West end, Glasgow
Photographs by
Islay McLeod
Society
Anthony Seaton
The first general election that I remember was in 1945. The war had just been won and the speeches of Winston Churchill still rang in our young ears, yet the electorate, including very many young men and women whose efforts and sacrifices had brought that victory, decisively rejected the Conservatives and elected a Labour government led by Clement Atlee. ‘A modest man with much to be modest about’ was how Churchill described him, but he was an exemplar of what has been called the professional ideal.
Our parents who voted in that election voted for a Britain that they hoped would be better than that which preceded the war and which had endured the great depression and hunger marches by the impoverished unemployed. They were not to be disappointed, as the Attlee government converted the aspirations of the Beveridge Report into the reality of the welfare state, the mark of a civilised society that has now survived six decades.
Four of Beveridge’s five giant evils: want, disease, ignorance and squalor, were largely to be eliminated in the ensuing decades, despite an almost unbearable wartime debt to the USA that was only repaid half a century later. Only one evil remained intractable at first, idleness, an evil that prior to the war (and also ironically thanks to it) had been eliminated and thereby validated the economic theories of Keynes.
The success of the welfare state in eliminating the spectre of want and in promoting better health, living conditions and universal education is something that older generations appreciate better than those born in the 1950s and since; indeed some in the post-1960 generation, including almost all the present government, seem to have forgotten our good fortune and our debt to Clement Attlee.
They characterise themselves and their fellow citizens as consumers and society as dependent on growth of consumption, consumption of a notionally endless supply of natural resources. They forget that resources of food and energy are not unlimited in an increasingly densely populated planet; they forget that to all consumption there is a down side as increasing energy use drives change in the very climate on which our food and water supplies depend. I ask myself, how can this have come about in a nation celebrated world-wide for its contributions to science, engineering, culture and even democracy? What has gone wrong?
I like to go back to the 18th and early 19th century, the era of Britain’s greatness, when its scientific inventions and their development by entrepreneurs made this country the most prosperous in the world, trading with those dominions and colonies that had painted vast tracts of red on our school atlases of the 1940s and 1950s. And yet that era was also a time of grinding poverty, of ignorance and disease, and of unemployment.
A measure of the unfairness of society is that not until 1842 were children under the age of 10 prohibited from being employed in coal mines. Scots crofters were driven from their land at the whim of sheep-owning lairds and the Irish starved when Phytophthera devastated the potato crop. It was truly the age of plutocracy, government by the rich for the rich, making the rich richer. The nation thrived and sought other territories and peoples to exploit, but it was, as Disraeli pointed out, in reality two nations, of the rich and the poor. Yet slowly and subtly it changed.
Before the era of popular communications, a movement arose characterised as answering to the professional ideal, in contradistinction to the entrepreneurial ideal. The professional ideal was inspired by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and the examples of early philanthropists and reformers including Robert Owen, Robert Peel the elder and the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, men of means and good fortune who believed that it was the responsibility of people like themselves to improve the loss of those less fortunate.
It led eventually to the Fabian concept of socialism and the ideas that informed both Beveridge and Attlee.
It was something that was to last until an ambitious chemist, Margaret Thatcher, became prime minister in 1979 with the word ‘freedom’ as her battle cry. Having defeated the enemy without in 1945, we were now to turn our attention to the enemy within. That fifth of the giant evils, idleness, was to rise to prominence in the political battles to come.
The Fabian ethos was based on gradual reform, evolution. Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher advocated a different path, revolution. The former, being based ultimately on ruthless autocracy was initially successful; the latter, being tempered by democracy only partly so. The first survives in China and has been replaced in Russia by kleptocracy. In Britain the unheralded revolution has replaced democracy with plutocracy. We had failed to notice it coming and now are suffering.
The revolution started with the assertion of individual rights, at the cost of societal goods. Those rights took the dominant form of the right of an individual to make his or her way in the world and not be inhibited by society’s regulation, barring obvious criminality. ‘There is no such thing as society’, only the individual and his/her family. Wealth was to ‘cascade down the generations’, unhindered by taxation. Those who made money were entitled to keep it, taxed by the state as little as possible.
Regulation became a dirty word, people should be free to look after themselves. The Great was to be put back into Britain. The old heavy industries, unprofitable and dependent as they were on manpower, should not be supported by the state, whatever the costs in enforced idleness and loss of skills of those they employed. Taxation policy subtly started to favour the rich, employment policy started to introduce greater incentives to productivity, and the defeated political Labour opposition in Britain looked back to its Fabian, as opposed to its Chartist and trade union, roots and started to evolve. It was the start of the era of the Great Delusion.
I still remember my shock when, during a period working in USA in 1969/71, I asked a group of my students why they had gone into medicine and it became apparent that financial reward was the main motivation of the majority. Of course, most had endured financial hardship by attending two universities on the way to their qualification, whereas in Britain university education was then free. It made me realise how different our two countries were and reinforced my determination not to practise privately.
