You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house! or Ireland as others see us…. February 6, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Ireland.trackback
There’s an article in last months Prospect which is very very interesting indeed. Not so much because it’s correct in its general thesis, which I’m far from certain about, but rather because it illuminates some information about the new rich in Ireland and about the roots of that wealth and also provides a remarkable clarity as regards the perceptions by some of that wealth.
So it is we turn to “Lucre of the Irish”, by John Murray Brown, Ireland correspondent for the Financial Times [as it happens Mary Fitzgerald is Prospect's editorial assistant, provides a riposte].
It argues that:
According to the historian Roy Foster, after centuries of misfortune, the Irish have finally got lucky. On most weekends you can see some of the luckiest at play at Ireland’s big racetracks—rough-handed farmer types, wads of notes at the ready, who arrive by helicopter with their well-dressed ladies and are as comfortable in the owners’ enclosure as in the company of the other punters pressed against the rails. On my last visit to the races, I saw one such man emerging from a corporate marquee, flute of champagne in one hand, pint of the black stuff in the other. It was a fitting image for Ireland’s new rich.
He continues that:
For the first time in Irish history, some of these racegoers have become, almost overnight, part of a big, indigenous moneyed class. In a population of just 4m, there are, according to Bank of Ireland, more than 30,000 euro millionaires—up from a few hundred 20 years ago—and at least 300 people worth over €30m. Almost all are self-made, and much of the money has been made in only a decade or so.
The reasons for the existence of such a ‘class’ is “a creation of the country’s extended economic boom and an associated leap in property values. The country entered the 1990s with an unusually benign combination of a growing, well-educated workforce and strong demand for labour, the latter the result of high levels of inward investment, much of it from the US, attracted by low taxes and light regulation…Average annual growth of 7.2 per cent over the past ten years has encouraged Irish expatriates to return home, and more recently Poles and other immigrants have maintained the growth rate of the labour force”. And the consequence of this apparently benign confluence is an ‘Ireland [with] the second highest per capita income in Europe (behind Norway), well ahead of Britain and the US.’
Brown asks about the nature of the ‘new rich’. He questions whether they are leaving a mark on business life, or are they simply speculators, are they philanthropic, what is their impact on the society and the self-perception of the nation? And he notes that in previous generations Irish people did make money, but usually by departing our fair shores. Interestingly he’s somewhat dismissive when he notes that ‘there is some old money in Ireland’. And intriguingly he contrasts the 30 odd year slog that it took the Smurfit’s and O’Reilly’s to gain global prominence as business people and the current crop who have managed to do so in barely a decade.
But he points to the fact that many of these new millionaires came from property and building and were ‘well placed’ when the economy began to expand in the early 1990s to take advantage of that expansion. He suggests that many are from rural backgrounds and that they have fewer ‘airs’ than previous generations of businesspeople. He doubts that many would accept a knighthood from the British monarch, like O’Reilly or Smurfit. Still, as he describes them it’s clear that whatever about the rural backgrounds, there is no lack of appetite for ferociously conspicuous consumption. He describes how Johnny Ronan of Treasury Holdings… ‘with his jet-black beard and long hair, is the industry’s most dashing “high roller.” ….after winning one bitter planning battle, he celebrated by flying 50 friends to Italy, where Luciano Pavarotti sang for them in the garden of his villa. A few years ago, he sent a voucher to his business rivals informing them that they had each had a Guatemalan pig named in their honour, as part of a fundraising effort by Trocaire, a Catholic charity. He is a keen huntsman and art collector, and owns a Humvee amphibious US army jeep as well as a €650,000 Maybach, described as “a Mercedes on steroids.”
And in truth no horny handed son of toil this, Ronan is the ’son of a wealthy Tipperary pig farmer, was privately educated, and after school trained as an accountant’.
Séan Mulryan of Ballymore Properties ‘likes to spend too…Debbie Harry performed at his 50th birthday party. He owns two executive helicopters, and racehorses and studs in both Ireland and France’.
