Owning Chickens

Karl Marx believed that revolution would come when the status of the skilled working class and lower middle classes began to decay to the extent that they found common ground with the 'lumpen proletariat', i.e. unskilled workers.  I think his greatest oversight was consumerism, that the capitalist state successfully bribes many sectors of society away from unrest by permitting companies to constantly sell consumer products and through the availability of such items, the competition between individuals that they foster and the advertising which boosts both of these they were able to distract most people from political struggle.  However, as I have noted before the economic power of people who are working class and middle class has continued to slide over the past sixty years, to the extent that someone like me, a graduate holding sometimes managerial positions is not able to purchase those things which are seen as being associated with 'middle class' life.  Instead I am down at Lidl worrying about what of the immediate needs I can afford as if I was simply someone stuck in the unskilled working class, the bulk of whose expenditure, like mine goes on necessities: food, utilities and accommodation.

Back in July I read an interesting article by Oliver Burkeman about how poverty saps your willpower because there is a 'psychic cost' in worrying about having enough money and what precisely you can spend that money on, that then drains your personal abilities for doing other things that need will power, a whole host of activities such as dieting, exercising, taking classes, etc.  Thus, when society makes people anxious and worrying about where every penny is going it makes it far harder for them to improve their situation, thus, to some extent creating a 'dependency culture' though in the opposite way to right-wing thinkers believe.  In fact if you give people more money, you reduce them worrying about how they are going to pay the electricity bill or buy sufficient food and you thus leave them with more will power, more personal capital to do things like applying for more jobs, or more vitally take training and along with providing the funds for saving, you actually stimulate the personal capacity to save.  Obviously it impacts on individuals to different degrees.  However, I know as someone who applied for 80 jobs and attended 29 interveiws, I used up a great deal of my personal capital and consequently could not do other things such as reading fiction or non-fiction or writing.  Now I am in work, there are fewer concerns and I am reading more and writing more too as I have some 'spare' mental/psychic capacity to tackle those thing.


Of course, you are scarred by bad experiences and so I am now constantly nagged by the fear that once again I will be made redundant and have to try the house once again (a process itself which exhausts much personal capital) and this continues to make me apprehensive and probably not working at my best.  In addition, with a legacy of paying landlords after I have left the house due to fixed-term contracts, being wrongly taxed and having charges levied on me by Newham Council continues to sap my financial resources.  I just cannot believe how much I still owe.  This leads to fascinating situations.  The other day I realised I was walking along in my £28 suit and my £14 shoes, all from Asda going to my car which is insured for £1000 but in my bag I was carrying a laptop and an iPad which combined are worth £1800.  They belong to my company, of course, not me.  However, it does increasingly make me feel like a proletarian moving in a middle class context.  That was what my previous employer disliked.  They were insisting of bourgeoisie moving in their middle class context and seemed angry that somehow, despite my lack of money, I had, through my skills and effort had been able to get into their world and worked hard to drive me back out, something they were unapologetic about and I am still stunned by the words they actually used and the attitudes they exposed, this is 2011 not 1951 or 1911. 


Society is supposed to have moved on, though we do seem to be in the midst of a social counter-revolution something which I am glad more and more newspaper commentators are noticing and protesting about.  Strangely, from assuming I was middle class, I seem rapidly to be turning into a bit of a working class warrior.  My parents were skilled working class and I even lack their skills (nursing and electrical technology).  I guess if wordprocessing is some kind of basic skill then I am semi-skilled.


This is an incredibly round about way of opening my posting about chickens.  What do they have to do with social class?  Well, like camping, they seem to be something which might have been seen as a working class activity now being colonised by the middle class.  Whilst I do not have the income or clothes or groceries of the middle class, due to being a graduate and my interests, I do tend to see things very much through a middle class perspective and have aspirations to be, some time in the future, someone who can afford once again to go on a foreign holiday and buy the cultural items like books and movies that I associate with being middle class.  I guess the point about groceries above, should have brought this home: that the middle class have the luxury of worrying about the future, whilst those of us who are slipping from the class, no longer can:  I cannot afford insurance and certainly know the child who lives in my house will never go to university; I have no idea even where I will get a car from when the current one dies.  For me expenditure is simply paying the bills this month and hoping I can next month, nothing longer term than that.  The middle class, in contrast still can think about their children's higher education and their own retirement.


Sorry, I must get back to these chickens.  So keeping chickens has in recent years, become a middle class hobby, well, in the UK.  In Belgium it has been something that everyone seems to have been doing for ever and even so they still not seemed to have grasped that cockerels living in the suburbs will crow at 01.30 because they think the street lights are daybreak.  Once it became clear that we would not be compelled to sell this house, the woman who lives in it with me and her son, decided she needed to have chickens.  To some degree this was sensible, because while I was unemployed, between the three of us we were consuming 20 eggs per week.  In five days she had relocated the compost, levelled and stripped a patch of ground in the garden, bought on eBay and erected a chicken house and then constructed a wire fence and gate (cunningly made from a picture frame, the cheapest way it seems to get a hardwood frame as discount 'fancy goods' stores sell them cheaper than buying the wood from DIY stores).  I was brought in to bring home the chickens, 4 for £10 each and their straw, corn and 'grit' which seems to be a high calcium thing to help with shell production.


