a period of boom and now it is in crisis.  How could I have predicted in 1994 that instead I should have been taking travel agents' qualifications so I could still get a job in 2011? 

People say 'save'.  I have done this throughout my life.  I used up my first batch of savings covering my mortgage while unemployed for five months in 2009.  I have now used up my redundancy package and tax rebate paying it in 2010/11.  Of course, I had mortgage protection, but it does not apply if you are not claiming unemployment benefit and you cannot claim that if someone in your house works for more than 24 hours or you have been in fixed-term contract work.  I should have saved the premiums on paying for that insurance.  If I had got a job just 3 months after being unemployed or even 6 months, then I would be comfortably off and ready for when the next crisis hit.  We are only at the start of the government-augmented recession, we have years of this to go.  It took from 1979 to 1994 before the economy recovered last time, so on a tight estimate we have about until 2023 before we can breathe easily in the UK, perhaps longer given how severe Cameron has been compared to Thatcher in the damage he is intentionally doing to the economy for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons.  However, all that money is now gone, so next time I lose my job it is going to be very nasty.

Of course, I have not been lazy. I have now applied for 80 jobs which works out at 1.5 applications per week, below the level of 2 per week that the Department for Work and Pensions insists on. However, that average does not reflect the seasonal ebb and flow of vacancies and that in some weeks I have applied for 6 vacancies and in others none. In addition, applying for jobs these days is not just about sending in your CV. On average I write 5000 words per application, with some as long as 10,000 words. The longest, with 51 requirements, took me 8 hours to complete. In addition, as so many applications are done on unstable online application forms, I have probably re-typed many thousands of words again when the system has crashed and lost all that I have input. I lost two hours' worth of work last month because they system decided to drop out. Another even timed me out, after three minutes, before I had time to set my password for the application, then would not let me access or delete or replace the account which only had my name and address on. When I emailed the company I was told that a lot of people had had a problem with the online application. Why not get it fixed then?

I estimate I have written 400,000 words in applications, enough for four doctoral theses or a series of novels (I used to calculate things on the basis of an Agatha Christie novel, they were 60,000 words long, but these days they seem very short, so probably 120,000 is closer to the average). Of course, a lot of it is repetitive stuff and I still have no idea why companies want to know which 'O' levels I got in the 1980s, what grade I got for each of them and the precise day (not just the month or year, but the actual day) on which I was awarded the qualification. What difference does it make if I got a B or C in Chemistry 'O' level on 29th June 1984 for whether I am a good office manager or not?

I have had 29 interviews which works out at more than one every single fortnight.  Of course, they have not been spread out evenly and things like Christmas, Easter and the run of bank holidays, means they have been ill-distributed; on 4 occasions I have had 2 on the same day.  I have applied for jobs ranging from £19,000-£54,000, meaning, in fact my life could have gone down very different paths if I had got a job from one extreme or the other.  The same applies to where I will end up living.  The geographical bounds of my applications are now Southampton-Swansea-Edinburgh-Colchester, an area which covers a large chunk of the UK's population and economic activity.  In southern England, of course, it is distorted because a lot of the jobs in a particular circumference are actually in France and some UK employers seem reluctant to accept applicants from other areas.  One employer in Hertfordshire actually said to me 'we've never employed anyone from the other side of the M25' as if it was an iron curtain.  It is bitterly ironic when the phrase 'get on your bike' has returned to attack the unemployed with, you find employers who have a difficulty envisaging employing people who live elsewhere even within the South-East region.  Of course, being unemployed, you cannot be picky, you know you have to be willing to go anywhere and rent a shitty room in a house that you have had to compete with six others to secure in order to get work.  Quality of life does not even come near the equation.

The biggest problem for me being long-term unemployed is the fear.  Having already lost my house and the career I once had, I worry how much longer this can go on and how much worse it can get.  Employers are reluctant to take on the long-term unemployed as if they have succumbed to their disease and are now incurable of all the bad habits that unemployment instills in people.  They do not understand that we are so desperate we are willing to work for poverty wages, wherever they choose and dare not question whatever outrageous demands they may make.  That is the impact of 12 months' lashing with the whip of unemployment.  I am doubly cursed now because I am over 40 too.  An article recently said employers see the over-40s as lacking energy and being fixed in their ways.  This is ridiculous, I have had to adjust so many times in my life, I have worked for four different employers at times, that I am honed in the art of being flexible and adjusting the work changes.  As for energy, I have never rolled in hung over like many in their 20s, I do not spend time texting my friends or updating Facebook pages, in terms of productivity I will be better than someone 20 years younger.  However, of course, such prejudices are not challenged and in fact as attacks on feminism have shown, in many ways, prejudice in terms of what you are is again acceptable, just as David Cameron and his supporters have desired.

Stretching out in front of me is an ongoing path of uncertainty.  Will I still be unemployed this time next year?  How much poorer can I get?  I know there will be loads of disappointment.  I have been rejected 28 times from interviews and another 51 times been told I was not even good enough to get there.  Every piece of feedback seems to contradict the one before.  Just recently I was told that I did not come across as sufficiently sympathetic to workers when apparently being overly-sympathetic was criticised in my last job.  Even now with work, nothing seems certain.  I have been incredibly lucky, but will always remain fearful that it will be short term.  I was laid off from my old job only 7 months after being appointed to it.

I am both weary of how long having no job went on for with no succees and retain a fear that this is the pattern my life will hold in the future especially as I progress further into middle age.  No-one seems able to offer practical help, they just seemed to be able to harangue me or avoid me.  Joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed does not permit access to a fraternity, rather you simply become classified a pariah.  Of course, I am grateful that I am now in a job, but I know that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in the UK in even worse situations with even less hope than me and I mourn for that and the long-term damage it is doing to the UK.

Are Britons Only Socialist in Times of Crisis?

Many people argue that the British population is inherently conservative and for most of the time, Conservative, i.e. supporting the policies of the Conservative Party.  I suppose that most people who are generally comfortably off, no matter where they live have a tendency not to want that disrupted and to keep out others from enjoying what they and their families have.  It is a trend even in states such as China, which is Communist and founded on revolution and in which a lot of things still need to change, let alone countries, that whilst suffering from a recession currently, are far better off than those countries where the bulk of the world's population lives.  Recently I have noted people who whilst they want to reduce pressure or upset for themselves actually want other people to suffer more 'for their own good'.  Of course, the standard thing about pressurising unemployed people to take low-paid work and uproot and move right across the country or face punishment have been wheeled out again as the level of unemployment has risen.  However, I have encountered people saying Sweden is now lagging because its policies of equality means there is no 'edge' to drive people to work harder.  These people love having the whip cracked as long as it is on other people not themselves.

