FRAGMENT ONE: THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN
I was born in 1948, and so became a baby boomer destined to live the formative years of my life protected by a largely stable cross-party political consensus on the moral worth and benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I was fortunate to be among the 20 per cent of schoolchildren who passed the ‘11+’, attended the local grammar school, and in 1968 was one of only 7 per cent who went to university. When I graduated there was a choice of jobs. And to cap it all, I’ve never had to fight in a war. This is not to say that all was well in Britain through the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s. But the generations that have followed us will be aware of the relative beneficence and stability of this particular phase of capitalism. In this Fragment I give an indication of just how Britain in the twenty-first century differs from the one I entered in the aftermath of World War 2.
Population Changes
In 1950 the population of United Kingdom was 50 million, compared to nearly 68 million in 2024. The population density in 1950 was 205 persons per square kilometre and is now up to 278 persons. The female population has consistently outnumbered the male population and this remains the case. As far as age is concerned, the median age of the population – the midpoint separating the higher half from the lower half – has increased from nearly 35 years in 1950 to just over 40 years now. Significantly, nearly 20 per cent of the population is now aged over 65. So, in a nutshell, we currently have a population which is considerably larger, of higher density, continues to have more females than males, and has a much higher proportion of older citizens.
As far as regional inequalities are concerned, the UK remains one of the most spatially unequal and over-centralised countries among those in the Global North. London and the South-East of England, where I happened to be born and brought up, is by far the most prosperous region. Nevertheless, the poverty rate in the sprawling and heterogeneous capital of London stands at 25 per cent, which puts it in joint second place with the North-East of England, the West Midlands occupying top spot at 27 per cent. The poorest areas are to be found in West Wales, Cornwall, Durham and Tess Valley, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire, Lancashire, Northern Ireland and East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire; and these compare unfavourably with the other regions of Northern Europe. Factors cementing and still deepening regional inequalities include deindustrialisation during Thatcher’s 1980s and the recession following the financial crash of 2008. So, geography and where one happens to be born matter.
To these demographic shifts and regional inequalities might be added the phenomenon of migration. There have been numerous historical episodes of migration to Britain, but these were small until the Second World War. The British Nationality Act of 1948 granted ‘subjects of the British Empire’ the right to live and work in the UK, and the Home Office has estimated that the net intake from January 1955 to June 1962 was about 472,000. From 1962 onwards, however, successively tighter immigration controls were placed on migrants from the New Commonwealth. Overall, numbers grew slowly, by less than 2 million between 1951 and 1991. In the late 1990s, however, the pace and scale of migration increased significantly, due in part to a relaxation of controls by Blair’s New Labour government. In fact, the foreign-born population of England and Wales more than doubled between the 1991 and 2011 Censuses. Nearly 15 per cent of the current UK population were born abroad, with migrants from Poland forming the largest grouping, just outnumbering Indian and Irish migrants. The majority of migrants are aged 26-64. The pattern is for non-EU migrants to come to Britain for family reasons, and for EU migrants to come seeking work. In terms of ethnic group rather than country of birth, 82 per cent of UK citizens are classified as ‘white’ and 18 per cent as ‘black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic group’ (BAME). London remains the most ethnically diverse region, 46 per cent identifying as BAME and an additional 17 per cent as ‘white ethnic minorities’, followed by the West Midlands. The North-East of England and Wales are the least ethnically diverse regions.
In sum, Britain has witnessed a very significant increase in its population since World War 2, which in turn means a higher population density. It also has a much higher proportion of older people. Its regional divisions have grown deeper and the poorest of these are among the poorest in Northern Europe. The proportion of the population born overseas has grown, as has, a different issue this, the proportion in BAME communities. These general population changes both set the scene for us and are causes and/or effects of shifts in a wide range of social phenomena of interest to a sociologist of twenty-first century Britain.
