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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » John Major is right: social mobility is the silent NIMBY
Around fifty years ago, the prime minister of the day confided in his PR advisor that “the period since 1832, in which the middle classes had dominated government and politics, was disappearing” and that “power was passing to organised labour”. It was a surprisingly Marxist analysis to come from a Conservative PM but not untypically for a Marxist analysis, it was wrong.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24837502
http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/88398/the_daily_telegraph_saturday_16th_november_2013.html
I blame Falkirk!
Ahem.......First!
Con: 144 (incl. 91 incumbents)
Lab: 211 (68)
LD: 63 (25)
UKIP: 56
Green: 8 (1)
SNP: 0
PC: 10 (2)
Applying the L&N model we have:-
(Central forecast)
Con vote lead 3.7%
Con seat lead 1 seat
(10000 Monte Carlo simulations)
Chance of Tory vote lead: 97.9%
Chance of a Tory seat lead: 51.6%
Chance of a Hung Parliament: 97.1%
Chance of a Tory majority: 1.5%
Chance of a Labour majority: 1.4%
So a slight weakening of the Tory position on last month, and the weakest since April, although a Tory vote lead has now been forecast for 13 consecutive months...
We don't seem to hear the same horror stories from North of the border.
Is this true, or have I got the wrong impression?
The Royal Marsden Oracle Cancer Trust are keen to use his story in their fundraising efforts... [world's longest survivor of pharyngeal cancer; cured 19 years ago - the death certificate says 'Old Age'. ]
Note from the surgeon to my Dad three years ago
January 1st, 2010
Dear Derek,
Many thanks for your card and good wishes. I am glad you are keeping well.
You may recall that I wanted to record your curative treatment for pharyngeal cancer as it is very rare.
We have two cases, yours and a subsequent gentleman that I treated 7 years ago - a ventriloquist, who was also able to retain his voice box.
I am pleased to say that you are the longest surviving cured patient in the world literature and the other patient, the second.
I am pleased for you both that you are cured.
It makes my work so rewarding and why I continue to research new techniques.
Best Wishes
Peter
Please, if you've never donated to a medical genius, please consider this man, who operated on my father in 1994, after he was given two years to live by the local surgeon.
http://www.royalmarsden.nhs.uk/consultants-teams-wards/staff/consultants-r-z/pages/mr-peter-rhys-evans.aspx
http://oraclecancertrust.org/peter-rhys-evans/
Donate:
http://oraclecancertrust.org/ways-to-donate/
"Some of the details are extraordinary. One researcher, who spent a decade observing how mothers look after young children in supermarkets, found that only 1% of children judged unattractive by independent assessors were safely secured in the seats of grocery carts. In the case of the most attractive the figure was 13%. Another researcher studied police photographs of children who had been abused and found such children had lower craniofacial ratios than those who had not been."
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21589845-what-makes-beautiful-visage-and-why-may-have-been-discovered-accidentally
This type of story was one of the drivers that made me choose healthcare as a profession, the opportunity to contribute to the improved well being of mankind. This may sound a bit overweening but the achievement of the surgeon above shows that one person can make a difference.
The flat-lining of global temperatures while CO2 production massively increased (particularly from the shipping of industry from lower-pollution to higher-pollution countries) shows the earlier warming wasn't man-made - at least not by carbon anyway - not that the earlier warming didn't happen.
If the weird weather is the result of the earlier warming then it will remain as long as whatever did cause the earlier warming doesn't go into reverse e.g.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304672404579183940409194498
the result will be revolution, or, in Britain, a lot of grumbling, and exasperated tea-drinking
Maybe Labour and the Tories can merge and have a nice front bench of PPEs telling us all that we need more diversity.
As a side thought if we need lots more diversity, why are public sector jobs always advertised in the Guardian ?
Falkvinge also pushes this as a way of encouraging entrepreneurship, because it's much easier to take a risk on a new venture if you know you're not going to end up homeless:
http://falkvinge.net/2013/08/31/more-thoughts-on-the-coming-swarm-economy/
If we don't think the government should be doing this then maybe there's a way to do the private-sector equivalent of a graduate tax, where structure a loan so that you'll pay back the money it takes to get where you want to go, but you don't have to pay it if you don't get there.
