by Owen Jones
The middle-class domination of education is just one way the privileged protect their own interests. Kids from privileged backgrounds also disproportionately benefit from their parents' networks and contacts. Many get into desirable jobs as much through recommenda- tions and friends of friends as through their qualifications. Could a working-class kid from Liverpool or Glasgow even dream of this kind of leg-up?
But nothing has done more to tum major professions into a closed shop for the middle classes as the rise of the intern. Unpaid internships are thriving, particularly in professions like politics, law, the media and fashion. According to a recent survey of 1,500 students and graduates, two-thirds of young people feel obliged to work for free because of the recession. For many, internship can follow internship, with paid jobs dangled like carrots but never offered.
This is not just exploitation. It means that only well-heeled youngsters living off mum and dad can take this first step in the hunt for a paid job. MPs might speak passionately about 'social mobility' from the podium, but they are among the worst offenders. Parliamentary interns provide 18,000 hours of free labour a week, saving MPs £5 million a year in labour costs. According to the parliamentary researchers' union Unite, less than one in every hundred interns receives the minimum wage, and almost half do not even get expenses. I know of one former Labour minister who has made many speeches defending the minimum wage and the importance of being paid for a day's work-at time as employing a whole army of unpaid interns.
The rise of unpaid work is why, if you are a working-class the same kid with dreams of becoming a lawyer, you may as well forget it. A report by Young Legal Aid Lawyers published in 2010 revealed that, because of requirements for unpaid work experience opportunities, much of the law was a no-go and subsidized training area for working-class people. What makes this so perverse is that legal aid exists to help people who cannot afford to pay for legal advice. 'It's already quite unusual to find legal aid lawyers who come from unprivileged backgrounds,' said Laura Janes, the chair of Young Legal Aid Lawyers. 'There is a danger that legal aid will become a "ladies who lunch"- type occupation. Legal aid lawyers are often representing the most underprivileged people in society. A lot of the young people I work with don't understand what their lawyers are saying to them because they come from completely different backgrounds"
In sum, it is scarcely surprising that many major professions are out of bounds to the working class. Today's professional born in 1970 would have grown up enjoying a family income that was 27 per cent above the average. For professionals born in 1958, the figure is only 17 per cent. But the story with some individual professions is even more disturbing. Take the media. Journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5 per cent above the average. But, for the next generation born in 1970, the gap has widened to a stunning 42.4 per cent.
This is not to say that social mobility would be the answer to all the problems of working-class Britain. After all, even if there were a few thousand more lawyers who hailed from places like inner-city Liverpool, the vast majority of people would remain in working-class jobs. But, as well as being manifestly unfair, the unrepresen tative social composition of the professions ensures that Britain remains dominated by an Establishment from the narrowest of backgrounds. The result is a society run by the middle class, for the middle class.
We have seen some of the subtler ways in which the class system is propped up. But underpinning all of these factors, of course, is wealth. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2010 revealed that in Britain, a father's income has a bigger role in determining how much his son will earn than in any other developed country. Indeed, the link between a father's background and his son's future is three times greater here than in social-democratic countries such as Norway or Denmark." Thus, in Britain, half of the economic advantage that a high-earning father has over a low-earning father is passed on to their offspring. If you take Canada or a Nordic country, the figure is just 20 per cent.
Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. Ifyou are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. Britain's class system is like an invisible prison.
The demonization of working-class people is a grimly rational way to justify an irrational system. Demonize them, ignore their concerns and rationalize a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power as a fair reflection of people's worth and abilities. But this demonization has aneven more pernicious agenda. A doctrine of personal responsibility is applied to a whole range of social problems affecting certain working-class communities--whether it be poverty, unemployment or crime. In Broken Britain, the victims have only themselves to blame.
7
Broken Britain
Has anyone noticed ... that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as 'middle class', but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used tocall the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state.
-Simon Heffer'
Mrs Parry is a woman battered by events that were outside her control I met her in the centre of Ashington, a 27,000-strong community about seventeen miles north of Newcastle. It was the world's biggest mining village until the local pit closed in 1986, just a year after the defeat of the Miners' Strike. Thousands were thrown out of work; the community has never recovered.
When I asked Mrs Parry what impact the pit's closure had on the community, she interrupted me before I had even finished the question. 'We died!' she responded with a combination of grief and conviction. 'Once all the mines closed, all the community had gone. It's just been a big depression ever since, just struggling to survive, that's all.' Both her father and her then-husband were miners. They split up the year he lost his job. 'We owed not just our livelihoods, but our lives to the pits as welL My dad retired, and then he died. My marriage broke up.'
Before the 1840s, Ashington was a tiny hamlet. It became an effectively purpose-built town when coal was discovered. Irish farm workers fleeing the Potato Famine came to the town to work down the pits, as did farm workers from Norfolk, lead miners from Cumberland and tin miners from Cornwall. Six hundred and sixty-five cottages were built in eleven long rows to house them. As the town thrived, working men's clubs sprang up alongside schools, post offices, churches and a police station. Coal had brought the community to life.