And these are people who are intimately connected into politics. Brown notes that…’A tribunal looking into corruption in Dublin planning discovered Seán Mulryan paid 50,000 Irish pounds between 1994 and 1998 to Liam Lawlor, a Fianna Fáil deputy and Dublin councillor, although it found no evidence that this had influenced any decisions’.
What is troubling about the article is that it raises many interesting points, and also no small number of disturbing ones. Perhaps it is overstating the situation to compare our property tycoons with Russian oligarchs. And yet…”According to one estimate, six or seven businessmen own almost all the commercial property in Dublin. Such a concentration of ownership was probably last seen in the days before Irish independence. In those days Irish land was worth a fraction of that in England, but it now commands a large premium, despite Ireland’s much lower population density”
Then one might query the rather breathless presentation of all this, as if it was incontrovertibly a ‘good thing’. The rich are rich. They are a different sort of rich – although reading through the article they simply appear to be slightly better at hiding their wealth in some areas. Brown suggests that… “There is, of course, some excess. The rich Irish think nothing of flying to the US for a weekend of shopping, and party invitations among the elite now routinely include longitude and latitude details for the benefit of incoming helicopters. But many of the new rich are from humble origins, and aware of the offence that flaunting their wealth can cause. “You won’t see any boats in Irish marinas over 60 foot. Not that they don’t own them, but they keep them elsewhere,” reports one financial adviser”.
So, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Brown also suggests that while there is a left wing critique the left parties (Labour and Sinn Féin) have not ‘performed well in recent years’. He notes that there is an increase in the growth of inequality, but then argues that Ireland has always been closer to Boston than Berlin. And here he makes some serious points…”Ireland has no universal health service: nearly half of the population has private medical insurance, and less than 30 per cent are covered by the state-funded “medical card,” which entitles holders to free care”. But he also locks into a discourse which is often used by the cheerleaders of new elites, an assumption that the newcomers are somehow supplanting old elites of middle and upper class. So we are told that:
One group that is often disdainful of the new rich is Ireland’s old elite of mainly Dublin-based senior civil servants, lawyers, journalists and artists. According to David McWilliams, this group is showing a renewed interest in the Irish language, and sending its children to the Dublin Gael schools, where the teaching is in Irish, as a means of distinguishing themselves from the brash newcomers.
Then there is the other discourse where a sort of petty-nationalism is displayed to somehow ‘justify’ business – a sort of Clausewitz-like notion of commerce as war by other means… note the following:
There has clearly been a political aspect to this—although it has not been much noticed in Britain. In 2004, Derek Quinlan, a former Irish tax inspector, paid £750m for the Savoy Group of hotels in London. Like other big foreign deals, this was reported in the Irish media as a matter of national pride. Indeed, Quinlan recalls that an Irish employee at the Connaught Hotel, part of the Savoy Group, ran the Irish tricolour up the hotel’s flagpole when the story broke. “It was put up without my knowledge,” he said. “But I cried. My poor father, who was in the Irish army, would have loved to have seen this.”
And in a sense this brings us to the heart of the article, a sort of breathless approach to the issue, one where extravagant wealth becomes ‘explained’, whatever the evident inequalities (or if one prefers, egregious disparities) that it engenders, by nationalism, anti-elitism and so on and so forth. That this wealth does not appear in a vacuum, or indeed that it in itself generates new elites is forgotten in an analysis which can – for consistency – only regard the present and recent past, not the future.
Part of this explanatory discourse is to look towards that one area where wealth can be seen to be seen in a somewhat softened light – by some. That is, public philanthropy. The article ponders on the question as to:
What about the accusation that the new rich are not putting money back into society or culture, in the manner of rich philanthropic Americans? “There is a gangster charm about some of the property people,” says Michael D Higgins, foreign affairs spokesman for the Labour party and a former arts minister. “But what I regret is they haven’t the imagination to fund an orchestra, or a piece of public sculpture.”