"According to the ‘levy control framework’ established by the Energy Bill, it means more than tripling renewable subsidies to £7.6 billion by the end of this decade. The total renewable subsidy which UK consumers will have paid via higher energy bills for the ten years to 2020 will be an almighty £46 billion."
So £46 million on lobbying could get a return of 1000 times the investment.
Who needs technological innovation when you can just buy yourself a guaranteed profit through lobbying the political class.
OT - Cameron's trip to Jaffna has generated a lot more press coverage internationally for the plight of the Tamils than sitting it out in London ever would have done.....
Maybe if he wrote to Cambridge and explained the problem nicely, he could get a refund on his PhD...
Sachin Tendulkar's Test career comes to an end 24 years and 1 day after it began as India win by an innings and 126 runs in Mumbai. Shame the Windies couldn't put up more of a fight so that he might have batted in a second innings:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/24970365
How easy would it be for a young Welsh speaking working class solicitor to become PM these days, or the illegitimate son of a housemaid from the Highlands, or a provincial shopkeeper's daughter, from the town's grammar school, who doesn't go to Oxford to read PPE? You would have to be optimistic about that happening again.
The privately educated encompasses Eton - with fees well in excess of UK average wages and day schools which had provided grammar school education to a wider social intake albeit at a cost to many parents perhaps at £12K pa.
This is another good article by David, who I hope is considering having his own blog so he can have his thoughts on these cross-partiy issues seen every day. Just a brief comment: an issue is that there is a self-reinforcing idea of what an MP is like (a well-spoken middle-aged bloke with gravitas and a record of party activity) and people who don't fit the image struggle with the activists in all parties who choose candidates - working-class, young, elderly, female, black, whatever. The activists would deny prejudice and would be happy to select a candidate who fitted the image but also happened to be female, black, working-class, etc., but I think the expectation is there. It's why Labour fell back on AWS - the view was that the preconceived image could only be eroded if there were actually a lot of women MPs. Since one can't really have restricted shortlists for every possible group, it's an unsolved problem.
Even so, I would be surprised if those 234 non-incumbents selected for the three main parties in the above figures doesn't include the vast majority of target seats, where the candidates will be expected to work hardest. Given that they are one of only two routes in - the other being a retirement from a safe seat, of which there aren't likely to be that many this time given the unusually large turnover in 2010 - the boat has mostly sailed for the ambitious. Of course, there's nothing wrong with fighting a losing cause but it's not going to change the picture in Westminster.
Unless it buys these shallow half wits something it will remain hot air.
Parenting is the key - don't rely on the government.
Plenty of kids from poor homes earning the big bucks - just not in politics.
Dr. Spyn, I entirely agree. All Women Shortlists are blatant sexism, discriminatory against men and patronising to women.
F1: Button has a 3 place grid penalty for ignoring red flags yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/24965482
Weirdly, we've had two fog/smog-related sessions being truncated this year. Can't remember the last time (before this season) we had one.
Early discussion is up here:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/america-early-discussion.html
I'll have the pre-qualifying piece up this afternoon.
It's where they are at !!
With the Tories' top 20 targets from the LDs, 3 are still to select: Eastleigh and two Scottish constituencies.
By contrast, just 4 of the LD's top 10 targets have selected.
My wife and I both come from modest backgrounds, people who were very working class but worked their way up to professional status. I earn reasonably well but there is no family money.
Despite this I am willing to spend £20K a year out of taxed income to give my 2 younger children a private education. This is a major financial sacrifice, not just now but when I retire on a non-existent pension. This piece made me reflect on why.
I see the world David does. I see in every range of activity, even anarchic ones like pop music, that privately educated people are becoming more dominant and social mobility is falling.
This is undoubtedly a very bad thing, I am a meritocratic conservative. It is very difficult to argue that the social inequality in our society can be justified unless you can argue that this is society rewarding the greater utility of those who by skill or sheer hard work contribute more. The less even the opportunities the less moral justification there is for the difference in earning and wealth.
