Ideas@TheCentre
The Road to Broadcasting House
I heard an interesting interview on BBC Radio Four’s Today program the other morning. It was with The Guardian journalist Stephen Armstrong, who has retraced George Orwell’s 1937 journey to Wigan Pier and tracked down some of the sons of men Orwell interviewed for The Road to Wigan Pier. Here’s what Armstrong said:
Orwell met a lot of people on the road to Wigan Pier and he disguised a lot of names. We discovered that we know three of them quite well: a man called Gerry Kennan, who was a union activist, a man called Sid Smith, who was selling newspapers, and a guy called Jim Hammond, who was unemployed, a black-listed communist miner who really wasn’t getting any work.
So I went back to try to meet their sons. Gerry Kennan’s son, unfortunately, died at the end of last year. Sid Smith grew his shop into the largest independent retail newsagent in the north-west and his son Trevor now lives in a large house in green fields on the edge of Wigan. And Tony Hammond is now a retired High Court judge.
The BBC interviewer was astonished. These are only two cases, of course, but social mobility like this is not what The Guardian and BBC journalists expect to find when they go sniffing around northern, working-class towns like Wigan. This story just doesn’t fit with their familiar narrative of class privilege.
For years, I have been trying to convince anyone who will listen that social mobility in Britain is extensive. Like most other advanced capitalist countries, Britain is an open, meritocratic society where talent and hard work count for much more than social origins. Employers are interested not in who your father was but in what your competencies are.
But no matter how many times I set out the statistical evidence, politicians, academics and left-wing journalists refuse to believe it. Government is so convinced there is a problem that it is threatening to withdraw funding from top universities like Oxford and Cambridge unless they accept more working-class entrants on lower grades. Prime Minister David Cameron has appointed a social mobility ‘Tsar,’ Alan Milburn, who describes Britain as a ‘closed shop society.’ Milburn told the BBC last year: ‘In Britain, if you’re born poor, you die poor.’ This despite the fact that 80% of people born to parents under the poverty line in Britain avoid poverty when they reach adulthood.
We might hope that Armstrong’s stories of the retail magnate and the High Court judge might help correct some of these prevailing myths and misconceptions. But when a BBC interviewer gets together with a Guardian journalist, it doesn’t take long for them to revert to type.
Armstrong went on to tell of a 12-year-old in Wigan who thought that to become a High Court judge nowadays, ‘a magician would have to cast a magic spell.’ Armstrong concluded from this that mobility doesn’t exist anymore: ‘The opportunities that they [Orwell’s generation] had seem to have been closed off.’
He went on: 'Poverty is back to 1936 levels. I met a girl, Sarah, who is living on £2 a day.'
This does sound like appalling poverty. Except it turns out that Sarah had failed to attend an appointment at the Job Centre, so her unemployment benefit was docked. Instead of arranging a new interview, she was living in a homeless hostel and had apparently taken up with some undesirable men. Armstrong concluded from this:
'So Victorian style poverty and fates worse than death are increasing.'
'Yes,' said the BBC interviewer, now safely back in his comfort zone. And with ruffled feathers back in place, Radio Four moved on to its next story.
Listen to the interview here.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