Changes in the Nature of Work
There have been major changes in what is called the sectoral composition of UK employment since the 1970s. The key change has been the fall – in absolute terms and as a share of jobs – of manufacturing, and the rise of several service sectors, including business services. In 1970 manufacturing accounted for 29 per cent of jobs while it now accounts for only 8 per cent. It is a decline largely due to a mix of technical innovation and the automation of manufacturing jobs, and to globalisation, which has meant that manufactured goods can be more readily and cheaply imported, and more production has moved overseas. Over these same decades the number of jobs in professional services, education and health has risen, from 14 per cent of total jobs to 31 per cent. Post-Thatcher the pace of change in the composition of the workforce has slowed: the 1980s witnessed peak change. Older workers are currently less likely to change jobs than younger workers, and less likely to move from one sector to another. The sector matters here: workers in hospitality and retail, for example, account for a full third of all moves.
Unsurprisingly employment relations have undergone significant changes too. In the era of welfare state capitalism that edged into the 1970s: there was close to full employment, with unemployment representing a conspicuous challenge to the government of the day; job security was the norm, with workers’ rights largely respected; there was a high rate of trade union membership; wages were relatively high; there were strong protections for workers in the public sector, as well as for professionals; the top rate of income tax was relatively high; corporation tax too was relatively high; and the tax collection authorities were fairly robust. All this contrasts strongly with the post-industrial or rentier era: there now exists what is called ‘disguised unemployment’, for example via the extension of higher education, early retirement and underemployment; labour is treated as flexible, leading to insecurity and a growing ‘precarity’ in the workforce; trade union membership is low; wages are lagging with a growing reliance on subsidies; workers in the public sector are exposed to market competition and professional autonomy is under threat; top rate of tax is relatively low; corporation tax too is relatively low; and tax avoidance and evasion are facilitated by a weakening of tax collection authorities.
Thirty-eight per cent of people in the UK now attend university, but unlike in my day a degree rarely guarantees a chosen career, or even gainful employment. And when political propagandists insist that rates of upward social mobility are higher now because more people are engaged in non-manual or white-collar jobs than was the case in the past, they are being disingenuous. This is almost entirely a function of the decline of manual in favour of non-manual work. Moreover, insecure work, or precarity, is widespread. Short-term contracts have become the norm, and one in 30 jobs now involves zero hours contracts, giving occupants no security of employment at all. In line with a series of interventions during the Thatcher years, ‘unemployment’ has been subject to repeated redefinition. Each redefinition has cut the official unemployment rate as well as the financial support available to those judged to be ‘economically inactive’. Currently, anybody who carries out at least one hour’s paid work in a week counts as employed. Each administration in rentier capitalism has ramped up measures to force people seen as economically inactive into often low-paid and insecure employment, in the process removing their benefit rights. Revealingly, while 20 per cent of the UK population are now living in poverty in the UK, one in six of these are in families with ‘high work intensity’. In-work poverty has increased dramatically in the twenty-first century.
The Distribution of Wealth and Income
As far as wealth is concerned, the richest 10 per cent of households in the UK own 43 per cent of all wealth, while the poorest 50 per cent own nine per cent. The richest 50 families hold more wealth than half the population. If the wealth of the super-rich continues to grow at the current rate, it has been calculated that by 2035 the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK Gross Domestic Product. In regional terms, the South-East is the wealthiest and is over twice as wealthy as the North of England. Much of this is drive by property wealth.
This distribution of wealth in the UK is broadly comparably to other countries similarly placed in the world system. However, the distribution of income in the UK is different: the UK has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe, for all that it is less unequal than the USA. The top one per cent of UK earners have average salaries of £180, 984, while the top 10 per cent on average earn £66,669. The bottom 10 per cent, by contrast, earn an average of £21,000.
