The longest journey starts with a single step
Regular listeners to the Moral Maze(hi Mum) will spot the connection between Michael Buerk and David Aaronovitch. The former has been the long-time presenter and chair of the programme, the latter was a very accomplished stand-in earlier this year. But this week there is another connection – immigration and jobs.
Today in The Times, Aaronovitch is fighting a brave rear guard action against the widespread but erroneous view that immigration creates unemployment and drives down wages. Given how many people – the latest being Ed Miliband – seem to have bought the ‘immigration is bad for the poor’ line, David’s determination to base his opinions on the actual statistics is an example – to misquote TH Huxley – of slaying a seductive hypothesis with an ugly fact.
Last night after our Moral Maze conversation about the morality of bailing out the Greeks (or should that be bailing out the banks), Michael Buerk was telling me about a recent visit to Herefordshire. Knowing me to be a bleeding heart liberal, the great man was as circumspect as possible in asking why it is still the case that Eastern Europeans migrants are willing to take jobs which indigenous youth refuse (I imagine he might have posed the question in somewhat more forthright terms if his interlocutor had been my fellow Maze panellist, Michael Portillo).
From their different perspectives both David A and Michael B agree that the problem about unemployment in areas where there are jobs is more to do with the readiness and willingness of local people to work than the impact of migration.
Why is this? The political right’s argument will tend to focus on the failings of the unemployed and will prescribe a more authoritarian regime in terms of benefit conditionality. The left may point to low wages and the poverty traps created by reductions in the value of in-work benefits. There may be validity in both arguments.
But I think other things are at play too. One might be what could be called the narrative of work. My suggestion to Michael Buerk was that Eastern Europeans may be willing to do tough work for low wages because they see this as part of a bigger life story. Perhaps their ambition is to settle in the UK or maybe to return to their mother country with enough money to set up their own business. In contrast, young people with limited skills and expectations of career progression may see the choice as simply between being free to hang around on limited benefits (perhaps occasionally topped up occasionally by cash in hand odd jobs) versus the constraints and indignities of a menial job which only gives them a few pounds a week more spending money, by the time things like transport, uniform etc have been paid for. This is not to condone those who choose not to take opportunities but to suggest that motivation is not just a matter of proximate choice but also wider life narrative.
I don’t know if there is any authoritative research on this but anecdotally it seems that employers who have a good reputation for looking after and progressing staff (M&S, McDonalds) will attract plenty of applicants for jobs even though starting wages are modest. Also relevant is research undertaken a few years ago which showed that many working class young people had a pretty sketchy understanding of the labour market and the range of careers that existed in any sector, such as health care.
I guess all I am saying is that part of encouraging young people to take on opportunities which offer limited short term benefits is to provide information and encouragement so that they see this as being the first step on a bigger project of personal growth, financial independence and career development. Ministers are currently mulling over whether to abandon independent face to face careers advice so perhaps this is another reason to suggest they shouldn’t. It’s also why I hope we at the RSA can take forward the promising work we have been doing around providing mentoring for students in FE.
Getting young people to take up modest opportunities (and we shouldn’t forget that in some areas there are no opportunities at all) is about sticks and carrots but also about advice, encouragement and support, and in that we can all play a role.
A home for the incurably smug
When I was at secondary school we had a mock trial and I was chosen as lead for the prosecution. I cleverly set a trap for the gang alleged to have broken into the tuck shop. But when the plan worked and the two witnesses directly contradicted each other I punched the air and whooped in delight. Unfortunately, this irritated my classmates so much that they found the defendants not guilty to spite me.
In a similar vein my fellow Moral Maze panellist Clifford Longley, who is a learned, witty and modest man, made the mistake on one programme of starting a contribution with the words ‘I think this is my killer point’. He has never been allowed to forget it.
So now on those very rare occasions when I think I have scored a goal in an argument I try to keep my satisfaction to myself. So it was last week in an LBC debate on immigration that we hosted here at the RSA.
Peter Lilley was the most anti-immigration voice on the panel. As the evening wore on it wasn’t so much his views that got me down as his insistence that anyone who expresses any concern about immigration is labelled a racist. Given that almost every single national newspaper is in favour of tougher restrictions, not to mention the Coalition parties (even Ed Miliband said that a failure to express concern about the impact of immigration lost Labour supporters), this does seem a rather out-dated view.
Although the Great Room audience was pretty balanced in its views, it was clear from the phone-in comments that the LBC listeners were on Peter’s side, and many of them shared his slight persecution complex.