Within the space of a week we had gone from being a non-chicken owning house to one with four breeds of chicken: a New Hampshire Red (which looks like the classic protrayal of a chicken with brownish feathers), A Sussex (white with black flecks around the neck), a Bluebell (subtle shades of grey) and a Black Rock (with green-black and flame brown plumage; I can see why people 'show' chickens).  They seem to settle in quickly and eat a wide diet, so fewer of our scraps are going to the compost and now instead go to the chickens.  In return though, chicken droppings are supposed to be a really good source of fertiliser.  The chickens came to us at 17 weeks and within 3-4 weeks were laying regularly and so we now get 4 eggs almost every day, enough to generate a surplus.  Though the eggs are equivalent to the 'small' size you buy in the shops, we know that there are no growth hormones in them and the chickens have a good quality of life, though I have been designated the slaughterman if any come to the end of that life, though saying that the woman in my house has become so attached to them that I think she would rather have a chicken retirement home with hens too old to lay. Having spoken to another very middle class man from Wales about his, he only got former battery hen chickens as one might take in a rescued cat or a retired racing greyhound.  Apparently battery hens are retired after only 18 months of laying, though this can be only half way through their full laying period. 

I had anticipated the eggs coming out with shells of a variety of colours, but the four breeds we own all produce medium brown eggs just the shade of the ones you find in the shop.  You can find breeds that produce pale or speckled or even pale blue eggs, I have seen these at other people's houses but they are not from the varieties we have.  The eggs are of the size that would be deemed 'small' in the shops, so I have had to use more as I am used to 'large' eggs in my cooking.  One thing about our eggs and, in fact, all home grown ones is the taste, it is so much better than the ones you get from the shops, you have to try it.  The yolks are far yellower, sometimes even orange and your omlettes and scrambled eggs come out with a very bright colour, which ironically looks 'artificial'.  Interestingly in the first touch of the cooked egg on your tongue you get more flavour than in a shop bought egg, but that flavour tends to fade faster.  This may have to do with the youth of the chickens and that apparently the whites are more watery.


The chickens have proven quite easy to tend especially as they have got to know the woman in my house and her 9-year old son.  It is fascinating how they so quickly have come to resemble rural paintings from the 19th century, having intuitively adopted the use of slender sticks to herd the chickens back into their run from free range in the garden and then into their coop.  The other thing I had not anticipated is how quickly they become like pets.  Having each chicken a different breed (which could have selected from among a further four breeds at the farm we bought them from) helps with identification, but even so you would soon be able to tell them apart even if they all looked the same as they behave differently. 

We have encountered some illness from our chickens.  They are prone both to internal parasites like worms and external ones such as red mite.  We had to take the New Hampshire Red to the vet as she seemed underweight and we feared that she had worms.  I have only been in a vet's once before and forgot that they call out the name of the animal to go into the consulting room and often append the owner's surname on the end.  It was quite comic taking the poor hen in the car in a box with her head protruding from one end and her tail from the other, with her looking out the window at passersby.  She was pretty well behaved in the surgery only flapping up twice and she was very patient being weighed.  Given the fact that my brother, his mother-in-law, my aunt, my girlfriend's sister's friend and friends of the boy in my house all own chickens, I had expected our vet, even though he is urban rather than rural, to have more familiarity with them (one of his receptionists keeps them too).  I think maybe we should have gone beyond the town limits to a more rural vet.  However, he was game and I guess his knowledge of poultry is increasing.  It was a little funny, because as with human patients, the woman in my house went in with as much information gleaned from online discussion forums as she was going to get from the physician.  Anyway, the hen was less ill than we thought which was good.  We did stock up on medicine to be on the sure side.

The woman who lives in my house has read about their societies and whilst I knew about the 'pecking order', this does not seem to remain static in our coop.  There is sometimes some feather-wrenching pecking when they are bored.  However, rubbing Vick's decongestant on the areas liable to be attacked has proven as effective warding off attacks as we were advised.  Apparently, being an all-female community it can become a little like a women's prison (and the group dynamics shown in the movie 'Chicken Run' (2000) seem to make much more sense to me now) with sometimes one taking on a 'male' role and even crowing.  Their laying time also gets in step, just like the periods of a group of women living together will become synchronised over time. Watching the 'ladies' as the woman in my house calls them, pecking around and hearing them 'sing', that kind of rising note rather than a cluck is amazingly soothing.  We are learning the different sounds they make: the distinctive laying 'cluck' which alerts us to the arrival of a new egg; the alert but not alarmed cluck when a hen is taken into new surroundings and a warning one, fortunately at this stage only 'black special' (as per the UK's BIKINI levels of alert for terrorism) as a dog was sensed two gardens away, rather than the 'amber' alert of a fox in the vicinity.