You might ask, well, 'what has this to do with Socialism?'  You may ask 'what is Socialism, anyway?'  It is a term that even the Labour Party dropped more than a decade ago.  The wealthy actor, Alan Cummings, when interviewed recently listed it as the extinct thing he would like see revived.  A lot of people equate it with Communism and they think that died the day the Berlin Wall was knocked down in 1989.  Of course, saying all Socialists are Communists is like saying all Conservatives are Fascists: inaccurate and ignorant of how the political spectrum works.  Of course, that was how many people have liked it.  In particular, Margaret Thatcher (British prime minister 1979-90), who, on more than one occasion said she wanted the elimination of a spectrum of political parties and preferred to have simply two very close to each other as is the case in the USA, often equated not only Socialism but the Labour Party (which often had more Liberal than Socialist policies) with the Communist.  In that way she could portray them as a the 'fifth column' or 'the enemy within', in league with the USSR to undermine democracy in the UK during the Cold War.  Of course, Socialists are passionate defenders of democracy as are most Conservatives.

What is Socialism? Well, the key word is 'social', it is a political philosophy which sees the benefit of the whole of society as the key driving force.  Of course, Margaret Thatcher argued that there was 'no such thing as society' and emphasised that it was individuals' desires and units no greater than families who should drive what happened politically and economically.  Socialism argues that people are different, they have different needs and abilities but they should be looked after when they cannot look after themselves (such as when ill, pregnant, unemployed or elderly) but also that they have responsibilities to the rest of the community and that whilst they are free to make their own way in the world and make profits (this is crucially where Socialism differs from Communism) they should not do so by exploiting people whether in their own country or in other countries.  This means employers should pay decent wages, have reasonable working hours and conditions and listen to the people that they are employing.  A key objective of Socialism is that everyone has equal opportunity, whether it is in terms of access to health care or education or to get on in their lives.  Vitally Socialism is against people being barred from certain jobs or other opportunities simply because of what social class they come, what gender, age or ethnicity they are.  In the 1960s this approach, seen with the creation of numerous new universities to allow people greater opportunity to go into higher education, was condemned as 'meritocracy', i.e. that people with ability could succeed.  Of course, this has been turned around from a negative term to a positive one.  As I have noted regularly on this blog since the 1980s we have moved too far away from a meritocracy to too many people simply getting good positions because of what family they were born into or which elite school they attended.  Opportunity is now less than it was thirty years ago.

A lot of Socialist principles overlap with Liberal ones and probably the most Socialist governments in British history, those under Clement Attlee 1945-51 actually pursued a Liberal policy.  Rather than having a controlled economy in line with what Socialism advocates, after 1948 they used Liberal Keynesian approaches, manipulating rather than directing the economy, notably through shifting interest rates.  In terms of health and social welfare, though they created the National Health Service, they permitted private, fee-taking doctors to continue practising and rather than funding a lot of health and social welfare from direct taxation as you would expect a Socialist government to do, they widened welfare insurance, which had been introduced in the 1910s and created National Insurance in line with what the Liberal, William Beveridge had advised during the war.  The idea is that you pay into national insurance as you would any insurance so that you build up a fund that you can draw upon when you need it, for example, when ill or elderly or out of work.  Of course, as with all insurance, some people never make a claim whereas others claim often, but that reflects the diverse needs of our society and that is not something we should try to restrain.

The most Socialist element was nationalisation of key sectors of British industry.  The focus was on the 'commanding heights', i.e. those sectors of the economy that fed through into many others.  Thus, coal mining and the railways were nationalised.  The fact that these industries had been run poorly or inefficiently before was a good reason for the state to take over.  Gas extraction and provision; electricity generation; water supply; coach transport; airlines; freighting and later steel manufacture were all nationalised; though some steps, such as with airlines had been taken before the war.  Other countries, notably France did the same kind of thing.  The British, however, even with nationalisation, tempered Socialism with Liberalism and had a very 'arms length' control by the state of these industries and did not direct them in the ways they should stimulate the economy the way that even right-wing governments in France did especially with the largest state-owned company in France, Electricite de France (now EDF Energy).  Often, as with the example of gas and water supply what we saw in the UK was really just grand 'muncipalisation'.  Many suppliers had been established by city councils in the 19th century and the regionalised approach to gas and water supply (and some water regions, such as City of York, were very small) was continuing this 19th century approach rather than moving to a really Socialist method. 

In later years nationalisation in the UK was not used as a way to try to stimulate the economy but rather to bail out failing companies such as Rolls Royce in 1971 (nationalised by Edward Heath's Conservative Government), British Leyland car manufacturers in 1976 and British Aerospace made up of a number of aeronautical manufacturing companies and British Shipbuilders, the same for that industry, in 1977.  It is unsurprising that nationalised industries that had failed continued to suffer but it meant that nationalisation was now seen as a failed economic policy and this was at the time when New Right ideas were rising both in the USA and the UK emphasising the reduction of all state control or even regulations and clearly nationalised industries were an anathema to such thinking (notably the economic viewpoint held by Margaret Thatcher).  Ironically Thatcher's government nationalised collapsed chemical company, Johnson Matthey in 1984. 

Despite the emphasis on nationalised industries the state sector was never larger than 20% of the economy compared to 90%+ in Communist countries.  In the 1980s and 1990s the nationalised industries were sold off by the government which brought revenue to the state.  The idea was ownership would be held by numerous small shareholders but generally they were bought out by large companies and increasingly ones from abroad.  Whilst there have been regulators of these former nationalised industries control over prices and profits and trying to keep up quality has not really worked; many have a near monopoly and as has been seen in the past couple of years attempts by government to stop them charging high prices and providing poor service have failed.

Conservative propaganda about Socialism has always been pretty successful.  In 1992, Labour did not win the election after a successful campaign arguing that its policies would lead to higher taxation, a view that even Labour supporters seem to come to believe.  In the 1950s the Conservatives argued that Labour's nationalisation was akin to a command economy and though Winston Churchill shot himself in the foot in 1945 likening the Labour approach to the Gestapo by the 1950s the Conservatives were successful in portraying themselves as the party of freedom against Labour's restraint and austerity.  In the late 1940s, of course, the public had been used to both restraint and authority so that argument had little impact.  In addition, Labour does seem to offer solutions to ingrained problems and in 1945 the public had been really voting on the problems of 1931 rather than the post-war era.

