The Pinch

How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - And Why They Should Give It Back

David Willetts

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857891426
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The baby boom of 1945-65 produced the biggest, richest generation that Britain has ever known. Today, at the peak of their power and wealth, baby boomers now run our country; by virtue of their sheer demographic power, they have fashioned the world around them in a way that meets all of their housing, healthcare and financial needs.

In this original and provocative book, David Willetts shows how the baby boomer generation has attained this position at the expense of their children.Social, cultural and economic provision has been made for the reigning section of society, whilst the needs of the next generation have taken a back seat. Willetts argues that if our political, economic and cultural leaders do not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay for their parents' quality of life. Baby boomers, worried about the kind of world they are passing on to their children, are beginning to take note. However, whilst the imbalance in the quality of life between the generations is becoming more obvious, what is less certain is whether the older generation will be willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a more equal distribution.

The Pinch is a landmark account of intergenerational relations in Britain. It is essential reading for parents and policymakers alike.

Chapter 1

Who We Are

Picture a family gathered around steaming plates of pasta on a massive trestle table under a tree in a Tuscan garden with uncles, aunts, brothers, daughters-in-law, elderly sisters, all engaged in an excited, voluble hubbub. That is a real family, the kind of family in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It is easy to assume – I certainly used to – that at some point in the past the English lived like this too. Even if the food was not so good we too surely lived in big, extended peasant families and in those times all the land belonged to a feudal lord as well. Then there came a great transformation – perhaps the rise of Protestantism, or the Civil War, or the Industrial Revolution – which drove the spread of private property and the modern nuclear family. But the truth is that England never was a society of peasants living in extended families, and we never had true serfdom. As far back as 1250, and probably even earlier, it looks as if England had a very different social structure, different even from the rest of the British Isles. Forget everything you think you know about extended families, arranged marriages, serfdom, and seigneurs. As far as we know none of that happened in England – ever. When it comes to families, England was the first nuclear power.

Instead think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. We go out to work for a wage. Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work when we are in our teens. If you are a boy you go off to be an apprentice and if a girl perhaps to be a servant in another house. You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. You are not dependent on inheriting property from your parents so they have a limited hold over you and you can choose your spouse. Indeed, when it comes to choosing your partner what matters is love, actually. It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite late, possibly in your late twenties. If a man gets a girl pregnant before then he might well have to marry her but they tend to avoid full sex, settling instead for elaborate forms of heavy petting.

Because we marry quite late and the two parents then bear a large part of the burden of raising our children, we do not have many of them.¹ If a society has extended families or clans then this spreads the costs of raising children across more adults, who then have more children younger. That means there is a danger of cycles of population boom and bust as surges in the birth rate are followed by famine and collapse. But that is not the English model. Our population grows slowly but steadily after the catastrophe of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which may have reduced it to 2.5 million. Britain’s first great economic statistician, Gregory King, estimated that the population of England in 1688 totalled 5.5 million.² His key table includes estimates of average family size. The upper-class ‘heads of families’ do indeed have many family dependents. But where the wider population is concentrated, categories such as the 750,000 ‘freeholders of the lesser sort’ or the 1,275,000 ‘labouring people and outservants’, estimated family sizes are 5, 4 or 3.5. This first demographic analysis of England offers further evidence that we have long had small nuclear families.

There are a small number of rich families with an enormous amount of land for whom arranged marriages matter for dynastic settlements and inheritance, but it is a mistake to assume they are typical of everyone else. Most people are, of course, peasants in the sense that they work on the land from generation to generation. But they are not under the exclusive control of a feudal landlord, let alone his property. They can make themselves available for hire at the great seasonal fairs. They are probably paid in cash not in kind. Money matters. There is borrowing and lending and mortgages and, to keep all this going, quite a sophisticated law of contracts. In turn these contracts are enforced by an independent judiciary.

Here is an account of England in the flat language of modern sociology. It is a familiar account of who we are and how we live: ‘The majority of ordinary people in England… are rampant individuals, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically “rational”, market-oriented and acquisitive, egocentred in kinship and social life.’