I spend because I want my children to have at least the same opportunity I had from a state school turned comprehensive but with a grammar ethos. I don't believe that that would be the case any more if my children went to such a school, certainly in Dundee.
That said, it's not UKIP, or at least, UKIP is only the latest manifestation of a phenomenon which is at least a decade old.
Many in the poorer sections of society stopped supporting any of the main three parties between 1997 and 2001, something not unrelated to the experience of Labour actively courting the middle-class vote in office as well as opposition, while the Lib Dems were so close to Labour as to be almost indistinguishable and the Tories were still suffering from shock from the defeat in 1997 and not up to the job of opposition, never mind government.
Since then, some flirted with the BNP, particularly when immigration was a significant issue, or with other minority parties. These have generally been short-lived affairs, as may be that with UKIP - there are many internal contradictions in the electoral coalition the Purples have and reconciling them will be no easy task. For one thing, while UKIP does mine one working-class political seam, which I'll call Powellite for convenience, though that's not wholly accurate, it's not one that their economic policies are designed to attract.
In fact, immigration was the other issue I had to cut because of space. Here, it's Labour's internal coalition which has borne the strain, with the interests of ethnic minorities and WWC voters being opposed. No surprise which has won. The middle class largely benefits from immigration, with lower service costs; the working class loses out, as wages are depressed and rents increased. With a strong strain of left-wing argument also labelling an anti-immigration view as racist, the WWC concerns were simply swept under the carpet or bought off through benefits - both of which delegitimised the case for polite society (even while tacitly accepting it).
Paradoxically, a lot of the ethnic diversity is at a cost of social diversity, so privately educated British Asians squeeze out comprehensively schooled white British.
To an extent this happens in parliament. Chukka may be Britain's most prominent black MP, but he is a privately educated middle class one. It all depends on what we mean by diversity!
I would also suggest that the potential pool of bright working class kids is smaller than it once was. There are fewer working class people full to begin with, and in particular the social mobility of the post war period has shifted the brighter part to the middle class. It is a smaller pool to fish in. Of course reversion to the mean means that there will always be a fresh supply of bright working class kids, but it will be a smaller one.
There is often talk about lack of real work experience of MPs, but is there any MP with a history of long term unemployment? Paddy Ashdown had a year on the dole, can any MP beat that?
How? Because to have the best opportunities you had to work for the best firms. To work for the best firms you had to have not only the right qualifications but the right contacts that would get you an internship, work experience, all the other things that an employer can quite legitimately look for on the CV. As a lawyer this certainly rang many bells.
There was a period in the 80s when the profession was growing very rapidly on the back of the housing boom when there were far more opportunties for the young, ambitious and talented to break through. I agree it is much harder to see those opportunities today.
Thatcher? Likewise. Her personality and character overcame the drawbacks of her background and gender. (She also had an 'in', though her father. She was at least familiar with the political world in a way that very few are today - even local politics is very much a minority sport these days).
MacDonald. Not a hope in hell. There simply isn't the route for people like that these days.
Another section of the piece I considered and discarded was looking at the parental backgrounds of Labour's cabinets of 1924, 1945, 1964 and 2010. In the end, I didn't have time or space to do it fully (and in any case, it couldn't be definitive given the blurred lines of class that exist), but from that which I had found there was a clear and marked trend; that in the forty years between the 1920s and the 1960s, the middle classes had already captured the leadership of the Labour Party, not just right at the top but also at the next level down. In effect, the middle class progressives simply migrated from Lib to Lab and took over the show.
Quality has a value all of it's own and - sadly - the Left (including OGH's dhimmies) do not understand this: Quantity feeds their bar-charts. Thus we end up electing MPs based upon their 'tick-boxes' and not what they can add to the process: Ergo, a public-sector parasite is more likely to stand/be elected than a businessman generating wealth. This fundamentally destroys the future of the nation (and her economy [cf. Gormless McBruin])!