The reason why Tony Blair was so focused on manipulating the media was because he knew from history how long it had been manipulated against anything Labour had done.  However, he went so far in making the Labour Party seem acceptable to the media that he sheared it of the bulk of its Socialist principles.  Clause 4, the part of the Labour Party constitution which advocated nationalisation, was scrapped in 1994.  On coming to power in 1997, Labour in fact went further than the Conservative governments by denationalising the Bank of England and so giving up even Keynesian control over interest rates.  I believe that Tony Blair was neither a Socialist or really a Conservative, he was a Blairite and created a personal party out of the shell of the Labour Party; using Christian Democrat principles as the covered, but really based on his own ambitions and simply what he felt was 'right'.  This is why people feel Socialism is dead in Britain, but in effect we probably have not even seen a mildly Socialist government in Britain at least since 1976 if not since 1970 and that is the way company bosses like it.

The key problem for Labour, aside from the fact that the financial sector always tries to make a run on the pound and destabilise the economy, in fear of what constraints they will be put under, is that trade unions see an opportunity to get the deals that they have battled to achieve under a Conservative government.  Now, as in 1978/9, they are busily undermining the Labour government with demands and strikes that make it appear to voters, ironically most of whom will be workers, that the government has no control.  Of course, part of the problem is that no British government has been able to tackle the greed and huge profits of those who run business, so it is unsurprising that workers want more.  If the utility companies had been compelled to pay a windfall tax and bankers to limit their vast bonuses, ironically I think we would be seeing less industrial action.

Anyway, having cantered through Socialism, you might be thinking why is that relevant now?  Well, it is my suggestion that the British population while Conservative most of the time, turns to Socialism when things are going wrong.  In 1945 Socialism was seen as the way to avoid a return to the Depression of the 1930s and the economic slump that had followed the First World War.  In 1964 Socialism was seen as the way to stop Britain's industrial stagnation, unwillingness to modernise and thus its slipping competitiveness from worsening.  In 1974 Socialism was seen as a way to heal the sharp rifts in society and especially in industrial relations.  Of course, there has always been ambivalence as the elections of 1951, 1964 and 1974 showed and the wealthy always pull out the stops to prevent the advent of a truly Socialist government.  This is one reason why Gordon Brown who, unlike Blair, is a Labour leader, has come under sustained media attack throughout his term in office.  However, it is clear that the British public is drifting back in a Socialist direction once more.

Of course, it is not pure, unadulterated Socialism, there are other trends such as blaming problems of immigrants, which are an anathema to Socialism but almost seem to have become a norm in much discussion.  However, adherence to the National Health Service and a national innoculation programme to combat swine flu is one characteristic of a more Socialist outlook. People do not seem to realise that in the USA they would have to have health insurance for things they currently get for free and once they were elderly they would find it difficult to get cover.  Most likely they would be paying for innoculations.   I know prescription charges have risen but no-one pays for innoculation and the elderly and people like me with a lifelong condition, diabetes, who need constant medicines, do no pay.

There are, in fact, demands that the NHS expands it role and does more to provide treatment for the elderly, and for example, one-to-one care for premature babies.  Such things are costly and perhaps people are unwilling to tolerate the tax to pay for these.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whilst re-inforcing pride in the military among the British population, are seen increasingly as hopeless and people are calling for an exit.  The Conservatives argue that Labour has not provided the military with the equipment it needs, something I agree has been a problem, but how does anyone expect David Cameron with all his emphasis on cutting public spending to be able to afford to send even one more helicopter to Helmand province? 

The key area where we are seeing a return of Socialism is, ironically, in terms of the previously most controversial aspect of the ethos, nationalisation.  We now have a larger nationalised sector in the UK than at any time since about 1986.  The British government took over the Docklands Light Railway in 1997 and effectively the railway track of Britain is run by Network Rail a company without shareholders but underwritten by the government.  In 2008 Northern Rock building society and the mortgage lending part of Bradford & Bingley building society were nationalised. The government took over 60% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and 40% of the HBOS-Lloyds-TSB banking conglomerate giving it a large slice of the British banking sector, especially in mortgage-lending which has always been a key element in shaping the British economy.

It is unlikely that even Clement Attlee would have been able to control such a large aspect of the financial sector.  The closest we came was when Roy Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour Party said around the time of the 1992 election that the investment group 3i would be nationalised under a Labout Government to form the basis of state investment in private industry.  The uproar was such that the idea seems to have been entirely forgotten almost immediately.  Interestingly, this year, finally, the government is compelling credit card companies to raise the minimum repayment level on the amount people owe.  This should have come in at least 10 or 15 years ago and could have restrained some of the overheated consumption and massive debt that amounted during the late 1990s and early 2000s that has distorted the economy in an unhealthy way.

All of these steps have been taken with no dismay from the general public.  When there is a crisis they expect the government to step in and sort it all out for them.  The rest of the time they whine about over-regulation, the 'nanny state', that taxes are intolerable and so on, not realising that lack of regulation has led to much of the crisis we are now in and that expensive bail-outs can only be funded by taxes.  Again nationalisation, which seems such a dirty word in most years, is seen as the solution.  Again, however, as in the 1970s, it is being used to catch falling businesses.  This is the wrong way to approach the economy.  Northern Rock should have been nationalised before it started its mad approach to mortgage lending.  I would have taken it over in 2005 at the latest and then, rather than it being a drag on the British economy it could have been used to stabilise house prices and provide stimulus to new business. 

With the first £1002 train ticket for the journey from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in western Scotland, a distance of 2,720 Km (a round the world air ticket can be bought for £800 and you can travel from London to Zurich on the luxury Orient Express for £1000 or from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway - 5,806 Km for only £995) and most inter-city rail fare prices having trebled in the past 15 years, a period in which inflation has been below 3%, it seems apparent that if we want a mobile population using the greenest form of transport around, i.e. electric trains, then we need the whole rail system back in state control.  You find that the only people who praise the privatisation of the railways are people who never travel on trains.

So, are we seeing a Socialist conscience developing among the British population, wanting a tax on bankers' bonuses, limits on the pay of the wealthy, better value public transport and a health service expanding its scope combined with a tolerance, possibly even an enthusiasm for privatising what are now the controlling sectors of the British economy?  People would argue, as historian Corelli Barnett did in the 1980s that the British have become too used to the 'teat' of state intervention and would be traumatised to have it taken away from them and left to fend for themselves.  However, of course, with Thatcherite policies a great deal has been taken away and yet there are still billions of pounds of benefits that people who are entitled to them do not claim.  Britons are an independent people that still like to make their own way as best they can, despite all the propaganda about benefit swindlers and dole scroungers.  Ironically no-one goes after the tax defrauders who owe millions in total to the British economy but they have taken out to tax havens.  We need to go after these people and make them contribute the way I and the large bulk of ordinary British people do.  We have no choice about paying or not paying tax, so why should the wealthy get to make that choice?  Hopefully people are beginning to realise that only a tiny fraction of the population are ever going to win the lottery or set up a business we can sell for millions or become a pop star or some other kind of celebrity, so instead of thinking it is alright for the rich to get away without pulling their weight because one day we might be one of them, more of us need to make sure there are opportunities for a decent life for all.

