Mobility and employment
This section concerns social class, movement between classes over time (social mobility) and the ways in which people still largely come to have their class assigned (employment). The story begins with a chapter from a Guardian article that summarises how people are increasingly members of ‘poor’, ‘average’, or ‘rich’ classes, and demonstrates how, in many areas, there has been a substantial decline in the proportions that fall into the ‘average’ categories. In ‘old money’ these were ‘upper-working class’ or ‘lower-middle class’. Within this chapter it is suggested that, if current trends continue, soon only a minority of people will be ‘normal’ in their social position; only a minority will fit within the centre of the income range. Instead a majority will be either rich or poor.
The second chapter in this section, taken from a trade union magazine (Rapport), continues the theme of suggesting that soon it really will no longer be normal to be normal. Geographical residential location for many is being increasingly determined by monies that have to be inherited or gifted from relatives. Ever more differentiated incomes from employment (and interest on unearned wealth) result over time in gross inequalities in the financial endowments gifted to different groups in society. However, many affluent Britons, especially some who have retired overseas (with the help of their wealth), see the problems as caused by influxes of immigrants, not by increasing inequality. An extract from an academic paper first printed in the French language geography journal Géocarrefour is included next to highlight this. Its primary concern is to report on the growing dominance of London over British society and British human geography; or how the key determinant of the economic and social fortunes of major towns and cities in Britain in recent years has simply been how far they are located away from London. Its secondary concern is to highlight xenophobia among so many of the elite of England regarding their fellow citizens.
The story in this section is brought to a close with a chapter that reproduces an article originally written for the magazine New London Review, which was sold in only one small part of London. It reports on the extent of the divides inside London itself, on the extent of poverty, inequality, excess and suffering there. London contains both the greatest excesses of wealth and one of the largest spatial concentrations of unemployment in Western Europe. This is followed by an article from the British Medical Journal on the evidence for adverse health consequences from enforced labour programmes for the unemployed, and exploring what the alternatives were to mass youth unemployment in earlier periods. Those alternatives were ignored following the general election of May 2010.