“The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” So said former United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. He was alluding to the timeless issue of intergenerational tensions that are passed from grandparent to parent, from parent to child.

Although George Osborne has shelved the next stage of his “pensions revolution” which he was due to unveil in his latest Budget, the issue will not go away. There is a growing sense of cross-generational dissatisfaction, exacerbated by the media, quick to report that today’s “millennials” — those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, also known as Generation Y — are the unluckiest generation since the Second World War, while people nearing pension age find the welcoming horizons of retirement receding ever further.

Aggravating factors include economics; advances in science and technology; shifts in cultural attitudes; and the proliferation of communications. The reason the argument is taking a critical turn now is because the British population is swelling — and fast.

According to the Office of National Statistics, we have grown by more than 10 million people since 1964 (an overall population increase of 18.7 per cent) and approximately half of this growth has occurred in the last 15 years. Not only are we growing in number, but we are getting older. A recent government report stated that ten million people in Britain are over the age of 65 and that this number will have nearly doubled to approximately 19 million by 2050. And as the number of elderly citizens rises, so too does the number of very old citizens. There are currently more than three million people over the age of 80, and if current patterns continue this figure will have almost doubled by 2030.

The demographic shift is largely due to improvements in healthcare. The changing face of the British population compounds the increasing pressure on the younger generation to support the old in the long term.

Consider the financial implications of these demographic changes: an ageing population will place a heavy financial burden on the state. Some 65 per cent of Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure goes to those in retirement. If the population increases at the current rate, the government will need to spend an additional £10 billion per annum for every additional one million people in the retirement age bracket. How will it do this? By taxing those in work — in other words, the middle-aged and the young.

The first baby boomers have themselves joined the ranks of pensioners. I asked boomer Alexander Gregory, a father of five, what he thought the effects of an ageing population would be on his offspring. “We don’t know but we must find out. There is a huge need to really think about the challenges it will bring both on a macro and micro basis, and to start working on policies to react to those challenges. Everyone pays lip-service to this problem but the state is not really working on it. Adopting a wait-and-see policy will lead to reactive short-term planning rather than suggesting solutions for the next 50 years. Long-term planning will lessen the burden for young people.”

It is plain to see why millennials are feeling the strain: not only are they working away with no end in sight (the state pension age is rising: currently at 65 for men and 63 for women, it is predicted that the retirement age will be 67 for all by 2026) but they are also working to support an ageing population. On the surface this may seem both unjust and economically troubling, but dig a little deeper and the problems aren’t quite as burdensome as they initially appear. The population has been ageing for decades now; previous generations were faced with the same dilemma. The working population has increased as well, so there are more people putting money in the pot.

Generation Y gets a mixed press; some are sympathetic to their plight while others label them as “lazy”, “unrealistic in their aspirations” and “demanding”. But it is certainly true the cost of living has made life harder for young professionals today than ever before, particularly when considered alongside average earnings. Property is the only investment that seems both secure and worthwhile, but with ever-rising living costs, saving for a deposit on a home is, for many young people, a pipedream. So graduates are increasingly forced to return to the family home: according to the ONS, the number of young adults aged 20-34 living with their parents has increased by 25 per cent since 1996; 3.3 million of them now live at home.

Ed Howker, journalist and co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth, says: “The economics are quite clear. It’s clearly disproportionately expensive to be young and to try and get a roof over your head in the UK now, more than it was a generation ago, even several generations ago.

“At the end of the day, the state is responsible. It’s difficult for schools and pupils to work out what they need to do to make themselves more relevant in this labour market. Anything we can do to improve the market signals between these two sections would be really helpful.”

The government has recognised young people’s wish to secure their future by investing in property. In 2013, it introduced the equity loan Help to Buy scheme. By 2014, it had allowed 53,000 households to buy a home with a fraction of the deposit they would normally require. A year later, the Rent to Buy Scheme was introduced. The government said it would “boost building of new rental homes that will also help hard-working people later upgrade into home ownership”.

But is this assistance enough? Katya, a 23-year-old graduate who lives in London, thinks not. “It is totally impossible to get on the housing ladder,” she declared. “The only people that I know who have managed to do so have had help from their parents. The rest of us have just given up and accepted that we will be renting for the rest of our lives. Buying a house in London isn’t an option that anyone my age can even consider, unlike the previous generation, who presumed that getting a house was a rite of passage. The sad reality is I am never going to be able to afford a house.

“Help to Buy isn’t as viable as it sounds — in fact it is quite restrictive. It’s a good idea, but doesn’t translate in practice. I still can’t afford to participate in the scheme, even on a London salary.”

It is clear why some young people feel that the world is against them, and life was better for their grandparents. However, resignation will not solve their dilemma. A change in attitude is required. We are conditioned to believe that owning bricks and mortar is the most tangible way of securing one’s future, but Switzerland’s home ownership rate is 44 per cent, compared to Britain’s 64.8 per cent. If we followed suit, savings could instead be invested in emerging businesses.

On top of financial worries, technological advances, travel and communications are all creating social change, which means that our behaviour is altering alongside socio-demographics — and it is more complicated to measure.

The internet is the most palpable indicator of change. In 2014, Ofcom released a report that found one in three children in the UK aged 15 or below had their own tablet, a figure that had doubled in the 12 months preceding the report’s publication. In the same year, the ONS found that 97 per cent of households with children had internet access. And it’s not just the young: 76 per cent of adults in the UK access the internet every day. What are the implications in terms of intergenerational tensions?

The proliferation of internet usage is not the only indicator of change: the ways in which the internet can be used is more indicative of how the world is changing in favour of the young. The internet is something of a Sargasso Sea, separating workers and pensioners, which widens as its possibilities multiply. Originally designed to ease communications, web applications now enable users to function with extraordinary convenience: one can order food, book transport, control finances and shop online simply using mobile telephones. The rapid increase in apps and their usage has given birth to a new wave of start-up businesses and the renaissance of the entrepreneur, particularly among the young: recent research found that the number of under-35-year-olds starting businesses has increased by more than 70 per cent in the last decade.

Howker concedes: “This is a fantastic time to be alive. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly missing those improvements.” Along with technology and communications, ease of travel increases year on year, meaning that we can trade, and access lifestyles that were previously unimaginable. Traffic to, from and within the United States is predicted to grow at an annual growth rate of 3.2 per cent, says the International Air Transport Association. Cheap flights and package deals make holidays more accessible to all.

Social strategist Paul Flatters argues that there has never been a better time to be young. “Young people live longer lives, they are likely to be healthier and because of many of the wonders of life in the 21st century, they will enjoy a much more varied, richer life.

“If we think today’s young people are having a difficult time, it begs the question: when did they have a better time?”

Lydia, a third-year History undergraduate at Edinburgh University, says: “I think there is and always will be criticism of younger generations by their elders, and I can see that due to the era of globalisation and massive technological revolution that we live in, the divide could get bigger.”

But she argues that the “old vs. young” argument was largely sensationalised, and expresses general contentment with her lot. She sees tensions as simply a matter of perception and perspective: “Freedom of movement in the EU, for example, can be seen either as an opportunity, for someone to live and work abroad with ease, or as a way that opportunities are taken away from one nationality and given to another.”

Lydia is optimistic despite obvious obstacles, such as student debt. “After university, I know that the job market is pretty tough, but I also think that while at university people could spend a lot more of their time contributing to their resumé while being happy and productive members of society. The increased difficulties of employment should encourage this, and not moaning. We are, when you think about it, one of the luckiest groups alive today.”

The post Don’t Pit Generations Against Each Other appeared first on Standpoint.

The seminar I am attending is not speed dating or a singles event, but a course entitled “Love & Soulmate with Kathryn Alice”. For £75 a ticket, delegates are treated to a motivational talk from the warm-up act — a young man who explained to us how we could open our hearts to each other — and a seminar from the love guru herself. 

Alice, a Californian, resplendent in flowing blonde locks, pale-grey linen and a fixed, serene smile, is the author of Love Will Find You: Nine Magnets for Bringing You and Your Soulmate Together (Avalon, 2007), plus a number of CDs and audio products. Alice lectures on love all over the world, and has, according to the delegates on my table, something of a cult following. “I was about to fly to California to meet her,” said Irene (not her real name), a middle-aged Asian woman who has been single since her husband left her a decade ago, “but then I saw an advertisement for this seminar. I could not believe it. It must be fate.”

Although the seminar is clearly a money-making event, Alice is not raking it in like a number of others in the “love for sale” market. The hire of the hotel ballroom on a Saturday evening, plus the DJ, warm-up act and administration and advertising costs, would not leave a huge amount of change out of the joining fee. Perhaps such events are seen as loss-leaders, there to promote supplementary materials and encourage people to sign up to the more expensive one-to-one sessions.

The UK organiser of the event, Gail De Souza, agreed to speak to me following my revelation that I was at the seminar to research an article on the commercialisation of loneliness. De Souza told me that she had made a financial loss on the event, but that she did it “out of love”. The room was only about half-full, and many of the people there were linked to the organisers, but nevertheless such an approach to finding your true love can be addictive. Many of those attending had been to several such seminars previously and said they would continue until they found their soulmate.

Some will acquire a taste for such methods of meeting a partner and will go on to hire personal “dating trainers” to help them with their online search skills; pay for advice from a “flirt coach”; or even travel the world to other events like “Love & Soulmate”, believing that, as they are about to be told by Kathryn Alice, “There is someone for everyone out there. You WILL find them.”

This event is one of many examples of the increasing commercialisation of loneliness. The advertising industry has capitalised on people’s desire to find their soulmate and live happily ever after, and it has gone way beyond online dating services.

The dating scene is getting seriously pricey. A year with bespoke dating agency Berkeley International will set you back £10,000. Then there are dating “boot camps” such as Kama Lifestyles, which costs £800 a day.

Not only is the online dating business huge, there are now virtual dating assistants such as Vida Consultancy that, as it claims on its website, “specialises in getting dates with women you want to date, does all the work. YOU get all the credit. It SUCKS sending message after message to women who never write you back. What’s worse is if you’re getting any messages at all, they’re probably not from the girls you want to meet.”

