One of the most striking things about the history of the last two centuries in Britain is the constant change of society. Traditional ways of life were uprooted and populations subjected to a different world to their parents and grandparents generations. In Britain the post WWII generations, the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers were perhaps the lucky generations who saw quality of life improving during their adulthood in a transformative century.
Those that arrived to adulthood after the year 2000 were branded the Millennials and who have been perhaps the first generation in those two centuries to see quality of life fall, albeit shielded by the explosive rise of the internet at the tail end of the last century. This generation face a global environmental crisis a declining economy and for the most part an insecure home.
These problems were foreseen by the previous generations but far too little was done to avert the decline. Largely because the right wing establishment ignored the problem. The problem being not only a lack of sustainable development and poor planning but a wilful releasing of national assets into the pockets of the privileged few of the establishment. This establishment is but a tiny part of the British population, but they were enabled to ignore the problem by hoodwinking a sizable portion of the population to support their continued and increasing seizure of resources.
The two most obvious failings were in Housing and Transport. Back in the 70s and 80s Housing and transport were relatively cheap. Almost anyone who had a full time secure job and didn’t blow their disposable income on living it to the max could afford to buy a house near where they worked, surrounded by businesses to make their lives easier. However the rot started. Hypermarkets began to crop up on the edges of the big towns and cities. Cars were cheap, the roads relatively empty, so those in the suburban areas could easily go to these hypermarkets and make savings on their grocery shop than visiting the traditional baker, greengrocer and butchers shops around the corner. This was seen as being modern, where successful people went for their shopping to visit these cathedrals of commerce and convenience, people who felt like they were doing ‘the right thing’. Today, almost all those local shops have gone and the health and quality of life of all has suffered. Now we have no choice but to travel miles to a small number of foodstores and are forced to buy whatever rubbish they sell.
It was and is very sensible to own your own home. Paying off a mortgage is a lot cheaper over a lifetime than paying rent, yet was a little more every month, so some compromise of use of disposable income had to be made. so renting got the stigma of something for young adults and the feckless. The feckless as surely these people could also get a secure job and a mortgage too if they didn’t go the pub every night of the week?
Which of course the formerly ‘feckless’ did, in the 70s, 80s and 90s lots of people bought their own homes and went to the pub to socialise less as mortgages were only a little more per month than renting. The problem was that the establishment made it difficult to build enough new homes for the growing number of households and alowed new builds to be of lower quality than the older housing stock. so values of homes shot up. Paradoxically this made people who had homes feel richer, more successful and people who had done ‘the right thing’.
By the 90s housing costs were getting very silly. Those whom had been lucky enough to have or able to borrow capital saw that buying a second home was a very sound investment, even if they didn’t rent it out as it could be instantly sold for a profit and it was sensible as a good way of funding a retirement from work. At the end of this period, where these investments were becoming harder to acquire, many were sold cheaper properties in Central and Eastern Europe. effectively to continue the British Empire tradition of exploiting the resources of other countries rather than build useful things.
It became difficult for young people to buy houses or even rent near where they wanted to live or work. However if only they looked a little further away they could find somewhere affordable and travel in. Over time those distance increased to the point when somewhere in the 90s there were no longer cheaper areas to move to. Suddenly for most of Britain you lived miles from you work and social life and food shops were a few miles away, so you needed your car for everything, and no new roads have been built, the public transport system remained a mess and so all these journeys are a lot slower today because of traffic congestion as not only those who were ‘doing the right thing’ were waiting at the traffic lights, everyone was.
It is too late for the Millenials as now it is more expensive to rent than to buy and the banks won’t loan you the money as you don’t have a secure job, you do short contracts and they have stricter lending criteria now with the lack of economic growth. So Millenials are trapped having to run a car to be able to access a job and having to pay high rental costs, high indirect taxes and essentials being more expensive, because all the businesses are paying very high rents too, so have no real spare income to save or invest. They work hard to pay the mortgages of an older people they are not even related to. This is a huge problem not just for the Millenials but for the economy.
