The New Serfdom

by Angela Eagle

  The same toxic mix of moral injustice and economic self-destructiveness is seen in another social evil that is often a direct result of mental illness: rough sleeping, which has been getting worse and worse over the past seven years. The government’s own figures show that the estimated number of rough sleepers in Britain has risen from 1,768 in 2010 to 4,134 in 2016. You’d think the Conservatives in government would have noticed, since the highest rate of rough sleeping is in the Conservative local authority area of Westminster itself, home to Parliament and Whitehall, with 260 counted in 2016.

  The government’s own analysis says: ‘Of those rough sleepers who had a support needs assessment recorded, 43 per cent had alcohol support needs, 31 per cent drug support needs and 46 per cent mental health support needs, with 13 per cent having all three needs and 26 per cent having none of these three needs.’ That means 74 per cent of all rough sleepers had a diagnosable mental illness or substance abuse problem.

  Because rough sleeping is highly visible (unlike homelessness more generally, where someone doesn’t have a permanent home but may be living in council-funded temporary accommodation or in a hotel), it of course garners a lot of political attention. Local authorities understand that you need integrated teams comprising health, social care, welfare and housing to deal with these problems, but the cuts to their budgets simply have not helped at all.

  The raw economics, calculated by homeless charity Crisis, are that it costs the state substantially less to deal with someone’s problems early (on average less than £1,500) than dealing with it once the problem is entrenched (£20,000 per year in health, policing and social services per rough sleeper). The failure to fully fund rough sleeping prevention and assistance services is a classic example of a false economy and one that causes huge misery.

  The only country in Europe that has managed to resist the rising tide of homelessness and rough sleeping is Finland. Finland decided to take an approach to housing that saw it as an absolute right and basic need. So, they decided that anyone that was sleeping rough should immediately be given a secure, permanent dwelling. So, for the young person kicked out of their family home, the drug addict desperate to get back on their feet but with nothing stable in their life, the person who lost his job and sank into severe depression, they will provide them with stability and compassion. This has allowed people to turn around their lives, become part of society, access help, get back to work and start paying rent. You can imagine the howls of the Hayekians, but in fact, Sajid Javid, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and a self-professed Thatcherite, is implementing three trials in Manchester, Merseyside and the East Midlands. It is an approach that has the potential to show just how effective taking the market out of basic needs can be – and how compassion and social solidarity can be the catalysts for people to realise their full potential.

  The final social evil that we must look at when we think about untreated mental illness is that of suicide. Suicide and self-harm are not mental health problems in themselves, but the Mental Health Foundation states that 90 per cent of all suicides have been ‘found to be associated with a psychiatric disorder’. Suicide rates in Britain have been falling since a peak in the recorded rate sometime during the Great Depression. The lowest rate ever recorded was in 2007, just before the banking crisis and recession; a third of the rate in 1934. Since then, the rate rose by about 10 per cent but is now declining once again. Part of this is due to specific policies addressed at making it more difficult to commit suicide – such as detoxifying the domestic gas supply, fitting cars with catalytic converters and banning certain pharmaceuticals that are particularly dangerous in overdose. Part of it is that we have created quite an effective working relationship between government, local authorities and charities.

  But, as we are frequently reminded, suicide remains the biggest killer of men between the ages of forty and fifty-nine. Male suicide rates are much higher than female rates: around three times as high. One reason for this is because older men are the least likely to seek help for psychiatric illness, as opposed to a physical ailment for which they would go to a doctor, and instead tend to ‘self-medicate’ with alcohol or drugs, both of which have serious neurological effects that can exacerbate symptoms and cause a downward spiral in mental health.

  The answer is a mix of everything we’ve discussed above: to ensure that when people do seek help they can get access quickly; that we try to eliminate the stigma around mental illness; and, given a raft of evidence that people with a low perceived socioeconomic position are much more at risk of mental illness, that we address some of the social inequalities that can make people’s mental health deteriorate in the first place.

  There can be no doubt that Britain has achieved a considerable amount since Beveridge’s time and indeed in the past few decades when it comes to mental health. We’ve made great strides in eliminating the stigma of mental illness and in improving the quality of care. However, we have so much further to go. It is imperative we ensure that we treat mental illness in the same way we would physical illness: everyone has an absolute right to quality care, free at the point of access, when things go wrong. However, it’s also imperative that we treat mental health (as opposed to illness) – to ensure our population is happy and reduce predictable stressors – much as we seek through our physical public health programme to prevent diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems before they manifest. It is also undoubtedly true that we cannot afford to allow budgets to continue to be squeezed and cut when they need instead to be increased. And it is also going to be increasingly important over the next decade to address a looming crisis in an age in which inequality is ever more visible, and the mental health of many people – especially our young – is being damaged by the inevitable economic consequences of Hayek’s market fundamentalism.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BIGOTRY AND INTOLERANCE

  Pastor Martin Niemöller was a German Protestant and human rights activist who was detained in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps in the Second World War. Before his imprisonment, Niemöller had been sympathetic to the Nazis and to their anti-Semitism. It was only when they took control of the Protestant church that he became a resistor. After the war, he wrote a short poem that spoke to his and Germany’s wilful ignorance of the murderous hatred that had grown in their society. The poem also reminds readers of how those who peddle blame and hate always expand their targets; that hatred becomes an end unto itself.