Then there is Sam Owen, one of a number of so-called relationship coaches, based in Cheshire. Owen offers sessions at £125 per hour. There are also “flirtology” classes, such as the course run by Jean Smith, who describes herself as a social and cultural anthropologist. Smith claims in her publicity that “flirting is a science”. The course costs £1,797.

How did anyone manage to date, fall in love, or find a life partner before these people began charging you money to achieve it?

Money and sex have long gone together. We only have to look at the scandal involving hacked and leaked information on its members from the online infidelity site Ashley Madison. “I only signed up to catfish lonely liberal women,” commented one former member below an online article on the topic.

Dr Catherine Hakim, in a report for the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), recently argued that prostitution should be legalised and treated like any other financial transaction, such as paying to eat in a restaurant. In her report, Supply and Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century, Hakim claims that the “sexual deficit” among heterosexual men (meaning that they want more sex than do women of the same age) can be addressed by legitimising the purchase of sex, and that decriminalising Britain’s £4 billion sex industry would increase protection of women. Despite there being no credible evidence for her claims, there are a number of countries in recent years, including the UK, that have had their GDP boosted by estimates of their economies that include the profit from the drug and sex industries.

In the past decade, increasing numbers of entrepreneurs have come up with new ideas for making money from loneliness: mail-order brides, dating coaches, synthetic “partners” such as RealDolls (life-like human dolls, created initially for sex, but also in more recent years for a type of faux companionship), and reproductive services to produce children to provide solace for the solitary.

Loneliness is a growing problem in the West, with some studies claiming it has become an epidemic among young adults in the UK. It is also a significant problem for older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over 50, and is set to get far worse as populations age even further.

Many of us live alone. According to the census, there were 7.1 million single-person households in England and Wales in 2011, an increase of 1 million from the previous decade. In the UK as a whole, 13 per cent of the population lives alone.

People spend money, join groups and organisations and put serious time and energy in the attempt to rid themselves of the feeling of loneliness. Surely, many would argue, finding a variety of ways to assuage loneliness is a positive thing, even if cash changes hands?

I have long been critical of commercialised sex and have spent decades, alongside other feminists and human rights activists, campaigning to abolish the international sex trade. The hostility I have had directed at me, by those on the liberal and libertarian Left and Right, has been extraordinary. My work on domestic violence, rape and child sexual abuse has left some men feeling defensive, and whenever I speak, or attempt to speak at universities these days I am more often than not “no-platformed” by the National Union of Students for, among other things, “whorephobia”.

“Because money is made out of prostitution, there are plenty there to defend it,” says Rachel Moran, a survivor of the sex trade and author of Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (2012). “Those shouting us down about how great selling sex is would not dream of defending domestic violence in this way, because it is not a commercial business, relying on good PR and advertising.”

My recent “no-platforming” was a few weeks ago. I was due to speak at the University of Manchester at a debate on feminism. My opponent was to be Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator and professional anti-feminist. One of the justifications of banning me (but keeping Yiannopoulos) was the fact that I consider prostitution to be a cause and consequence of women’s inequality. It would appear that my critique of commercialised sexual abuse is more dangerous and unpalatable than misogyny spouted by men like Yiannopoulos.

Few would see the connection between the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I attended, and prostitution. But profiting from those seeking love is surely as unethical as making money from sexual gratification.

I wanted to find out from the delegates at “Love & Soulmate” whether paying money in the pursuit of love paid dividends. Jane (not her real name) is in her early thirties and works in the charitable sector in London. At the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I spotted her looking somewhat embarrassed when, as part of the obligatory ice-breaker exercise directed by the warm-up act, she was asked to turn to the person on her left, place her hand on his heart, and look directly into his eyes. (At this stage I pretended to be taking an urgent telephone call.)

Jane has been looking for a life partner since the break-up of a four-year relationship eight years ago, and had previously tried online dating. Having spent “hundreds of pounds” joining various sites and going on “pointless dates with unsuitable men”, she saw an advertisement on a women’s magazine website for the Kathryn Alice seminar and decided to try it out.

The seminar was at least two-thirds women. One woman was in her eighties, and had been looking for love since her husband had died some time ago. The majority seemed to be fairly young to middle-aged. The tables were set out in the style of a wedding breakfast and were littered with glitter and tiny red love-hearts. Red heart-shaped balloons decorated the room, and a DJ stood behind a deck in the corner, spinning tunes such as Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything”, and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady”.

I met Jane, a conventionally attractive woman that I would have assumed would have no trouble in the dating world, during the break. Had she benefited from the advice given so far by Alice and her colleagues? No, she told me. “It was all about what we needed to do differently,” she said. “The problem for a lot of women is that many of the men out there are not very nice, and tend to be afraid to commit. Most women can get dates if all we are looking for is a fling or a one-night stand.

“We were told that the only reason we had not met anyone yet was because we had not opened ourselves up to the possibility of it yet, or opened our hearts. But the reason why most of us would have been there was precisely because we had been looking, had been open to it, but had not been able to find the right person.”

Although women dominate such seminars and the types of online dating sites and apps that are geared towards finding relationships as opposed to casual sex, a growing number of British and American men looking for a wife will access a commercial service rather than use the traditional methods. This is an expensive business, according to a Reddit thread earlier this year. Men can pay as much as $50,000 (£32,700) to meet a woman this way.

For the women in the Thai sex industry, the prospect of a foreign husband and a nice house in the West is a far better than dire poverty. But the fact that some women are desperate enough to sell themselves to such men is no excuse for us to accept the fact that thousands of British men take advantage of their lack of choice. If a man cannot acquire a girlfriend the old-fashioned way, he should accept that it is unlikely a beautiful young woman in a faraway country will desire him. The UK government should take a stand against men who travel abroad to buy sex, as it allows poorer countries to sell its women like cheap holiday tat.

In Russia alone more than 25,000 women per year sign up to the country’s 1,000-plus marriage sites. Only 5-7 per cent of the women who sign up eventually find a foreign spouse, according to a study conducted by an American university.

The mail-order bride industry, now linked to online dating, has roots going back to when early European settlers in North America requested wives. The Virginia Company of London sent several shipments of mail-order brides in return for payments in tobacco. The first documented mail-order brides started where so many now end up: London. Today, the mail-order bride business is huge and extremely lucrative, with men being far less stigmatised for finding a spouse this way.

Prior to travelling to the potential brides’ country of origin — often the Philippines or Russia — the customer will look through an online catalogue to choose women to whom he is attracted. I spoke to Jim (not his real name), a British Asian from London who had recently been widowed and wanted “a second chance of happiness”. He told me that he was “bombarded” with advertisements for mail-order bride services via his email and social media sites while linked to several internet dating services. “It would never have occurred to me to actually look to buy a wife,” said Jim. “I wanted to date lots of potential partners so I could choose from them. But I became convinced that it would be best if I cut all the middle stuff out and chose a bride in one go.”

First, he had to pay money to access the email addresses of the women he liked the look of from the catalogue, and then for their addresses in order to send letters and gifts, which the customers were encouraged to do. Most of the women do not speak English so Jim had to meet the cost of translators and interpreters whenever he wrote to one of them or when they spoke via Skype. “It ended up costing me £10,000,” he told me, “just to sign up to the service, make contact with the girls and send them gifts and money. And I never did find my bride.”

According to a study conducted in Hong Kong and published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2013, those who have few friends, feel alone at work, or are sad about a break-up are more careless with their money, because they associate being wealthy with being socially accepted. The study found that lonely people can be drawn to gambling. Online poker and other forms of gambling attract lonely individuals as they almost always include a chat facility where players can get to know those involved in the games. Often this can lead to addiction and, of course, excessive spending.

Then there is the “girlfriend experience”, where prostitutes are paid to pretend they are in love with the man, and do all the things with him, including sex, normally associated with a close and intimate relationship. These women can be rented by the week, the month, or even longer. These services can be bought from any brothel and escort agency in Britain, but many men choose to travel abroad for the “girlfriend experience”, maybe because it gives them access to subservient women. I have interviewed women who have provided these services. They each told me that having to pretend to be in love with the punter is akin to torture. But when love becomes another service provision or commercial exchange, the one handing over the cash has the power.

Disabled men, including returning war veterans, are the latest to be targeted by those with money signs in their eyes. TLC (Tender Loving Care) Trust, a service set up by former pornographer Tuppy Owens, is linked to a charity (Outsiders Trust). It is, nevertheless, peddling the commercial services of individuals and escort agencies advertising sexual services. Checking the websites of the escorts listed shows that they are not particularly targeting disabled men, but simply adding to their customer base.

In 2010 the Telegraph revealed, following Freedom of Information requests, that some local authorities in England had used taxpayers’ money to pay for the services of prostitutes to be delivered to the homes of disabled men, similar to the Meals on Wheels scheme, and occasional visits to lap-dancing clubs. One man who suffered from a brain injury had had “sex work” built into his council care package. I took part in a TV debate earlier this year alongside a women who had bought a brothel in the north of England for her disabled son after taking him to Amsterdam (where prostitution is legal) for his first sexual experience.

The financial exploitation of loneliness can lead to a view that those without pots of money are destined to remain without a partner. Last year, a study conducted by retail analysts Mintel found that just 4 per cent of those with an annual income of more than £50,000 had never found love. However, the proportion of the loveless increases as you go down the income brackets, reaching 17 per cent for those on less than £9,500 a year. The research also found that those with an income of more than £50,000 were most likely to have fallen in love five times or more during their lifetime.

But is this love, or a synthetic version that is more to do with the wallet than the heart? Take the boom in buying a baby via surrogacy services. Babies can appease loneliness, and today it is easier than ever to order one over the internet. All you need is plenty of money. First, you are supplied with a catalogue by the commercial service supplying the eggs. The women selling the embryos are typically young, highly educated and conventionally attractive. Once the eggs are purchased, a womb, usually belonging to a poor, desperate woman, perhaps in India or Ukraine, is rented. If sperm is required, another catalogue is produced, this time full of photographs and life histories of good-looking, high-achieving men. At the end of the process, the gestational carrier will hand over the baby to the purchaser.