The veteran Socialist politician Tony Benn often recounts when he was on a train that broke down and how it suddenly seemed as if people were becoming Socialist, sharing out the food and other supplies they had, working together to make the best of a bad situation.  When the train was running smoothly of course they did none of this.  People often refer back to the 'wartime spirit' when people supposedly collaborated in the way that Benn saw them do on that train.  Historian Nick Tiratsoo has shown that a lot of that was exaggerated and we know that 'outsiders', often Jews, were kept out of air raid shelters and whilst the bulk of the population was struggling to feed their families on rations, those who could afford to, could eat unrationed food in restaurants.  However, though it might have been exaggerated it does seem that, possibly counter to what you might expect, in crises Britons become less rather than more selfish.  It is a shame that they cannot maintain that attitude in the better times.  I know David Cameron thinks he will walk into being the latest Conservative prime minister but the recession has reawakened the dormant Socialist tendencies in the British population and if Labour appeals to those rather than trying to be a pale version of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party, it may win at the next election.

Are Thatcherite Attitudes Beginning to Fade?

I am not a regular reader of right-wing or tabloid newspapers, in fact I have little time for newspapers anyway as I drive around so much. When I lived in London I used to make a point of picking up newspapers of a different political slant to my own so that I was in touch with how other people saw the World. Travelling on the underground for two hours every day as I did, there were always abandoned newspapers around. Of course the bulk of the British population has always been conservative, and at times even Conservative, though even Margaret Thatcher only ever won a minority of the percentage of the votes, but because of the weird electoral system the UK has this often gave her a large majority of the seats in parliament. The bulk of the UK population is apolitical, often actually anti-political. However, this does not stop most people 'knowing what is right' and often having a far more right-wing list of policies (especially on capital punishment and immigration) than anyone in the Conservative Party would ever dare voice. As a campaign to encourage people to vote a couple of years ago, these people say 'I don't do politics', but in fact spend a lot of time ramming their political message down people's throats, yet because they see it as 'common sense' or 'simply what is right', they do not want it tarred with the brush of 'politics'. I always cringe when someone starts a sentence with 'I'm not a racist but ...' because you know a whole list of racist attitudes will follow.

The right-wing tabloid press, notably 'The Sun' and 'Daily Star' as well as the middle-ranking right-wing newspapers particularly 'Daily Mail' and 'Daily Express' have had an important role in shifting electoral behaviour especially in the 1980s-90s. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party he visited Rupert Murdoch who owns 'The Sun' and the higher-ranking right-wing newspaper, 'The Times' to win his backing before trying to win public support. He knew that Murdoch's scare campaigns especially about the level of taxation that Labour would introduce had severely undermined the party's electoral chances and most certainly lost them the 1992 election which it had, up to the end, appeared that they would win.

We are now in a different world, though politically not that different. The Blair Party, which effectively was what New Labour was, stuck carefully to the Thatcher Consensus, not altering the economic pattern of little public social housing and privatised utilities and transport. The only alteration in this was the minimum wage which was set at a pretty low level, so that even those bosses who whined about it, actually found their pay bill rise minimally and because of the stimulus to consumption in so many households in the UK, domestic demand rose for certain low cost items, notably food, cheap clothing and cheap electrical goods, especially mobile phones. Gordon Brown who built his economic reputation on economic prudence did not move radically from the Thatcherite/Blairite policy, but the economic crisis of late 2008 shook the whole system up. Thatcher would have just let unemployment rocket. As I noted last year, various employers were eager to see the return of the 'whip of unemployment' and their wishes have been granted. Ironically, however, the collapse of banks notably Northern Rock and HBOS led the state to nationalise banks on a scale that would have even startled Clement Attlee the Labour prime minister 1945-51 who oversaw nationalisation of about 20% of the UK economy following the Second World War.

Through the 1990s and 2000s there were complaints about the huge bonuses and large salaries that many bosses were awarding themselves but these tended to be short-lived complaints that led to nothing. The bulk of the UK population clung to the Thatcher illusion that 'everyone can be a millionaire, so everyone's got to try' even though the bulk of the wealthy were a very narrow slice from privileged backgrounds to start off with. The assumption that long persisted was that any constraint on money making was a bad thing. Such an attitude was still around until last year. Fortunately things have changed. People realise that if the state had not stepped in then their mortgage lender in many cases would have simply folded. We have not experienced the recall of debts in the UK in the way we know from the Depression era of the UK, but widespread repossession and forced sales because the bank had collapsed rather than because the borrower had defaulted, would have been an immense trauma in the UK, a country with a society that believes its whole economic stability is based on housing. The arrogant, persistent greed of leading bankers even when they have had to be baled out by the state has slowly penetrated the strong adherence to Thatcherite values.

With house repossessions reaching 40,000 in 2008 and expected to exceed 75,000 in 2009 people have a sense, in contrast to the 1980s, that this was not 'necessary' and actually that with less greed from leading bankers and companies, they could be retaining their houses. For once the blame is being aportioned properly. I think this is due, in part, to this shock coming after years of stability since the end of the last UK economic problems ending in about 1994. When mass unemployment hit in the early 1980s, people had already had a decade of seeing heavy industry finding it hard to adapt to the move to a service economy, which became the dominant form of industry in Britain from 1974 onwards. Combined with that they had seen the impact of rising oil prices and saw an easy scapegoat in the Arab oil-producing countries. The 'War on Terror' including the invasion of Iraq had no impact on the average UK citizen and certainly nothing even approaching the scale of the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market has done.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, as 'The Guardian' highlighted this week that the British public is slowly beginning to shake off the Thatcherite mindset, or at least question some of its easy assumptions. In the budget a new top rate of 50% tax was announced for people earning over £150,000 (€166,500; US$217,500). Currently we have 40% if you earn over £37,400 and 20% for income below that with a varying amount depending on your circumstances but around £6,300 which you can earn tax free. In Sir Geoffrey Howe's first budget in 1979 the standard level of tax was reduced from 33% to 30% and the upper rate from 83% to 60% but he raised VAT (Value Added Tax, tax on purchases) from between 8-12.5% to 15% and petrol duty from 45% to 60% to compensate. Of course the monetarists believed lower taxes would stimulate the economy, though by raising indirect taxes Howe probably helped to accelerate the onset of the 1980s recession by further reducing consumption, though he would have seen such steps as anti-inflationary and one thing monetarists loathe is inflation. So, the introduction of the 50% band is hardly 'a 70s-style raid' as the 'Daily Express' portrayed it nor 'a return to the politics of envy' as the 'Daily Mail' said.