‘Disposable income’ measures the amount of money a family has for spending and saving after direct taxes have been allowed for. It includes earnings from employment, private pensions and investments as well as any cash benefits from the state. A majority of households in the UK have disposable incomes below the mean income of £32,300. Once again poorer households have lost out, principally because of decreases in wages, but also because of real-term reductions in cash benefits. Households in the bottom 20 per cent have an average disposable income of £13,218. Those in the middle of the income distribution have seen little change in recent years, but those households enjoying higher incomes have seen an increase in disposable income: the top 20 per cent have a disposable income of £83,687.
So the statistics on wealth and income inequality are telling. Wealth remains the preserve of the few, while incomes, including household disposable incomes, have become more concentrated at the top, with the well-off benefiting disproportionately, those in the middle being stretched and often squeezed, and the poor becoming significantly poorer.
The Housing Calamity
The 1950s saw a boom in house building, in large part to replace the 250,000 homes destroyed during World War 2, but also to replace older properties judged unfit for human habitation. Through this decade, 250,000 local authority homes were built per year, many of them in new towns like Hemel Hempstead, Harlow and Crawley beyond the newly created green belt. The first comprehensive English Household Survey found that by 1967 half of the housing stock was owner occupied; 29 per cent was rented in the social rented sector; and 17 per cent was privately rented. Subsequently, one of the most telling of Thatcher’s privatisations occurred in the 1980s, when she introduced ‘right to buy’, with the covert aim of reducing the size of the social rented sector. Local councils were not permitted to use the money from selling off heavily discounted council houses to build more to replace them. This was advertised as a transfer of capital to poorer families, but many buyers quickly sold their properties on, often to landlords. The result was a severe shortage of social rented housing and a boost for poorly regulated private landlords. The private rented sector has reverted to what it was before the council house building programme of the 1950s, namely, the sector with the lowest quality housing and the most expensive tenure. Cramped conditions are commonplace and many people now live in private rental accommodation officially deemed ‘unfit for human habitation’.
Home ownership peaked in England at just under two-thirds of the population in 2017 and has slightly reduced since. The current market mitigates against younger people buying their own properties, most conspicuously in the South-East of England: they cannot afford deposits even if their incomes are large enough to cover mortgage repayments. Only one in 10 current owner occupiers in England are aged between 25 and 34, while over a third are 65 or over. But for many owning their own home is an ambition too far. And at the other end of the spectrum, there has been a growing number of people condemned to periods of homelessness. Responses to Freedom of Information requests reveal that one in 182 people in England are currently homeless. This amounts to 309,000 people, including 140,000 children, and incorporates an astonishing rise of 14 per cent over the last year. Short of public and affordable accommodation, councils are having to put families up in grotty hotels, B&Bs and cramped bedsits. Over 3,000 people are sleeping rough on any given night.
It is no exaggeration to describe the housing situation in England as calamitous. Far too many people lack decent accommodation despite paying rentals they can barely afford. To add insult to injury, over a million properties across England are currently unoccupied (four per cent of all dwellings). The growing number of homeless is a scandal in an affluent country in the Global North, yet some Conservative MPs have even called for ‘needless and unsightly’ homelessness on our streets to be made a criminal offence.
Hardship and Suffering
Inevitably, the levels of hardship and suffering experienced in England and the UK have mushroomed with an expansion of material and social inequity that extends beyond precarious pay packets to penetrate deep into people’s homes, often damp infested private rental homes, and increasingly into tents or cardboard boxes on the streets. But suffering is not just a companion of inequality. It can take many forms and gain a life of its own. Several dimensions of vulnerability and sources of suffering have been well documented. Among these is ‘alienation’. Often people feel like cogs in a malfunctioning economic machine, forcibly separated from any kind of intellectual or emotional commitment to the limited paid work on offer, from any sense that it is worthwhile, from those they work with, even from what it is to ‘be human’. Another is ‘powerlessness’, the sense that they are impotent to change their circumstances for the better. ‘Marginalisation’ accompanies membership of social groupings long regarded outsiders: Roma communities, migrants and asylum seekers in the UK for example may feel neglected or discriminated against as social misfits. ‘Exclusion’ provides another case. It is an irony that the popular political notion of social inclusion has often provided cover for policies that exclude. You can only include if it’s possible to exclude. Those rejected for inclusion can find their exclusion all the more painful. ‘Loneliness’ is more obviously associated with hardship, suffering and distress and is frequently the product of physical isolation at home, as occurs with many older people and single parents.