Last month, an Idaho woman named Brooke who had served as a surrogate three times died while carrying twins for a Spanish couple. Surrogate pregnancy is illegal in Spain and other European countries. The European Parliament called surrogacy and egg sales an “extreme form of exploitation of women” in an official resolution.

I called Jane a few days after the seminar to ask how she was feeling. Depressed, she told me. “I feel I was told at that seminar that meeting someone right for me is not a matter of chance or good luck, or even going to the right places, but that it is something I am doing wrong,” she said. “I was left feeling like I had no further knowledge about how to find a partner, and more determined to go out and meet men face to face and be prepared for disappointment. I don’t believe that if you follow her advice it will happen as a matter of science. You can’t buy your way into a perfect relationship.”

The post Money Can’t Buy Us Love: Profiting From Loneliness appeared first on Standpoint.

A new book has now emerged, On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future, edited by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, explicitly harking back to the earlier one. Regretting, in his own words, that “on facing savage attacks [on Faith in the City] not only by those in the government of the day but also by other powerful figures in society, the Church leadership then lost its nerve and moved on to internal ‘churchy’ matters”, he presents the new book as the Church of England having regained its nerve.

On Rock or Sand? (SPCK, £9.99) may not be quite as bad as its predecessor, but Archbishop Sentamu’s contribution, the lengthiest in the book, is fundamentally flawed. His overriding concern is with inequality, of the extent of poverty in what is, overall, a relatively prosperous society. The flaw—surprising in one who originally hails from overseas—is that he presents this solely as a British phenomenon, seemingly unaware that studies by the International Monetary Fund and others have clearly shown that, throughout the developed world, inequality (as officially measured) has been gradually rising for the past 30 years or so, under a wide variety of governments and policies.

So there is nothing unusual about the British experience, nor can it be attributed to the policies of the present UK government. Indeed, the most recent official figures suggest that, over the past few years, income inequality in the UK (unlike in most other countries) has lessened slightly. There are clearly larger forces at work affecting us all, of which modern technology and globalisation are two of the most important; and most people, sensibly, would not wish to turn their backs on either. It is, of course, understandable that at a time of recession inequality causes more resentment than it does when overall prosperity is growing—which, happily, in the UK it now is. It is also understandable that at a time of recession there is increased resentment at the extent of tax avoidance by the rich. But that is a separate issue.

According to the leftist French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written a best-selling (if little read) big book on the subject, the explanation of growing inequality worldwide is that the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. This dubious generalisation is not only based on flawed statistical evidence but ignores the extent to which the return on capital reflects risk. Be that as it may, his proposed remedy is a swingeing tax on high incomes, worldwide. My own experience is that, when as Chancellor I sharply reduced the tax on high incomes in the late 1980s, the yield actually rose, giving me more scope for helping the poor through public expenditure. The only sufferers were the accountancy firms and tax lawyers, who had been doing very well advising the rich how to reduce their tax bills. Needless to say my heart bled for them, but I felt they would survive.

I was also aware of the observation of the eminent development economist, Professor Peter Bauer, that you do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor. The bottom line is that we need to focus more on policies that relieve poverty, rather than attempt to reduce—or is it eliminate?—inequality.

Be that as it may, Archbishop Sentamu is not only seemingly unaware that the rising inequality which exercises him is a global, not a British, phenomenon. He is also, surprisingly (although this is true also of Piketty), apparently unaware of a much more important feature of the past 30 years, namely the progressive reduction in inequality between the developed and developing worlds. As a result of the belated discovery by most of the developing world that the liberal market capitalist economy, for all its undoubted flaws (for that is the nature of mankind), is the only high road to material prosperity, and greatly assisted by globalisation, the gap between living standards in the developing world and in the developed world is steadily narrowing, a welcome process that seems likely to continue.

It is true, of course, that inequality within the developing world is considerably greater than in the developed world, and is probably growing faster. Nevertheless, a world in which extreme poverty is perceptibly diminishing, and inequality reducing on the global scale, while by no means perfect (nothing is), does not seem to me too bad. There are certainly far worse things to worry about.

Archbishop Sentamu’s ignorance or neglect of what has been happening beyond our own shores, however, is one thing. What surprised me more was the contribution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the book. I have a high regard for Justin Welby. We worked closely together, for more than a year, as members of the Parliamentary Banking Commission, under the outstanding chairmanship of Andrew Tyrie MP. Indeed, it was on my suggestion that (as Bishop of Durham) he was invited to join the Commission in the first place. Moreover, he is unusual among the bishops and archbishops to have had a successful business career before entering the Church, having been a highly-regarded group treasurer of Enterprise Oil, trading oil derivatives with the best of them. (Curiously enough, Enterprise Oil was a company which in a sense I created, when, as Energy Secretary, I forced the then state-owned British Gas Corporation to disgorge its North Sea oil interests, which I then privatised under that name.)

At the heart of Archbishop Welby’s contribution there is the following bewildering passage: “We believe that if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow. That is a lie. It is a lie because it is a narrative that casts money, rather than humanity, as the protagonist of God’s story.”

I have to say that, in a rather long lifetime either observing or participating in politics and public life, I have never come across anyone who believes that “if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow”. With great respect, the only proposition close to a “lie” is to assert that “we” do believe that. We certainly believe that it is an obligation on governments to try and “fix” the economy to the extent that they are able to do so: the people, rightly, expect no less. But insofar as this is connected to the “fixing” of human beings (a much more difficult task) the relationship in fact flows in the opposite direction.

For example, the full name of the Commission on which Justin Welby and I sat was the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards; and “standards” referred to standards of behaviour, a cultural and ethical matter which was at the heart of the banking meltdown of 2008 and which had had such disastrous economic consequences. As I wrote in the updated version of my memoirs some five years ago, “While New Labour’s system of bank supervision and regulation was a disaster, that is in no way to deny that the root cause of the crisis lay in the greed and folly of all too many bankers, in the broadest sense of the term.”

This is certainly a difficult area. The ability of politicians and governments in a free society to influence human behaviour and promote ethical standards is limited. And it is significant that the great Adam Smith, author of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an analysis of man as a moral being, and The Wealth of Nations, an analysis of man as an economic being, spent most of the rest of his days vainly trying to write a synthesis of the two.

But the claim that “we” believe that by “fixing” the economy we can “fix” human beings, and that this alleged belief has anything whatsoever to do with the problems that face us, is absurd and unhelpful. Archbishop Welby may well have a point when he complains that “our greatly secularised society seems to agree on only one, quite un-Christian principle: that it’s every person for themselves”; but that clearly doesn’t apply to the political class. Unlike in some other countries, few in Britain enter politics in order to enrich themselves, nor (unless they become Prime Minister) do they do so.

As I have observed elsewhere, there has indeed been a damaging cultural change, which has undoubtedly made a contribution to the banking disaster in particular. In the old days, bankers’ greed and folly was to a considerable extent kept in check by the fear of loss of reputation if things went wrong: a powerful spur to banking prudence and rectitude. But we now appear to live in an age in which the acquisition of wealth counts for more than reputation. The archbishops would have done better to have addressed themselves to how this might be reversed. But then that would have been much harder.

The post We Can Fix The Economy But Not Human Nature appeared first on Standpoint.

Many classic movies have signalled and shaped new cultural trends: The Birth of A Nation stimulating racist social activism; A Clockwork Orange depicting senseless violence; Kramer vs. Kramer showing the heartbreak of divorce; Philadelphia reducing the stigma of Aids; Brokeback Mountain normalising homosexuality, to name a few. Fifty Shades of Grey will probably become another watershed cinema event linked to the mainstreaming of pornography that brings sadomasochism into living rooms and bedrooms worldwide. Working as a certified sex therapist in Pittsburgh, I’ve already detected more than a few signs of this mainstreaming. A recently divorced thirtysomething man concluded that his lack of success dating was because modern women were into sadomasochism, so he replaced his nice guy behaviour with BDSM (that’s Bondage, Dominance, Sado-Masochism). A distinguished sex therapist told me that she couldn’t lend me her three-volume set of Fifty Shades because she had given them to her daughters. Her kids call it “Mommy Porn”.

What Fifty Shades of Grey notoriously lacks in well-written prose, it apparently makes up for with juicy storyline. Ana Steele, 21-year-old student and ingénue, stumbles into interviewing a wealthy 27-year-old entrepreneur for her college newspaper. In a stroke of sardonic irony, this handsome sophisticate is named Christian Grey, a name pregnant with meaning. After the initial interview, Christian serendipitously encounters Ana in the hardware store where she works and he buys rope, masking tape and plastic ties. Later that night Ana “drunk calls” Christian who lets her know he will pick her up because she is intoxicated. On a later date, he flies her to his apartment in his private helicopter where he shows her his playroom of BDSM gear and introduces her to the dominance and submission contract stating that there will only be a sexual relationship with no romance and that she is not allowed to touch or look at him. Tension mounts in the relationship, with Ana asking Christian to “punish” her; he obliges by beating her with a belt. The denouement, overlooked by Fifty Shades fans, is that Ana leaves devastated, realising that she and Christian are not compatible.

This “new Christian” protagonist is both chronologically and culturally very distant from an earlier Christian, the Everyman of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. The Christian Everyman, burdened with sin, embarks on an allegorical journey through varied temptations from his hometown, the City of Destruction, towards deliverance in the Celestial City of Heaven. Guided along the way by characters such as Piety, Prudence and Discretion, Christian’s friend Faithful is able to resist the temptress, Wanton, who tries to dissuade him from continuing the journey. Where Bunyan’s Christian passed through a more black and white world of clearly defined good and evil based on revealed truths and absolute values, James’s Christian traverses a miasmal world of multiple shades of grey that celebrates rather than condemns “transgressive” sexual behaviour.

