The Guardian view on Britain’s jobs market: Miliband’s diagnosis vindicated
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Version 0 of 1. The real case against Ed Miliband, insofar as it exists, is less about anything he actually says than the failure of people to listen when he says it. On Monday he will make a reasoned pitch to the CBI about the grave dangers of playing games with Britain’s future in Europe, but in the darker moments brought on by his pitiful personal poll ratings, the Labour leader must wonder whether such substance can ever answer criticisms that are almost exclusively about style. Taking on the baiters – who gossip about somehow persuading former home secretary Alan Johnson to quit his enjoyable new life of literary stardom to return to the political bearpit – is doubly difficult because none of them have chosen to speak up in public. Mr Miliband could start by drawing a contrast between the anonymous plotters and his own decision to take two media moguls to public task in recent years, bravery which is now being repaid with recycled photographs of awkwardly eaten butties. But a deeper problem remains – because of his background and his man-and-boy Westminster career, it is tough for Mr Miliband to look like he’s got any personal hold on the problems gripping a cash-strapped and depressed nation. Here Labour’s leader has no alternative but to return to the substance. He must concede that he has indeed lived a relatively privileged life, even if it’s privilege of a different sort to that of David Cameron or Nick Clegg. The difference with them, he could argue, lies in the fact that he is the only one of the three that has offered a consistent analysis of what has been going wrong for his less-privileged compatriots. At the start of his leadership, Mr Miliband developed two themes – the squeezed middle and what he called “the British dream”, the old and, he said, faltering assumption that your children could do better than you. At exactly the moment that Westminster bed-wetters are reaching peak panic, serious social research is emerging that bears out the prescience and urgency of both. Squeezed Britons don’t need a thinktank to tell them that their pay remains stagnant in a proclaimed recovery – every shopping trip demonstrates how wages have failed to keep pace. But in new research last week the Resolution Foundation shone valuable light on exactly why average living standards have fallen in a way not witnessed since the 19th century. While the welcome arrival of the young and the previously unemployed into jobs is one factor dragging down average pay, another influence has more disturbing implications – namely, a “downward shift” in a British occupational mix, where growing proportions seem fated to care for the elderly or service the rich. The immediate wage squeeze is bad enough, but – as further work from the foundation will demonstrate next week – what is even more frightening is the lack of meaningful prospects in these sorts of sectors. So-called promotions can often involve new stresses and less flexible hours in return for an extra 50p an hour. Not so long ago, proliferating management posts created room at the top, and more routine jobs seemed set to wither away. But now it is bottom-end jobs that are booming, and separate new research from Erzsébet Bukodi and colleagues points to dark implications for Britain’s social mobility problem. Instead of looking at wage rates alone, the scholars consider class more broadly, that distinction between security, status and prospects on the one hand, and – on the other – low-grade work with, in Jarvis Cocker’s phrase, “no meaning or control”. Contra the ubiquitous political claim, the problem is not that there is less mobility overall, but rather that the mobility is increasingly of the wrong sort. Compared with the 1960s or 70s, or even the 80s, far fewer young adults are climbing the social ladder, while more are sliding down the snakes. Having spotted this problem early, Mr Miliband must now seek to shift a personality-dominated discourse back to some hard economic questions – questions about hiring practices that allow labour to be turned on and off like a tap, about training and, most importantly, about under-investment. Answers could enable more feet to get on to that social ladder, and also persuade a sceptical country that he deserves his chance at the top of the greasy pole. |