Gordon Brown did try a 'windfall' tax last year on power companies, who as I noted at the time, were making ever larger profits simply by raising prices and blaming the rise in oil prices. The reduction in their charges were very slow and piecemeal when the oil price came down. However, Brown, possibly thinking back to the windfall tax of 1949 introduced by Sir Stafford Cripps. He was unable to pull it off. Cripps and the rest of the Attlee government found they were unable to shift British industry the extent to which the country needed it moved, but they certainly had greater power in altering the economy than Brown has. He was told bluntly that any such tax would simply be passed on to the consumers he was trying to help. Thatcher delivered all power over our energy and its price into the hands of wealthy business people most of whom are from outside the UK, and of course, the French government who own most of EDF.

What is interesting is that surveys show that the right-wing press have got it wrong. You have to be well over 40 to even have a dim memory of the 1970s and a lot has happened in the economy since then. Of course business people always complain tax is too high having no memory for when it was much higher and yet businesses still prospered. There have always been very rich people in the UK even when taxes were far higher than now. Greed persists. However, the public tolerance of it seems to be waning and even readers of the right-wing newspapers that have condemned this move, are actually behind it. To some degree people see it as a fair punitive measure. The economic historian E.P. Thompson (1924-93) despite being a Marxist noted that through history the British people have not sought revolution, but the 'moral economy', i.e. what they see as 'fairness' in terms of prices and pay. He shows examples of bread riots in which the people did not take the bread home and eat it, but set up stalls to sell the looted bread at a fair price. Despite Thatcherism, this basic attitude continues even though it is hidden among all the extreme right-wing complaints about immigrants being to blame for everything. The other thing is how far away the wealthy and ultra-wealthy are from the general public.

Back in 2003, 'The Times' defined a 'Middle Englander' also known as the British yeomanry, and other such phrases as someone earning £60,000 (€66,600; US$87,000 at current exchange rates) per year. Interestingly, 80% of the UK population earns less than the average annual salary which is now around £26,000 (€28,800; US$37,700) the average in London is about £31,000 and that is the highest paid area of the UK. For single people (many of whom are retired), the average is only £16,000 (10.6% of the salary that will get this new level of tax). So this suggests that the 'middle' ranked person of 'The Times' is actually in an elite of around a sixth or seventh of the population. I earn £39,000 now, so I am in the elite of a fifth of the population, but I end the month with £100 in my bank account, minimal savings, a 12-year old car and will probably have my 3-bedroomed semi-detached house repossessed when I am made redundant this Summer. So, even among the broader elite, economic times are hard. There are 350,000 people in the UK earning over £150,000, so it is unsurprising that the 'Daily Mail' has been told despite all its whining that there is not going to be a strong Conservative Party response to the new tax band, though that does not stop buffoons like Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London being indignant about it.

For all the assumptions that the Conservatives are easily going to win the next election, they ought to be careful no to be seen as too associated with big business and greedy bankers and opposing the 'fair' penalties imposed on them. I think the assumption of Labour's fall is very lazy and has been being talked up since Brown became prime minister, based on very little. Brown has worked hard to minimise the impact of the recession on ordinary people and it seems they are beginning to notice that. In addition, despite me commenting on this for the past year or so, the Conservatives still have not come forward with any clear policies and certainly no clear way of doing anything about the impact of the recession. Many people are likely to fear they will simply repeat Thatcher's attitude of holding up their hands, saying they can do nothing about it, and even worse, that it is 'good' for the population to go through this. As we have seen since 1873 and 1931 the Conservatives always struggle with any ideas when hard economic times come and ironically, as later Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan did in the 1930s start flirting with state-backed initiatives of greater control over the economy.

I am heartened that the British public, in part, is beginning to shake off the easy, nasty assumptions from Thatcherism. Of course, the right-wing elements remain. Driving through rural Dorset recently I heard how antagonism to migrant labourers is rising as unemployment increases. We can expect that alongside the desite for a moral economy will be the less moral attitudes of hunting out scapegoats too.

Just to wrap up, I am always stunned when I start doing research for a posting the extent of madly extreme views I come across, for example someone arguing that the British tax system is far too complex with its different bands and that there should be a single flat percentage of tax for income tax! This is illogical as all of us have to spend a large chunk of our money on the basics like housing and food, so if we become very wealthy we may have a larger house or more houses and more cars, etc., but all of us only actually need one house, so the wealthier have a great deal more 'slack' in their income that morally they should give back to the society they are draining from in order to make their wealth. However, ideas such as a single band of tax show that clearly there are some corners where Thatcherism continues to thrive.

We Expect You to Be Able to Walk on Water - Excessive Demands in Job Specifications

With the end of my current job less than five months away I am back into the pattern of applying for work. Of course I am doing this at probably the worse time possible. There are going to be so many more people out there seeking jobs. I have already accepted that given that all the jobs in my field seem to be in northern England or Scotland and I am living currently in southern England, that I am going to have to move yet again which will mean that by the end of 2009 I will be in the fifth house I have lived in since 2005 and the eighth since 2001. You can hardly say that I am not part of the flexible labour force, though of course half of those moves have been compelled by the landlord rather than me seeking work.

Anyway, having swallowed the fact that there will be yet more packing and unpacking, before that stage I actually have to get a new job. Of course, I have accepted that it means that I am likely to face a pay cut too, but again, I reckon I could probably tolerate a fall of £5000 (€5600; US$7100) per year, perhaps more, especially if I move to northern England and Scotland, where, bar from in expensive city centres, the cost of property to rent is cheaper than the South-East of England and some consumables are cheaper too. Against this willingness to be flexible is the fact that I am now over 40 and despite anti-ageist legislation, I know that in all fields employers prefer a cheap, young employee over an old, more expensive one. So I quite expect to be unemployed with only my £1400 redundancy payment to help me out, this would pay less than two months' worth of my mortgage, so house repossession is also likely.

Despite the fact that much of what I have currently could be gone by the Summer, I am persisting in looking for any job that I seem suited for. I am registered with online agencies and have weekly emails of vacancies. I also have friends and relations keeping their ears and eyes open for possible jobs too, just as you are recommended to do. At present I am being very positive and applying for posts that would actually be a promotion for me, though I may be deluding myself in that regard. The big challenge is the job specifications. I discussed some of this back in August 2007 when looking at the silly way so many companies behave when recruiting people. Now I am back to actually applying for jobs once more, I am finding many new examples and I am sure thousands of you out there have your own war stories.