Many critics and scientists have raised concerns that Fifty Shades glorifies abuse and pervasive sexual violence against women. Some studies have found a relationship between reading the first volume of Fifty Shades and signs of eating disorders, engaging in binge drinking, and having emotionally abusive partners. This is not to say that the book causes such behaviours because it may be that those who engage in them are drawn to the book. Despite these critiques, other professionals argue that although the book is “disturbing”, reading about these fantasies has value if it enhances the real sexual lives of women. But as with video games, the question can be posed: will the violence remain in the realm of fantasy or will it seek expression in actual behaviour, and if the latter, what then?

In today’s era of rapidly changing social and sexual values, sex therapists face new conundrums. What is the proper therapeutic stance when a couple with marital problems both agree that his sexual dysfunction is unrelated to the fact that he likes to dress up in a maid’s uniform and have his wife humiliate him as part of their erotic life? Or when people find consenting partners to inflict pain on one another or draw blood in order to feel sexually aroused? With such questions in mind, I ventured south from Pittsburgh to the swanky Hilton Conference Center in Miami for the annual meeting of one of the major professional sexuality societies. The clumsy but intriguing title of the conference promised to be stimulating: “Embracing the Sensuality of Diversity in Identities and Cultures.” It didn’t disappoint.

I learned from a presentation on “Kink Sex” that there are no fewer than 500 “paraphilias”, a more objective term that about 35 years ago replaced “perversion” and later “sexual deviation”. These include obtaining sexual gratification in atypical ways such as needing a leg cast to be aroused or receiving shocks to the male organ, known as CBT or Cock & Ball Torture. The term “paraphilia” is derived from the Greek roots “philia”, meaning love, and “para”, meaning amiss, as in wrong or improper. The new CBT (not Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, familiar to professionals and laymen) seems to miss the mark as a way of expressing love. Many might still consider this form of sexual pleasure to be inherently abnormal.

But this is no longer the view of the psychiatric establishment. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association has the last word in defining what is a disorder. The newly released fifth edition (DSM-5) introduced a distinction between “paraphilia”, which is not inherently pathological, and “paraphiliac disorder”, which is. A paraphilia is now pathological only if it does not abide by three individualistic criteria: consent by mature adults, lack of personal distress, and avoiding harm to others. Sexual abnormality is no longer defined by any objective psychological criteria for mental health, and it is taboo to identify abnormal sexual behaviour on the basis of religious belief.

The keynote speaker of one of the plenary sessions—let’s call her Molly—an articulate and funny African-American woman, presented a talk entitled “A Journey into BDSM and Race”. Her written précis recounted a personal narrative of being a “black submissive in the kink world, ‘a minority within a minority'”. She traced her journey towards affirming a preference to be sexually aroused by enacting the role of black slave being beaten on the rear with paddles by a series of white masters—mostly men but also a few women.

The educational objective stated that the presenter would guide participants to a “greater understanding of the personal and often spiritual aspects of BDSM”. She was not merely affirming a new normal, but rather a new pathway to spirituality. Note the march of sexual progress: BDSM, which was a perversion or deviation, became normal if practised by consenting adults, and was now vaunted as a pathway to spiritual elevation. Through this cataclysmic shift in sexual morality, we have the “new, new normal”: non-pathological, loving and spiritually uplifting acts of bondage, dominance and sadomasochism.

During Molly’s journey to this new freedom of expression, she struggled with self-doubt. She wondered whether Martin Luther King would call to her from his grave, “Honey, this isn’t what I had in mind when we marched from Selma to Montgomery! ” And she expected a very different response from a lesbian feminist friend to whom she confessed, “I feel shame about having a fantasy of being abused by a British sailor. Am I OK?” Instead of the anticipated condemnation, her friend laughingly responded, “You’re not OK—but it’s fantastic!” The new ethic is: if it feels good to me, if it turns me on, it’s a positive social value.

The culmination of Molly’s provocative presentation was a video that showed her on all fours—fully clothed to avoid any prurient implications—and facing the camera in order to capture her expressions of sexual satisfaction as various white “masters” whacked her rear end. Nearly all of the 300 sexuality professionals attending this session gave Molly a standing ovation. The audience enthusiastically applauded this celebration of the ultimate human freedom to define one’s own sexual pleasure, even if it is in the form of pain and self-degradation.

How did this dramatically changed sexual landscape come about? Two 19th-century thinkers figure prominently in plunging us into the morass: Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American minister and champion of individual freedom and nonconformity, and the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche.

In his essay “Self-Reliance”, Emerson was the first notable American intellectual to elevate the individual self as the ultimate arbiter of values: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members . . . Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” (My italics.)

Despite his theological background, Emerson replaced the revealed truths of Christianity with the inner God that he believed dwells at the core of every individual and that must be affirmed personally. If every person sincerely searches within, he or she will confirm the universal truths that Judeo-Christian religion previously asked us to accept on the basis of a higher authority.

Emerson espoused the Transcendentalist belief that people and nature were inherently good, containing a piece of divinity within. Not only was external authority not needed to ensure virtue, but religious and political institutions corrupted the purity of the person. Only allowing self-reliant individuals to discover God within and live in accordance with self-affirmed truth will lead to a harmonious society.

Nietzsche elevated the individual a decisive step further by famously proclaiming: “God is dead.” For Nietzsche, values do not derive from any transcendent truth, whether from the God above or the God-infused self within. Rather, morality is defined by the emotions of those who hold institutional and political power.

Nietzsche believed that the pre-Socratic Greeks had no concept of “evil”, but only concepts of “good versus bad”. Good was defined as that which felt good to the noble, aristocratic, free Greeks who held power; bad was what was different, such as the practices of the helots, the lowest class of Greek serfs.

A shift in values occurred when the weaker, lower classes built up feelings of ressentiment towards those in power. They established a priestly power class who, driven by deep resentment of previously ruling Greek nobles, replaced the idea of bad with “evil”.

If God is dead, morals do not emanate from God, but derive from whichever ruling group establishes the values that feel good to them. The new sexual values are no longer defined by God’s laws and inculcated by the priestly class. Instead, sexual values are defined and legitimised by the new power groups—the psychiatric and sexuality societies—that define mental illness and health. These values are inculcated through our schools, universities, television shows, movies, newspapers, magazines, music industry and social media.

Emerson’s self was bound by a notion of God that dwelt within; Nietzsche’s self is unbounded, the ultimate Superman. If it feels good, doesn’t appear to harm others, and is done between consenting adults who mutually accept the terms, there is no higher authority to declare it to be bad, let alone evil. As long as the power group in a given society defines a set of behaviours as “non-pathological”, they become the new normal. But before celebrating this brave new world, consider the paradox of Molly, the keynote speaker who explored sadomasochism and race. Her freedom to find goodness in expressing the “integrity of her self” culminated in sexual arousal through a reenactment of slavery. The path blazed by Emerson and Nietzsche has brought us full circle from freedom back to slavery.

Molly argued that because there are rules allowing her to control the very thing (slavery) that she despises, the experience is empowering, freeing and sexually satisfying. Really? If she were truly free, would she choose to enjoy sexual pleasure as a black woman in this way? Or would she have continued to explore the self-confessed guilt and shame she experienced at the start of her journey, perhaps through (in this case) old-fashioned psychotherapy? BDSM used to be viewed as the “acting out” of sexual and psychological conflicts that needed to be internalised and analysed in order to resolve the underlying psychological conflict. No longer, according to our professional societies. In determining psychopathology, feelings have replaced reason, deviation has been normalised, and past perversions have become spiritual paths.

Ruling structures that place a premium on freedom without balancing it with a principle of restraint inevitably lead to tyranny and terror. Total freedom to express any desire that gratifies only the unbounded self will culminate in unhappiness, at best, and enslavement to one’s passions, at worst. It is no accident that Molly’s new, new normal expression of boundary breaking and “transgressive” freedom was not merely an act of slavery, but an act of a slave being abused. As I left the auditorium, I recalled Dostoevsky’s prognostication in The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Whither next?

The post Why Is ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ the New Normal? appeared first on Standpoint.

I suppose everyone has a story, and mine is this.

Looking back at my childhood, I now know that I had quite an unusual upbringing, though it never felt that way at the time. I was born in Bangladesh to parents of two different faiths who had both decided to keep their respective religions even after their marriage. The Bangladeshi education system doesn’t really accommodate children like me, possibly because mixed-faith marriages are so rare in the country. Religion forms part of the core curriculum and one must start studying it at primary school.

My liberal, idealist parents refused to choose a religion for their six-year-old, and instead set up a school with their friends (like-minded, but not parents of mixed-religion children), following the old style O-level curriculum under the British Council. I could now carry on going to school without having to pledge my allegiance to either one of the two religions I had inherited.

But the problem was teachers, or the lack of them, and also the lack of students. This was an experimental school, more like a tutorial really. Our parents were our teachers, and students — particularly in the higher classes — were a rare thing. My class never had more than four pupils, who started leaving one by one as the O-levels drew nearer. What parent would want their child to be a guinea pig for a school that had never put a pupil through those all-important exams? My own parents, could have been the answer, except that they redeemed themselves by actually letting me decide whether I wanted to enter the mainstream education system or continue with my O-levels, so I was being forced to do nothing against my will.

During the year running up to the exams, I was taught at home by several tutors, most of whom had little experience of the syllabus. I was incredibly lucky to have the most amazing English teacher who provided me with a solid understanding of the language (though I never really spoke English outside lessons until I came to the UK), but I had to teach myself some of the other subjects. The lack of access to a laboratory also meant that I couldn’t study sciences, but that was just the price I had to pay for my own choice.

It became quite clear after the O-levels that it would be nigh-on impossible to carry on my education this way. Also, the political situation in Bangladesh was becoming more uncertain by the day. Because of my parents’ and grandparents’ activism and anti-fundamentalist stance, our family had been under threat on and off my whole life. I’d grown up with threatening telephone calls and our home had been firebombed twice. So when I managed to get a partial scholarship to a sixth-form college in Oxford, my parents decided to pack me off to the UK for my education — an education which was also going to be my inheritance, for which my parents remortgaged our family home, and my lawyer mother, who had spent most of her life doing voluntary work until then, moved to the capital, Dhaka, to take up a full-time job.