People’s suffering routinely shades into mental health problems for which insufficient help is available. People in lower socio-economic groups have a higher likelihood of developing mental health problems. Children and adults living in households in the lowest 20 per cent income bracket in the UK are two to three times more likely to develop mental health problems than those in the highest. Employment status is linked to health outcomes, with unemployment or economically inactivity seeing higher rates of mental health problems than the employed. But not all employment is positive for mental health. The quality of the work is key. Work that is low paid, insecure or poses health risks can be damaging to mental health. Those on housing benefit are more than twice as likely to have a common health problem than those not receiving it (35 per cent as opposed to 15 per cent). These and other sets of statistics show relationships between material hardship, psychosocial stress and those varieties of suffering that take a toll on mental health.
Between 2016/2017 and 2021/2022 the number of people accessing funded mental health services increased from three and a half to four and a half million, yet this equates to only around a third of people with mental health needs accessing services (with an estimated eight million still not doing so). Since the COVID-19 pandemic the mental health of children and young people in the UK has deteriorated further and faster, once again most dramatically in poorer families. A fifth of children aged 8 to 16 had a probable mental disorder in 2013 and this percentage has increased since. And mental health care is now being significantly underfunded and rationed in the UK. In one global survey, the UK ranks as the second worst in mental wellbeing when compared with 71 other countries.
Health and Wellbeing
Mental health problems are one product of post-1970s social change. They are critical for any sense of wellbeing. But so too are assaults on physical health. It has been estimated that between the introduction of the political policy of austerity in 2010 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a million people in 90 per cent of the regions of England have lived shorter lives than they should have. It is remarkable that life expectancy at birth in the UK, after a long period of steady improvement, is now in decline. Moreover, we have seen an expansion of the gap between the health and longevity of the better off and that of the poorer segments of the population since Thatcher’s days. Health inequalities were high in the 1920s, and rose again between 1959 and 1963, but declined during the 1960s and 1970s, only to rise again in the early 1980s. They have continued to rise since. COVID-19 widened health inequalities in England by disproportionately affecting those already experiencing health inequalities.
It is now well established that most of our health is determined by our material and social circumstances. Although much is written about the importance of lifestyle, including what we eat and drink and the amount of exercise we take, these are not decisions people take in isolation from their economic and social circumstances. Decisions about lifestyle are part and parcel of the resources available to them. A million people across 90 per cent of the areas in England lived shorter lives than they should between 2011 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the pandemic has only made thing worse. NHS treatment and care accounts for only about 20 per cent of population health. Funding cuts, like the average reduction in English local authority spending power of 34 per cent since 2010, have hit the poorest areas in England most. Continuing political austerity as a whole has contributed significantly to life expectancy actually falling for women in 10 per cent of the poorest areas, as well as to health inequalities widening.
Hardship caused indirectly or indirectly by government cutbacks, plus the distress often associated with it, find ways of making people sick or sicker. The present cost of living crisis is penetrating the bodies of those who are poor and struggling to make ends meet. It is taking away the number of healthy years during which they might reasonably hope for, and expect, a positive and enjoyable quality of life.
Novel Cultures and Identities
Cultures have a momentum of their own. They are shaped by class and state, by economics and politics, but only very rarely determined by them. There were early signs in the 1960s in England in particular and the UK in general that long accepted public ‘stories’ or narratives of change and progress were being challenged. It was a challenge both to positive views on capitalism and the future and to negative judgements pointing to the need for widespread transformations. It was as if what many people had long taken for granted was suddenly open to question. Some treated this as a newfound freedom. Added to this sense of liberation was a feeling that we were now able, or at least more able, to choose or construct our own personal identities.
