We need to go backwards to go forwards

Two new books Atlee: A Life in Politics by Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds and What did the Baby Boomers Ever Do for Us? by Francis Beckett have thrown the spotlight both on the remarkable social reforms Atlee introduced in the UK in the six-year Labour Government from 1945 to 1951 and the consequent erosion of these reforms. Beckett blames one single generation – those born in the years just after the war – for their dismantling, but the worse effects were achieved (if the Atlee generation was their grandparents) by the baby-boomers’ parents, the generation that included Margaret Thatcher - amongst others. Some of the younger Labour politicians around at the time of Atlee’s Government were already less than idealistic, with Hugh Gaitskell  introducing prescription charges in 1951, something  James Callaghan did again in 1967 following their abolition in 1964.  With Thatcher in power in the 1980s, the country had shifted so far to the right that the Labour Party effectively panicked and saw itself as terminally unelectable unless it too changed. I remember at the time saying to a friend that I did not believe that the Labour Party would ever be in power again, and so far I have been proved right.

Contrast, then, the truly progressive modern Government of 1946-1951 with the New Labour Government of 1997-2010 and its programme of ‘modernisation’ (a code word for privatisation), and some of the baby-boomers are to be blamed as well.  Atlee introduced his reforms when the country was poor and at a low ebb, whereas Blair removed maintenance grants for students in higher education at a time  - in 1998 - when the country was supposed to be booming. Yet there were two major waves of post-war reforms in Britain (as indeed elsewhere in Europe) and those in their twenties and thirties in the sixties and early seventies were also responsible for important changes in social attitudes in the shape of campaigning for civil rights and against racism, gay rights, feminist campaigns and much else, and what has been achieved in this respect is here, one hopes, to stay.

Nevertheless, as a baby-boomer myself, I am dispirited by what successive governments - not just in Britain  but in other parts of Europe – have done to make us less of a civilised society in many important respects.  The difficult part now is that the most radical progress is to be achieved by first going backwards – backwards in order to go forwards. To nationalise much of what has been privatised. To remove private companies from the ‘clutches’ of the NHS. To ensure that everyone in the country whoever they are and whatever their income have more than enough to live on. To make higher education free again throughout the whole of the UK.  To replace everything that charities do in the UK with government intervention so that charities are effectively put out of business … The list – a huge list – carries on, but already I realise that I am mentioning things that were outside Atlee’s compass. It is not just that progress has to be seen in the light of a world so different to that of Atlee’s – it is also that the development of the ideas of socialism itself have not stopped, as though the position where we should now be is already a long way down a road that branched off many miles back …

How can this tortuous route backwards and forwards now be taken? In terms of party politics it can be taken now only by a government whose party does not treat itself or society in an oligarchical manner – a party that does not believe in ‘-ocracies’ of whatever type. This is a big ask – and such a programme needs aspects of both the former waves of reform to succeed: it needs a huge change in social attitudes away from an overriding belief in the ‘market’ to a belief instead in the world, a world where the ‘paid working person’ is also just one element within a much larger framework. This has to be combined too with the effective  administrative zeal of an Atlee Government. But crucially it needs something else as well. It needs a younger generation to throw off the still continuing charge of being ‘Thatcher’s Children’ and for them to say, and to say loudly, ’We will change this’.

We cannot legislate for a better class of criminal to sit in Parliament

There is talk about Conrad Black taking his seat again in the House of Lords, against the continuing debate about whether those who have served time in prison should be allowed to do so. But to ask whether a convicted criminal should be banned from the Lords – and therefore, by implication, Parliament as a whole – is also  to ask whether grassroots campaigners including all kind of protesters as well as many feminists should therefore never be allowed to stand in Parliament either.  

Better to ask the question whether Conrad Black should have been given his seat in the first place – an action which has been just one small part of a long-term institutionalised and ongoing corruption of the second House, that is to say a House still peopled by too many rich powerful industrialists who thereby gain an excorbitant influence in Parliament.

The poor should be speaking in Parliament

We have of course many experts in the Chamber today, but perhaps the biggest experts of all on the subject of this debate are not present. They are the poor themselves. I believe that they should be here in the Chamber somehow, for the simple reason-and it seems common sense to me-that the views of the poor should be heard in a debate on the poor. It is a question of representation, since those who are poor and on the margins of the mainstream are effectively denied a voice. This is the reason, I think, why we still have something called “poverty” in our sophisticated western society.

I was once a little closer to this form of expertise; I was on benefits myself, specifically income support. This was in Sheffield in the 1980s at a time when unemployment was less reviled than it is now, partly because of the sympathy for those working in the coal-mining and steel industries who had been put out of work.

