A commentator on this blog has criticised me for suggesting that aspiration cannot change outcomes in society. He says, in response to my blog on education, here:
For example, you say “Aspiration cannot be dealt with when there is nothing to aspire to unless you are in the top 10% (or less)”.
If this statement is true then I am puzzled as to how the Labour and Co-op movements etc developed and using a more recent example, how Nelson Mandela came to lead an African country.
First, let me dismiss all argument based on comparison with Nelson Mandela. The man is an exception to all rules.
And let’s also not confuse the current environment with that which existed a century and more ago: things have changed a lot. Which is my point: things have changed so much that for most there is nothing to aspire to in our society: intuitively some young people are not aspiring in the way the education system (and the neo-liberal market infrastructure) assumes desirable for two reasons.
First of all an increasing number question the relevance of aspiration when all it seems to entail is excess consumption that is destroying the environment paid for with a burden of debt that will last until retirement, and beyond. Quite reasonably they ask if that consumption is the real meaning of being and whether that debt is a burden worth enduring to suffer that lack of meaning. Some, and it is an increasing number, are clearly deciding to opt out of that system. They are quite rationally not aspirational in the way the market system demands they be.
Second, intuitively many people know that there is no point in being aspirational when the prospect of success is very, very low indeed. Real wages for most people in the UK have hardly advanced in decades. Nor has real wealth — unless you are in the top 10% of income earners — and even then most of the advantage goes to the top 1%. The gap between the richest and poorest is widening. The chances of breaking out of your social situation and advancing up the materially measured social hierarchy — which is presumably what aspiration means in this context — is reducing rapidly as social mobility declines in the UK.
Of course people don’t measure this sort of thing — but all around them they see and hear the evidence that this is true — that you are, in the vast majority of cases, stuck where you are. Even things that used to appear normal — such as buying your own home — are now beyond the means of a significant part of the population. They will never be able to own the one thing most people have always aspired to because the price is way beyond the means of people on above average, let alone average, incomes in the UK.
And if you can’t aspire to this rather basic standard of security — which the rented sector cannot emulate in its current form — you are forced to adopt a very different view of what life is going to be about.
Comparing to the early 20th century and late 19th century is in that circumstance little short of absurd. It was then vey obvious that aspiration would bring reward. But now you can seek to secure a sensible and useful job, have a partner, and find yourselves under a mountain of debt with young children in a home too mean to allow you to live well (which is the standard offering now put up by market driven builders) and face a life of misery as a result. So why bother?
This is the problem for the next decade. If we cannot solve this and give people reason to hope again we’re in very deep trouble.
There is no chance whatsoever that the market will do that.
It’s the market, after all, that has killed aspiration by denying its rewards to most people.
And the result is not just a loss of aspiration, but a world of insecurity and fear. Fear on the part of those denied hope as to what might happen to them and fear by the minority that have command of resources about how they can hold on to what they have — and maintain the difference between them an the rest of society (which is, for example, what the whole private school market is really all about).
This is the challenge social democrats have to rise to and resolve. I doubt if anyone else can or will.
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It may surprise you but I agree almost entirely with what you say. I spent the New Year visiting friends and family in the south-east of England and it is shocking to me how hard people are required to work for a very low standard of living. My sister in law, for example, has a decent, interesting job that pays an above average salary in central London. She is looking to buy a flat in south-London: there is nothing on the market for less than 10 times her salary. And then there is the cost of commuting, insurance etc. Fortunately, her parents can help with a deposit and probably cleared her student debt. With that help, she can just about manage. But that’s all it is, managing, and without that help (which most people don’t have) I don’t know how she would cope. And perhaps that difficulty in getting by is what makes people resent taxes so much: because it is harder to pay your taxes when you don’t feel you have enough for yourself.
But I think there is another aspect to this. The young (or what I see of them) have not rejected consumerism. Large numbers of them want mobile phones, take out coffees, nightclubs, gym membership, beauty products, new clothes, foreign travel. They don’t see the point in saving money, because the amount you would have to save before it gave you any benefit is too large. If they withheld all discretionary spending for 5 years, they might get enough to pay a deposit on a small flat: not exactly tempting, is it? So they live for today. I’d love them to reject consumerism because it destroys both the soul and the environment, but they’re not there yet.
And the proliferation of celebrity nonsense means that much of what people aspire to is totally unrealistic anyway.
So I agree that aspiration doesn’t work any more. The media pedalled aspirations are totally unachievable and the “realistic” aspirations are not practically achievable. The problem is, what is the solution? And it is not clear to me that taxing more and increasing the role of the State is the solution. I think a better solution is through a new localism: encourage communities to become stronger, more inclusive, and more reliant upon each other. Rather than buying from multinationals buy from neighbours. Allow people to work for themselves without bureaucracy and paperwork (and that includes HMRC stuff). Have a whole cultural change away from the TV and media obsessions. But it seems to me all of the solutions come from making things smaller rather than making government bigger.
Is not the domination of the finance industry in the Channel Islands promoted as ‘localism’? The daily mantra of “they pay for our high standard of living” from the politicians is as close to a doctrine-led belief system as it gets.
There is no ‘better future’ for my children without knowing that their children will also have a ‘better future’ for their children.
If the young, and their parents and mentors and idols, truly believe that indivdualist competition within an environment of decreasing resources, increasing inequalities and its encumbent increasing social incoherence, then we have failed the generation before us who toiled to give us these material rewards in the first place.
I don’t believe it is a big/small state argument, but rather one of ‘belief’ in who and what we are doing with our lives. The ‘state’ as we know it is discredited. The wider religions are discredited by fundamentalist attitudes and those that espouse non-religious social scientific possibilities are derided and labelled as ‘nutters’.
We need to teach children how to think, not how to pass tests designed to prove political ‘value for money’. True individualism is an understanding of how an individual exists within the wider scheme, of how every decision they make has an impact on other individuals, and with that knowledge, make decisions that increase the probability of their children having ‘better’ rather than ‘more’.