Britain will no longer “tolerate the gap between the rich and the poor”, says London’s Mayor Boris Johnson. I find it harder to tolerate Mayor Johnson.
Being a politician, he personifies the failings of the breed. One of them is seeing any problem as merely an opportunity for scoring cheap points off the opposition. In this case, Boris’s sole message is that the Conservative Party, especially if led by him, will reduce the offensive gap.
He suggests that increasing social mobility through better education will do the trick and he may well be right. Bad education is definitely a factor of poor upward mobility, though it’s not the only reason.
But why is our education so bad? And what does Boris propose to make it good enough to act as a social hoist? That’s where the problem with modern politicians lies: none of them has either the brains to identify the real problem or the courage to do something about it.
The problem in question can be summed up in one word: socialism. The more socialism, the wider the wealth gap – to this rule there are no known exceptions.
In the USA, where the millstone of socialism is somewhat lighter than in Britain, MIT and the Federal Reserve did research on a broad sample, producing interesting results.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005, when egalitarianism proudly reigned supreme, this ratio stood at 158:1.
This is less spectacular than the 700:1 Boris quotes for one FTSE 100 company, but good enough to make the same point: unfettered competitive activity creates numerous opportunities for economic advancement. It also produces competition for qualified labour, which leads to higher pay at the lower levels.
However, socialism, even in the relatively small doses administered in Western countries, is a poison reducing capitalism to corporatism.
Corporate executives running this quasi-socialist system come not from the entrepreneurial classes but from exactly the same gene pool as politicians. Hence they display the same characteristics: dishonesty, selfishness, powerlust, greed – qualities identical to those of which they accuse capitalists. Hence also the ease with which they float from corporate to government careers, and vice versa.
Fair enough, national education is also poisoned by socialism, to death. The system of selective grammar schools, destroyed in 1965, ensured that about 25 per cent of the people were well-educated, with the rest functionally competent enough to fend for themselves.
Conversely, the egalitarian system introduced after Anthony Crosland, Labour Education Secretary, vowed to destroy “every f***ing grammar school”, has predictably produced two generations of illiterates unable to support themselves.
Not to worry: the socialist welfare state steps in to take care of the barbarised and brutalised populace, with a two-fold destructive effect.
First, the welfare state is funded by strangulating the productive economy with inordinate taxation, running deficit budgets and increasing the national debt. This slows the economy down, reducing opportunities for advancement.
But much worse is the adverse moral effect of the welfare state on both its operators and its recipients. Both are corrupted equally, if in different ways. Our rulers don’t mind: the welfare state combined with comprehensive ‘education’ serves their needs perfectly.
By making many unable to pay their own way, the state creates a culture of dependency, increasing its own power. And keeping the population ignorant makes it more likely to vote for nonentities, the dominant type among today’s power seekers.
Thus the gap that vexes Boris so isn’t a mechanical problem but a systemic one. It can only be solved not by tweaking the mechanism here and there, but by redesigning the system. Once this is properly understood, specific steps will suggest themselves.
The welfare state must be eliminated, with the Exchequer taking care only of those too old or infirm to look after themselves.
The system of multi-tier education must be reintroduced. As Boris himself said a few years ago, before he realised he could become prime minister if he played his cards right, “some people are too stupid to get ahead”. Possibly, but only total imbeciles can’t acquire basic literacy and practical skills.
Children with brains and get-up-and-go, about a quarter of all, won’t have to depend on having parents rich enough to put them through private schooling – and neither will they be held back by standards pitched at the least capable.
The latter group won’t be cast in the role of perennial underachievers. They’ll learn less in the way of the humanities and more in the way of practical skills – just as they did in the secondary moderns of yesteryear.
That way they’ll be able to survive handsomely – and, as sociologists know, survival is a much stronger inducement to hard work than the desire to increase one’s comfort.
To sum up, only by abandoning socialism can we close the wealth gap. So is this what Boris is proposing?
Not at all. He isn’t proposing anything radical, or indeed anything at all. He just mouths generalities and party slogans, proving he’s perfect prime-ministerial material.