I suggest that poverty as an experience is actually very simple, even if the bureaucracy that has accumulated to deal with it, including the benefits system, is complicated and public attitudes themselves are convoluted. I think that over a period of decades we have become, with a larger middle class, more aware at least of the idea of poverty, but perhaps less tolerant of those who remain unemployed, in the sense, of course, of not having paid work.

I believe that there are really just two things that a Government should bear in mind about poverty. The first is money. This Government are freezing benefits and capping the housing benefit. Sheffield was then, and still is, cheaper than London, but income support was impossible to live on then; today, with a personal allowance rate of £51.85 per week for the under-25s, who have been hit the hardest by this recession, I would say that it is absolutely impossible to survive on. Whatever you read in the newspapers, it is difficult to survive on most benefits.

The second and related issue is the stigma of being unemployed, by which I mean not having paid work, which is not necessarily the same as not working. For everyone on basic benefits, this stigma is less now connected with unemployment; it is more about being off the map and unvalued as a citizen. I believe passionately that one should be regarded as a citizen whether one is in paid work or not-indeed, whatever one’s status. That means that if you do not have an income, or have a low income, the state should pay you a decent rate on which to live.

The very language that the new Government use perpetuates the stigma. For example, The Coalition: Our Programme for Government says:

“The Government believes that we need to encourage responsibility and fairness in the welfare system. That means providing help for those who cannot work, training and targeted support for those looking for work, but sanctions for those who turn down reasonable offers of work or training”.

Carrot and stick, carrot or stick, it does not matter-this is still, in an old-fashioned sense, a perpetuation of an “us and them” situation for the poor who, in comparison with the poor in Victorian times, are highly articulate and educated and have expectations.

If we were not so wedded to the entirely constricting idea of paid work being the measure of all things, we would solve poverty overnight. However, by these restrictions on benefits, this Government are saying that we cannot afford to do so. Like others, I believe that this Budget owes its inspiration much more to political philosophy than to national need. The Green Party for one, now represented in Parliament at last, believes that we should not be having these cuts at all and that we should be doing quite the opposite and creating jobs in the public sector.

Another example of this same stigmatisation are the powerful television adverts which are supposed to target, in their words, “benefit thieves” but which in fact, I believe, help to criminalise people who are claiming benefits. Just as bad is the fact that no Government yet have run TV adverts advertising unclaimed benefits, which is a little bit like the “finders keepers” rule. Why do a Government who would claim to lift people out of poverty not chase down as assiduously the poor who do not know how to claim benefits as ferociously as they do those who may be claiming too much? It is easy to build up a head of righteous indignation over those who it is said are abusing the system, but are we not truly abusing the system if we do not reach out to those who are poor? I would like an answer from the Minister as to whether the new Government would consider running such TV adverts.

Where should we be looking for answers? Is it appropriate for charities to fill the gap? I notice this week from the Evening Standard that the Government, in a supposed time of national austerity, are providing £1 million of matching-funds to a newspaper editor’s project to dispense largesse to the poor, piecemeal via a number of charities. This is David Cameron’s big philanthropic society in action, turning the clock back to a Victorian society in an age when the poor do not want to be, and should not be, patronised. I am not saying that individuals might not be helped by this, or that charities are not fine, but the proper purpose of charities is, in my view, that they do-yes-a significant job of stepping into the breach when a Government fail to do the appropriate and long-term job that they should do. I would support a Government who said, “We will make all the charities that cater to poverty redundant by such and such a date”.

I can give one example of a government policy that seemed to address the twin evils of money and stigma. From income support, I went on to the original enterprise allowance scheme as an artist. Of course, the scheme did not suit everyone at the time-those who had worked in traditional industries in and around Sheffield just wanted their old jobs back-but a number of things made the enterprise allowance scheme unique.

First, you were instantly destigmatised, because as soon as you were self-employed, you were considered to be working, although-this is the significant point-you might not yet have had any income from your work except for the small weekly grant that you received. Secondly, there was no bureaucracy. The business plan was easy for anyone to fill in. You did not have to be a businessperson to do that and you were not judged according to how the business might do, although some people later became highly successful commercially as a result of being on the scheme. Thirdly, they left you alone-a mark of respect and trust. Fourthly, you followed your dream, or simply continued with your work, for which one might say that the state was paying, although not very much.

Unfortunately, the enterprise allowance scheme did not last. It was watered down and then scrapped as the big stick once more came out, but it is being looked at again. It features in the recent Arts Council England report, Creative Survival in Hard Times. I understand that the Government are taking an interest in the original scheme and I would like to know whether they are thinking about reintroducing it.