  First they came for the Communists

  and I did not speak out

  because I was not a Communist.

  Then they came for the trade unionists

  and I did not speak out

  because I was not a trade unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews

  and I did not speak out

  because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me

  and there was no one left

  to speak out for me.

  Britain has made huge progress in confronting, discussing and addressing bigotry in our society. In 1992, the Commission for Social Justice was curiously cautious about not spending a lot of time thinking about discrimination on race, gender, religion, disability or mental health, although it did devote a lot of time to class. In 1942, Beveridge would not have understood much of our contemporary debate on discrimination. He may not even have recognised our modern diverse society.

  Because democratic socialists believe profoundly in equality, we have been in the forefront of the battles to fight all forms of discrimination. This commitment is about the kind of society we wish to live in. It is about building social solidarity and ensuring that all our citizens, whatever their gender, ethnic origin, disability, belief, socioeconomic class or sexual orientation, are treated first and foremost as human beings with rights to respect and equal access to economic and political opportunity. Discrimination prevents individuals from reaching their full potential and that damages our
society as a whole. Just as we must fight to end undeserved privilege so we must act to open up life chances and opportunities to all. In this time of anger, resentment and rising populism fuelled by hate, we all have a duty to acknowledge the human rights and dignity of every human being.

  There are a number of ways in which people are discriminated against, including on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability and class. Discrimination can be direct or indirect, and the perpetrators can be individuals, groups, institutions and even the state itself.

  In the UK we have made great progress in legislating against hatred and discrimination and we can be proud of this but we are clearly not there yet. There are still powerful forces of intolerance and of outright hatred within our society who wish to preserve the privileged access to opportunity which they believe is theirs by right. The snarling faces of Britain First are at one extreme. But discrimination is usually more subtle than that. The persistent gender pay gap; the CV with an ‘ethnic’ name less likely to progress to interview even if the work experience it contains is identical to a CV with a ‘British’ name; the worsening structural impediments to social mobility which hold working-class people back; the effective exclusion from work of the majority of people with disabilities; the horrifying fact that eight out of ten young trans people have self-harmed and that the number of lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have experienced a hate crime rose to 16 per cent in 2017, according to Stonewall. So, where are we today, and how far have we got to go?

  WOMEN

  Women comprise just over 50 per cent of the population and yet do not hold 50 per cent of jobs. The more senior the roles, the fewer women will be found. Angela was especially struck by the dwindling number of female ministers she encountered at meetings of the EU Council of Ministers as the councils she attended on behalf of the UK government became more senior. When she attended the Environment Council or the Social Affairs Council, there were many women, but when she became a Treasury minister and attended the Economic and Finance Council (Ecofin), it was overwhelmingly male. A glance at the G7 or G20 leaders photo calls demonstrates just how far the world has to go to include women fully in political life. As a result of exclusion and discrimination, women have less income, wealth and opportunity, and are disproportionately more likely to be victims of sexual violence, domestic violence and discrimination in the workplace. Recently we have been reminded of the extent of the misogyny that is endemic in our society: from Gamergate to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which has spawned the inspirational Time’s Up movement in response. Nor has the treatment of women in politics improved as they have become more involved in higher-profile roles. Angela was no supporter of Mrs Thatcher but was nauseated by the sexist attacks she endured, such as exhortations to ‘ditch the bitch’. Hillary Clinton suffered relentlessly appalling treatment in the 2016 US presidential election, including – uniquely – directly from her opponent on the stump and in the televised debates. Social media has normalised vicious misogyny in the UK and it is coarsening our politics in the UK.

  The End Violence Against Women Coalition, a campaigning group founded in 2005, published a list of key statistics that makes for gruelling reading:2

  In 2016 there were 2 million female victims of domestic violence.

  Two women every week are killed by a current or ex-partner and other close relative.

  Only 15 per cent of serious sexual offences and 21 per cent of partner abuse incidents are reported to the police.

  More than 100,000 women and girls in the UK are at risk of and living with the consequences of female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so called ‘honour-based’ violence.

  Girls in schools in the UK are experiencing high levels of sexual violence and harassment, as alarmingly evidenced by Parliament’s Women and Equalities Select Committee.

