For those of us who grew up and were educated in the 1960’s and 1970’s the UK has, in many ways, been a (very) good place. Careers were relatively easy to come by and we are still reaping financial rewards through our savings, pensions and houses. It looks like being a different story for the next generation. Why are benefits for the well off retired untouchable and yet those for young working families an ongoing target? In my view things are going sharply in the wrong direction and there are really powerful forces at work to ensure that this continues. I recognise that some people are going to have a lot more money than others. C’est la vie. If someone earns a lot of money and pays at least the same proportion of tax as the rest of us then we can acknowledge their success and be grateful for their contribution. If their success has come at the expense of poor working conditions, low wages, active self enrichment and flagrant tax avoidance then they deserve our opprobrium. Just look up the record of Philip Green in retail to understand what I mean. What particularly incenses me is that our society is structured to ensure that a few people are generationally advantaged to do better than the majority i.e. be in control of wealth and power. That is not “aspirational”, it is entrenched structural unfairness and I genuinely don’t understand why the great majority doesn’t stand up for itself to do something about it.

Things started to go badly wrong in the 1970’s with the miners strikes, local government strikes and so on. Instead of the country pulling together at a time when wealth was more evenly distributed than at any time in our history it all became very nasty and divisive. Those in control moved to stop the equalisation of wealth whilst those fighting to redress generations of exploitation failed to learn that more equal societies achieve this by working with business rather than against. Thus we had the confrontation between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. The right was terrified of highly paid workers holding the country to ransom. The left came across as communist revolutionaries. My Grandfather was a Durham miner. He was not a left wing revolutionary but, employed by mine owners whose immorality and callousness would even today beggar belief, he deserved a little better than an outside toilet and tin bath in front of the living room fire. Things had moved on a little by the time of Arthur Scargill but the way Margaret Thatcher and the Tory party crushed and erased not just the coal mines but the societies they supported I still find unforgivable. We know that after the Hargreaves “riots” the police colluded to falsify evidence and put miners in jail - the state against the people.

In Germany the trades unions and the government manage to work together for the benefit of the country. In France things are more volatile but in the country of liberty, egality and fraternity you can understand that workers might be wary of the “flexibility” in the workplace that we are so keen on. Nevertheless French workers are 25% more productive than in the UK. In the UK the unions have been crushed and many workers reduced to zero hours contracts and the minimum wage. Not that I am in favour of industrial blackmail and instability but usually if you treat people as if they are equal and responsible human beings they will respond accordingly.

We complain bitterly about EU bureaucracy being foisted upon us but in my experience this is a largely unfounded charge. The English are obsessed with process and bureaucracy but some social change in the UK has been groundbreaking and the rest of the EU is catching up. For example, and with apologies to my former colleagues who are well aware of this, after the Aberfan disaster in 1968 the design and construction of mine waste tips was regulated very successfully. Recently the EU has introduced a directive to require countries that don’t have similar regulation to introduce some. Where regulation is already in place it doesn’t have to be duplicated - except in England where we have introduced a completely new regulatory regime in addition to that already in place. Unlike every other country in the EU England maintains separate planning and environmental legislation under separate government departments - with all the complication, duplication and conflict that ensues and that I have battled with over 35 years. This doesn't happen in any other EU country. It is entirely in our own hands to make things simpler but our obsession with bureaucracy and process is more important than the outcome of a simpler system. Anyone who has been affected by the money laundering regulations will be well aware of the bureaucracy surrounding financial transactions in the UK. I have often rued the day we took out a Power of Attorney over my fathers financial affairs. 

UK governments of all complexions are now obsessed with process and they use this to retain centralised power but at the same time to devolve responsibility. We have one of the most centralised bureaucracies in the developed world. By introducing targets and process management government can control. Look at the national curriculum in education, government targets in the running of the health service, the very limited powers of revenue raising enjoyed by local government (and hence the main reason for George Furgusson’s failure to do anything meaningful for Bristol; he doesn’t have the power or the finance). Government wants public services run by process management - not by free thinking professionals responsive to local requirements. Government will demonise public sector workers who object - it has done it to GP’s, teachers, junior doctors, firemen, local government workers, the police, customs and immigration - the list goes on. 

The demonisation of people on benefits has been particularly horrible. 

In the field of town and country planning all this comes to a head. The planning system is less concerned with outcome than process. In the absence of a collective sense of what development the country needs, major construction projects can take decades to deliver. Mind bogglingly complex processes are put in place often seemingly with a view to frustrate rather than facilitate development. These processes are more important than the development itself and a whole section of the UK legal system is dedicated to exploiting this. Combined with our individual rather than collective approach it is easy to see why NIMBYism has come to dominate the English development process. We all acknowledge the chronic housing shortage so long as any new houses are not built anywhere near us. We all want to save the planet from global warming as long as it doesn’t mean a wind turbine, solar array, waste to energy plant, nuclear power station or in fact anything anywhere near us (BANANA). To compound matters we are dismantling the planning departments that should be guiding the development most appropriate for the country. Planning officers do little more than tick process boxes to evaluate developer led schemes. As a result there is little integrated development and developers use the best lawyers to push their schemes through the planning process, often in the face of concerted local opposition. 

London and the south east is the economic powerhouse of the economy because the economy is now so skewed towards the service sector. Expand airport capacity outside of south east England? You must be joking. The south east gets the only high speed rail link with Europe, Crossrail, the new London ring water main, the olympic stadium, the glitziest office buildings in the world, the Docklands Light Railway, the new Thames Gateway container port. Sorry Tyneside but we won’t extend the high speed rail link beyond London never mind invest in any “northern economic powerhouse”. Don’t believe a word of George Osborne’s “northern economic powerhouse”. It was just electioneering and all the rail projects proudly referred to have now been cancelled or put on the back burner. The UK won’t invest in its own back yard which is why we struggle even more to see why any of our money should be spent, through the EU, in other economies. Who can blame the Scots for tiring of this London dominated approach and governments that refuse to have any industrial strategy because that is “market intervention”?

Corporations do this also by devolving responsibility onto consumers to manage their accounts through a web site. They like to call it consumer control. It isn’t, its a way to reduce overheads i.e. offices and employees and the consumer is left arguing with a computer - or maybe a call centre in India where the employees can be paid less than the UK minimum wage and have no authority other than put you back into the same computer system you have called to complain about. I often wonder how on earth the vulnerable in our society i.e. those who aren’t articulate, tenacious and pushy, survive. My father in his 80’s with mild dementia was preyed upon by telephone sales and marketing organisations.

Continuing to be a lukewarm associate member of the EU won’t by itself solve any of these problems but it does seem to me that the only hope for a more enlightened approach is to be part of a European initiative that has at its heart a resolution to address some of the social issues that still blight the UK. Not that everyone in Europe is keen on the EU and there are right wing movements led by the likes of Marine Le Pen that very much want to get out. The same forces that are at work in the UK and that will open up greater division and instability in Europe if the UK votes to leave. With the Union with Scotland at risk again these really are dangerous times.