As with all pets, we will need a sitter if we ever go away even for a day, because of the need to get the chickens in and out for exercise and to replenish food and water; they drink a great deal.  Apparently you can hire chicken sitters.  Unfortunately being in a road which is more than four-sevenths occupied by students, there are no neighbours with sufficient expertise that we can ask even in exchange for free eggs.  I guess we will have to move into a more middle class area where others have chickens.  So far we are a long way from recouping the £240 spent on getting the chickens set up, plus £44 for medication and I guess that is why this is a middle class activity, not a proletarian one.  It was the woman in my house's money rather than mine and there are clear non-monetary benefits for her in terms of a real sense of achievement, an affinity with her 'ladies' and the soothing effect just watching them go about their business has.  The next plan is for bees...

Ed Miliband: A New Hope?

With all the gloom happening in my life at present, another job rejection on Friday; further steps in disposing of my house before it is repossessed and simply having a cold, I actually got quite excited this weekend when it was announced that Ed Miliband has been elected leader of the Labour Party.  I have labelled myself a democratic Socialist and certainly adhered to Labour Party policies in the 1980s, but was very much turned off by New Labour and have not voted for the party since 1992.  Of course, to the 'mainstream' of British society with a centre ground in politics far to the right of anything I (like most people) would have considered acceptable in the 1970s, I must appear like some revolutionary.  Though I have lost my faith in the particular electoral system the UK uses I certainly support democracy and in fact feel in all its aspects it was damaged by both Thatcher and Blair.  Ed Miliband was an unexpected winner.  Since Tony Blair succeeded so well at the 1997 election it seems that no political party can accept a leader who does not look incredibly like him.  David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Miliband look like clones created from cells of Blair with a little different input.  Ed Miliband, in contrast, reminds me of the US actor, Ray Romano, though more cheerful in demeanour.  David Miliband seemed to adhered to the politics of what Labour was in 1994-2008, the Blairite Party.  Blair and Mandelson are hovering in the wings trying to keep Labour as the Blairite Party and not go back to anything resembling the Labour Party before 1994 or, in fact, anything more modern.  Blair was very much a Thatcherite and was unwilling to at all address the immense power the wealthy were continuing to accrue through his terms of office.  This left a basis on which Cameron could come in with the smokescreen of the national debt, to implement a harsh New Right monetarist policy of a severity which would have even made Margaret Thatcher hesitate if it had been proposed in 1979 or even 1983.

The Conservatives believed that they could not have won against a Labour Party led by David Miliband and to some degree are probably a little relieved by the unexpected outcome of Ed coming to the role.  However, if David had been chosen, then the Labour Party would have received another nail in the coffin and the Blairite Party would have been reinvigorated after the brief interlude of Brown.  Of course, the Conservatives and their allies in the media will present Ed as a tool of the trade unions and as dangerously 'red'.  However, as he has noted very vigorously in his first interview as leader, wanting social justice and for the bulk of the population not being compelled to serve the interests of the ultra-wealthy is not left-wing policy.  So many commentators forget that the current Labour Party including Ed Miliband is far less Socialist in its outlook than the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan; they oversaw and economy which was 20% nationalised, had a large, robust and growing welfare state and civil service, oversaw social house building and limited the removal of capital from the UK, all things that would seem radical if proposed these days.

What gave me some hope seeing Ed Miliband being interviewed yesterday is that he is willing to challenge the inequalities of British society.  Of course, he is going to emphasise that he is his own man, every party leader does that, but I think no matter what support he got, he can bring not only the Labour Party but its broader support in the country together.  He seemed far less unafraid than either his brother and certainly Blair, of saying things which sound hard.  We know he would take on the banks.  I thought it was utterly disgraceful of Baroness Warsi to come on the BBC and say that Ed Miliband had been disgraceful in not using his first speech to apologise to the nation for the economic mess that she believed Labour had got the country into when in office.  Would any political leader have started their career that way?  It shows how much contempt she holds for the Opposition that she patronises then that way as if they are not fit to be considered a proper political party.  The other thing, of course, is would the Conservatives have done anything different if they had been in office?  Would they have allowed banks to have collapsed?  No.  It would have caused immense hardship to millions of ordinary voters.  The fact is that Blair, adhering to the Thatcherite creed of deregulation, had allowed merchant banks and speculators to gamble with the UK's money.  They knew that if they lost the state would be compelled to bail them out or risk a wider crisis.  They take such aid for granted and have won triply: they had their banks saved, they now have a government following the monetarist line they love and they are back to paying obscene bonuses and salaries backed once more by the state.