I do wonder who writes job specifications. In most companies of any size the Personnel Department or Human Resources or whatever, is often involved and from my experience on that side of the process, have a great deal of input which usually slows down and complicates the recruitment process. These days there is often a standard pattern, with an outline of who you would be reporting to if you got this job and what functions the job entails, well that is fine, it is generally what you need to know. Sometimes there is a detailed description of the company and its history which if you were interested you would already know anyway, but some people insist on including as if they are going to set you a comprehension test on it. Then you get to the so-called Person Specification. This reminds me of people who go to dating websites and somehow expect that they can order a perfect partner who matches every item they tick or cross. In fact humans are more varied than that and do not fit patterns.

The idea behind person specifications is a sound one, that they break down the requirements of a job into bite-sized chunks against which the applicant outlines their abilities and experience. When applying for my second job in the civil service, the interviewer literally read out these and asked for a response which was then written down by the secretary, sometimes she would ask for another example too. It was incredibly mechanical and would have been better handled by completing a computer-based questionnaire. It is clear that these specifications are an aggregate of the wishes of a team of people, often coming from very different parts of the company. Many people involved in recruitment have set requests that they always ask for (particularly in terms of qualifications) which in fact bear no relevance to the job in question. I remember working with one colleague on recruitment who always insisted that the applicants must make use of time management software in their work. I suppose it is a good principle, but she simply kept asking about the use of this stuff and ironically none of the applicants used it. Asking for certain qualifications is more about the perceived status of the job than actually what the job entails. I am incredulous that I received application forms for managerial positions which ask me to list every exam I took in secondary school and which grade I got. I last took such an exam in 1984, what effect does whether I got a 'C' or a 'B' in 'O' Level Mathematics (an exam which has not existed since 1992), 25 years ago, have on how good I can manage a department now? It is just like saying that the overseas sales of the company in 2009 are influenced by the balance of payments or the exchange rates of 1984. For all the emphasis on skills, abilities and experience in person specifications, so many of the elements included are simply ritualistic.

Companies are conscious that their staff costs are often the largest single component of their outlay so they seek to reduce them, often below a level which permits the company to function most effectively. This seems to be particularly the case in the UK, which ironically has a low-salary economy, but certainly has the longest working hours of the EU. This is because so many UK employees are actually doing the job of 2 or even 3 people. I remember some jobs of the past that I have looked at that definitely seemed to include this. In particular in the late 1990s I remember a company in Norwich that wanted someone who could translate documents from German to English, establish a database, maintain an online presence and work on the helpdesk until 10pm when requested. In many companies these functions would be carried out by four staff, perhaps with some overlap, but to expect all of these skills to be wrapped up in a single individual for £16,000 per year (which even in 1998 was not a stupendous salary) either seemed that they had a precise person they simply wanted to give the job to, at a miserly rate if they indeed had all those skills or that the coming together of different departments had meant the stitching together of a Frankenstein's monster of a post. This was just one of the most extreme examples, but you see if constantly. Whenever recruiting staff I always battle to keep down the number of requirements on the person specification and ensure they are actually relevant to the job the person will do, not what people think the person doing that job does or wishes they would do.

Often the demands are contradictory. Even if you can read the coded language of person specifications it often conceals a turmoil behind the thinking of the recruiter. The most classic case of this I saw was when I worked with two colleagues on a panel to appoint a deputy to the fourth member of the panel. She was one of these people who bunged in loads of additional requirements, like so many managers, seeming to feel that a single employee could somehow radically alter the department and this in a 0.5 post not even a full-time one. Her specification wanted someone who could organise huge events, deal on a one-to-one basis with clients, maintain and further develop the website in new directions and carry out both secretarial and administrative roles on 2.5 days per week and the actual days altered week-to-week as the manager required, though she often gave less than 14 days' notice. We asked the manager if she wanted an assistant or a lieutenant. Now there is a difference, the former simply does what the manager asks and takes little iniative; the latter can stand in for the manager if she is not there and will develop new projects under her own steam. Anyway, the manager said she wanted a lieutenant. She had the chance to change her mind when we interviewed the applicants, one was like an assistant in personality and one like a lieutenant. The manager went for the latter who turned out to be incredibly hard working (often staying late and coming in at weekends despite being part-time) and advanced the department's provision and profile. Was the manager pleased? Of course not, she whined and complained that this woman was taking far too much initiative and being too brusque. She kept the woman on probation for 12 months longer than normal by which time the woman sensibly resigned. Of course the manager had in fact wanted an assistant, well, in fact a lackey, but had felt embarrassed to admit that despite it being offered to her. In addition, her own self-esteem seemed to matter far more than any benefits which accrued to her department.

So, even behind the over-stacked, contradictory person specifications there is often a whole extra layer of incompetence just lurking there. Now it is my turn for the first time in almost four years to start applying for jobs again. Fashions in recruitment seem to change pretty quickly, in my experience the acceptable style for a CV lasts two years, but person specifications are still around and seem to be much in the same style. Of course the companies I am applying to, may be simply lagging in terms of fashion. Person specifications usually have Essential (usually shown with an 'E') and Desirable ('D') criteria which are usually used to separate two very close interviewees. The former, in theory, are what you must have in order to do the job, though as noted above, in fact they are usually the requirements three people need to do three different jobs and it is unlikely anyone straddling so many skill sets actually exists. This is why you so often see re-advertisements with the company complaining that there were insufficient good candidates. It also helps explain why industry feels young people are under-skilled. This may be true in some cases, but no-one has analysed if in fact, the mismatch stems from companies increasinly wanting applicants who are made up of more than one individual's abilities and have years of experience in a newcomer to that labour market.

I was told that if you match 4 out of 5 of the E requirements then you should apply for a job. Of course many recruiters do not work that way, it has to be that you match 6 out of 5 (the sixth being the one they would have wanted to include but it was felt there were too many and you should know what the extra ones were) or otherwise you are hopeless. Recruiters are merciless in telling applicants when they feel they have wasted their time. (As an aside, you know how, especially in times of high unemployment you are advised to speculatively apply to companies that you think you could work for. When I did this one rung twice to tell me at length that 'this is not how things are done' and that I should know better. They thought I was lying when I said other very similar companies took my applications in good faith and in at least two cases in the past it had got me work). No-one ever applies for a job for 'fun'. There are far better things to do in a day than spend a couple of hours filling in yet another form and trying to draft what you are saying to the hundreds of requirements expected by the company. As applicants we take it seriously, it is a shame companies often do not do so too.

My last application was in response to a person specification. It had 18 E requirements and 3 D requirements, actually not a bad number. However, when you look at what they entail, they need a strategist, a process manager, a product quality controller, a staff performance/personnel manager, a market researcher and forecaster, a marketing manager and a researcher, and, of course, your bog-standard line manager and committee chair. Now, many of these skills do not actually sit well alongside others. In addition, if I was as good a marketing manager as they are seeking, I would be going for marketing manager jobs, not this vacancy and in fact that goes for most of the other types of post they are wrapping up in this one. I applied partly for the challenge of stretching myself across these different roles, but I anticipate they are going to be disappointed because this is not one job it is at least four if not more.