It may seem strange now to younger people that those of us who entered professions such as teaching and medicine in the 1950s and 1960s did not expect to make much money. There was no embarrassment in claiming that one had a vocation, and that one’s aim was to help those less fortunate. Some, of course, became ambitious for wealth, but they were the exception. It was the job itself that gave one satisfaction, not the money.
This was professionalism. And it is significant that these two professions, teaching and medicine, seemed to attract particular attention in the Thatcher revolution, being seen as self-serving conspiracies almost as Bernard Shaw had characterised private medical practice. They needed commercial management, targets, competition, freedom from the constraints of the monopolistic state. The alienation of the professions had begun and competition in what was inevitably a state monopoly, the NHS, was a disaster with the introduction of extraordinary layers of managers sending bills back and forth to each other in the name of efficiency. The personal satisfaction of working in these professions was steadily diluted.
The Great Delusion came on so gradually that those of us busy in our jobs hardly noticed it. ‘Deregulation of the City and Financial Services Industry’ almost seemed sensible at the time. The trades of stockbroking and banking were honourable ones; we all knew our bank manager and were familiar with the inquisitions necessary to endure if we had to justify our overdraft or get a mortgage. Our pensions were dependent on the honesty of stockbrokers. These were trustworthy people who invested our money wisely and extracted interest at rates largely determined by the Bank of England.
Those of us in the north of Britain hardly noticed the tall buildings springing up in the ancient city of London, but gradually tales of huge bonuses started to filter out. We supposed that bonuses must be to compensate for long hours and stressful jobs, and perhaps wished that the long hours and stress that we had endured willingly for decades might have been recognised in the same way. We did however notice two things; bright graduates seemed to want to go and work in the city rather than in the traditional professions, including those most important to the prosperity of Britain, engineering and science; and bonuses started to become an accepted way of paying people excessive amounts throughout the nation, even in the nationalised industries.
Early in 1995, a trader in Barings Bank, who had been earlier prohibited from broking in the UK for making a fraudulent application, managed to lose his company $1.4 billion trading in Singapore, forcing it into bankruptcy. It started me wondering where the money came from and where it went, and to what extent the large profits being declared by financial institutions were dependent on gambling. But the economy seemed to be buoyant and this was marked by a building boom and increases in the prices of property.
People began to speak about a bubble but the Labour Government continued with the economic policies of its predecessor, with the difference that it was inclined to use the revenues gained from the city in expanding the public services rather as the Conservatives had used its revenues from oil to pay for unemployment. In February 2008, puzzling over where the money was coming from and being unable to get a clear answer from people who might have been expected to know, I wrote:
I have sought in vain the answer to these questions:
When a financial establishment loses billions of pounds, who receive the winnings?
If, as we are informed, the process can be described as ‘betting’, with whose money is the bet made?
What is the net benefit to society of such gambling?
May this process be regarded as a means of transferring money from those of modest means to the rich?
Does the apparent importance of London as a financial centre and thus a significant part of the British economy depend on such risky activities?
I sent the letter to the Times and it was not published. Within months we knew the answers, but behind the story of sub-prime mortgages and their buying and selling lies a deep malaise.
It is the malaise that led our society to value such an intrinsically valueless activity as the buying and selling of money so much more highly than education, science, innovation and enterprise. It is the malaise that values everything in monetary terms and characterises us as consumers rather than people, attaching a negative value to education, health and welfare. It has led to widespread corruption even in the Houses of Parliament and to the situation where our representatives are beholden to a small range of companies and the super-rich. It has increasingly biased the press, so we read ‘It’s the Sun wot won it’, and when the Sun changes its mind it has given us a cabinet of millionaires.
But the world is changing quickly now. There is a new generation of the young seeing the mistakes their elders have made. They communicate by the internet and are less likely to be influenced by the traditional media moguls. They do not like what they see and perceive injustice when they are asked to get into debt to go to the same universities that their political masters attended free. They understand the need for innovation and entrepreneurship but do not see the government promoting these. They realise that the consequences of climate change are with us now as drought, floods and crop failures in other countries affect food prices here. They know the economy of the world is shifting eastwards and that our future depends on more than financial gambling. And they protest in the streets, as have their contemporaries in Paris, Teheran, Tunisia and Cairo. All are expressing a frustration about their respective ‘cracies, be they klepto, auto or pluto.
Since money is simply a symbol of some more concrete good, useful for exchange in markets, the acquisition of great wealth can only mean its removal from others. I have watched the progressive glorification of the acquisition of wealth and the denigration of public service with increasing alarm. It has accompanied the decline of our country in the esteem of the world and has increasingly turned us not into Adam Smith’s nation governed by shopkeepers but a nation dependent on gamblers.
As the many young people faced with poor prospects and unemployment see where our decline into plutocracy has led them, they must be thinking that there is a better way. I doubt if our political class or the complacent super-rich, inbred and inexperienced in the realities of life in contemporary Britain can see this. How long before we see a Facebook revolt here?
Professor Anthony Seaton is an emeritus professor in the school of medicine and dentistry at the University of Aberdeen
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