One consequence of all this is that it has become progressively more difficult to develop criticisms of the capitalist status quo, or to advance manifestos for significant social change. And insofar as this is the case, the new culture provides good cover for the ideology of the dominant or ruling class (‘ideology’ here referring to a worldview distorted by vested interests). The current cultural climate focuses on individuals, not society. Thatcher notoriously said ‘there is no such thing as society, just individuals and families’. It is a culture that divides rather than unites. It also fuels a personal form of ‘identity politics’ and to a considerable extent this form of politics has displaced the politics of distribution and redistribution that prevailed in welfare state capitalism after World War Two.
I have referred to this new culture that has come to fruition in rentier capitalism as a type of cultural relativism. It is as if everything we once – rightly or wrongly – held sacrosanct has been reduced to one view of ‘how the world is or ought to be’ among many other options. Often people refer to each and every worldview as an ‘ideology’. The most extreme representation of cultural relativity is captured by ideas like post-truth, gaslighting, wokeness and cancel culture. Arguably, this is most clearly grasped in the context of digital platforms. Some people are even referring to the advent of ‘digital capitalism’. Certainly, global operators like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft have pioneered new forms of profit-making and communication with as yet unrealised potentials: ‘goods’ like diffusion of information and emancipation versus ‘bads’ like surveillance and manipulation. Frequently today, it’s as if you are either one of us or you’re beyond the pale. In other words, cultural relativity is divisive as well as distracting. All this is linked to a new politics of identity.
The Fractured Society
What this all adds up to is that contemporary British society has become fractured. There have always been nooks, crannies, splits, cracks and crevices, but these have become exaggerated in the post-Thatcher decades. We are now faced with open and weeping wounds. Too many people who have no option but to try to sell their labour in the marketplace are either failing to gain employment at all or are stuck with insecure low paid non-jobs that fail to cover their basic and unavoidable expenditures. In many dimensions inequality is growing. The super-rich are accumulating enormous wealth while skipping their taxes, and their high-income managerial and professional allies are doing nicely. But others in the middle classes are being squeezed and a growing proportion of those running small or freelance businesses and the working classes are under the cosh. Nor do there seem many grounds to hope for better times ahead.
On top of all this we are facing new and intensely serious global risks, none of which appear to be upsetting those with the economic capital and political power to effectively address them. Foremost among these is climate change. This too is turning into collateral damage of rentier capitalism, persuasively packaged by its ubiquitous neoliberal ideology. The prognosis is dire. It has been estimated that two billion people worldwide are likely to be stranded in inhospitable conditions as soon as 2030. Environmental crises are common in the Global South and have already begun to impact life in countries like the UK in the Global North. It is of course the nations of the Global North that are primarily responsible for climate change. And yet recent governments in the UK have prioritised: (a) maintaining the profitable but environmentally catastrophic fossil fuel industry and, (b) preventing desperate people driven from their homes by climate change and unsustainable living conditions elsewhere from entering the UK. To this issue of climate change must be added that of the ‘Great Power’ sponsorship of warfare via the selling arms to any geopolitically useful regime or faction willing to pay for them. The US, EU and UK support of Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza provides a paradigmatic example. Moreover, many of the civil wars raging in the former colonies of countries like the UK are products of past imperial division, brutality and exploitation. Environmental threat and continuing conflict are the principal drivers of the present huge wave of migration.
I return to these wide global threats later. But it is one thing to chart dismal trends in the UK, to make mention of wider planetary challenges, and to conclude that British society is in important ways fractured, and it is quite another to analyse why this is so and to find a way to secure the right kind of lasting change. It is to the possible role of sociology in providing such an analysis that I turn now.