Some figures for typical English towns and villages confirm that and capture vividly how markets seem to matter more than roots. In Leighton Buzzard, out of 909 transfers of land, 66 per cent are outside the family; only 15 per cent went to the family in the owner’s lifetime and another 10 per cent at death. Another study, of a village near Huntingdon, finds on 43 occasions the property is passed on within the family of which 24 are direct blood inheritance. But there are 21 cases of the property being conveyed to someone outside the family and 98 cases of an open market sale. A third study shows 87 per cent of land transactions taking place between people not related to each other through kinship. And a host of studies show lots of buying and selling of property. This is just what we would expect – a nation of cash, contracts, and commerce. The key question is supposed to be whether or not these modern patterns of behaviour are desirable. Has this turbulent individualism eroded our ties of family and community? But there is just one hitch. The statistics for Leighton Buzzard are for the period 1464 to 1508; for the village near Huntingdon the period studied is 1397 to 1457; and the 87 per cent non-family transactions occurred in a manor in about 1400. The quotation is from a description of England back to the thirteenth century by Alan Macfarlane, the historian above all who has revived this understanding of England and whose influence pervades this chapter.³

The power of local barons over peasants was limited by an effective national government too. Insofar as medieval England was ‘feudal’, its feudalism took an unusually centralized form. The Normans successfully increased the power of central government and subordinated local magnates. Peasants could not be called up for military service directly by a local landlord. In the words of Frederic Maitland, the great Victorian historian, the King could directly tax his subjects, ‘their lands and their goods, without the intervention of their lords’.⁴ There is local administration of the Common Law, that exceptional English creation of the early medieval period. But the Common Law is crucially not local law. You are bound by precedent, a body of case law that is consistent across the country. That is what ‘common’ means. Royal authority is used to standardize justice, limiting the power of barons to administer the law in their own interests. Indeed, the crown keeps direct control of justice in the regions by sending travelling assize courts around the country. This makes it much harder to do special favours for kith and kin and so helps to ensure protection for the small nuclear family without extended networks of relatives. The standardization is not, however, achieved simply by royal fiat: it is achieved by lawyers meeting at their London Inns to compare notes and establish through these self-governing institutions a shared understanding of the law, built up through precedent – the role of precedent and its limit on discretion being a difference between the English legal system and the more Roman-influenced legal traditions which flourish on the Continent.

An effective national government and a national framework of law bring standardization, which makes geographical and, hence, also social mobility much easier. Internal migration is easier than in the rest of Europe: not least because you are not tied to an extensive network of favours and reciprocal obligations. Indeed, geographical mobility is another exceptional feature of this English model.

This adds up to an extraordinarily balanced political and social system in which an effective national government protects the rights of individuals and families and stops the creation of local clans and concentrations of baronial power. It is not, by and large, possible for local feuds to develop into private wars. Local barons are not able to extract tax at will. And administration of justice remains broadly fair without special favours to networks of relatives. That list is a neat description of the key features of the eighteenth-century English polity when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, but its roots go back at least 500 years. It might be called merely a nightwatchman state. But this is to underestimate the crucial role of effective national government even then. It is not a libertarian utopia. Maintaining an effective framework of national law and stopping local magnates being too powerful are both crucial national responsibilities, discharged by virtually no other government at the time. This is the paradox of strong but limited government. This strong government protects small families.

These small families are very unusual. Unlike many other cultures we lack specific words for particular types of uncles, grandparents and cousins (how many people could work out what relation a second cousin, twice removed, would be to them?). There is no frame-work of law setting out obligations between them. Even our earliest law code, King Alfred’s, places very weak obligations on families. In the words of one historian of Anglo-Saxon society, ‘the duties kinsmen had with respect to [a given family member] were few.’⁵ These small families can be extraordinarily strong, held together by powerful attachments between a couple and with marriage increasingly recognized in canon and civil law as a pre-eminent institution. But their unusually small size compared with other types of family also makes them vulnerable to external shocks. An extended family can offer more by way of support and mutual insurance.

This model of law and society is quite different from other models which obtained and still do in many other parts of the world. In parts of Asia for example it is still assumed that if one member of a large extended family gets a good job his responsibility is to distribute the benefits to his relatives and ideally get them a similar job in the same organization. Helping relatives with contracts and jobs is not seen as corruption but as a moral obligation. Big clan-style families are better than nuclear ones at spreading advantage and pooling risks, but for them to be effective people have to stay close to each other, so there is less mobility.⁶

Sometimes we may regret that England does not enjoy the advantages of these clan-style families, and look back to an earlier age when supposedly we did. The earliest recorded example of this sort of nostalgia is a sermon given by Bishop Wulfstan in 1014, in which he expressed regret that vendettas were not what they used to be as family members just would not join in – ‘too often a kinsman does not protect a kinsman any more than a stranger.’⁷

These mobile individuals and small families had to look outwards and create alternative networks for support and insurance. So they were very effective at creating local and civic institutions. With small families people need more of these civil networks in order to sustain a given level of social insurance. Medieval guilds are one early example. And early means early – these societies were being created more than a thousand years ago. The rules of the Thegns’ Guild in Cambridge in the late tenth century describe the obligations between ‘guild-brothers’; for example, ‘If any guild-brother dies outside the district, or is taken ill, his guild-brothers are to fetch him and bring him, dead or alive, to where he wishes, on pain of the same fine which has been stated in the event of his dying at home and a guild-brother failing to attend the body.’⁸ Instead of families discharging what Bishop Wulfstan thought were their responsibilities, outside groups such as guilds were providing mutual insurance of a sort we can recognize today.