Anyhow, my moment of inner triumph was when Peter responded to a question about the low paid. He said that if we stopped immigration the labour market would tighten and wages for UK workers would go up, thus reducing poverty. My response was to point out that in many occupations which rely on low paid migrants it is far from clear that the market will tolerate higher costs. The example I gave was social care and, I added, given Peter’s support for the Government’s austerity package presumably he wouldn’t want anything to raise public costs. Perhaps he was just sipping his water but I couldn’t help noticing that at this point Peter was slightly less ready than before with his rebuttal.
So, I was interested to read about the problems besetting Southern Cross care homes and the wider issues of finances and standards affesting teh sector. cross this morning in the newspapers that many companies providing care homes are now in dire financial straits, as well as too often delivering poor standards. It doesn’t seem that wages are the precipitating factor but it hard to see how the sector, residents, carers or the state could pick up the tab if wages did rise significantly.
So there you have it, my killer point. And even though there’s seemingly nothing I can do to eradicate the self-satisfaction from my tone, at least I managed to wait a week.
The real problem of politics
There are two articles worth reading together in today’s Times: Rachel Sylvester says that politicians have no choice but to accept in full the recommendations on their allowances due to be made this week by Sir Christopher Kelly. Her column concludes:
‘ The real problem about expenses is that they have made it harder for politicians to show leadership about the things that matter far more. The verdict of the court of public opinion is too harsh on many MPs. But unless they accept it and move on they will never be able to convince the voters to listen to them on anything else’.
Turn back a few pages and there is Ann Treneman’s typically engaging Commons sketch, which has long been the paper’s only dedicated coverage of Parliamentary proceedings. It is Treneman’s job to encourage us to laugh at our politicians but it seems that any attempt she might make at belittling yesterday’s debate about the EU summit would pale by comparison with MPs’ determination to belittle themselves.
While all this is going on, the fundamental problem with our democracy is, if anything, getting worse. This problem is the gap between the world as it is and the world as the public thinks it is, or wants it to be – which, in turn, leads to an ever greater list of issues on which there is simply no honest position that politicians can adopt which does not risk public outrage.
Despite arriving late, Home Secretary Alan Johnson gave an interesting speech here yesterday (featured on Page 1 of the Times). As Michael Clarke, Director of RUSI, said in his thoughtful response, the Home Office, perhaps more than any other department, has to try to adapt to a fast changing and shrinking world. In so doing the department faces issue after issue, most created by aspects of globalisation, on which the public is profoundly ambivalent. Here are three examples:
• We want to know who is in the UK, to better enforce immigration rules and to ensure that people only receive the services and benefits to which they are entitled, but there is both scepticism and antipathy towards the national database which underpins ID cards.
• We want to reduce asylum applications and to return those who came here illegally or have not won the right to stay. Yet if we had befriended a Zimbabwean or Iraqi who had settled here with their family we would no doubt think it was appalling that they might be forcibly repatriated. In response to a question along these lines Alan Johnson told the Great Room that when some time ago the Home Office said that it would not return any fleeing Zimbabweans the number of applications from those who claimed to be from that country rose by 80%.
• We want our civil liberties protected but we would be outraged if a terrorist incident occurred which we felt could, by whatever means, have been avoided
It is not that these issues are irresolvable. Nor that the Government has always got its strategy right. Indeed, yesterday I left Michael Clarke and philosopher AC Grayling in John Adam Street agreeing that the Government had made the mistake of making the protection of lives more important that the protection of our way of life (which includes our rights and liberties).
My point is simply that these issues are difficult and that if we (or the press) are looking for simple and reassuring answers we are looking in vain.
This was one of the themes of my annual lecture last week. Here is an extract:
“ It is hard enough for politics to reconcile different interests and preferences in society but, now, a combination of the complexity of modern life and consumerist expectations mean that politicians face the challenge of reconciling conflicting interests and preferences in the same people. Generally, it is a challenge they duck. We have an economy and a public sector mired in debt. We have ambitious carbon reduction targets but no realistic account of how we are going to meet them. We are the fifth richest nation in the world but suffer high levels of child poverty. All this may be cited as evidence of how politicians have failed to face down the superficial and contradictory demands of voters.
If we wanted people to see democracy as inherently about dilemmas, and trade offs, balancing interests within people, within society and across time, what might we do?
If you want to know what I think is the answer you’ll have to read or watch the whole speech…..
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