Ed Miliband certainly seems to be a leader for which policy is more important than how it is represented in the media.  For Blair the portrayal of things was always more important than the policies themselves.  This is why so much of his time in office saw the government paralysed, not only concerned about how the policy would work, but even more focused on how it would appear; hence the terribly slow progress on constitutional reform.  Of course, he is shifting more to the 'centre' as to win the next election Labour must not only secure the votes of the unemployed, but also of the 'squeezed' middle class.  Reference to housing and tuition fees plays well to this set of society who thought, from the vague policy statements that Cameron put out before and during the election they were going to get another Blair, but have found instead someone who makes Sir Keith Joseph appear to have been caring.  Unlike the ultra-wealthy, the middle classes, however, they may struggle against it, are in fact dependent on a robust state, and, in fact, because they statistically engage more with things like higher education and will live longer than working class people, they often need its support in a wider variety of aspects in their lives.  Miliband is personable, but from the outset, what has won me over to him, is that he has presented simple messages that are about making the UK a more fair society, not classless, but reducing what we have seen in the past two years, people being rewarded for being reckless out of the pockets of hardworking people.  Even the daily headlines about 'dole cheats' will not convince most of us, that the bulk of the people around us, are like us, wanting to simply house themselves, feed their families and work in a reasonable job.

I suppose I like Ed Miliband because from the start he is talking about things that I get upset about on this blog, primarily the inequality, in terms of opportunity in particular, which is being sharpened in our society.  While I would probably still be considered middle class, as I lose my house and I return to the rental sector and the income in my house is now so low the child living in it is entitled to free school meals, I am sliding into not even the working class, but the bottom end of that.  Of course, I have thrown away the aspirations of a couple of years ago and know I will now never get promoted; never will own property again and, may be jobless for years to come, but, it would be nice if I could still believe the boy in my house does not face the same fate, and, perhaps, even go to university one day.  Naturally, if the destruction of the UK economy continues at the pace it is at the present, then he will not even get the opportunities currently available to teenagers and most likely will be in classes of 45+ pupils before he gets to leave school.  His only hope would be to emigrate, but given how education is to be slashed in the coming years, he would be so much less skilled than foreign rivals, assuming he has not died of some illness hospitals cannot afford to treat or through contracting a superbug in unhygenic health facilities.

One thing the Conservatives have won on is to get everyone obsessed over the deficit as if this was evil and has to be eliminated immediately.  Of course, any Conservative MP of the Churchill and Macmillan years would see it differently, knowing that in crisis the state borrows, this is basic Keynesianism, the economic policy followed from 1941/8-1972/6.  However, monetarism has been so engrained in UK thinking as the only, 'rational' way of viewing the economy that no-one yet can challenge it.  However, even in this context Miliband can refer to Alastair Darling's plan for halving it in four years with cuts in public spending but not to the severity the current government is adopting.  The illusion that Cameron has created is that his economic policies are necessary for tackling the debt.  In fact, he would have pursued them even if he had come to power before the banking crisis.  The debt is a smokescreen for the harsh monetarist policies it is clear he always dreamed of implementing.  The only use of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition is actually, finally, someone is making a fuss about tax avoidance by the wealthy, seventeen times more damaging to the economy than the estimated level of benefit fraud, but something Blair and even Brown did not tackle.

Commentators are right.  Labour is already as popular as the Conservatives and once the cuts really hit, they will become immensely popular.  At the time, I disagreed with Polly Toynbee that Brown should have stepped down before the election, but now hold the opposite opinion.  If a Miliband had come to lead the party, then the outcome would clearly have been different.  Sensibly he is drawing a line under the New Labour era, which he cleverly portrays as being old fashioned.  In fact it allows him to recapture good elements from the history of the Labour Party.  Doing this in 2009 could have spared the UK from the horrific experience it is now going into.  People talk of a 'double dip' recession.  This analogy is wrong.  To have a second dip, means you have to have had a peak of some recovery in the middle.  As yet we have had no such recovery. We are on the 'downward staircase' recession, depression in fact, with some plateaus of things not worsening, and then a further fall as the next batch of government cuts kick in.  Labour is the party of hope and I think it is ironic that Ed Balls referred recently to the Attlee Labour governments of 1945-51, because if Labour return to power in 2015 (hopefully it will be sooner), then they will be facing an economy dealing with many of the same difficulties as when the Second World War finished.  Hope will be like gold dust in those days and strong policies to revive the country will be necessary.

I know many years of hardship, for me personally, and the bulk of my friends and relations lie ahead, but this week at least I feel there might be someone who understands and is seeking to bring forward policies which will at least ameliorate the worst of it.  I know I am putting a lot of store by the new Leader of the Opposition, he may fail, he may be marginalised, but for a small moment, I do feel at least a little ember of hope.