A problem for several reasons. It has created a culture of rentiers, where if you have capital you invest in land or tangible assets that give you a good return (which is essentially everyone else working to make you richer rather than producing a valuable good) rather than investing in production of goods and services. It denies young adults decent disposable incomes. Young adults should have disposable income as they don’t yet have families to support and it is they who make decisions in the market about what to spend money on which will be the technologies and solutions for the future. It quite cyclical, there may be a good business case for a new concern, but not enough people able to afford it to enable it to be developed into something that is an improvement to replace an older thing. It also stifles time and energy for learning skills and time to develop new things, it erodes the entrepreneurial spirit as young people can’t as easily go off to create something new as they are tied to a job as they are tied to paying the rent and other debts.
This all suggests a need for a radical change, to raise productivity and sustainability, to improve quality of life and to reduce harm to the environment. So the establishment produced a brilliant wheeze to distract us all, Brexit. The older generation fed a constant diet over decades of blaming the Common Market, EC and now EU for every woe. It was EU rules and EU immigrants to Britain that were causing all the problems so the papers say [i.e. not us in the Establishment who could have kept Britain really growing but chose not to]. The Brexit vote coming a decade after the 2008 crash where the decline of the UK economy was much noticeable to the typical person (house prices have been stagnant apart from a London bubble), Brexit has achieved its end of being a distraction from the actual causes of the decline of the economy, divided the nations into Brexiteers and Remoaners and achieved the good old British divide and rule strategy that has always worked so well for the British Establishment.
It is any surprise that the majority of people under 45 years old voted Remain, whilst a majority over 45 voted Leave. The idea that those who couldn’t afford their own house and didn’t have a decent disposable income must surely be feckless people has rooted in a national consciousness, however now it simply isn’t true . They who have drunk deep of the idea that they are successful people who do they right thing and hold onto the idea that elsewhere in Britain are the unsuccessful, the feckless who are causing the problems. Or if you have missed out on this success, then it is their fault that you are not so (the EU, Socialists, the Scots, the Welsh, Hippies, Immigrants from other EU countries, Single Parents, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Ginger haired people, Northerners, Southerners, University educated people, People who like Marmite, Fat people, Vegans, Buckets of picked herring and so on]. Of course none of these people or entities are the problem. The British Establishment and large corporations have colluded to make more capital for themselves by destroying the social capital and infrastructure in British society which is the real driver of economic growth.
Of course there is a lot wrong with the EU, it is part of the Establishment too. I’ll wager you would get a massive percentage support across Europe for the sentiment ‘There is a lot wrong with the EU, it needs radical root and branch reform’. I’m not averse to leaving the EU as such, but it isn’t the panacea it has been suggested and certainly not as Thersa May has been doing. I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments of ‘Taking Back control’, Democracy and the benefits of a united Britain.
To get there, to this world where we can improve quality of life, genuinely tackle climate change and okay Unicorns if you want, by making the economy work for the population of the economy, where innovation and skill are rewarded, but having fat lumps of capital from not producing anything of value isn’t, we do need radical reform. It’s just that leaving the EU and leaving the Tories in charge of that isn’t going to achieve that because they are the Establishment, it’s going to make things worse. First we need to stop Brexit and then the real work begins of transforming our society back to a growing developing society. For that work has to involve giving communities back control, for devolution, for localism, for decisions to be made by people like us who live where we live, who we share our towns with. That means strong local councils, Welsh and Scottish independence, better quality housing that you have a stake in, rather than paying someone to live there or taking money from someone else living there. We have to work together, rather than against each other. Margaret Thatcher famously said that “There is no such thing as society” but there is society, but Thatcher tried to destroy it, to remove the benefits of mutual cooperation. All Brexit has done is divide us and made finding solutions to our problems harder, it’s time to stop Brexit.