Coming over to study in this country with very little spoken English, learning to live on my own — away from home and family at 17 — had its own challenges, but it worked for me. This, the culmination of all my and my parents’ choices, was the best thing that could have happened to me. With the best intention in the world, no one could have planned it for me.

I admit that mine is an unusual story, but my basic point still holds. Every individual is just that — individual. Other than some very basic requirements, everyone will have different needs, priorities, tastes. The state, therefore, can only provide some limited, basic services which will satisfy the needs of all its citizens. If it tries to do any more than that (for which it will inevitably need to grow in size) it will fail to satisfy or cater for a lot of its citizens. And in the process, it will encroach on its citizens’ individual choices. To run a big state, taxes need to be high — much higher than what is required to fund the basic services we really need from the state — leaving less in the pockets of individuals to spend on what is important to them, rather than what the state believes is important to them. At the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we often come across huge state expenditures which no one ever asked for or expected the state to provide. Take the art gallery in West Bromwich, The Public, which cost taxpayers £72 million but had to be closed just five years after it opened because nobody visited it, and was then turned into a sixth-form college for a further £6 million. And that, in my eyes, is where a big state begins to fail individuals. There’s a moral argument there too. We are legally obliged to pay taxes; if we don’t, we go to jail. The state therefore has a moral responsibility to make sure none of that money is wasted and every penny is spent on something for which there is a collective requirement.

It is this thinking that motivates me, gets me to work every morning. I could have made an unmitigated disaster of my life because of my choices. But that would have been my own doing; the responsibility would be mine to put my life back on track. The flipside of that argument is that if I wasn’t allowed to make my own choices and take the risks that I did take, I wouldn’t have had half the opportunities which became available to me. The world wouldn’t have noticed, but a huge part of it would have remained unexplored by me.

The post The Importance of Individual Choice appeared first on Standpoint.

Our pubs are closing at the rate of 30 a week, a secular equivalent of what has happened to the Church of England. Around 20,000 have closed in the last 20 years. Some would say this is good. We do not want to be considered a nation of drinkers. Having more or less closed down the recreation of smoking, the self-appointed people who police our health are now trying to do the same with our drinking. Once that is done, they will make what I still think of as Kentucky Fried Chicken illegal: though it has always seemed to me that anyone who eats it is providing his own instant punishment.

But we have never really been a nation of drunks. The image of the working man staggering out of the boozer on a Friday night, his wage packet having just augmented the brewer’s profits, may have been true for a time after the last war, during that first age of general affluence, in some industrial towns and cities, but it was far from universal. The “lager louts” of the 1980s were also the unfortunate result of the income of many young professional men suddenly exceeding their capacity to hold the drink that they could buy with it.

The pictures that decorate our newspapers now of mainly young women in states of alarming undress lying in gutters are usually no fault of a public house. They have staggered out of one of the “clubs” that now proliferate in urban Britain, and whose function is far from that of the community-based, socialising atmosphere of the traditional pub. Worse still, they have drunk themselves to stupefaction before going out, on cheap drink from supermarkets that is far less expensive than that sold in the hideous bars they then head for.

The availability of cheap drink, bought and consumed in this way, is one of the many reasons why the traditional pub has declined. When they close in the country they are mostly turned into private houses; when they close in towns they often become rather gruesome clubs, where, ironically, the drink is far more expensive than any pub would charge. When they close in the country the heart, to use an already overworked cliché, can be torn out of the local community. When they close in a town they contribute to the worst sort of cultural change, which is to impede the basic function of human beings enjoying their recreation together. The steady destruction of this national institution may well be merely a function of the free market, and I would not for a moment suggest that any form of subsidy should keep them open. But I think the time has now arrived when we should stop being complacent about it.

For reasons I still struggle to understand, our Conservative-dominated government tried in November to preserve the “tie”, the system by which pubs owned by breweries were forced to buy their drinks from that brewery. This was, the brewers say, enabling them to make the sort of profits that keep pubs open. The evidence of the 30 closures a week suggests that was not the case, and that something radical had to be done in order to stop the British boozer going out of business altogether. A Commons rebellion defeated this vested interest, and now pub landlords can buy their drink from wherever they want. This should drive down the price and perhaps attract more people into pubs, rather than sit alone at home drinking supermarket beer, because the prices ought to go down. The brewers, starved of their unreasonable, restrictive-practice based profits, may well close some pubs. Equally, they may well find that the houses they own generate larger turnovers because of this deregulation. Or they can sell their pubs off to people who might, as the economy recovers, find themselves able to make a success of a business that, for centuries, was inevitably successful.

Pubs have gone out of their way to attract a wider range of customers. Most have parts where children can go with their parents; the best ones still have bars set aside where they can’t. Food is now the sine qua non of the thriving business, and much of it is rather good, even in those places not known by the pretentious and rather unpleasant phrase “gastro pub”. I know various unpretentious places that buy their meat from a proper butcher rather than a low-grade cash and carry, and have fish brought in from the coast, and who have local bakers provide them with high-quality bread. Local pubs become showcases for local produce. Freed of the control of big brewers who drove down quality while driving up the prices, they buy in their beer from local micro-breweries, and offer their customers victuals of a quality probably never seen before in such places. So it is ironic, at a time when some pubs are probably far better than they have ever been, that so many of them are closing down.

In the part of East Anglia where I have lived all my life I drive around and see pubs I stopped at 20 or 30 years ago now turned into houses, or, if the village is lucky, an Indian restaurant. Going to a restaurant is, though, an event. Going to a pub is an everyday part of life. It used to be a place where fathers took their sons to help civilise them and introduce them to adult society. I have spent some of the happiest hours of my life in such places. I only hope my children have the chance to do the same.

The post No More Room for an Inn? appeared first on Standpoint.

The 20th century witnessed an historic, often bitter, contest between individualist and collectivist traditions in the pursuit of social progress. By the 1950s, it resulted in the state reigning supreme in health and welfare provision, with charities reduced to the periphery. Things have moved in recent decades, with something of a charitable revival. By this century, Britain had reached a curious stage in the evolution of social policy, in which the state wanted the voluntary societies to do more and the voluntary societies wanted the state to do more. Now, the exhausted parties seem to be heading for the ropes, in what we have come to call, sometimes admiringly, sometimes not, partnership.

In the ambiguous welfare world of today, it has become necessary to use the word independent before the name of a non-governmental charity, for it is no longer obvious that a charitable institution is not a government agency. Charity law, after all, does not prohibit government authorities from setting up charities. Britain remains a nation of joiners and volunteers, who continually revive our local communities from below. But at the higher echelons of social provision, which attracts the bulk of media attention, there is some confusion over what constitutes a charity. In an era of partnerships and public service contracts, the state and many voluntary bodies have become so intertwined that it is rather fanciful to think of them as representing two distinct sectors. Greyness pervades the discussion.

I would like to begin with some remarks on the history of charity, which should help us to put our current position in context. The boundaries between state assistance and charitable assistance were much clearer in the past. In the 19th century, a general guideline was that charity dealt with deserving cases and the state with the undeserving. This division of responsibilities often broke down in practice but at least it gave some clarity to the issue. There was a measure of state funding of individual institutions in the 19th century. But in general, the attitude of Victorian charitable campaigners to the state was rather like the revulsion felt by the curly-haired boy in Nicholas Nickleby, as his mouth opened before Mrs Squeers’s brimstone and treacle spoon.

The Victorians held government in esteem, but expected little from it on social issues. They widely assumed that in serving good causes voluntary associations served the wider cause of religious and civil liberty. Charities gave a voice and influence to those who were excluded, or felt excluded from the political nation: minorities, dissenters, women and the working classes­ — perhaps above all to the working classes, whose charitable energies and effective organisation still await recognition. To most charitable campaigners, the state was an artificial contrivance, useful in punishing sinners but incapable of redemptive action. They were apt to think that government institutions were heartless and bureaucratic. Prisons and workhouses, for example, had an unhappy reputation for insensitivity among charitable activists, particularly the women, who were becoming more and more influential in the 19th century. 

The Victorian years saw the feminisation of philanthropy, in respect to both volunteering and subscribers. At the beginning of the 19th century, women comprised about 10 per cent of charitable subscribers; by the end of the century the figure was over 60 per cent. Removed from political influence and professional employment, large numbers of women turned naturally to charity as a form of self-expression, which led to a general softening of Victorian society. But their charitable activities were often hedged in by restrictions. Elizabeth Fry’s experience in prison reform is but one example of “masculine officialism”. In 1869, the prominent philanthropist Josephine Butler argued that large legislative welfare systems were “masculine” in character, while the parochial system of charitable ministration, with its corollary of recreating domestic life in institutions, was essentially “feminine”. I will return to this theme.

Victorian philanthropists could boast of remarkable achievements. In 1885, the charitable receipts for London alone exceeded the budgets of several European states. But in the late 19th century, attitudes to poverty began to change, partly driven by the rise of social surveys. In an industrial economy under strain, people began to take the view that poverty was not simply a product of individual breakdown, as charity’s advocates had long assumed, but of faults in the economy and the structure of society. Those who took the view that the state should intervene more decisively believed that their more “scientific” appreciation of the causes of poverty would lead to its elimination.

The story in the 20th century is a familiar one. Successive administrations were increasingly drawn into the social arena, at first piecemeal with the Liberal social reforms early in the century, and then, propelled by the Depression and the command economy of the Second World War, into more wholesale welfare changes. In time, a less personal approach to welfare, the belief in the efficacy of legislation and state intervention, became as compelling to its advocates as Christian service had been to the Victorians.