But others in the arts and education worlds say the new rich are generous donors. In 2005, Martin Naughton, founder of Glen Dimplex, an electrical appliances company, donated €5m towards a new nanoscience research institute at Trinity College, and last year his company began sponsoring a new set of literary awards. Mick Wallace, Wexford-born founder of Wallace Construction, has funded the rebuild of Dublin’s New Theatre. Michael Colgan, director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, says it is a matter of how you approach the new rich: “They are not the sort of people who want to sit on cultural committees and feel patronised. With these guys you take them out to lunch and they will sign a cheque for €50,000. It’s not because they love theatre, but they see the Gate as part of an Ireland they want to feel proud of.”
And how can we judge, really? Is Higgins correct or is Colgan? Note too another narrative of blunt hardy folk who don’t want to feel ‘patronised’.
And pride in Ireland is a fluid thing. Bono and his cohorts prefer to have their tax affairs routed out of the country. The pragmatism of the wealthy overcomes any residual pride. Another twist on the nationalist narrative one might argue. And here the piece is very explicit:
They are using their money to make a statement—and the statement is that Ireland has arrived. Consider the sponsorship of Goffs Million, a race invented by the Irish bloodstock auctioneers in the 1980s. The original idea was to get buyers into the company’s sales ring, because only those yearlings bought at the previous year’s sales could compete in the race. It became one of the richest events in European racing. The first sponsor was Cartier, the French jeweller. Today the race carries the name of a hotel, the Parknasilla, owned by Bernard McNamara, a county Clare property developer.
I often reference Donald Horne, and he has some interesting things to say about how elites generate ‘myths’ to support their hegemony. Here we have a perfect example. The self-referential aspect of it all is evident. We have arrived as a state/society/nation because we now sponsor Goffs Million. Note the necessity to use numerous axis on which to project this ‘achievement’, because really, which one is it? And perhaps more importantly ‘we’ haven’t, and sponsoring Goffs, while no doubt cheering to those doing so, has no specific reference to the broader group termed ‘Irish’. Indeed to even posit in such terms is to ignore the divisions both political and otherwise which lead many to consider developers as a group within Irish society in a far from uncritical fashion.
And it is also supremely contradictory – as, admittedly, all things are – because it then moves to a conclusion that argues that:
On the other hand, relations between Ireland and Britain, and particularly between the Irish and the English, have probably never been better. As the Irish increasingly look beyond Britain, they have become less chippy about their relationship with their giant but often insensitive neighbour. “The Irish inferiority complex has disappeared and the British superiority complex has been weakened,” says [Garret] FitzGerald. Of course, he adds, relations will never be truly equal and Britain continues to cast a big cultural shadow over Ireland—British television, for example, is ubiquitous. “You can’t have equality between 4m and 60m. But there’s certainly less inequality.”
The article argues that:
One consequence of all this is that the Irish are now looking at themselves differently. The image of humble but poetic Catholics living in the shadow of the stiff and snobbish Protestant English is no longer meaningful on either side, even as caricature. The nation of “saints and scholars” has shown over the past decade that it has a genius for business too.
One of the great – and sometimes not so great – aspects of living a while is that you tend to notice how everything comes back in one form or another. I’ve spent a fair tranche of my adult life hearing how the “Irish are now looking at themselves differently”. In the late 1980s as we attracted expanded multinational investment we were ‘changin’. In the early 1990s it was football. Our anything but victories were evidence of a new ‘pride’, a new ’sense of success’. Then it was economic growth. Our cities, filled with the drunken laughter of our then young folk – well, my laughter as well at the time – demonstrated a ‘new Ireland’. Our shiny new divorce law indicated our society was more ‘generous’. Our skylines indicated a future written in the steel gridwork of cranes. And now, as boom flattens, perhaps even tanks, we finally ‘look at ourselves differently’. That’s twenty years of holding a mirror to our faces. I’m far from convinced by such narcissistic tropes.