John Prescott and Class

As I have commented before, I have thought that John Prescott received an unfair condemnation as a politician. I do not think he is the best politician the UK ever had and his support for Tony Blair especially over the war in Iraq angered me. However, his abilities and in particular his analysis of the UK political scene I think have been under-rated. Due to his physical stature, his accent, his behaviour that is like many ordinary men of his age and background, people have assumed that means he lacked knowledge and skill. However, even if incompetents rise to the top of various political systems he would not have been able to hold his position as deputy prime minister for ten years if he lacked ability; Blair removed even close allies if they blundered. Throughout his term as prime minister, Blair was almost untouchable for the media, so Prescott took some of this flack. In addition, Prescott's ordinary nature, his moments of temper made him an easier target. However, interestingly things that he was ridiculed for, such as bus lanes on motorways, actually worked. Of course in the UK as elsewhere bringing in a successful policy is less important than winning the approval of the media and thus the public. A key challenge for the media, of course, was that right throughout the period of rule by the Blair party (1997-2008) Prescott was seen as the embodiment of the Labour Party that had gone before. He complied with Blairist policies but there was always a suspicion from the right-wing media that he Prescott would contaminate the policies that they (and their constituency of the wealthy and the nationalistic) were enjoying so much with something that had more reference to the needs of the broader British community.

Prescott was the embodiment of man who had got on. In some ways he should have been the symbol of the input the Labour Part had made to the UK in the last 60 years. His grandfather was a coal miner, his father was a railwayman, having failed the 11-plus exam (which separated children at 11 into different types of schools and curricula) he worked as a ship's steward and yet ended his career as deputy prime minister. This says a great deal about increased opportunities and how education can help you get on. Someone coming from that kind of background today would find it far harder to progress than Prescott did through the more liberal times of the 1960s and 1970s. Ironically the Blair Party's policies have shut off so many routes that Prescott's equivalents in the 2000s could have come through.

Now, on 27th October 2008, Prescott presented a programme on BBC2 (you can still watch it on the BBC iplayer) called 'The Class System and Me'. Social class is a big issue in the UK. Despite rhetoric about the classless society in the UK since the mid-1990s in fact it is incredibly difficult to break away from the class you are born into in the UK and to be something of higher status than your parents. My father came from a working class background and moved into the technical lower middle class ranks. He could now be counted as middle class, as a property owner with investments. I attended university the first (and last) in the whole of my extended family to do so. Yet, rather than rising to a class higher than my father I am busily sliding down, pushed around by landlords, having few items that I own and with the casualisation of labour, having no career structure. I am back down to lower middle class and anticipate that by the time I retire will actually be worse off than my grandfather (who actually owned a house for many decades) floating down in the unskilled working class, certainly in terms of my income and what I own and the shops I frequent, if not in terms of the culture I put myself in.

Prescott saw himself as having risen from the working class into the middle class. That is a good thing. It is easier on you living a middle class life than a working class one (even easier if you are living an upper class life) so much more is done for you. It is unsurprising that Prescott enjoyed having the large cars that came with his job. Only those who had been used to driving themselves around in small, old cars or going by public transport truly relish having a car at your command. Prescott was ridiculed as 'two Jags' (as in Jaguar cars) but actually I would be more alarmed at someone who did not relish that opportunity and saw it as something normal. Prescott received criticism in 'The Guardian' newspaper for his programme on class. Having risen through the classes it is naturally a topic that interests him, added to this he comes from a political party that was founded on a class basis. It was suggested that he was somehow now only learning the 'ropes' of being in a higher class and that he should have known that before he became deputy prime minister. That utterly missed the point. It assumes somehow that middle and upper class behaviour is somehow more correct and more valid than behaviour of people in other classes. Of course that is not the case, though society insists that it is. In addition, whenever Prescott indulged in upper class behaviour, notably when he tried out the game of croquet, he was mocked for apeing his 'betters'. In the USA black politicians and business people (probably far less now since Obama) were often ridiculed for behaving like successful whites, and yet if they did not then they would always be seen as behaving 'wrongly'. This is the 'lose-lose' situation that social elites set up to keep capable people out of their ranks. In their view you must assimilate yourself into their modes of behaviour and so adopt all the assumptions and values that come with them, or you are invalid. However, some people, whether they are black or from a working class background will always be seen as invalid and so their attempts to assimilate or be assimilated are simply ridiculed and the British media was wonderful at doing that kind of social policing on Prescott on behalf of the elites who both feared and despised him. It is interesting to see the comments written on the BBC messageboards, some suggesting that it is wrong to see Prescott as having become middle class as even though he has middle class trappings, they argue, he will never be middle class, only his grandchildren could reach that ranking!