The relationship between government and the people changed so dramatically in the post-war years that late-Victorian Britain was widely seen as an ancien régime. The creation of the welfare state signalled that there was a decisive winner in the debate over social policy. The extraordinary circumstances of “total war” had necessitated planning of a universal nature and on a scale never seen before. The planning imperative meant that government paid scant heed to the democratic impulses and good offices of charitable associations with their ethic of personal service and selective provision. After all the strains and suffering of the 1930s and 1940s, fairness was a powerful argument on the side of widening government provision in the health and social services.

In what may be seen as the welfare equivalent of urban renewal, post-war reconstruction ravaged much of the historic fabric of the charitable social services. Something fundamental happened to British culture, once so Christian and voluntary. The traditional liberal ideal of balancing rights and duties had been supplanted, as the social critic David Selbourne observed, “by a politics of dutiless right”. “The impression was given,” as the former Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Security Richard Crossman conceded, “that socialism was an affair for the Cabinet, acting through the existing Civil Service.”

It was perhaps not surprising that politicians did not encourage popular participation in their reforms. Social laws offered a blueprint for the reconstruction of society that did not require the participation of volunteers or summonses to self-help. If the interests of the state and society were identical, intermediary institutions were superfluous. Ironically, the inheritance that politicians and civil servant mandarins welcomed — and built upon — was a systematic paternalism that far exceeded that of the voluntarists they often disavowed.

As the burden of care shifted radically to government, charitable service became characterised as an “amenity”. There were occasional puffs offered to philanthropy by political leaders, but Crossman observed that to many on the Left philanthropy was “an odious expression of social oligarchy and churchy bourgeois attitudes” and “do-gooding a word as dirty as philanthropy”. Barbara Castle, as Labour Minister of Health, believed that a proper social democracy should show “a toughness about the battle for equality rather than do-goodery”. The use of “do-gooder” as a term of abuse encapsulated the transformation of values that had taken place.

In the post-war decades, British citizens showed little uneasiness with the greater ministerial control over their lives, for they widely identified with the achievements of the welfare state. It was not a strong current in political discussion to argue that effective social reform might come from below, from local institutions that derived their energy and legitimacy from openness to the immediate needs of individuals and communities. Across the political spectrum, politicians sought to replace the sense of community, which people had built up in the past out of family life and self-governing local institutions, with a sense of national community, built out of central bureaucratic structures and party politics. In passing social legislation, Parliament acted in the name of equality and social justice. The beauty of such abstractions perhaps blinded the public to the dangers of overburdening the state.

The strategic planning in welfare provision that characterised the post-war decades ended in doubts, reassessment, and recrimination. After the oil crisis in the mid-1970s, the spending limits of the state social services propelled a revival of interest in charitable provision. The New Right, with its reversion to the language of the minimal state, echoed sentiments that had been little commended since the heyday of Victorian liberalism. But such sentiments were being voiced in a world that had lost its Christian underpinnings and in which more and more women went out to work, leaving them less time for volunteering. Mrs Thatcher, an admirer of Victorian values, often spoke in glowing terms of voluntarism, but her Victorian values were highly selective. She had a need for political control that expressed itself in greater centralisation, not less, and carried forward the very collectivist agenda she disavowed.

Mrs Thatcher failed to recall that the Victorians saw little virtue in blurring the boundaries between the state and voluntary institutions. On this issue, one of the measures of her administration was particularly significant, though now little remembered. Section 5 of the Health Services Act of 1980 permitted hospitals to organise their own appeals. Giving what amounted to charitable status to statutory bodies stunned the charitable establishment. Those myriad societies which had struggled to find a place alongside the NHS as money-raisers for hospitals were now in direct competition with the largest, most heavily financed enterprise in the whole field of social welfare, whose fund-raising drives were to be financed by the Treasury. The then Chairman of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, Sara Morrison, declared that the Health Services Act represented “the most damaging blow suffered by the voluntary sector for many years”.

The decline of world socialism after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 had more positive repercussions for voluntary traditions than Mrs Thatcher and the New Right. It was a powerful reminder of the political benefits of voluntary activity. The decline of British socialism challenged the Whiggish assumption that social provision was a linear progression towards a model welfare state. The challenges to collectivism effectively changed the language of politics, reshaping the context in which charity was understood. In the 1990s, charity came to be elided with notions of civil society or community service. If social engineering was the fashion in post-war Britain, welfare pluralism, with its emphasis on democratic local initiative, was increasingly the language. The Labour Party under Tony Blair, reeling from Thatcherism at home and the collapse of socialism abroad, felt obliged to cast aside the dogmas of the past and embrace charitable institutions. Politicians of all hues now conceded that the state had failed to elevate the principle of social duty, and adopted the mantra of balancing rights with personal responsibility. This did not, however, diminish their desire to co-opt and control voluntary societies.

For all the talk about welfare pluralism and a fresh role for voluntary institutions in the 1990s, there was an assumption that the state was still in charge, but it should offer charities a more prominent role in social provision. Definitions matter, and now the government rather than the charities provided them. For centuries, the standard definition of charity was “Christian love”, or “love of one’s fellow man”, or simply “kindness”. But as Britain moved from being a voluntary society to a collectivist one, from a Christian society to a secular one, such meanings looked decidedly old-fashioned. Consequently, the definition of charity has come up for bureaucratic review, to make it more compatible with the national, secular and corporate priorities of government.

An important update on offer came with the Charities Act of 2006, which defined charity as “public benefit”. The usage reflects a government agenda which seeks to offer a concordat with its junior partners in the voluntary sector. But as charity comes under ministerial control, it is effectively depersonalised. One of the complaints I sometimes hear from charitable campaigners today, particularly women, is that government funding and the corporate nature of many institutions are driving out traditions of personal ministration. In the press, the criticism is typically that today’s voluntary workers lack the human touch and spend less and less time on their visits to beneficiaries. One is reminded of Josephine Butler’s remark that legislative programmes are masculine and charity feminine. What we are witnessing today, as charity becomes more corporate and bureaucratic, is its masculinisation.

The Charities Act 2006 reads as though written by a robot. It lacks any sense of the past, and you will look in vain for the words kindness, love, or, for that matter, Christianity. It is a measure of religious decline in Britain that the definition of “religion” in the Act includes belief in more than one God and belief in no god at all. Now that, one might say, is being ecumenical with the truth. The resort to phrases like “public benefit” is an example of the administrative mind forging a conceptual language to justify the state’s ascendancy in welfare provision. This conforms to a presumption that citizens become moral agents through compulsory taxation to pay for universal benefits. But this notion that we become compassionate through compulsion and proxy is a flattering self-deception, especially as universal benefits often accrue to those who do not need them. Perhaps we can look forward to the day when the Inland Revenue sets up its own charitable trust, to receive donations from citizens who wish to top up their taxes with gifts to the Treasury.

Voluntary action extends well beyond what the political language can provide. Officialdom is impatient with anything casual or humble, what Wordsworth called “that best portion of a good man’s life — his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love”. Of course, charities need to be businesslike and efficient in order to spend their donors’ money wisely, but they should not be judged by performance indicators alone. Victorian legislators had wisely avoided defining charity too narrowly, for they assumed that it was preferable for charities to define the citizenry.  But in highly centralized democracies like Britain, politicians, whatever their party allegiance, seem unable to resist co-opting rival centres of authority.

Just as the bureaucratic mind cannot cope with the creative chaos of competing organisations pulling in different directions, post-war British politicians have not been able to imagine any form of democracy operating outside the parameters of ministerial control. The Victorian belief that democracy is inherent in independent voluntary institutions is largely beyond their understanding. In 2001, Gordon Brown remarked: “Politicians once thought the man in Whitehall knew best. Now we understand that the mother from the playgroup might know better.” Rest assured, he didn’t mean it. This is the same Gordon Brown, who, in an article in The Times in 1988, decried charity as “a sad and seedy competition for public pity”. As Chancellor and later Prime Minister, he assumed that one way to invigorate his political agenda was by further co-opting and financing charities. Government funding escalated.

As the state insinuated itself in the folds of charity, the government, not the voluntary citizen, has become the presiding judge of what constitutes charity or public benefit. While definitions continue to revolve around the issue of independence, governments of all stripes tend to see charitable institutions, at least in the health and social services, as agencies under their supervision. Traditionally, charities saw themselves as having their own objectives. Government stresses professional competence and efficiency. Traditionally, charities stressed personal service and moral purpose. Government expects welfare to be systematic and comprehensive. Traditionally, charities valued selectivity and improvisation.

Government provision depends on compulsory taxation; it is not religious or altruistic but quantitative and materialist in conception. It is largely about furthering equality. Charitable provision, on the other hand, cannot be extorted by force. Its proponents have flourished in a liberal polity, often underpinned by religious belief that is primarily individualistic, even though it may also be egalitarian. To a Treasury official, representing the collective, a hospital waiting list is an abstraction. To a charitable campaigner, representing the individual, it is an offence. Distinctions between charity and government action are thus deeply rooted, not least in thinking about their respective roles and boundaries. The state will almost certainly retain its pre-eminence in the health and social services in Britain, but the perennial question remains: where should the balance lie between the “right” to welfare and the “virtue” of charity?

In recent decades, the balance has been further complicated by the so-called “contract culture”. In 1990, the Home Office, in the interests of efficiency, directed that in dealing with voluntary organizations government departments should establish clear policy objectives, and grants that did not relate to such objectives should be phased out. With the implementation of that policy the government sought to enlist the voluntary sector for its own purposes. As charities are brought into the orbit of government they are encouraged to take on board a view of welfare that is favoured by the state.

The use of charities to do the government’s bidding has been criticised as a devolved form of government administration that turns the intermediary institutions of civil society into agencies of the state through contracts and financial control. This does not alarm defenders of government partnerships, who argue that cooperation with the state arose from the historic failings of charitable societies. They are inclined to see critics of the contract culture as reactionaries, living in a Victorian dreamland. Clearly, the world has moved on over the last century, but we are in no position to look down on the Victorians. Look around, we owe much of our cultural, medical, and religious infrastructure to their benevolence. The original Church House was built to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Since the 1980s, a few social critics and a smattering of politicians have argued that government funding and the voluntary ethos are incompatible. In the eyes of such commentators, we are witnessing a further stage in the perfection of the state monolith under the guise of partnership, a process that one charitable director calls a “cultural takeover by stealth”. The appetite for state contracts and grants has grown to the point where the question is now being asked how institutions paid for out of compulsory taxation, which would not exist without state subsidies, can be called voluntary. As most of us will agree, charitable independence is a slippery concept, which has received several tortuous analyses in recent years. The next time it is under examination I would suggest the employment of a language philosopher rather than a team of lawyers.