And lest this seem like a carnival of begrudgery, let me note that it is on our watch – and by this I mean the contemporary Irish left, that such excess has manifested itself, that we have seen a degradation of our public services by those who pay them lip service, largely for electoral ends. That the wealth has not been turned, by any serious effort on the part of state or government, towards the public good. That however much talk there is of this having a ‘nationalist’ hue that simply does not appear to transfer in any meaningful way to our society, or in any clear way to solving the societal ills. That – even if we attempt to deal with this group indirectly – the revenue streams generated by the activities of many of those listed above (and let’s not forget those who work for them) have been squandered. That we still have no universal health insurance, no proper state education system and no proper pension provision. What a waste. But what on earth has the left been doing, what vision has it articulated, what connections has it made with the actual – as distinct from an idealised version of – the Irish people? Because, when it comes down to it, however much the excessive aspects of new wealth are concealed – and I’d have my own mind as to how successfully – the existence of such extremes of wealth are simply not questioned by the broader society. And that has to be in part our fault.
Great piece – just what I needed over breakfast to kick start the indignation to get me through the day……
It needs to be said again and again; we’re not a rich country – we’re a country with a few rich people in it; we won’t be a rich country in any real sense until we have a health service, until primary schools are funded properly (the average primary school runs a deficit of about 25k per year), until ……. we all know the list.
That’s so true sonofstan about us being a country with a few rich people in it. And the corollary is…
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Jason Whitmen
Why is always a slight touch of Darby O’Gill and the little people to anything like this written about Ireland? And seeing McWilliams quoted again as an expert on all this; over-rated and over-hyped isn’t the word.
But what on earth has the left been doing, what vision has it articulated, what connections has it made with the actual – as distinct from an idealised version of – the Irish people?
A few years ago I wrote this:
Why are we giving such an easy ride to a government that is so blatantly on the side of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of society? Is it because we are too embarrassed to complain about the unfairness of ‘the rich get richer’ approach to government for fear that we will be seen as failures? After all if you can’t get rich in Ireland today then you’ve only yourself to blame. Right?
I think that mentality is widespread even among so-called parties of the left.
Just a further point….
The idea, mentioned in the Prospect article that the south- Dublin intelligentsia (sounding a bit Waters-esque, there) send their kids to Gaelscoileanna in order to distance themselves fr0m the materialism of the arriviste, is a little naive; they do it so their kids will a) get a better grounding for the private secondary school they’ll go on to, and b) make friends of their own class. Gaelscoileanna and ET schools do better than their common or garden catholic neighbours largely because an affluent parent body has the means and the time to support their kids’ schools more actively, and because, thanks to long waiting lists, they pretty much exclusively teach Irish kids, and thus don’t have to cope with non- english speaking kids from often poor backgrounds (and of course, irish kids from poor backgrounds)
Just as in the 70s and 80s, a liberal ‘intelligentsia’ differentiated itself from the mucksavages and gurriers thorugh espousing liberal social attitudes with regard to moral issues, so, now they differentiate themselves through lifestyle from the mucksavages and gurriers grown rich through property (or drugs…..). In neither case has any larger vision of a better, fairer country for all played much part in their outlook.
To the question – what has the Left been doing while all this economic and social rapine has been going on – I suspect there are a number of answers. Here’s a small one. Because of the Left’s agnosticism on wealth generation it has failed to distinguish productive activity (which should be supported) from unproductive activity (which should be taxed, taxed, taxed). For my mind, if someone makes money from setting up an enterprise that makes widgets (or the modern equivalent in goods or services), employs people at good rates, recognises their workplace rights, pays their taxes, and generally goes about the hard slog of creating new markets with all the new homegrown skills that requires – well, hell, he or she can park their 60 foot marina in front of my house and I’ll put the cat out to guard it for them. But becaue the Left (and I don’t mean everyone on the Left) doesn’t understand the authentic difference between that and what too many of our new rich get up to, it prevents us from intervening on the issue of wealth-generation and leads some – like a Labour TD last year – to say nonsensical things like, ‘We must become the party of the marginalised and millionaire.’ We should start ‘mixing it’ in our mixed economy while still calling for taxes and regulations and social check-points on a lot of the millionaires. We can be relevant and rowdy at the same time.