Prescott is not the first Labour politician to be in that position. We can see parallels to Ernest Bevin, a leading trade unionist and Labour Foreign Secretary 1945-51 who was in a similar position vis-a-vis the upper classes. Of course the progress of such men in British politics is portrayed by the upper class as demonstrating that we have an egalitarian society. As Lord Onslow noted to Prescott, there had not been an Onslow in the Cabinet since 1870. What Onslow of course conceals is that actually he probably wields far greater power outside the government than part of it. These days so much government policy is channelled by what the rich and the upper classes will tolerate. They were given their greatest burst of freedom by the Thatcher regime and no-one is really in a position to limit that. The policy arena in which Prescott operated had parameters set by Onslow and his kind, nothing could stretch beyond these. In fact all Labour governments in British history have run up against these parameters set up by the upper classes, but over the decades the arena for policy has been increasingly narrowed. People like Onslow, show, how effective the propaganda machine of the upper classes is, in making so many people believe that any reference to privilege, class structure and lack of social mobility is somehow 'outdate' especially since the collapse of Communist regimes in the 1980s. It might be portrayed in that way, but in fact the upper class and super-rich have far more grip on British society and have clamped down on social mobility in a way that they have not been able to do to this extent since 1945.

One aspect of Prescott's programme which received particular attention was his reference to private schools. As regular readers will know their privileges and their distortion of opportunities in education, especially access to leading universities, is something I have long bemoaned. Prescott was right on target when he noted that private schools uphold many of the elements of the British class system. I will add that you can see this in sharp contrast to France with its post-revolutionary society in which anyone who has the ability can attend a Grand Ecole, whereas in Britain only a tiny fraction of society, the most privileged will ever get into the so-called 'public schools' (the elite private schools) and from people from these ranks are heavily over-represented in senior political, legal, religious, civil service, military positions not because they are of greater ability but because they have the right connections. Prescott acknowledged that the parents of the 7% of children who go to private schools were seeking to buy their children the best opportunity in life and he did not begrudge them doing that. He did, however, note what that signals to the 93% of children whose parents cannot afford to send them to these schools.

Prescott wants the break down of the sharp divide in British education. It is ironic that the Blair government actually sought to increase division in education by further segregating the schools that 93% of children go to into faith schools, grammar schools, specialist academies, etc. so exacerbating the shutting off from access to good schooling to even groups of children who are in this 93%. Of course Prescott was attacked for being 'out-of-date', an unreformed class warrior and seeking to 'punish the successful'. They also said that a quarter of pupils come from areas of below average income. Well, in the UK in a single street you can have a wide range of wealth, you can see it all over London, so I would not put much store by that point. In addition these schools are successul because they are not constrained by the factors that ordinary, state schools face in terms of pupil numbers, constant monitoring and a sustained shortage of funds. If state schools each received as much money as the average or even poor private school, you would see immediate improvement. Of course people do not want to pay the taxes to provide that and parents who send their children to private schools have the gall to say they should be exempt from part of their tax bill as they do not use the state system (yes, but all your British teachers were trained by it).

Prescott argues that the only way to begin to erode the sharp class divides in the UK, which are detrimental to social harmony and its economic success, is to break down such divides and invest heavily in state education. To say that Prescott's views are outdated is utterly wrong. In fact given how social division is increasing in the UK and social mobility reducing rapidly, his points are even more relevant today than they were in the past. If we are going to have a better society in the UK in the future in fact we need many more class warriors like Prescott, all strength to him!

P.P. - 12/02/2009: I was pleased to see that he was behind a 13,000-signature petition to try to get the government to block banks that have been bailed out granting their employees huge bonuses. A good step, keep it up John.

The British and Bank Holidays

As I have noted on a number of occasions in the past the UK has 5 fewer bank holidays than any other country in the European Union. We get the following (typically they are given on the nearest Monday following the date itself): New Year's Day (1st January), Good Friday and Easter Monday (which move according to when the Easter holiday is), May Day (1st May), Spring Holiday (26th May this year, anyway the last Monday in May), Late Summer Holiday (a.k.a August Bank Holiday, 25th August this year, the last Monday in August), Christmas Day (25th December) and Boxing Day (26th December). Scotland (2nd January, 4th August) and Northern Ireland (17th March, 14th July) get an additional 2 bank holidays compared to England and Wales. Even the USA renowned for not having long holidays does better than the English and Welsh let alone our European neighbours. Those campaigning for us to have St. George's Day (24th April) as a bank holiday do not want an additional bank holiday they want it simply to replace May Day which they see as 'too Red'. Despite us having so few bank holidays you can guarantee that the news will have some employers' spokesman (and it is typically a man) complaining how many billions of pounds have been lost to the economy by workers having a day off. The British worker typically works longer than any other in the European Union in the average week anyway, surely these long hours more than make up for the bank holidays, but no, of course we must feel guilt that we are not working as hard as we can for the wealth of the company owners. The UK is exempt from the EU's working time directive which limits jobs to 48 hours per week and many people work a lot longer in the UK. Rules are tighter than they were in the 1990s but in the UK you can still work more than 48 hours per week if your average is less than 48 hours per week when seen over a 17-week period.

There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.

Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.

The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.

The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.

My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.