In contemporary Britain, charitable officials often come from a background in government service and wish to distance themselves from the hierarchies and pieties of the charitable past. For them, partnerships are what enlivens the voluntary sector and makes their labours possible. The agreement titled “Getting it right together”, which was signed in 1998, provided a framework for cooperation between central government and voluntary organisations. It recognised the diversity of volunteering and sought greater recognition for volunteers. But the agreement skirted the issue of independence, preferring to emphasise that volunteering was open to everyone. 

The government’s recognition and promotion of volunteering has much to recommend it. And while few doubt that the work done by state charities is valuable, the nagging issue of their independence will not go away. There is bound to be a cost to autonomy, personal ministration and civic democracy when charities become enmeshed in government regulation and what overseers call “service delivery”. Complex contracting arrangements, have created, as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) observes, bureaucratic “pitfalls”. Who is the volunteer working for in this compact? Those charities that work closely with the local or central government are more likely to shape their priorities to suit available grants, to create their own bureaucracies, to distance charitable campaigners from beneficiaries, and to play down religion. As they become larger, they take on the character of government departments.

Furthermore, as charitable agencies become increasingly accountable to government, they are prone to forfeit their role as critics of government policy. The growth of partnerships has dulled the candour of charitable officials. Some years ago, the Association of Charitable Foundations observed that “in a world where funding comes from service contracts, there is a danger that passion is neutralised, in the interest of financial survival. People do what they are paid to do rather than what they care deeply about doing.” A hospital voluntarist put it more succinctly years ago: “No one is rude to his rich uncle.”

One of the issues before us is whether charitable campaigners can find a role that is consistent with their traditions of institutional autonomy and personal service? In the late 1970s, about 10 per cent of overall charitable revenue came from government sources. According to a study of the British voluntary sector by Jeremy Kendall, the figure stood at 45 per cent by the beginning of this century, while donations from individuals had declined. In 2010, figures compiled by the NCVO put the overall proportion of state funding at 38 per cent. Presumably this was for a somewhat narrower definition of the voluntary sector than Kendall’s. Whatever the percentage, we are dealing with large sums of money, just under £14 billion transferred from the taxpayer in the year 2009/2010.

At present, about 41,000 charities, about a quarter of all registered charities, have a direct financial relationship with the state. Of these, it has been estimated that 27,000 receive more than 75 per cent of their income from government sources. Extracting information on the percentage of government income of individual societies can be difficult. In many annual reports there is a lack of transparency on this issue. Charities are under no legal duty to advise in their accounts how much, if any, of their income in the year is derived from government sources. Still, from available financial records, it is clear that even once fiercely independent institutions receive substantial amounts of their income from government.

For decades, charities have been, as I put it years ago, “swimming into the mouth of Leviathan”. Their increased dependence on the state has blurred the boundaries of charitable and government provision, which is further complicated by the many governmental authorities that have set up charities. The balance of power in the voluntary sector has tipped in favour of large, publicly-funded institutions. The 130,000 or so charities that do not receive state support, typically small institutions, rarely have a voice in the media and are largely outside the debate, though they will be influenced by its results. What is the government planning to do for them, apart from offering them contracts and grants?

As charities are brought into the orbit of government, they take on a view of welfare inherited from the state, whose contracts often set their agenda. Once on the payroll of the taxpayer, they have less incentive to raise funds privately. Indeed, many charitable officials think of themselves not as charitable campaigners but as employees of government. Several have admitted as much in my company. The leader of one prominent society told me privately that he thought charity “demeaning”. Yet his institution enjoys the tax benefits that charitable status provides.

The issue of the generous salaries given to senior administrators in many publicly-funded agencies has aroused a good deal of comment in the press of late. The criticism flows from a misunderstanding. It arises from assuming that CEOs of the publicly-funded institutions are in fact working for voluntary institutions, which is questionable. Their generous pay is perfectly understandable when seen in the context of the pay scales of government bodies, such as NHS Trusts. The directors of independent charities are relatively poorly paid because they often have to raise their own salaries through fund-raising measures.

In the Thatcher years, talented Labour Party supporters, isolated politically, moved into charitable societies. With egalitarian ideals and a background in political lobbying and government service, they do not want to return to a time when voluntary institutions were responsible for essential services. Nor, unlike charitable campaigners of old, do they have the desire to make themselves unnecessary. Talk about the Big Society or rolling back the state makes them nervous. They are content to act as welfare providers dependent on state grants and service contracts, which pays their salaries and keeps them in touch with national policy.

Still, we may be reaching a tipping point, when more and more individuals will assume that charities are essentially governmentfunded and consequently end their contributions. The universities, which are seen to be state institutions, have had this problem for decades. A former CEO of the Countryside Alliance, which raises most of its income from subscriptions, accuses the government of obfuscation: “The laziness of the Treasury in not establishing a proper framework for quasi-government bodies as separate from charities is an insult to the millions of people in this country who give of their time, expertise and money to truly independent voluntary organisations.” It is this lack of clarity that has led some critics to call for a new category of non-profit organisation, those that receive substantial funds from statutory sources.

As I suggested  earlier, neither charity nor the government has lived up to public expectations of social provision. The charge once levelled at Victorian charity, that it could not cope with the volume of social need, is now levelled at the government. But whatever changes are being considered that affect the relationship between the state and charity, it is worth putting them in the context of first principles. Sadly, we have become accustomed to politically expedient quick fixes — the lottery is a prime example — which have left us in our present state of confusion. I am reminded of what Walter Bagehot, the great Victorian Liberal, said about the characteristic defects of the English: “Their want of intellectual and guiding principle, their even more complete want of the culture which would provide that principle, their absorption in the present difficulty, and their hand-to-mouth readiness to seek reform without thinking of the consequences.”

Since much of the former hostility between Left and Right over social provision has been defused in recent decades, partnerships between the state and charitable bodies seem likely to grow. But if the contract culture continues to expand it may have unhappy consequences, not least for many of the independent institutions that struggle to compete for individual donations. Perhaps some research on the issue of unfair competition is in order. But there are still bigger issues at stake. Voluntary action provides a democratic safeguard, against what Stanley Baldwin called “the standardising pressure of the state’s mechanism”. Tension between the state and independent charitable institutions, with their different agendas and contrasting democratic forms, is both desirable and invigorating. A social philosophy that undermines the freedom of association and the duties of citizenship is one in which democracy atrophies.

The poor will always have us with them. Consequently, charity is as important to the givers as to the receivers. Historically, it was not simply about the delivery of services to the needy, but also about civic participation, self-help and moral training. Recent government statements suggest they admire such principles. But if our politicians really believed in them they would clarify the boundaries between the state and charity, would lessen the unnecessary regulations on those institutions that do not receive state assistance, and would increase the tax incentives to giving. There has been little sign of support for such changes from our elected officials, for it would reduce government revenue and control.

I will end with Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th-century philosopher of associational democracy, who observed that in a culture in which free associations prospered individuals had to prove themselves resolute and responsible in their dealings with others. This was in sharp contrast to an authoritarian culture, however benign, which encouraged docility and indecisiveness in its citizens. And he concluded: “Among democratic nations it is only by association that the resistance of the people to the government can ever display itself: hence the latter always looks with ill favour on those associations which are not in its own power; and it is well worthy of remark that among democratic nations the people themselves often entertain against these very associations a secret feeling of fear and jealousy, which prevents the citizens from defending the institutions of which they stand so much in need.”

The post The State of Charity appeared first on Standpoint.

Curiously, I was on my way to my first ever Speed Awareness session. I wondered why. I had been digitally captured in Denham — twinned with Shark Bay, Australia — doing 33 mph in a 30 mph zone, which had been a 40 mph zone in the previous three years I’d been driving there, including last week. Still, I had broken the law of the land and must be re-educated or face points on my nice clean licence and perpetual fear of my accelerator foot.

My instructions were to turn up at 10 am to a numbered building on the Uxbridge Road. The Uxbridge Road was not familiar to me but it is now. I drove up it and down it, executing illegal turns right, left and centre, but by 10.30 it was clear that even if I found the building I’d be so late that I’d be made to attend a Punctuality Awareness session in an industrial park in Cold Christmas Lane. Eventually I went home, telephoned, agreed to pay £93 for my tardiness and arranged another date. This time I rehearsed the journey in advance and arrived in good time to park and hear the end of Desert Island Discs.

There was a waiting room inside for all the miscreants and it resembled a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, I imagine. No one spoke or exchanged glances, and the reading material was rank. It was irresistible.

“Good morning fellow criminals!” I chirped as I came round the door.

One or two of them smiled shyly and a couple even responded. Within minutes we were exchanging experiences, comparing scenes of crimes and giggling behind our hands like Japanese tourists. I was all set to resume my traditional role as class clown.

But the instructor was a gem — funny, forthright, interesting and informative. The hours flew past as I took notes, exclaimed at revelations I should have known and asked  pertinent questions. Like the best teachers, he presented his case with clarity and levity, including acronyms such as COAST — Concentration, Observation, Anticipation, Space, Time — and wise homilies: “Only a fool breaks the two-second rule; only a prat gets closer than that.”

And it turns out we were there for a good reason. If you hit a pedestrian at 30 mph they are likely to survive. If you hit them at 35, chances are they will die. It’s a sobering thought. I came out chastened and resolved. I would take an advanced driving test. After all, when I took my first, 37 years ago, I was heavily pregnant and not required to do the emergency stop. Since then I had fallen into bad habits which had be reined in immediately.