Take away the heart of a community and it will wilt and begin to die. 'The community just disintegrated,' says Mrs Parry. 'There was [ust nothing left for nobody. They tried to fetch various works up to the industrial estate, but every one's just left after two or three years. Loads and loads of men over forty-five never worked again, because they were too old.'
When the jobs disappeared, families began to fall apart. I asked her about the impact on working men's self-esteem when they were thrown out of their jobs. 'It was tremendous' There were a lot of divorces after the pit closed. They'd been together for twenty, thirty years. They just split up because the men weren't useful hanging around the house with nothing to do. Nowhere to go! I mean there was nothing. And we're losing all our social clubs now because the money wasn't there, and the older generation that kept it going is dying off.'
I ask her what jobs there are for young people. 'There's nothing! There's nothing! My son's twenty-four now and he joined the Army because there was nothing.His dream was to be a barman, and he went to the college, and he did silver service and all the training that's around for barmen. And he got jobs, but then they la
id him off: "Oh, we haven't got enough work, we haven't got work".'
Before the Army, the only option for her son was tojoin the ranks of Britain's burgeoning hire-and-fire, temporary workforce with its insecure terms and conditions. 'He tried the factories, but that was no good because a lot of the factories round here--you're put in by somebody else. Agencies! And itmeant that he could be working for two weeks solid, and then not work for six weeks. Just had to wait until he got a phone call.'
She has two daughters. One works in Asda, the other is a teenage girl who is expecting her first child. 'It wasn't really a shock,' she said. 'I keep trying to think-it's my first grandson she's having! But I just can't get as excited as I was about the girl [her other daughter's child], and I've been wanting a grandson for years, for years .. .'
She was in no doubt about who was to blame for trashing her community. 'We've just been totally abandoned. Maggie Thatcher put the knife in and they just left us to bleed to death.'
Her voice started to break. 'Teenagers, I mean young people and teenagers at the time when Tony Blair got in, they were dancing and cheering in the street, and that broke my heart.' Her eyes were now welling up. 'Because they were so disillusioned! I mean we all thought "Oh, he'll do us the world of good" ... No, no. He didn't do nothing for nobody. I don't think he did anything even in Durham, where he comes from. So it's just been one big lie, one repeated another.'
Further down the road I found Robert, a middle-aged man sitting alone on a bench, staring miserably into the distance. 'I've been on long-term sick for years,' he told me. 'Jobs are bad up here.' For thir- teen years he worked in an open cast mine until it closed a couple of decades ago. 'I was on the dole for a long time and, as 1 say, 1 come down with long-term sick and I haven't worked since. Even my son-he's a joiner and a kitchen-fitter-he got made redundant a year and a half ago. He can't even get work, and he's got a trade! They're offering him jobs like Asda, you know, just really badly paid jobs. He's got three kids, he can't afford those jobs. It's not worth his while there, to take a low-paid job.'
Those I met who had jobs felt lucky, but anxious and insecure. Rachel is a woman in her twenties: her dad was a builder, her grandfa- ther was a miner. 'It's hard for jobs around here!' she said. 'There's very little going at the minute. I suppose people work up at Main Street. I know lots of people, my friends, work in Newcastle.' Many people she knows are out of work. 'I'm not even saying people who don't have skills or qualifications. People that do have the qualifications and skills, there's just no jobs to put them into.'
Rachel works for Northumberland County Council, the biggest employer in the county. Just weeks before I spoke to her, the council had announced that one in seven workers could face the sack. 'We have been briefed that there's a chance there'll be job cuts in our offices, and I suppose the offices we work with as well. So I know that we're very closely watching what happens with that.' She fears for the future. 'I think that because there's not the jobs at the moment, the fact that they're definitely planning to cut at least one person from our office and possibly more is a worry.'
I asked her if she had noticed things like drugs and crime in her local community. 'I would say that over the years it seems to get a little bit worse here,' she says. 'I don't know what that's to do with, personally. Possibly, possibly, I think that the lack of jobs made people find other ways, I suppose, to spend time doing something or to make money.'
Twenty-four-year-old John Ashburn and nineteen-year-old Anna agreed. I asked if Ashington was a nice place to grow up. 'NO, it's full of drugs,' replied John without hesitation. Why did they think drugs were such a problem? 'Because there's nowt to do here, so that's why people just think "Oh, I'll just take some drugs to get high and that", because it's something to do,' said Anna.
Anna lives by herself and is out of work. 'I've always wanted to work in a hospital, but you've got to have loads of skills to work there, and I don't have those skills, so ... ' John does at least have a job as a factory supervisor, but he has to commute to his workplace in scotland. 'I drive up every day ... Travelling three hours a day each way. And then twelve-hour shifts when you get there ... I do my shift then drive back here again. You just have to stay awake constantly-I sleep at the weekend.'