I do, however, disagree with the following point: Given that a recently elected Labour MP for Geordie-land confused a fall in economic output* with £300+ billion activities** I do not see how risk-aversion is an inhibator: Are you suggesting thick people can become Labour MPs through graft? Becoming an MP is simpler than becoming a school-teacher (but with better benefits and holidays)...!
* Using Ed-Bollox/BenM economic theory.
** Factors out by ten [Ms Alexander?]: That represents ~18% of GDP. Spread over three-years; it is mickey-mouse Chinese statistics....
Sounds very socialist to me.
£4 Billion investment in the oil field off Sheltand called Kracken
The field has at least 25 years of life left and a minimum of 140 million barrels of black gold, which will bring Westminster a bucket of money, for HS2 or some other insignificant project that will benefit Scotland and ensure we do not have the worry of what to do with our money and possibly spend it on the wrong things.
http://wingsoverscotland.com/burning-the-lifeboats/
"The open primary, which will be moderated by Mrs Frances Hoare OBE JP, will be held in Sherfield School in Sherfield-on-Loddon near Hook on November 17 at 1.45pm."
http://www.gethampshire.co.uk/news/local-news/public-given-chance-choose-north-6268256
Since it's one of the Conservatives' safest seats this selection will probably be more of a contest than the general election.
"Beat the Nats or don’t bother coming home” is the order to the Westminster division of Scottish Labour"
It was a malevolence of the, so called progressives Crossland and Shirley Williams, that wanted to put all children in one amorphous lump and in doing so, finally put the breaks on any natural advancement in education except by faux exams and manipulation by second rate teachers and exam boards. You get what you pay for and as a consequence we now get high rates of illiteracy and mathematical ignorance, which we once thought abolished when i was a kid.
You would have thought that Labour would have hedged their bets , waited till 2015 and if the worst happens they could load all their supposed big beasts into Holyrood election to try and get a big hand in the setting up of independent Scotland. Hard to see why you would need to do it before 2015 apart from self preservation or arrogance.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentrification
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-social-mobility-collapsed/16444
And on MP demographics:
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-who-runs-the-country
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21361903
http://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/Goldthorpe_Social_Mob_paper.pdf
Very sunny with snow on the high tops today.. stunning.
How is the drizzle?.
Wembley High Road and down towards Alperton is unrecognisable from my days, as is Kingsbury.
South Harrow high road is horrible.
Nigel Farrage to have a back operation.................
Will you be applying for the Wolfson prize this year? They are offering a large prize for the best idea for a garden city. That at least should keep the idea in the news for a while.
It does seem odd that in the 50s and 60s when there was a relatively static population but a major problem with derelict and slum housing that we got new towns but when our population is growing so much more rapidly there is so little enthusiasm. Is it not because they were something of a mixed success? Glenrothes is not somewhere I would want to live but my parents lived there happily for many years. Milton Keynes now seems to be economically successful but still largely soul less.
That said, although I accept that the planning system is largely driven by the need to protect the investment of the current middle classes, I am not sure that this is the largest single driver towards the reduction in social mobility. It doesn't help but education is more important.
You still have not addressed the main problem: it is not land. It is your intentions. Filling brownfield sites - yet alone the green belt - with more 1960s and 1970s style sink estates will do absolutely no good.
You have shown no interest in the quality of built houses, or the quality of life that people living in them might have. You just see housing as a political weapon, which is why you witter on about it, despite having no knowledge.
We need to be building communities, not houses.
I cannot stand that evil witch Williams, whenever I see her on QT acting like some grand old dame of politics I want to throw a brick through the TV. She has done more to reduce social mobility and ruined the lives of bright working class kids than anyone I can think of.
They called Thatcher evil, and she did nothing for the grammar school cause, but Williams is truly disgusting and one reason I hate the Lib Dems so much.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I would be thinking they deliberately do not want to educate the masses.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIYZQFcBnZ8&
When I was a teenager there was a hospital on Hither Green Lane. It was closed and left derelict.
In 2005 I [and my Serbian princess] moved into a 'new-build' on said site. Since then the rest of the site has been re-developed (but, sadly, social-housed).25
So - if you are still awake - it proves that the Saville map is pointless. Brown-field to homes will, by definition, increase property prices.
