New British Caste System

Posted on September 8, 2007
Filed Under Welcome To Great Britain, Politics, News |


For anyone who can remember the British Labour Party before Tony Blair and his chums turned it into New Labour, there may be a vague impression that it used to stand for social inclusion and a ‘levelling of the playing field’, so that the rich were not allowed to ride roughshod over the poor with impunity.

Obviously, it metamorphosed into a slick marketing machine, the purpose of which was to steal from the poor to give to the rich, but in a way that the poor did not immediately feel that they had just been beaten up and robbed.

The theory went that if you kept repeating catchphrases often enough, people really would imagine that their lives had got better. If you fiddled the figures enough, people could pretend that they were not paying more and more of their earnings to a government which was helping them less and less.

Until, that is, some chaps at Sheffield University started making some maps. That is, maps of the real world lived in by real people, rather than the terra incognita and fantasy land inhabited by politicians.

What it has found is that social mobility, which had been moving fluidly and rapidly for some sixty years, has now ground to a halt under the ten year reign of New Labour. If you are rich, you will find it almost impossible to find your fortunes in jeopardy, however dimwitted and profligate you may be. If you are poor, that will be your inescapable lot, even if you are a parsimonious genius.

Society has achieved the status of an immobile monolith under Tony Blair and his pal Gordon Brown. The rich are free to gad about and gallivant, the poor are manacled serfs whose only purpose is to pander to the whims of their innumerable political and corporate masters, the supplicants and beggars beyong the closed portals of plenty, the gated communities of unbridled avarice.

The Guardian quotes from the authors of the report:

Bethan Thomas, a researcher at the department of geography at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the study, said it showed clearly that disadvantage at birth tended to follow through each stage of life. “Every step of the way, your chances are much more constrained. This is not to be deterministic; obviously there are people from disadvantaged areas who do make that leap and people from the most advantaged who can’t be bothered, but those cases are much less common.”

While the continuing effect of a disadvantaged background might not surprise, the extent of disadvantage, particularly among children and young adults, was striking, Dr Thomas added. “We have had 10 years of the Labour government and they keep saying things are improving, and maybe they are - but there seems to be little evidence that we can see.”

[…]

Daniel Dorling, co-author of the atlas, said: “Most people think they are average when asked. In most things, most are not. Most say they are normal, but our atlas shows that what is normal changes rapidly as you travel across the social topography of human identity in Britain - from the fertile crescent of advantage, where to succeed is to do nothing out of the ordinary, to the peaks of despair, where to just get by is extraordinary.”

There is an enormous problem here and the rich need to understand that they are sitting on an elegant pressure cooker or powder keg. One day, the poor are going to take things back and when they do, they are going to know exactly where to look.


You can also go to the debate section where there is further opportunity to get involved in discussions or start new debates.

Go to the campaign section to start or join a campaign.

[?]
Share This Tags: environment | fairness | freedom | government | social breakdown

Comments

Leave a Reply. Note Creative Commons licence.




By submitting a comment here you grant this site a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. See also Creative Commons licence to the right of page on site. It is just a way for other sites to use content or comments from this site without restrictive copyright requirements.

Bad Behavior has blocked 277 access attempts in the last 7 days.

Close
E-mail It