Always with us?
Through the New Labour years, with low inflation and steady growth, most of the country grew richer. Growth since 1997, at 2.8% a year, was above the post-war average, Britain’s gross domestic product per head was above that of France and Germany, and she had the second-lowest jobless figures in the EU. The number of people in work increased by 2.4 million. Incomes grew, in real terms, by about a fifth. Pensions were in trouble but house price inflation soared, so that home-owners found their properties more than doubling in value and came to think themselves prosperous indeed. One study showed that Britain had a higher proportion of dollar millionaires than any other country. Family budgets are by definition tricky things to generalize about but by 2006 analysts were assessing the disposable wealth of the British, defined by the consultants KDP as ‘the money people can really put their hands on if necessary’ at £40,000 per household. The wealth was not evenly spread geographically, averaging £68,000 in the south-east of England and a little over £30,000 in Wales and north-east England. But even in historically poorer parts of the UK house prices had risen fast, so much so that government plans to bulldoze worthless northern terraces had to be abandoned when they started to become worth quite a lot. Cheap mortgages, easy borrowing and high property prices meant that millions of people felt far better off, despite the overall rise in the tax burden. Cheap air travel, which had first arrived in the seventies with Freddie Laker, gave the British opportunities for easy travel both to their traditional sun-kissed resorts and to every part of the European continent. A British expatriate house-price boom rippled slowly across the French countryside and roared through southern Spain. People began to commute weekly to their jobs in London or Manchester from villas by the Mediterranean. Small regional airports grew, then boomed.
Clever, constantly evolving consumer electronics and then cheap clothing from the Far East kept the shops thronged. The internet, advancing from colleges and geeks to the show-off upper middle classes, then to children’s bedrooms everywhere, introduced new forms of shopping. It first began to attract popular interest in the mid-nineties: Britain’s first internet café and internet magazine, reviewing a few hundred early websites, were both launched in 1994. The following year saw the beginning of internet shopping as a major pastime, with both eBay and Amazon arriving, though for tiny numbers of people at first. It was a time of immense optimism, despite warnings that the whole digital world would collapse because of the ‘millennium bug’ – the alleged inability of computers to deal with the last two digits in ‘2000’, which was taken very seriously at the time.
In fact, the bubble was burst by its own excessive expansion, like any bubble, and after a pause and a lot of ruined dreams, the ‘new economy’ roared on again. By 2000, according to the Office of National Statistics, around 40 per cent of Britons had accessed the internet at some time. Cyber frenzy swept the country, and business; three years later, nearly half of British homes were connected. By 2004 the spread of broadband had brought a new mass market in downloading music and video online. By 2006, three-quarters of British children had internet access at home. Simultaneously, new money arrived. The rich of America, Europe and Russia began buying up parts of London, and then other attractive parts of the country, including Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire and Cornwall. For all the problems and disappointments, and the longer-term problems with their financing, new schools and public buildings sprang up – new museums, galleries, vast shopping complexes, corporate headquarters, now biomorphic, not straight, full of lightness, airy atriums, thin skins of glass and steel. This was show-off architecture for a show-off material culture and not always dignified, but these buildings were better-looking and more imaginative than their predecessors had been in the dreary age of concrete.
At a more humdrum level, ‘executive housing’, with pebbled driveways, brick facing and dormer windows, was growing across farmland and by rivers with no thought of flood-plain constraints. Parts of the country far from London, such as the English south-west and Yorkshire, enjoyed a ripple of wealth that pushed their house prices to unheard-of levels. From Leith to Gateshead, Belfast to Cardiff Bay, once-derelict shorefront areas were transformed. Supermarkets, exercising huge market power, brought cheap meat and factory-made meals into almost everyone’s budgets. The new global air freight market, and refrigerated lorries moving freely across a Europe shorn of internal barriers, carried out-of-season fruit and vegetables, fish from the Pacific, exotic foods of all kinds, to superstores everywhere. Hardly anyone was out of reach of a Tesco, a Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s or Asda. By the mid-2000s, the four supermarket giants owned more than 1,500 superstores. This provoked a new political row about their commercial influence but it also spread consumption of goods that had once been luxuries. Under Thatcher, millions had begun drinking wine. Under Blair they began drinking drinkable wine. Their children had to borrow to study but were more likely to go to college or university and to travel the world on a ‘gap year’, a holiday from ordinariness which had once meant working, occasionally abroad, but which by now might mean air-hopping across South America or to the beaches of Thailand. Materially, for the majority of people, this was a golden age, which perhaps explains why the real anger about earlier pensions decisions and stealth taxes failed to translate into anti-Labour voting in successive general elections.
Not everyone, of course, was invited to the party. New Labour’s general pitch was to the well-doing middle but Gordon Brown, from the first, made much of its anti-poverty agenda. Labour in particular emphasized child poverty because, since the launch of the Child Poverty Action Group, it had become a particularly emotive problem. Labour policies took a million children out of relative poverty between 1997 and 2004, though the numbers rose again later. Brown’s emphasis was also on the working poor, and the virtue of work. So his major innovations were the national minimum wage, the ‘New Deal’ for the young unemployed, and the working families’ tax credit, as well as tax credits aimed at children. There was also a minimum income guarantee, and later a pension credit, for worse-off pensioners.