Wandering around Ashington during the day, it was difficult not to notice a number of young mothers. But were they anything like the popular stereotype of the Vicky Pollard-style chav teenage mum? I spoke to nineteen-year-old Emma, out with her ten-month-old child. She had also brought up a four-year-old, from her partner's previous relationship--'in case you thought I had rum really young!' Her partner works four nights a week as a milkman in neighbouring Morpeth, Emma was, herself, determined to work as soon as possible. 'I do plan to go back to work. Definitely. I'd go back now but he's too young. My rna says that when he's about eighteen months, she's going to watch him for us and I'll go back to work.' She was particularly keen to get back to work because 'it'll be giving me a break'.
It would be wrong of me to portray Ashington as some sort of post- apocalyptic hellhole or as a society in total meltdown. The town centre is studded with shops like Argos, Curry's, Carphone Warehouse and Gregg's bakery. There's a real community spirit in the air. People are warm towards one another-as they were towards me, a stranger asking them intrusive questions. Communities like Ashington were devastated by the whirlwind of de-industrialization unleashed by Thatcherism, but people do their best to adjust and get on with their lives, even in the toughest of circumstances.
Father Ian Jackson has been the local Catholic priest in Ashington since 2002. 'It's a very warm, caring kind of community. People really look out for each other,' he told me. 'I think it was hit badly with the closure of the mines-there's very little work for people, so it's quite deprived in a lot of ways. But the people, I always find, are very, very caring and very generous.' A number of Filipinos have moved in to the area and, although he says there was hostility towards them to begin with, 'that's all died a death'.
But Father Jackson could not help but notice the terrible impact the lack of jobs has had on Ashington's young. 'For a lot of the younger people, you feel that most of them want to move on and move out, to get out of the town really, because there's nothing for them here! The main industry, I would probably say-you're looking at the big Asda that's just been built, and the hospital ... I think the young people would say: "What is there for me apart from working in a shop?"
The resulting despair was a major cause of anti-social behaviour.
I sometimes feel-and I'm not criticizing or knocking young people, I don't mean this as it sounds--that among the younger generations, because maybe they've got no prospects, there's a 'couldn't care less' attitude. Things like litter, and things like that. I see them walking past here, there's bins attached to the lamp posts, but they just throw everything over the wall. And if you say anything, you get a lot of aggression straight away.
A nearby pub that was recently closed because of drugs was a particular source of anti-social behaviour. 'I remember after midnight Mass at Christmas, it was Christmas morning-about half past five-and I was out here, sweeping up the glass and everything before people came to Mass in the morning. Bottles, just smashed-thrown all over the wall, litter everywhere.'
It's not just Britain's former pit villages that have been devastated by the collapse of industry. The Longbridge plant in Birmingham was once the biggest industrial complex inthe world. Itsustained the local community throughout the twentieth century. But when carmakers MG Rover collapsed in 2005, more than 6,000 workers were thrown on to the dole queue. Although Chinese automobile company Nanjing bought up the remaining assets, fewer than 200 people have jobs.
The collapse of Rover has had a similar impact on the local community as the closure of the mines had on Ashington. At Longhridge (which, according to the Chav Towns website, is home to 'Council Housed Antisocial Vermin ... More chavs hang round here than there are whore chavertes hanging at the dole line'), the
re are a number of boarded-up houses just next to the train station. Several middle-aged men were out and about on a Wednesday mid-afternoon. In neighbouring Northfield, where many of the Longhridge workers lived (and described by ChavTowns as full of 'the arse drippings of society' and 'toothless tattoed chav mums'), the rather grand-looking Old Mill pub has been abandoned, its windows smashed and its walls covered in graffiti. On the ground surrounding it were discarded scratch cards.
Don is the manager of the Greenlands Select Social Club in Longbridge. He describes a community' with its heart ripped out. 'An awful lot of people went to the wall when the plant closed,' he says. The Social Club itself took quite a hit. 'The takings went down about £3,000 a week. Because they used to come in at lunchtime as well as the evenings ... You don't see as many people out. I mean, you used toget sixty to a hundred in the club in the evening. You don't get twenty now.'
Two women in the newsagents vividly described tome what had happened to the local community. 'The young men-you see them at the school. When we had our children, we never saw a man about, you know. But they're at the school picking the kids up,' says one. 'It's because a lot of the women, the wives, can get cleaning jobs and that, so the men are picking up the kids, looking after the kids,' adds the other. 'I don't live round this area, and I was away for seventeen years. But when I came back to work here, I couldn't believe the difference in the area from them years. There seems such a lot of young unemployed and young girls with babies.'
Gaynor works at the nearby pharmacy. Her husband was one of the thousands of Longbridge workers who lost their jobs back in 2005. I asked her how she'd felt when he received his redundancy notice.
