the poverty of aspiration

At the same time as attacking a couple of novels (including the wonderfully raw Bullshit Bingo by Texan writer Misti Rainwater-Lites, which I reviewed a few days ago), I've recently been reading a commendable book by one Owen Jones - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.

This is an exploration of how and why, over the last two to three decades, it has become increasingly acceptable to mock and vilify the working class people of the United Kingdom openly and without embarrassment. Jones finds the roots of this phenomenon in the Thatcher government's "all-out assault" on the institutions, industries, values and communities of working class Britain.

From these origins, Jones follows the depressing tale of how our society has become more  and more unequal and of how even the Labour Party has abandoned the ideal of improving the lives of all working class people in favour of urging them to think in terms of aspiring to become middle class. 

It's cheaper, isn't it? Simply telling people that they should want 'upward' mobility costs nothing, whereas actually improving the lives of every working class person would  cost a lot of money, right?  As Jones observes, however, "not everyone can become a middle-class professional or businessperson" and he makes the obvious point that the majority of people still have to do the less well-paid jobs "that society needs to keep ticking".

If you are British and you consider yourself not to be working class, ask yourself to come up with completely honest answers to the following questions:

• Have you ever looked down on the people who empty your dustbin,  sweep your streets, clean your office or work at the checkouts in the supermarkets where you buy the fancy foods that are part of your middle class lifestyle? Have you ever described any of these people as 'chavs' or cracked a joke with your friends about the way these people speak, dress or behave?
• Have you ever referred to any of these occupations as 'dead-end jobs'?
• Would you like to live in a country where nobody empties your dustbin, sweeps your high street, cleans your office or sells you your groceries? If you wouldn't like to live in a country like that, can you really consider those jobs to be so without merit that the people doing them should be derided?

I would have thought that an obviously moral position to adopt is this: If it is essential for these jobs to be done in order to preserve the well-being of us all, then these are occupations which have real value and, by extension, the people doing this kind of work are valuable contributors to our society.

But it doesn't seem to work like that in the country that Tony Blair told us back in 1997 is a "meritocracy". 

Jones flags up the irony of meritocracy being a core concept of the New Labour project, reminding us that the word was coined in 1958 by a sociologist and social activist who had been a major contributor to Labour's election manifesto of 1945. Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy was a "satire meant to be a warning".  As Owen Jones points out, Young warned about the  unpleasant side-effect of creating a society in which those with the most talent rise to the top - that is to say, a society that remains unequal but with inequalities reflecting differences of ability.

I would not be surprised to learn that most people reading this would take issue with the idea that there is something wrong with that kind of society. The concept of meritocracy has been so widely advocated by mainstream politicians and social commentators for so long now that I'd guess its rightness is taken to be axiomatic by a great majority of British people.

Owen Jones does not buy that argument and neither do I. Jones observes, rightly I feel, that meritocracy "can end up being used to argue that those at the top are they because they deserve to be, while those at the bottom are simply not talented enough and likewise deserve their place."

It is this kind of assumption that underpins any thoughts you may have had about social mobility always being a very obviously good thing. This kind of assumption is the foundation on which you might have built the idea that it makes sense to think in terms of it being right for people to want to 'escape' those jobs involving bins, brooms and cash registers. "We frown upon the supermarket checkout staff, the cleaners, the factory workers," writes Jones. They are "slackers who failed to climb the ladder offered by social mobility."

This is a characterisation that I would urge everybody to avoid, but perhaps it's particularly easy for me to do so. I only have to think about my mother's parents.

My late maternal grandparents were among the most decent, honest, caring, moral and hard-working people I will ever encounter. When he returned from his Second World War duties as a young man, Ernest went to work as a postman and remained in the service of the Post Office until the day he retired. He variously delivered the mail, sorted the mail and measured up new posties for their uniforms. He never swore. He always wore a tie unless he was working in the little bit of garden at the back of the flat. He loved classical music, model vehicles, Crystal Palace F.C. and his wife Irene, who served food for a living, first in schools and then in the canteen of an insurance company's headquarters. Their homes were spotlessly clean flats rented from the Peabody Trust, one of London's oldest and largest housing associations. 

Ernest and Irene never aspired to own their home. They never owned a car and never wanted to. They never wanted holidays more opulent than a few days at a favourite B'n'B on the south coast. My grandfather did redocorate the flat every couple of years, but not to keep up with any Joneses or to achieve any 'lifestyle' sold to him by magazines or TV programmes. He got the paint and wallpaper out with something of the spirit of the Peabody Trust, which defines a good home as "a place that is safe, warm, clean, light, well maintained and evokes personal pride." I think he was proud of the fact that he and Irene brought up two daughters in exactly that kind of home.

I assume that Owen Jones wouldn't argue that nobody growing up in such a working class home should be permitted to have the desire and the opportunity to do more highly paid work and buy the trappings of what we would recognise as a middle class life. I would certainly not make that argument myself. 

But not taking issue with some working class people wanting those things is, I think, entirely consistent with believing that there is nothing wrong with those who do not aspire to 'upward' mobility.

My grandparents were very decent people, among the best I will ever know. They were NOT "slackers" who "failed" to do anything. They were comfortable with their useful work and the way they lived their lives. I would not look kindly on anyone who reads this description of Ernest and Irene and feels pity for them, much less anyone who might scorn them for any perceived failure of aspiration.

Owen Jones's book, then, is very much preaching to the converted as I follow its indictment of our fragmenting society, our political establishment and our media. For all that, I would recommend it without hesitation. Aspiration, touted so widely as an unarguably good thing, can be an engine of accelerating inequality and can be right at the heart of creating a culture in which mockery of the workless and the most vulnerable has spread to become, for so many, a wider disdain for the millions  of perfectly decent people who do the jobs that need to be done in order for us all to live in a civilised country. Aspiration on its own, it seems to me, is a rather poor value to put at the heart of our politics and our culture if not accompanied with a determination to move towards equality of conditions rather than just equality of opportunity - not least because it should be very obvious that even equality of opportunity is a chimera on these islands.