The minimum wage was first set at £3.60 an hour and rising year by year. (It stood at £5.35 an hour in 2006.) Because the figures were low the minimum wage did not destroy the 2 million jobs, or produce the higher inflation, which Conservatives and others claimed it would. Employment grew and inflation stayed low. It even appeared to have cut red tape, since the old Wages Councils had to inspect businesses more frequently than the new Inland Revenue minimum wage inspections. By the middle 2000s, the minimum wage covered 2 million people, the majority of them women. And because it was uprated slightly faster than inflation, the wages of the poor rose faster. The situation may change, particularly if unemployment worsens, but it appeared to have been an almost unqualified success, enough for the Conservative Party, which had so strongly opposed it, to embrace it under Michael Howard before the 2005 election.
The New Deal was funded by a windfall tax on privatized utility companies. By 2000, Blair said it had helped a quarter of a million young people back to work and it was being claimed as a major factor in lower unemployment as late as 2005. It was clearly less of a factor than the huge increase in the size of the state: in the Blair years, state employment grew by 700,000, funded by record amounts taken in tax. And the cost of goading, coaxing and educating people into jobs was very high. The National Audit Office, looking back at its effect in the first Parliament, reckoned the number of under 25-year-olds helped into real jobs could be as low as 25,000, at a cost per person of £8,000. All those new jobs which had to be created to help people into jobs came at a price. A second initiative was targeted at the youngest of all, the babies and young children of the most deprived families. Sure Start was meant to bring mothers together in family centres across Britain – 3,500 were planned for 2010, ten years after the scheme was launched – and help them to be more effective parents. A scheme in the United States had shown great success and Sure Start was another initiative backed in its essence by the Conservatives, though Blair himself appeared to be having second thoughts, as the most deprived families declined to turn up. He believed in sticks as well as carrots.
Abroad, the government’s anti-poverty agenda concentrated on Africa. In 2004 Blair initiated the Commission for Africa which worked to persuade the world’s richest countries to back a wide plan for economic, political and social reform, supported by debt relief. By then it was estimated more than 50,000 people were dying every day from famine or bad water in Africa and the continent’s AIDS epidemic was wiping out much of a generation. In 2005 Brown, struggling to persuade the United States to back his plans for an international finance facility – a global piggy bank – agreed to raise Britain’s aid contribution to 0.7 per cent of GDP. Washington declined to follow suit. Enormous strength was added to the campaign by Make Poverty History, one of the two biggest examples of street politics in the Blair age. Here was extra-parliamentary action which showed people’s readiness to engage with politics-as-unusual, a residual idealism. There is a tradition in Britain of moral protest and practical action for famine abroad. Oxfam had started as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942, campaigning to persuade the wartime government to lift its blockade on German-occupied Greece, where the Nazis were allowing people to starve as they diverted food to their army in North Africa. (Churchill took the view that the starvation was the fault of the occupying power and the blockade should stay – the argument was strikingly similar to those made about sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Major and Blair years.) What made the later movement different was the fusion of celebrity, music and television to raise unheard-of sums.
It began with the Irish rock star Bob Geldof, and Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, who were shocked by news coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. They formed a thirty-strong ‘supergroup’ to make a fundraising Christmas single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ It raised £65 m and Geldof managed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to waive VAT for the famine victims. This success was followed by Live Aid, a linked global concert held in London and Philadephia in 1985. It was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people in 160 countries, making it by far the biggest world television event to that point. Geldof continued to campaign on Africa, joining the Commission for Africa. Having sworn he would never try to repeat Live Aid, Geldof did so in 2005 with a host of rock stars, including U2 and the (briefly) reformed Pink Floyd, breaking more records for global audience numbers. This time, though, the focus was on lobbying the richest countries, meeting as the G8 under British chairmanship at Gleneagles in Scotland.
On 2 July 2005, some 225,000 people marched in Edinburgh calling for debt cancellation to help Africa’s poorest countries. A week later a £28.8 bn aid deal and a debt cancellation programme for eighteen countries, plus new guarantees to fund anti-HIV drugs, were indeed agreed at Gleneagles. Because parts of the rich world remained hostile to opening up trade to Africa, essential to helping the continent recover, some campaigners were disappointed. And the announcement was greeted with cynicism by the anti-globalization movement which was also a feature of these years. Geldof said, however, that ‘never before have so many people forced a change of policy onto a global agenda’ and his fellow campaigner, Bono of U2, claimed the deal would save the lives of 600,000 Africans, mostly children. The legacy of Live8 and the Commission for Africa will continue to be debated for years but it was a unique alliance between civil organizations, churches, rock musicians, actors, writers – and politicians. Both Blair and Gordon Brown were consciously trying to use the hundreds of thousands of marchers and the glamour of the rock stars to nudge other world leaders towards agreement, and they were at least partially successful. It showed what their partnership could do.