I believe that the only way to cure poverty is finally to accept that there will never be full employment in terms of paid work unless the state itself fills that gap and assumes and respects people’s contribution to society irrespective of their income.

Good business is not the reason we should keep free admission to national museums and galleries

Sometimes it is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and if, in the face of possible swingeing cuts to the arts, the Coalition Government keeps free admission to national museums and galleries, as indeed they should (and as Jeremy Hunt unequivocally promised in May), then it will be most likely, with this Government’s overarching belief in private sponsorship and the marketplace, that they will do so because it makes good business sense.

The free access policy has become famous over the years across the world and tourists now come to the  UK – and particularly London – because of it. Think back to the massive rise in museum visits that occurred when free admission was reintroduced in 2000, and one only has to imagine the huge drop-off in revenue that would occur for the paying special exhibitions and the highly lucrative museum shops and restaurants – not to mention all the other revenue losses in tourism - particularly from abroad, that would result if free admission was scrapped and museum visits once again fall.

But business demands obscure all the important cultural reasons why we should keep free access. One of the reasons that tourists – as well the British public – love the national museums – and why they flock to them – is that they are properly public spaces. If either everyone – or just those from abroad – had to pay then that sense of a cherished public space would disappear instantly. Public spaces are not public spaces if they are only selectively so. If people from abroad were to be charged then this would immediately affect UK nationals who would also have to be stopped and asked for some form of ID confirming nationality – and we have just rebelled against ID cards. No – that would be the end of our museums as public spaces.

The national museums and galleries are places where you can casually meet up and where you can also drop in, if you wish, just to see a single painting or other artwork. It cannot be stressed how important short and repeat visits to museums are, not just to artists and enthusiasts but to the public as a whole. It also unfortunately happens to be very difficult to communicate this significance to a mindset that sees the experience of visiting a museum or a gallery only as a ‘consumer’ experience (an experience defined by an admission fee) in a single visit, and the museum visitor is relegated to the role of a ‘customer’ who feels that they have to traipse round the whole museum in order to get one’s moneyworth. This is not what museums are about – they do not offer at all the same kind of uniform and discrete experience as, for example, the cinema does.  

All these treasures are still our own (unlike much else that successive governments have sold off), and I believe that we have the right to see them – with our friends from abroad if we wish – for free. December 1st next year marks then ten years since England, Scotland and Wales together had free entry to the national museums.  I very much hope that I along with the public and the whole of the arts community will be celebrating ten highly successful years.

Protests: Tate and Parliament Square

The protests against BP sponsorship of Tate could become interesting if they deepened into a long-term campaign against private money. Stephen Bayley in the Daily Telegraph today has correctly pointed to the ‘dirty’ uses to which many sponsors do now or have in the past put their money, although he tries to draw an equivalence, I think wrongly, between private and public funds for arts funding. But the current protest does not seem to be a protest against corporate interests as such – it is a protest only against the oil leak, and its choregraphed elements feel – dare one say- corporate and slick (pun intended) in an unreflecting and  non-ironic way.

Personally I am not, in principle, against either private sponsorship or against what are often magnificent corporate collections of art, particularly if such collections are displayed to the public, as German companies and banks often do. Big companies are big companies and do big company-style things. What I have found dismaying – something the current protesters do not address – is the extent to which the national British arts institutions themselves have over the years begun to resemble big corporations, a phenomenon that accelerated during the New Labour years as big business was embraced on all sides – and internally as well.

It is interesting that many of the 174 signatories of the recent Guardian letter appear to be relatively unknown artists and arts activists (Hans Haacke is an exception), whereas the well-established British artists yesterday interviewed in Guardian G2 acknowledged the importance of private sponsorship, if somewhat grudgingly.

What then is going on here? Do the protesters represent a new revolt against the market-orientated Thatcher generation, or is it just that younger artists/activists have nothing to lose, are simply getting into the mix, and will become themselves more conservative later – if indeed they are not so already? Is this protest then an all too thought-out and predictable activism which will be used as a launch-pad to a future artistic career, or do we see the beginnings of something deeper?

Contrast the perhaps overly choreographed Tate goings on with the ramshackle peace camp in Parliament Square, full of people who are not only passionate in their beliefs but are living them as well. The peace camp also contains middle class people but it is difficult to imagine much connection between them and the style conscious Tate protesters.

Boris Johnson is getting rid of Democracy Village in part because he thinks it attracts ‘drunks and the homeless’, yet he and the Government could learn a thing or two from the camp about social inclusiveness, since it has taken these people into their society in a way that, on a larger scale, successive governments have signally failed to do.