I thanked the instructor with genuine warmth and bid my fellow classmates farewell, vowing never to see them again in similar circumstances. We all agreed it had been a superb wake-up call. “Take care now!” we chortled, waving out of the windows of our vehicles in the car park queue, “Remember to COAST!”

I will never understand what happened next, even if I live to donate my head to cryogenics. I got into my car, started the engine, checked my back window, mirrors and blind spot, released the handbrake and backed slowly and magnificently onto a traffic island.

Traffic Island Risks. I thought my fellow Speed Awarees were going to expire. A couple were actually hanging out of their windows gasping for air. An Indian lady had covered her face with part of her sari, another woman was frozen in a pop-eyed, silent scream. They all thought I’d done it to make a point or get a laugh. I hadn’t. I was genuinely trying to drive by the book. Sadly not the Highway Code, more like Just William.

I am still talking about that Advanced test. It is up there with learning Ivrit and the trumpet. It took my late mother, then in her fifties, 69 driving lessons before she passed her test. After about the 60th, my brother agreed to sit beside her while she practised. She kept her foot firmly down on clutch and accelerator all the way to the end of the road, when my brother suggested she might perhaps like to change gear. She gave him her Judy Holliday look.

“You what?” she breathed in amazement. “On my own?”

Geoffrey swallowed hard and asked her what she meant.

“Well!” she said defensively, “Mr Middleyard always holds my hand.”

The post The Road to Repentance appeared first on Standpoint.

One of Marquand’s guiding lights is the idea of the decent society, developed by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. The decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate its members by treating them as less than fully human. The paradigm cases of humiliating institutions are the familiar discriminatory travesties: American slavery; the Nazi Nuremberg laws; and apartheid. Because these institutions were so humiliating, the societies that featured them must be considered indecent. 

There are two philosophically viable ways of using the concept of the decent society, and Marquand attempts both of them. Margalit, the author of the concept, sees it primarily as an ideal, “a utopia through which to criticise reality”. The decent society exceeds what any actual society has achieved and thus serves as a standard of criticism for current conditions. When Marquand uses the concept in this sense, he is on firm ground. He is right to worry about the humiliating effects of poverty and unemployment on our society, and his commitment to bringing these to his public’s attention is admirable.

The second use of the concept is to provide an all-things-considered judgment on a given society. Here, the standard for comparison is other existing and historical societies rather than an abstract ethical ideal, and Margalit makes these kinds of judgments cautiously.  Some societies — apartheid South Africa, Tsarist Russia — are clearly humiliating and therefore indecent. Usually, societies are decent in some respects but indecent in others and therefore may be characterised as “almost decent” or “relatively decent”.

Marquand’s attempt to provide an all-things-considered judgment of Britain shows a stunning lack of perspective. In the coda to Mammon, he claims that the past 30 years of capitalism have made Britain “blatantly indecent”. It is one thing to argue that recent economic difficulties have been a source of humiliation for the worse-off in society. It is quite another to place the humiliations offered by the British economy as of the same order as those meted out by racist, sexist and otherwise indecent regimes past and present. Even if we confine our frame of reference to the humiliation caused by the economic crisis in Western European countries, Britain still comes off fairly well. At least, that’s what waves of economic migrants fleeing the economic chaos of the continent seem to indicate. Marquand’s big heart is in the right place. Yet he misuses a philosophical idiom that is more appropriately applied to National Socialism than to British austerity. This weakens the force of his best arguments, and does no service to the ideal of reasoned public debate that he hopes can yet save Britain. 

The post Gross Indecency appeared first on Standpoint.

My wife was brought up in a house where the number of people exceeded the number of bedrooms by five. There was no car and no telephone and no prospect of a holiday. She worked hard at school and went on to university, as did four of her brothers. She is proud of her background, of its solidarity and lack of luxury, though not boastfully so. When she was in her early forties she became the head of an old Catholic school in the Northamptonshire countryside; the job interview took place in a house which had been used on television for a Jane Austen adaptation. It was her first acquaintance with the three gentry families which dominated the school governors and it was the start of a fruitful relationship which lasted eleven years. The gentry were entirely loyal to their appointee. They spent no time covering their backsides or nurturing their curriculae vitae and careers and they didn’t manipulate or dissemble. They shared both my wife’s sense of duty and her sense of fun; they thought instinctively about the good of the children rather than about regulations, publicity or politics. I retain a striking image of a school trip to Italy: we had a day at the beach and my vivid memory is of an elderly squirearchical figure of military bearing marching into the sea until he was waist deep and then turning and surveying the twenty three children to make sure they were all safe. Health and safety? Just do it. There were perks, too, to our working relationship with the gentry, including charming lunches in marquees, gifts of game and even a trip to Buckingham Palace.

Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, successful farmer, gardener, author and television presenter, needs no praise from me, but he’s going to get it anyway. His book on the gentry is superb, written well and combining breadth of vision with detailed narrative. There is a general account of the rise and fall of the gentry over 600 years combined with detailed stories where there were sufficient documents to tell the tale. (Imagine the research assessment terror if an academic historian covered six centuries!) The gentry tales extend geographically to France and Belgium, the West Indies and what is now the United States. The gentry here is defined by landholding and is the class below the aristocracy and above the yeomen in the scale of its property. It owes its “peculiarly English” existence to the persistent exclusiveness of the English aristocracy which remained at a fraction of 1 per cent of the population while grade inflation took the French and Russian aristocracies into the teens and the German aristocracy up to about 7 per cent of the population (my figures rather than Nicolson’s).

Thus the gentry was for a long time in pre-industrial and early industrial England the dominant class, owning more land than the aristocracy and populating a parliamentary chamber which soon became more important than the House of Lords. The Civil War was fought between the gentry. The Pyms and the Cromwells were gentry, but so were the hard-drinking, hard-wenching Norfolk cavaliers, from a few miles to their east, whom they fought against. It is thus difficult to talk about the values of the gentry, because at different times and in different places they embraced many different values.

The way of the life of the gentry always seemed precarious to the members of the class, usually because it was. You were dependent on agricultural production and prices. There was every chance of ending up on the wrong side in civil and political conflict: this was the fate of the family in Nicolson’s first story, the Plumptons of Yorkshire, in the Wars of the Roses. Neighbouring gentry were as likely to be your bitter enemies as your allies. There is the tale of the late Tudor feud between the Thynnes and the Mervyns; four centuries on the descendants of the Thynnes, raised to the aristocracy, have their own tourist industry, television programme and much else besides at Longleat while the Mervyns have dissipated. Even when you won a kind of gentry lottery, as the Hughes of Kimmel in Wales did when they found a rich lode of metals on their land, life could be cruel. The Hughes built themselves a really state-of-the-art house and acquired a fine town house as well, but the take-up on their invitations was humiliatingly low. They were known as bores.

Gentry is partly a lament for its subject matter. Nicolson is right to point out that the demise of the aristocracy has been greatly exagerated in that in more than 70 per cent of cases of landowners with more than 10,000 acres in 1860, their descendants are still in situ — a continuity surely unique among the world’s upper classes. Of the gentry, who still then owned 40 per cent of the land, under three per cent have descendants in the old place. The aristocracy had all the strong cards when it came to survival — the scale of their land, the grandeur of their houses and the acceptability of their titles on company notepaper; in many cases they also had great works of art, which turned out to be the best possible assets, as when Lord Brooke’s Canaletto of his castle turned out to be worth more than the castle itself. I remember arriving at Blenheim with a predominantly Indian cricket team and listening to their catalogue of Bollywood films which had featured the palace and celebrities who had married there. By contrast, the squire from an ancient family with a manor house, a couple of thousand acres and six tenants did not possess the ammunition to deal with fluctuating world agricultural markets and unsympathetic tax regimes. So they have largely gone, mostly replaced by yeoman farmers.

And, of course, the gentry often demonstrated a self-destructive degree of unworldliness which contributed to their decline. Sometimes their beliefs in community, tradition and religion generated an anti-commercial and even socialist tendency. This dimension is illustrated in Gentry by the story of Sir Richard Acland who became the effective leader of the opposition during the Second World War as leader of the Common Wealth Party which won by-elections from the governing Coalition. Sir Richard (a fifteenth baronet) gave most of the vast territories of “Aclandshire”, stretching over three West Country counties, to the National Trust. But like some Labour Party Lear (he was a Labour MP after the war) he seemed to think he could renounce his property but still remain in charge of it. He fell very precisely into Voltaire’s category of lovers of humanity who detest actual human beings. His concern for the little people co-habited with a fear and loathing of those between them and himself:

Smug little men and women with comfortable little jobs or fortunate little investments which bring them in three or four hundred pounds a year deceive themselves and . . . . disqualify themselves from taking part in the councils of the nation.

Do we, indeed? Acland may have got what he deserved (he taught in a comprehensive school), but his wife and children deserved better.

For 400 years much of the land was owned in England and much of the government was conducted, by the gentry. This is no longer the case (the hunting ban is the crude symbol of that), but, of course, it would be very odd if the change had not occurred.  But having acknowledged that obvious fact, it must also be remarked that there is both a huge legacy of gentry life and a successor class which Nicolson calls the fantasy gentry. The legacy lies in the transcendent truth, elaborated by my friend Martin Wiener in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, that English people have been uniquely dissatisfied with the statuses of bourgeois and professional. Our national obsessions with property, with gardening and with animals are surely a legacy of the gentry. The fantasy gentry are those who live out their lives on the land, but funded by pensions, trusts and dividends, indulging in a little shooting, some gardening and some equine connections. Sometimes their interpretation of this role can be surprisingly traditional. While jotting notes for this article I was contacted by one of my oldest friends, a former lawyer and investment banker, a man whose thoughts about spondulicks come with many noughts on the end. Did I want lunch tomorrow? If not tomorrow, then not for a month because it would be lambing time and he would be working all the hours God sends. On this anecdote, I rest my case.

The post ONLINE ONLY: A Lost Way of Life appeared first on Standpoint.