You do not mention quality of housing: you only use housing as a political weapon. You do not care what the housing that gets built under your grand plans is like to live in: you only care that it disadvantages the Conservatives.
I guess you won't be living in any of the resultant housing, will you?
As SeanT mentions, the impact of IT and other technology and globalisation has reduced both available jobs and job opportunity, couple that with the decline of educational standards for all and we have a triple whammy with the result of a growing underclass of undereducated and unemployable.
UK's education has been in decline since the early 1970s and politicians must take most of the blame for this decline whilst the rest of the world has been improving and we have reverted to near the educational standards of the early 1800s - good education for the few and poor education for the rest. Yet we had Labour ministers acclaiming exam results with ever higher pass rates that were the result of grade creep whilst the rest of the world was leaving the UK in their wake. So we now have parents who are so under-educated that they do not know how to help their own children with their education.
The 1944 Butler Education Act was good, except it was not fully enacted. Then the politics of envy took over (as shown by the 75%+ death duties imposed by Labour) and Crossman's promise. This was part of Labour's policy of equality of outcome, of non-competition and loss of aspiration and opportunity for all except those at the very top - a bit like Communism where a poor average is OK for all except the leadership.
There is nothing wrong with our children today, they are instinctively just as competitive, eager to learn and have different talents waiting to be explored developed. However the teaching profession needs a revolution of thought, minor universities need to revert to being technical colleges to serve local pupils and the pursuit of excellence for ALL children - whatever their talent and ability. What is standing in the way - only outdated social and educational theorists who are afraid of being proved wrong and have fed their ideas to teacher training colleges, only Trade Unions that are only interested in producer interest and not consumer interests and only Councils driven by political motives.
Gove is doing his best against vested interests but it will take another 15 years to get things right and another generation of children will have been consigned to the educational dustbin.
I was recently at a book reading by William McIlvanney who wrote the fabulous Laidlaw books. He grew up in a mining community in Kilmarnock. He told how as a teenager he came home and found his mum by the grate reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. One son grew up to be a brilliant novellist and the other a very successful journalist. Housing did not have much to do with it.
http://goo.gl/mcwU6z
Just 220 of those from from bottom fifth of families got grades to go to uni
We made some tremendously poor housing in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Some 1930s accommodation was equally horrendous, but that was better than what had gone before, and much of the worst does not survive to this day.
They were bad not just in the quality of the houses themselves, but how they interrelated with each other. In recent decades we have started to learn the lessons and improve things.
We need to improve on best practice, and not regress. Do you at least agree on that?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-24943637
I'm off out now, but maybe I'll do some digging later/tomorrow.
One in nine adults has no qualifications
Analysis of official figures shows wide variations between constituencies, splitting country into 'haves and have-nots'
Overall, the findings are that 11.3% of British adults do not have any qualifications. In England, the figure is 11.1%, in Wales it is 13.3% and in Scotland 12.3%.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jul/22/one-in-nine-no-qualifications
"parents in more advantaged class positions show in effect a clear awareness that
education, in its relation to employment, operates primarily as a positional good (Wolf, 2002:
ch. 8). What matters is not how much education individuals acquire but rather how much
relative to others - within, say, the same birth cohort - with whom they will be in closest
competition in labour markets. Thus, in the face of some general improvement in educational
standards, these parents can be expected to respond by using their superior economic
resources to engage in what Thurow (1975: 95-7) has called ‘defensive expenditure’: i.e.
expenditure aimed at preserving their children’s competitive edge. It is, for example, evident
enough in Britain today that parental - and, perhaps, grandparental - resources, even if not
sufficient to allow for children to be educated in the private sector, are still widely deployed
to buy houses in areas served by high-performing state schools, to pay for individual tutoring,
to help manage student debt, to support entry into postgraduate courses for which no loans
are available, or, in the case of educational failure, to fund ‘second chances’."
This exactly describes what I have sought to do for my children and the motivations I have described.
Possibly the greatest joy of this blog for me is the links by those who know much more about a given area than I do. Thanks Carola!
Nah - feed them to the Polar Bears.