The ‘guild-brothers’ were not blood brothers. These guilds were not family-based or closed shops. They were usually open to new members: ‘if our lord or any of our reeves can suggest to us any addition to our peace guild; [rather] let us accept it joyfully, as becomes us all and is necessary for us.’⁹ For the next thousand years the English carried on creating these groups and societies. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great nineteenth-century politician and historian, looked at them with a hint of amusement: ‘This is the age of societies. There is scarcely one Englishman in ten who has not belonged to some association for distributing books, or for prosecuting them; for sending invalids to the hospital or beggars to the treadmill; for giving plate to the rich or blankets to the poor.’¹⁰

Small families need civil society more. But it was not just voluntary societies which provided mutual support. You need markets and commercial services too. Instead of the mutual exchanges of the extended family, small families must buy services. For example insurance schemes, annuities, and savings help protect you when there is no wider family with any such obligation. This is one reason why England has a long history in financial services.

Small families meant there was a role for government too. Already by Tudor times the national government had stepped in with the Poor Law after the dissolution of those powerful civic welfare institutions, the monasteries.¹¹ The Elizabethan Poor Law required the provision of welfare, but delivered and financed locally. Despite its harshness and injustices it was a far more ambitious nationally legislated welfare provision than anywhere else in Europe. It set out the entire local parish’s obligations to people who could not care for themselves as they were old or infirm or not in work. Unlike in most other countries then or now, it was provided independently of employers or relatives. This left people unencumbered and mobile. When, centuries later, they were trying to reform welfare, Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister after the Napoleonic Wars, summarized this unique combination very neatly: ‘The legislature of no other country has shown so vigilant and constant a solicitude for the welfare of the poorer classes; no other has so generally abstained from the interference with the details and operation of trade.’

This is a very unusual social and political structure indeed. England has had unusually small families, unusually strong national government, unusually weak local magnates, and unusually free peasants. It is not just different from Papua New Guinea or Pakistan; it is also quite different from France and Italy and most of Continental Europe. This difference was recognized by foreigners. After visiting England in 1730 that shrewd French observer of human cultures, Montesquieu, observed: ‘I too have been a traveller, and have seen the country in the world which is most worthy of our curiosity – I mean England.’¹²

It is not that England is better or that foreigners are wrong. But England is certainly distinct. How come? One possible explanation, suggested by Alan Macfarlane, is that almost a millennium and a half ago the Anglo-Saxons brought with them the social, legal, and family arrangements of the German tribes. Perhaps because they were frequently on the move they did not have the sense of land held perpetually by some family or group. Instead it was always being exchanged between individuals. The original Germanic model then disappeared on the Continent as Roman law extended its way back across Northern Europe in the Middle Ages. However, it survived in England, to which it had emigrated. This idea was neatly caught by Benjamin Franklin when he wrote that ‘Britain was formerly the America of the Germans.’¹³ Montesquieu had a similar thought when he wrote that ‘In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus on the manners of the Germans we find it is from that nation the English have borrowed their idea of political government. This beautiful system was invented first in the woods.’¹⁴ The reference to the woods may be a crucial clue – one suggestion is that the need to cut down trees to create small clearings is why families were small rather than large and clan-based. It is indeed in Central Germany where archaeologists have found the first genetically identifiable nuclear family of a mother, father, son, and daughter buried together and facing each other in graves dating back 4,600 years. The mother was not genetically related to the father and had spent her childhood in a different region, suggesting that the relationship was not based on membership of the same clan.¹⁵

The range of family structures around the world has been mapped on to political structures by the great contemporary French thinker Emmanuel Todd.¹⁶ The correlation is uncanny and its historical roots deep. The other European countries with the Anglo-Saxon model of the nuclear family are the Netherlands and Denmark. Todd casually notes that these happen to be the areas of Europe once ruled by King Canute, which itself shows the timescale over which we must think about these family structures. Todd shows the fundamental importance not just for social structures but also for shaping political systems of the difference between endogamous societies, where marriages are often arranged and with relatives, looking inwards to reinforce the clan, and exogamous societies, where marriages are to outsiders and partners may be freely chosen. The second key distinction is between societies where inheritance is egalitarian, with all children having an equal claim and societies where it is inegalitarian with no obligation to treat all children alike. Many other European countries have exogamous marriage, but they do not usually have inegalitarian inheritance as well. (When we refer to marriage here its exact legal form and force may change over time, as common -...