UK Society: Divided and Lacking Social Mobility

Regular readers of this blog will know I am acutely aware of the difficulties of British society and how a lot of these are driven by corrosive attitudes and obsessions, notably over property and the very self-centred, consumerist attitudes so prevalent in the UK today. To some extent, people in Britain have been lulled into a false belief that the social divisions of the past have begun to be eroded. Apparently in the 1970s (a time when sociology was really developing as a research area) the UK was one of the most socially divided industrialised countries in the world. This was despite having had free education for a century and a welfare state since the 1940s.

One key difference between the UK and neighbouring states in Europe was that the UK had neither had a revolution nor had it had suffered the upheaval of either being occupied by a foreign power or being under a dictatorship. All of these factors disrupted the societies across Europe. Ironically people from ordinary backgrounds stood more chance of advancement under a Fascist, Nazi or Communist dictatorship than they did in British democracy. Partly, as I have mentioned before, this is because the UK is not a true democracy, half of its parliament is unelected and the prime positions in the Civil Service, Government, Military and its established Church, go to people (still predominantly men) who have attended a small number of select fee-paying schools called 'Public Schools' (ironically very exclusive and certainly not public). The next layers beneath the highest in each branch of British public life are held by people who attended less exclusive and a bit cheaper private schools. The highest that a person who has gone to a free state school can rise is to something like a senior doctor in a hospital or a chief constable (i.e. in charge of all the police of one county) or a brigadier in the Army or possibly their Naval equivalent (the airforce, the RAF, is more exclusive). Given that you have to be put on the lists of these schools the moment you are born and the annual fees are far higher than the average annual salary of people living in the UK, unless you have very wealthy parents you stand no chance of getting in and thus no chance of moving into the higher levels of British society.

Now, I accept that other European states have nobility and very wealthy families, the UK is not unique in this, it also applies to countries elsewhere in the world. However, if one looks at comparator industrialised countries, there are exclusive schools, but, say for example the Grandes Ecoles in France, even the poorest, intelligent pupil can get into them. In countries without a monarch, an ordinary person can rise to be president. In addition, middle ranking people who in the UK may never rise above being a low-level lawyer or civil servant or doctor or bank worker, similarly can reach higher positions. This means there is something to aspire to and you are not ruled out of so many areas the moment you are born. The USA has also suffered from social division. It has wealthy families who are politically powerful, but again it has structures that allow people to advance, no matter what their backgrounds. Show me the black people in the UK who have attained the level of power that Colin Powell or Condaleeza Rice have obtained; this is despite black people coming to Britain for at least the last 2000 years. In public service, the military and so on, as an ordinary person you can rise in a way that you could never do in the UK.

What the UK resembles is the post-Communist states like Russia, Poland, China (which is now really only Communist in name) where influence in political circles and so access to money from the break-up of the state machinery can give you an unfair advantage. To some extent social mobility in these states for those coming up in enterprise is currently greater than such small business people struggling in the UK. Many successful British entrepreneurs come from outside the UK especially from Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, rather than from within Britian. That is because they can draw on resources unfettered by British constraints. In addition they have often had access to the best education that their British equivalents are denied. This is one explanation for the growing percentage of people from an Asian background working as doctors in the UK. Ordinary white and black British people simply do not have access to sufficiently high level schooling to even aspire to be doctors and the wealthy whites in Britain lack the altruistic attitudes of their Asian-background counterparts to do something as beneficial as care for people.

The sharp divisions in Britain were exacerbated in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90) infamously said there was no society, just families and individuals. However, her policies reinforced the social divisions in the UK. She was the daughter of a grocer and had only attended grammar school (i.e. a free school, though in the upper educational category) in her youth and yet made it to be prime minister, something I doubt will be repeated in the UK in coming decades. Her obsession with property-ownership wrecked the state housing sector (which in Scotland had housed 60% of the population) and pushed people to own property or to be seen as irrelevant. The rise in house prices increased homelessness, rising the numbers of people living on the streets or temporary accommodation and also removed from many working class people affordable housing permitting them the money to spend on improvement for themselves and their children, especially in terms of education. In addition, Thatcher scrapped grants for students to attend university substituting loans instead. Working class people have less access to credit and a greater aversion to debt than people in other classes so again it closed down what had been becoming at least one way for working class people to get on through education. This was worsened anyway by budget cuts on education and pressure on local authorities who ran schools at the time to cut their expenditure too. Certain schools were encouraged to leave the local authority system and it was these elite 'grant-maintained' schools which received direct, generous government money whilst the so-called 'bog standard' schools that most children attend could only survive by not repairing buildings, by selling off playing fields and fund-raising events.

Whilst the UK, like the rest of the industrialised world was facing shifts in industrial patterns, the economic policies of Thatcher led to a very abrupt closure of manufacturing industries leading to unemployment of over 4 million people (about 16% of the working population of the time). Whilst work in manufacturing and related industries, such as fuel resources, was varied there were many skilled jobs that had paid well in the 1960s and 1970s. In their place came low-skilled, low-paid service jobs, so cutting household incomes among working class people and also destroying the ladder for improvement through skill development and hard work. In a call centre you come and leave without having gained new skills and there is little chance for promotion. Similarly the casualisation of labour has increased with large numbers of even office workers being on short-term contracts. If they lack the skills needed when a company changes methods they are simply laid off and other workers employed. Businesses constantly whine that they want schools and universities to train workers to exactly match the skills they need; yet seem entirely unwilling to see a role for themselves in that process, again another difference from comparator countries, notably France and Germany.