  Prosecution rates for sexual violence are worryingly low. Newspapers love to cover miscarriages of justice for accused men but the thousands and thousands of trials that never go forward because of prosecutorial reticence are never heard about, despite the fact that at the heart of each is a traumatised woman whose life has been utterly changed by the violence she has endured.

  Despite the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, which were put on the statute book by the formidable Barbara Castle, equality has still not been achieved. On remuneration, the gender pay gap between full-time workers has been driven down by successive administrations aggressively pursuing this as an issue, but it remains at 9.1 per cent as of 2017. As Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s first ever female general secretary, archly noted, it would still take decades for women to get paid the same as men at the current rate of improvement. Worse still is the gap for mothers. According to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, after childbirth the pay gap increases to 33 per cent after around twelve years. The wage gap is particularly serious for women with lower socioeconomic status, i.e. low levels of education and few qualifications. Part of the problem is the very high cost of childcare in the UK. This has worsened following government spending cuts, which have also led to the cuts to SureStart centres and the failure to ensure that all parts of the country have access to high-quality childcare. OECD projections show that by 2030, ‘if the share of women working reached the same level as for men, annual growth rates in GDP per capita would rise by 0.5 percentage points in the UK. The boost to economic growth would be even higher if women’s working hours increased too.’ It is a catastrophic waste of women’s ability, potential and our nation’s economic prosperity. Facilitating women to work by investing in childcare and elder care provision would quickly pay for itself and yet the progress made by the last Labour government has since stalled.

  Women also remain stubbornly locked out of Britain’s boardrooms and the top levels of our professions. The Directory of Social Change’s analysis of 339 corporate boards showed the overall percentage of women was 22 per cent. Cranfield School of Management found the proportion of women holding the most influential non-executive positions, such as chairman and senior independent director, in the biggest 100 companies in the UK is just 8 per cent. Meanwhile, John Allan, the chairman of Tesco, opined:

  If you are female and from an ethnic background – and preferably both – then you are in an extremely propitious period … For a thousand years, men have got most of these jobs, the pendulum has swung very significantly the other way now and will do for the foreseeable future, I think. If you are a white male, tough. You are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard.

  Nine out of the twelve members of Tesco’s board and Executive Committee are white men; there are no ethnic minorities. We are in the extraordinary position of being in the midst of a full-fledged backlash against the progress of women, when, in reality, not that much has changed.

  Women’s equality is a core goal of the Labour Party. Progress has been made but there are stubborn reactionary forces that have yet to be overcome. Since the financial crisis, the EU’s Gender Equality Index found we have made no progress on tackling inequality, lagging behind our neighbours, including France, Holland, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. The results are shaming. Critical, sustained and significant action is required to fix this ongoing moral injustice and profoundly economically damaging state of affairs.

  LGBT

  It was thirty years ago, in 1988, that the Conservative government put the infamous Section 28 onto the statute book. It banned local councils from ‘intentionally promot[ing] homosexuality or publish[ing] material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ in its schools or other areas of their work. The legislation was wildly popular with the right-wing tabloid press, as well – depressingly – as the Catholic Church, Church of England, Muslim Council of Britain and the Salvation Army. It was cruel and bullying because it signalled an official disdain for the struggles of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals to come to terms with their sexual orientation and be themselves in a society which often regarded them with
fear and contempt. Its characterisation of LGBT relationships as ‘pretended’ further signalled that it was OK to single them out and have no respect for them as human beings. The fact that it applied to schools prevented teachers from dealing with homophobic bullying and protecting genuinely vulnerable pupils who were left to cope alone.

  Fifteen years ago, this disgusting, cynical, pandering piece of legislation was taken off the statute books in the Blair government’s Local Government Act 2003. This was after a titanic battle with the House of Lords, which had defeated an earlier attempt. New Labour made huge strides on countering discrimination against LGBT people. They equalised the age of consent; ended the ban on LGBT people serving in the armed forces; gave LGBT people the right to adopt; banned discrimination in the sexual offence laws; banned discrimination in the workplace; created the Equality and Human Rights Commission to help enforce the equality laws; included homophobia in the definition of hate crimes; created civil partnerships, finally giving official recognition and legal rights to LGBT relationships; and introduced the Equality Act. The hardest battles were fought over equalising the age of consent, which was only put onto the statute book by invoking the Parliament Act, because the House of Lords simply would not pass it. Likewise, the battle to end discrimination in the provision of goods and services on the grounds of sexual orientation was fiercely resisted by some but put on the statute book nevertheless. All of this progress has changed political debate so radically that by the time the Conservatives finally came close to winning an election in 2010, they had had to install a leader who promised to consult on gay marriage if elected.

  And yet, despite all this progress, there is still far to go in society to achieve real LGBT equality. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 LGBT people in the UK by YouGov for Stonewall, a remarkable and brave charity that has done so much to combat anti-LGBT hate in the UK, makes for stark and depressing reading. They found that: