Every generation up to now has been able to expect to have a better life than the previous one - but that has all changed
The big picture: in his hour-long Budget speech, Chancellor George Osborne apparently uttered the word aspiration, in various forms (including the impossibly annoying “aspiration nation”), 16 times. That’s roughly every four minutes Photo: ALAMY
There was a time when the word “aspiration” was not an annoying tic – when it actually, believe it or not, had the power to transform British politics. It is hard to recall now how startlingly contentious a notion it was when it emerged on the scene in the Eighties as emblematic of the Thatcher revolution. The declaration that anyone, wherever he started in life, should be free to pursue whatever goal his ambition and inclination might achieve – that he should be positively encouraged to leave the limited expectations of his background behind – had not been the conventional wisdom at all.
There were two quite explicit forms of paternalism to be contended with back then: the traditional aristocratic Tory version, which despised “ambition” as a form of vulgar, petit-bourgeois gaucherie, and the Labour one, which preached passivity to its own people in the name of class loyalty.
Mrs Thatcher, whose own life embodied the concept of aspiration, used it, and the personal strength it had given her, to defeat the old establishment within her party. But of greater historical significance was the collateral damage that she did to the Labour Party, which had to reinvent itself in order to accommodate the radical idea that people might wish to reinvent themselves.
The primary mission of New Labour, as Tony Blair always said, was to acknowledge the “aspirations” of ordinary working people. The old-fashioned Labour message, “Stay where you are and we’ll look after you”, would have to be replaced by a modern one: “We will help you to get where you want to go.” It is really important to note how recent a development this is; in fact, it was one of those points at which, for those who prize the phrase, the “centre ground of politics” shifted.
After this, nobody could get anywhere on the electoral landscape without making his obeisance to “aspiration”. In his first major speech as prime minister, Gordon Brown used it to death, presumably to prove that he would govern on the New, not the Old, Labour terms. David Cameron has hammered away at it, presumably to prove that he is in the Thatcher, rather than (as many suspect) the Macmillan mould. And in his hour-long Budget speech, George Osborne apparently uttered it, in various forms (including the impossibly annoying “aspiration nation”), 16 times. That’s roughly every four minutes. The trouble is that, with all this repetition, its meaning has been almost lost.
But that is scarcely surprising. There have been precious few acts of government that have had any material effect on the ability of people to move up from poverty or disadvantage – which may seem surprising when politicians bang on about it so much.
That is not to say that there has been no government-led social progress: the improvements to housing and infrastructure (particularly public health and sanitation) enacted by governments have certainly transformed living conditions for the mass of the population. But in specific terms of allowing individuals to improve their own circumstances – in other words, of increasing social mobility – the influence of government intervention has been negligible. There are exceptions: the 1944 Education Act, which created the grammar schools, thereby revolutionising the lives and opportunities of a cohort of working-class children, did substantially alter social mobility and make it more feasible to fulfil “an ambition for something at present above one”.
In that spirit, Michael Gove’s insistence on breaking the domination of the education establishment, which went on record last week as believing that knowledge was dangerous, may also have a genuinely liberating force.
Arguably, Mrs Thatcher’s sell-off of council houses had a fairly dramatic effect of this kind, but it was more symbolic than statistically significant. What it did was to introduce the idea that people who had never before contemplated owning their own property might want to do so. And it was the fact of their wanting to that was such political dynamite: working-class people who had been assumed (especially by Labour politicians) to be grateful recipients of state beneficence, were actually eager to take control of their own lives and to enjoy the kind of self-determination that was taken for granted by those “above” them. But even in these notable cases, government was only making available possibilities that then had to be seized by individuals: it could not engineer social mobility, it could only permit it.
But, you may say, the present Government’s measures designed to get people off benefits and into employment must be conducive to mobility. Having a job is the starting point of any route up and out, so any government act that facilitates the movement from welfare dependency to paid employment is a positive reinforcement of aspiration. Yes indeed, but the reforms that the Government is enacting now are really the undoing of previous government actions. Had there not been the earlier kind of state intervention, which rewarded defeatism and resignation, there would be no need for the antidote.
In truth, it was the spread of prosperity in the boom years of post-war capitalism that most encouraged free social movement and personal motivation.
And here we come to what may be the real tragedy of this generation of political leaders who all noisily dedicate themselves to the cause of “aspiration”. For the last half of the 20th century – up until about 20 minutes ago, it seems – every generation has been able to expect to have a better life than the previous one: to have more opportunity, greater affluence and even, after the ending of the Cold War, a safer and more secure world in which to live. There was enough freedom and good fortune to be extended to an infinite number of people; to anyone, really, who cared to make an effort. Most of that expectation – even the international security part of it – rested on an assumption of continuous, everlasting economic growth. Well, that’s over now. No one can predict when it will return, and no politician can swear that the hopes and aspirations that rested on it are not, for the duration, cruel illusions.