Thus, through the 1980s the few opportunities for a solid base for the working class (the majority of the population) and their chances to rise up the societal ladder were pretty quickly smashed. John Major (Prime Minister 1990-7) who worked as an ordinary bank manager and rose to the highest position in the UK liked to talk of the UK's 'classless society' (for those unfamiliar with UK terminology 'class' in UK usually refers to socio-economic groupings, commonly working, middle and upper classes and sub-divisions in these; since the 1980s we have also had the 'underclass', people who are deemed to have dropped out the bottom of society and are usually homeless). In the early days of his regime Blair also spoke in the same terms, though it is notable that it did not survive his first time of office (1997-2001). It is clear that any reference to classlessness was a fantasy. Unemployment has fallen in the UK since the end of the 1980s, but the restructured economy is still very rigid in preventing people rising socially.

Why am I going on about all of this now? Well, it is because some people have been shocked by evidence that has appeared this week that brings how the reality of it. At the age of 5 the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds score far higher than the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds in terms of communication skills and other scholarly measures. By the age of 7 however, the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds exceed even the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds and from then on the poor children never catch up ever again and throughout the rest of their schooling never match less intelligent rich children. Partly this stems from the way British schooling works with the emphasis on projects and getting internet resources; the heavy encouragement to take additional classes outside of school hours and increasingly that children need to have home tutors too, all of these things are beyond my budget (and as I keep saying I earn 50% more than the average annual salary so am far from 'poor') let alone the average working class family's resources. With secondary schools being increasingly selective, when they reach 11, the poor children lose out in entrance tests to rich children who on an objective basis are less intelligent than them. Again partly this is because the tests are focused on knowledge common in the middle and upper social classes rather than the experience of the working class. It is not surprising then that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (reckoned to be the best universities in the UK) still take over 47% of their students from private schools (there are about 2000 private schools in the UK out of a total of around 30,000 schools of all kinds; primary schools tend to be much smaller so there are 22,300 of these whether state or private alone). More politicians for example have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge than any other university, so being blocked from them means you are often effectively blocked from parliament and alternative routes of the past such as coming through a trade union to being a member of parliament have been weakened as trade unions were hammered under Thatcher and have haemorraged members in an era when people are on short-term contracts and fearful of not being re-employed if they are politically active.

What has alarmed the government (and it is good to see that they are alarmed rather complacent) is that despite all the policies of the last decade under a Labour government (which coming from a Socialist background is supposed to be equality of opportunities for all) and an awareness of the need to challenge social division at least going back to the Labour governments of 1964-70, as a UK citizen it is as unlikely that your standing in society will improve during your life as it would have been 33 years ago. You could walk into a maternity ward at a hospital today and accurately predict the kind of work all the babies there will be doing in 2025 just by looking at their parents. (In fact whether you chose a state-run hospital or a private one would give you a good clue for a start). None of those babies will be able to improve on the level of income or education that their parents have.

Recently there was commentary on the novel by Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' (1932) which tends to get overlooked when referring to dystopian novels in favour of '1984' by George Orwell (1948). However, the novel shows a society driven by consumerism and in which happiness comes in the form of a pill. For this posting, though, is the fact that all children born in the UK of the novel (they are all test-tube babies) are categorised from birth into a range from Alpha to Epsilon depending on their mental abilities. That is effectively what we have in the UK today, except that an Alpha-intelligence baby from a poor family will be beaten in life by a rich Epsilon-intelligence baby. Our current dystopia is not even based on how beneficial a child can be to our society in terms of aptitude the way Huxley's was, it is far more arbitrary than that, it is simply based on who your parents are, nothing more.

Finally I have come to understand why in my teenage years my father encouraged me so strongly to emigrate. By then it was too late I was infected with the British fear of the unknown and instead shackled myself to a society in which I can never have any better standing than my father did. In fact in terms of income, adjusting for inflation, I earn much less than he did when he was my age.

If birth is the only qualification for success in the UK no wonder we are lagging behind rival countries. We effectively exclude millions of talented people from ever getting into a position to use their talents. How many people working in call centres in the UK, could instead be running successful businesses or government departments, if they had simply been born to richer parents? The UK would rather adhere to almost feudal mentalities than shake these up to benefit itself. I recognise that other industrialised countries do not have all the solutions, but if I was going to have a child I would want them to be born in one of those countries and at least feel that they could get as far as they have the ability to do so rather than being held back by the unbreakable caste system which denies them so many opportunities simply because of who I am rather than who the child is.