Setting unrealistic expectations is going to lead to disappointment and though the successful applicant will have done their best and try to fit with what is required, that disappointment that they are not the super-human that was desired is going to hang over them, as it did over my 2.5-day lieutenant colleague, and that is an appalling basis on which to start a working relationship. It also reduces effectiveness as managers squabble over the employee to make them come and do the role that they wanted and thinks they have appointed someone for, whereas 1-3 other managers also try to snatch the new worker thinking that the person was appointed to the role they felt they needed. The newcomer is left dizzy and their efforts are dispersed; they are at the whim of management changes and work that they have focused on might simply be declared unnecessary or irrelevant when a different manager comes to the fore. Thus, unrealistic, aggregate person specifications disconnected from the job in hand, not only make life difficult for applicants but also harm the company.

P.P. 17/06/2009 - I just encountered a new record for the number of requirements on a job specification. This one, which is actually a lower-ranked job than the previous record holder (36 Essential and 10 Desirable requirements). This one has a total of 38 Essential and 10 Desirable requirements. It is clear that whoever wrote the specification clearly cannot tell the difference between every task you might be assigned in the job and what the necessary skills are to undertake it. Whatever they might assume, there is a difference. To me all of this signals that more staff across companies need to be trained in how to recruit (and interview) effectively to save wasting their, the company's and the applicants' time.

Another phenomenon is that even with jobs which being advertised to the general public and are not internal posts, you are asked to show evidence that you have experienc of their particular, named committees, which not having ever worked there is impossible. This may be suggesting that really they only want internal candidates and yet have felt or been compelled to advertise more broadly, or, I believe more likely, that no-one has proof-read the specifications before they are sent out. For one the other day, which only had 20 Essential requirements, a number of skills were repeated down the page so responding to each in turn I found that I was repeating myself. It is a waste of time for the recruiters as well as for the applicants. Employers, please take far more care over your job specifications. In my experience, you can reduce your requirements by a fifth simply by removing duplication.

The Bitter Legacy of Recession

To people of my grandparents' generation (my grandfathers were 17 and 29 in 1929) there was one 'Depression' the economic downturn which affected the World from about 1929-36/9 depending on where you lived; New Zealand and Australia had been facing difficulties as early as 1927. Anyway, it was a period of economic slowdown leading to mass unemployment, peaking somewhere over 6 million people out of work in Germany in 1933 and globally unemployment was around 22% of people of working age in 1932. In the UK my grandfathers generally escaped the severest of the problems because they worked in the modern parts of engineering and were based in the South-East of England, the most prosperous part of the UK. Elsewhere in the UK, notably the heavy industrial regions of South West, North-West and North-East England and Central Scotland there was far worse times leading to hunger and deprivation. In those days the welfare state was minimally developed so there was little protection for those who were unemployed or their families. As always the wealthy saw it as an opportunity to grab back rights over individuals and for example, to compel women to go back into domestic service at low wage rates as in the 1920s it had proven tough to get cheap servants as more employment opportunities had opened up for women in the wake of the First World War.

Looking back in the 1970s, the Depression was something that these men and women never expected to see a repeat of. Anyway, the welfare state that had been constructed since 1945 made it far less harsh on people than had been the case forty years before. Then of course came the Thatcher years when the Conservative government engineered an economic downturn for political gains, primarily to smash the position of the trade unions, lower wage rates and make a workforce that was more compliant than the one they felt their government had inherited after the industrial unrest of the 1970s. Of course in 1974 the UK's industrial base for the first time had a majority of service sector jobs over manufacturing jobs and the decline of manufacturing continued apace across the western World. However, in the UK it was accelerated by hostile government policies. Added to this was an ideological element. In line with the American New Right attitudes, unemployed people were made to feel guilty for not having a job, they were portayed as lazy, unwilling to be flexible in finding work and somehow even 'sleazy' for accepting welfare payments in order to stay housed and feed their families.

Despite the complaints that British workers were unwilling to move to find work (viz Norman Tebbit's cry to 'get on your bike' to find work - though given the sharp differences in house prices the Conservative insistence that you were nothing if you did not own your own house actually reduced labour flexibility) I constantly encountered men who had travelled from other parts of the UK to South-East England where the service sector was prospering and lived in cramped accommodation often with many men to a single bedroom, just the way that foreign immigrants had typically done in the past, so they could earn money to send home. Let alone those Britons who went abroad to find work. Many people refer to the drama series 'Boys from the Black Stuff' (1982) as encapsulating the era, but they should also look at the comedy 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983) about British builders in West Germany to show another facet.

To people who had lived through the Depression or knew its history, we seemed to be back in those times once again. Unemployment officially was around 3.4 million in the UK at its peak, but on the way we measure it now it would have been something like 4 million. Certainly given the rise in female employment throughout the 20th century and the need since around 1966 to have two adult incomes to sustain a family of four, made exclusion of married women from the unemployment figures wrong.

Of course, often with hindsight people see the 1980s as an era of 'greed is good' and people able to make millions. Because some people did, this was used to show us that all of us could. However, the fact that much of such sums were derived through asset stripping other industries and forcing down wages shows the lie. Most of us had to be exploited by such conditions in order for those people to make their profits. Sound familiar?

I was growing up in the 1980s, I was 13 in 1980 and 23 in 1990. I managed to avoid most of the problems because I lived in South-East England and went to university and had prosperous parents who did not lose their jobs. Yet even I was aware of the impact that the Recession of the 1980s had on people. The key impact which still lingers today, was fear. Parents in particular were terrified of what would happen to their company. Life became grey, holidays were cancelled, people even complained when people on benefits had a television or wanted hot food. Families were broken up by the unemployment. Even at university, where we were the privileged (only 6% of 18 year olds went to university then compared to over 40% now) we all feared a long period of unemployment ahead of us at graduation. Despite graduating in 1990, I did not earn above £10,000 (€10,000; US$14,800) until 2001. When colleagues at work talk about how long the second recession of 1990-3 actually went on, lingering to 1996 and beyond, I wholeheartedly support them in their statements. In fact between 1981-96, the British economy as the bulk of the population experienced it was in a bad state and unemployment in reality was always far worse than statistics made out.