Poverty is hard to define, easy to smell. In a country like Britain, it is mostly relative. Though there are a few thousand people living rough or who genuinely do not have enough to keep them decently alive, and many more pensioners frightened of how they will pay for heating, the greater number of poor are those left behind the general material improvement in life. This is measured by income compared to the average and by this yardstick in 1997 there were three to four million children living in households of relative poverty, triple the number in 1979. This does not mean they were physically worse off than the children of the late seventies, since the country generally became much richer. But human happiness relates to how we see ourselves relative to those around us, so it was certainly real. Under their new leader David Cameron, the Conservatives declared that they too believed in the concept of relative poverty, as described by a left-of-centre commentator, Polly Toynbee. And a world of work remained below the minimum wage, in private homes, where migrant servants were exploited, and in other crannies. Some 336,000 jobs remained on ‘poverty pay’ rates.
Nevertheless the City firm UBS believes redistribution of wealth – a phrase New Labour did not like to use in case it frightened middle-class voters – had been stronger in Britain than other major industrialized countries. Despite the growth of the super-rich, overall equality slightly increased in the Blair years. One factor was the return to means-testing of benefits, particularly for pensioners and through the working families’ tax credit (which in 2003 was divided into a child tax credit and a working tax credit). This was a personal U-turn by Brown who in Opposition had opposed means-testing. As Chancellor he concluded that if he was to direct scarce money at the people in real poverty he had little choice. More and more pensioners were means-tested, eventually some 66 per cent of them, provoking a nationwide revolt and persuading the government to back down and promise an eventual return to a link between state pension rates and average earnings. The other drawback of means-testing was that a huge bureaucracy then had to track people’s earnings and try to establish just what they should get. Billions were overpaid. As people getting tax credits rather than old-style benefits, did better, and earned a little more, they found themselves facing demands to hand back money they had already spent. Many thousands of civil servants were hurriedly sent to try to deal with a tidal wave of complaint, and the system became extremely expensive to administer. It was also hugely vulnerable to fraud, with gangs taking over people’s identities (13,000 civil servants alone) and exploiting ‘a culture of overpayment’.
In the New Labour years, as under John Major, a sickly tide of euphemism rose ever higher, depositing its oily linguistic scurf on every available surface. Passengers became cubecame refuse operatives, stomers; indeed everybody became customers. Bin-men people with mental disabilities became differently-abled. And the poor became the socially excluded. There were controversial drives to oblige more disabled (and sometimes shirking) people back into work. The ‘socially excluded’ were confronted by a wide range of initiatives designed to make them, in essence, more middle class. In theory, Labour was non-judgemental or liberal about behaviour. In practice, responding to the darkest areas of deprivation, an almost Victorian moralism began to reassert itself. Advice on diet, weight-loss and alcohol consumption followed earlier government campaigns on AIDS and drugs. Parenting classes were much trumpeted. And for the minority who made life hellish for their neighbours on housing estates or in the streets, Labour introduced a word which became one of its particular gifts to the language of the age, as essential as dotcom or texting, the Asbo.
The Anti-Social Behaviour Order, first introduced in 1998, was an updated system of injunctions for what earlier generations called hooligans. These had to be applied for by the police or local council and granted by magistrates. To break the curfew or restriction, which could be highly specific, became a criminal offence. Asbos could be given for swearing at people, harassing passers-by, vandalism, making too much noise, graffiti, organizing raves, flyposting, taking drugs or sniffing glue, joyriding, either offering yourself as a prostitute or kerb-crawling in your car to find a prostitute, hitting people, drinking in designated public places…almost anything in fact that was annoying or frightening. More bizarre-sounding ones included giving an Asbo to an entire part of Skegness to allow police arrests of troublemakers there; a 13-year-old girl being banned from using the word ‘grass’ and an 87-year-old man being ordered not to make ‘sarcastic remarks’ to neighbours and their visitors. In one case a woman who kept trying to commit suicide was given an Asbo to prevent her jumping into rivers or canals.
Though almost every story about an unlikely-sounding Asbo as reported in newspapers turned out to have a reason behind it, Asbo-spotting became a minor national sport and there were fears that for the tougher children, they became a badge of honour. In their early years they were much mocked by Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs for being ineffective and rarely used by local authorities, as well as being criticized strongly by civil libertarians. Since breaking an Asbo could result in a prison sentence, it meant extending the threat of prison to crimes that before had not warranted it. Yet the public when polled strongly supported Asbos and as they were refined and strengthened they were gradually used more frequently, becoming almost routine. Like the minimum wage, Bank independence and some of the anti-poverty initiatives they seemed to be a part of New Labour Britain that would stick. At the time of writing, 7,500 or so had been given out in England and Wales (Scotland followed in 2004 with its version). Was this part of a wider authoritarian and surveillance agenda changing life in the country?