The Class Gap

Today, in a painfully predictable attempt to pacify the Labour Party's disgruntled financiers, the trades unions, Harriet Harman has spoken about the need to "narrow the class gap" in the UK. Now, there are several things wrong with this, so lets start with the most obvious first: she and her chums have been in government for the last eleven years, going on about equality and social justice. So why start to make these noises now? The sad truth is, they have no more idea of how to achieve this goal now than they did eleven years ago.

The next thing that's wrong is the presumption that government should be the tool which we employ to "narrow the class gap". By definition, any change which government can make will be imposed from above, not generated from below. Individual human beings will continue to behave like individual human beings, and only if they are motivated on an individual level to change their lot will anything change on a larger scale.

The biggest thing that's wrong, though, is the presumption that the "class gap" is what matters. Social class is not something that people, by and large, choose (though some people are remarkably determined to call themselves working class, especially when they have quite a lot of money and are a bit embarrassed about it). Social class is about how you're brought up, what your expectations and aspirations are, where you see yourself fitting in. It's an individual thing, something over which government has no control. I walked past City and Islington College's Business and Arts centre today and was struck by the conformity and almost uniform dress of many of the students: baggy tracksuits, trainers, large baseball caps with big labels on worn at funny angles. This dress code represents their social class, where they come from and where they feel they fit. You can't tell them that it's wrong, any more than you can tell them that their names are wrong.

What Harriet Harman and her socialist ilk fail to realise is that it is precisely the government-encouraged culture of dependance on state munificence that has come to define the aspirations and expectations of those at the bottom end of the scale. Their lives are sufficiently comfortable, their parents (thanks to the same welfare state) never saw the need to aspire to anything greater, so they are happy to claim benefits, live in local authority housing and breed more of the same. It's like refusing to remove the stabilisers from a child's bicycle - it won't fall over, but neither will it go very fast, or go round corners very effectively, so they will never really learn how liberating it is to cycle on two wheels. Similarly, for the benefit-dependent class, their liberty and social mobility is undermined by this safety net. Which is why it needs to change.

That would be difficult to do - to tell the long-term benefit claimants that, unless they actually can't, they need to think about making a living for themselves, rather than depending on those of us who pay tax on our incomes to subsidise their lives. But it is the only way to really liberate those at the bottom of the scale - take off their stabilisers and watch them wobble along on two wheels until they get the hang of it.