I find it ironic that there is a current radio advertisement encouraging young people to go to university and 'taste the opportunity' and 'be everything' that they 'could ever be'. Recession as were are experiencing now and will at least until 2015 if not longer clamps down on opportunity. Of course tens of thousands more young people go to university now than they did in 1985 and they have been lied to that for the thousands of pounds of debt they are incurring they will have a chance for a good job. This is utter rubbish. They have little chance of a job let alone a good one. Unemployment is set to return to 3 million and there is no sense it will stop there. This time we do not only have structural readjustment and a consumer downturn but we have vulture funds wrecking established companies for nothing but their own gains. Unemployment among people aged under 25 is at least 40%, i.e. 1.25 million people and unemployment in this age group is rising faster than among other age groups. Unlike their predecessors graduates in this group have massive debts that on a normal basis it would take years to clear, but this will be prolonged by a long period of unemployment.

Of course graduates are those with greatest privileges, they tend still, mainly to come from well off families and by definition to be best educated. So if they are being pushed into unemployment what about those young people with lower qualifications. Even in the mid-1990s you would see graduates hiding their degrees from their CVs so that they could get the low paid jobs that were going. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of Graduate Recruiters has advised graduates to do this, to take the mundane jobs. Of course this simply displaces the less qualified from those posts. For young people at whatever level of education, there is now no opportunity. You fight tooth and nail against everyone just to secure that job in a call centre as you know there is nothing else. When there you make no protest and simply work harder and harder, knowing that simple dislike from your line manager is sufficient to doom you to unemployment.

Everyone seems to forget the terror of the 1980s. Of course it was deliberate, the wealthy felt that workers were not sufficiently obsequious let alone grateful for their jobs and sufficiently subservient in the way they should be. Of course to any employer such things should be part of the natural order, whereas of course, I will contest such things as giving up human dignity. Once again with the years of New Labour, the employers feel we have become too cocky, slack and lazy and certainly not cheap enough employees. Back in July 2008 I talked about how employers felt they had insufficient unemployment to be the necessary 'whip' for their workers and of course now they have it back.

The legacy of the 1980s was enduring and I feel it has damaged British society. For a start people seek scapegoats and there are already warnings of rising tensions, often ethnically focused, on the UK's housing estates. People forget that the 1980s was renowned for rioting right across the UK and only some of it was directed at government policy, the rest of it was directed at people's neighbours. Now we have immigrants again who no doubt will form the focus of such attacks. In return the police gets heavy armament and restricts our civil society even further. The authoritarian state that Tony Blair so loved, ironically will come a step closer through the failure of New Labour's economic plans.

The other thing is that people stop taking risks. This means that they do not travel, they do not learn other languages, they do not set up businesses, they stay at home as a meek pool of labour. The wealthy do not want the masses to travel and to be educated because then they might start challenging their position. The whole thing about expanding university entry, lifelong learning, staying in education until 18, is now being undermined by the whip of unemployment. It smacks down people but it smashes their dreams far more. The reason why immigrants come to the UK, and increasingly from places like Eastern Europe and South Asia where they have been well educated and instilled with an enthusiasm to better themselves, is because so many people born in the UK have had all desire to take risks or get ahead, beaten out of them. It was beaten out of their parents in the 1980s and it is being beaten out of young people today.

Recession sees the redistribution of opportunity back to the wealthy and privileged who have always had the greatest opportunities and yet seem loath to even share them. This week I came across the trend of the 'New Olympians' as outlined by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in 'The Gods That Failed' (2008). They argue that the current situation is not some error or mishap of the global economy, but is in fact engineered by the powerful who feel that it is right that they should be serviced by the bulk of the population and that any movement away from that is wrong. This suggests that the post-1945 consensus or even the post-1848 perspective, that privilege should be challenged and that those in privilege should accept responsibility for their actions has been overthrown. In its place we have returned to some kind of medieval attitude, shorn of any Victorian philanthropic or even simply Christian elements, back to the anointment by God of certain individuals who it is wrong to even attempt to constrain in the slightest. King Charles I would feel very much at home as a vulture fund head, but people, he was a 17th century monarch, not someone of the 21st century. Are the gains of the past four centuries not worth struggling for.

Recession creates the passive UK society that so many with money and influence have been creating and seeking to maintain for so long. People now talk of 1945-73 as an aberration, instead we should have the hierarchical society in which everyone knows their place. Interestingly privilege is already receiving a boost. Even among universities employers are now only going to Oxford, Cambridge and the three colleges of London University: University College (UCL), Imperial and London School of Economics (which has the worst organised library I have ever seen). Attempts to widen access into the legal profession (only 10% of barristers have gone to a comprehensive school), the civil service, the military, are being attacked openly as 'class war'. People are no longer afraid to protect privilege even though it means that the top people in most of our state arms are from select private schools (and private schools in their entirety only educate 7% of children). Everyone especially in the middle classes, somehow thinks they are exempt, that they and their children will have opportunity. This is a massive delusion. Those who have opportunity are probably less than 7%, probably less than 1% of the population of any country. Yes, you might be able to get your child a job when others are out of work, but in fact they have no more chance of improving themselves and in fact no greater security than an orphan from a poor housing estate. There is the elite and there are the bulk of us, in-fighting in order to get the scraps the ultra-rich toss down. Of course they might not even select to distribute any scraps in your country they might all go to Poland or India or somewhere else. Do not delude yourself it is ever different.

The recession, as in the 1980s is being used in the UK to close down social mobility once again. No-one seems to have learnt the lesson that in the long-run this will damage the UK, because the bulk of successful new businesses in the UK are created not by those in the Establishment (they have no incentive to labour or innovate) but by 'outsiders' whether socially, ethnically or in terms of nationality. The UK is increasingly like China at the end of the 19th century more eager to cling to its out-dated structure than to move with the times to actually help the state to survive. The UK needs a social mobile, educated, confident population not a restricted and fearful one.

The current recession has come about through greed and game playing by the very rich. However, they are far from averse to it and its consequences as they recognise that twenty years on it allows them to jolt the bulk of society back into servile manners. States have found, that in contrast to the mid-20th century (and even then it was tough if you look at how governments were powerless to restrain oil companies) states have found that they cannot even get utility companies to behave in a decent, humane let alone altruistic manner. The ultra-rich are beyond government control and now they are effecting the kinds of society they want, totally unchallenging to them and enabling them to squeeze yet more profit.

I have seen cartoons recently in which Karl Marx is adopting an 'I told you so' manner. What Marx missed entirely is that even hiccoughs in capitalism let alone any steps towards seeming 'collapse' so terrifies the bulk of people, so divides them, so gives the justification to repression that no-one with revolutionary sentiments can come forward. Even in the 1980s I never anticipated that these circumstances of restricted mobility and economic hardship would persist so long, yet, now I know that whenever I die I will feel that I have lived through bad times and any periods when that was not the case were brief aberrations in the sustained period, through economic means, of fear and restriction of the bulk of the population of the UK.