Monday 12 December 2022:
Feelings about now and the immediate future
Over the course of the past year, have you come to feel any differently about the challenges future generations may have to face? If so, in what ways?
No, I do not feel significantly differently compared with this time last year regarding the challenges to be faced by future generations. I felt very pessimistic then, and I feel somewhat more pessimistic now. It seemed then, and seems clear to me now, that the system of government in the UK, and the systems of government throughout the world, as well as at the international level, are nowhere near sufficient to address the environmental and geopolitical challenges the UK and the world faces. Specifically, the world is dominated by commerce, the values of which are entirely at odds with the massive reduction in consumption required, and by nationalism. For example, the world was warned before the new millennium that burning fossil fuels had to stop. Instead, the fossil fuel companies and countries have lobbied, sown disinformation, threatened and obstructed in order to increase the burning of coal, oil and gas. Twenty years before that it was predicted that there would be mass migrations of people around the world due to environmental degradation and climate change, and the UK response has been to increase hostility to immigration and refugees.
We expect younger generations i.e., Gen Z and those born after 2010, are likely to be more financially stretched, and are likely to have responsibility for supporting a larger older population who may not be financially secure.
What are your feelings toward this idea? Why?
The notion that one generation is required financially to support another seems to me to be simplistic or unhelpful on several levels. First, parents bring children into the world with the expectation of caring for their needs at least until their progeny is ready to leave home. This applies the world over. In much of the world, there is an unambiguous social expectation that progeny will care for their parents' needs once the parents become too old or infirm to look after their own needs. This latter is a principal reason why families outside the economically-developed world tend to be large. This relationship has been partly or substantially broken in the economically-developed world. Older people have been commodified and packaged into care homes, providing 751,851 jobs in the UK, and 18,400 jobs in Northern Ireland, and thereby costing upwards of £100 million per annum in wages alone.
Second, I remain to be convinced that there is such a thing as a 'generation' outside catastrophic events such as a major war (such as the First World War, in the former Yugoslavia, and currently in Ukraine). Mostly, I consider references to 'generations' to be marketing (such as the invention of the teenager in the 1950s, phrases such as 'the grey pound', and Saga holidays) or political rhetoric (such as "a land fit for heroes" after the First World War, and that of the, admittedly much-to-be-admired, Atlee administration in the economic wasteland following the Second World War attempting to engender a sense of optimism in younger adults). Younger people in economically-developed countries typically like to differentiate themselves from their parents, in ways that are, at root, superficial such as musical taste, clothing fashion and dialect, but largely retain their parent's values.
Third, the idea that one generation is required financially to support another is predicated on the concept of paid employment being the only mechanism by which people can support themselves, and the primary mechanism by which the government can raise money through taxation. Whilst this has been the case in Britain only over the past few centuries, it is not the case the world over. There are other ways by which people can, do and have to support themselves, at much lower cost to the environment, as well as other ways by which government can raise money to pay for services and welfare, such as corporation tax, import duties and VAT. In the absence of income tax and National Insurance, it can hardly be said that one generation is being required to support another.
Fourth, specifically in the UK, when I was a child, municipally-owned social housing was the largest of the housing sectors. Privately-rented accommodation was either for rich people, or the subject of discussion regarding Rachmanism. Housing associations, such as the Peabody Trust were charities, and run as such. Owner-occupied housing was for those who were well-to-do, was an out-of-reach aspiration for many, and an inspiration for some to work hard. Then the Thatcher administration sold off a great many 'council houses', almost overnight creating her "property-owning democracy" (who would be more likely to vote for the Conservative Party). However, almost all of these 'council houses' are now owned by buy-to-let private landlords. All that has happened, therefore, is that municipally-owned social housing has been sold at considerably-reduced prices into the privately-rented housing sector. Whereas local councils had charged rents that allowed them to maintain their properties, private landlords operate their housing portfolios for profit. Consequently, the same people who would have been in 'council housing' fifty years ago, paying affordable rents, are now having to pay rents that include a profit for the landlord, over and above the cost of the landlord's buy-to-let mortgage. The massive house-buying spree from the 1980s to 2008, initiated by the Thatcher administration, caused house prices to spiral. This served as a positive feedback loop to the conversion to using housing as investment rather than primarily as personal accommodation. Younger people may now be feeling hard-done-by because they are having to pay proportionately more of their income in rent than had social housing still been in the hands of local councils, but for thirty of the past forty three years, and despite the obvious inequities and hardship caused, they have voted for MPs wedded to this housing policy.
Fifth, compared with when I was a young adult, young people have much higher material expectations. I frequently hear radio vox pops in which young people complain that they cannot afford to buy their own house. My father was 30 before he was able to buy a house, having worked hard, scrimped and saved. My personal story is very similar. I furnished my house with gifts, with hand-me-downs, with goods bought from sale rooms, and with items from classified advertisements. It took fourteen years before I could afford to buy a new sofa. Now young people expect to have £1,000 smartphones with £50 per month data contracts. Many of them expect to have a car. They expect to attend music festivals (Glastonbury: £350), to go on holiday to Ibiza, to eat out regularly and to have take-away food delivered to their door. They have subscription music, sport, drama and reality television streamed to their smartphones. This was all futuristic science fiction when I was their age, not least in terms of cost. For reasons I cannot understand, young people are willing to take on upwards of £30,000 of unsecured debt, something I could never have contemplated doing, in order to attend university.
When people born this century reach adulthood, they will live in a Britain that is less, not more, equal than it was when I was their age, and that is because their parents repeatedly voted for it to be this way. Throughout my life I have worked, mostly as a volunteer, to make the world in general, and UK society, a better place in which to live. Whilst I have attended my fair share of noisy demonstrations and silent vigils, I have mostly engaged in practical efforts to improve things, and have intentionally not sought primarily to benefit myself. I am unclear that, apart from making a noise about things, young people / young adults are doing that much to improve the society in which they live.
When you pay for your water bill, the charge may also include a proportion of investments made in water provision for the future.
What are your feelings about this idea? Have your views have changed over the past year.
When the water companies were privatised in 1989, it was explicitly so that they would invest in infrastructure. This was because the Thatcher administration had intentionally strangled the ability of the regional water authorities to borrow money. The Thatcher administration was ideologically committed to privatising the provision of fresh water and sewage removal, and knew clearly that the general public was overwhelmingly opposed to it, as they still are. In 2017, "research by the University of Greenwich suggested that consumers in England were paying £2.3 billion more every year for their water and sewerage bills than they would if the water companies had remained under state ownership." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatisation_in_England_and_Wales)