We can be relevant and rowdy at the same time.
Can’t wait to see that on an election poster!
And that has to be in part our fault.
I don’t really think this is true. The left says a lot of different things, because it’s composed of a lot of differnt people with a lot of different ideas. Not only is it not, in general, going to say the same thing, but there’s not really a right thing for it to say, and if there were somebody would be saying it already. The problem isn’t what is (or is not) said but the absence of an audience, which we cannot simply bring into being by finding the right thing to say.
‘We must become the party of the marginalised and millionaire.’
Jesus H. on a crutch. I used to live with an Enniskillen woman who’d witnessed the Remembrance day bombing. . . but if I’m in the Republic at the next election and I’m registered, I’m going to seriously consider voting SF, in spite of all they did in the bad old days.
I know SF’s claim to be socialist is merely silly, but what else is there for the despairing protest voter, if the Labour party can produce rubbish like the quote above?
As for the original story, well, it goes to show that you can decolonise the state, but you won’t necessarily decolonise the mind. Forelock tugging is still forelock tugging, even if it’s done towards a home-grown neo-gentry, rather than the old school imported gentry.
Re: gaelscoils. My cousins in Dublin went to a gaelscoil, and I think it saved them from growing up to be obnoxious D4 swine.
First, the left in Ireland (and elsewhere, but see qualifier) certainly has found it hard to articulate a coherent critque of the current market orthodoxy. The right has managed to burn the pro-business mantra into people’s minds — “In the 80s we had high taxes and third world services, so low tax is always good”. “Low tax means more investment, and therefore more jobs”. For “low tax” also read, “no regulation”, “less government interferences” etc. The left has had difficulty articulating an alternative vision to the current free-market orthoxody in many countried, but I add the qualifier because there has been a particular problem for the left in Ireland. First, our little country is far more influenced culturally and economically by what happens in the US and the UK, the twin homes of the free-market ideology. Though the Anglo-saxon influence has been felt everywhere, very few places are affected in the same way as we are.
Another difficulty for the left in Ireland is FF’s populism. FF continue to draw on the support of many ‘ordinary working’ people. During the boom they raised welfare rates, and presided over a boom in construction which for a period of time was a boon for whole communities where there was no employment before (we are in for a reversal there!). For a succession of budgets tax rates dropped – and ordinary workers felt the government was doing something for them. I know, I know, on the other hand they moan about the services such as health or schools. In a sense the penny hasn’t dropped.
But one way or another, the fundamental structural inequalities and the plague of elitism which scar our society have not been well explained or exposed by the (small and fragmented?) left.
Postscript on education as someone mentioned Gaelscoileanna:
there is a real sense now in south Dublin that private schooling has reached such a critical mass – in numbers terms but also as an essential in the middle class mind – that it is beginning to distort the whole area. A colleague of mine who is against sending her kids to one of these schools said that there is now a noticible division beginning to appear, or that some hitherto good community schools are beginning to suffer (I think the head of one such school in Stillorgan had an article in the times recently to the same affect).
And as an Irish speaker I totally agree that many are now using the Gaelscoileanna as pseudo-private schools soley for the fact that Gaelscoileanna provide a degree of exclusivity or insulation from socio-economic classes that are lower down the pecking order. I wonder what percentage of kids attend those schools primarily for linguistic reasons?
Just to be clear…. I’ve nothing against Gaelscoileanna or the language (I went to an Irish speaking primary and secondary school myself and I’m still rustily fluent) and I sent my own daughter to an Educate Together school – I can just see how these schools, whatever the sincere grounds for their establishment, end up being slightly elitist, if for nothing else because they are oversubscribed, and therefore get the sort of kids whose parents are motivated enough to put them on the waiting list at birth – never mind being in Ireland and knowing where you’ll be living in 4/5 years time. And they probably do inoculate a bit against D4 obnoxiousness….
ejh, I know where you’re coming from, but… at the same time if not us, who else? Sure, I agree, that the people are the determinants of whether a message is accepted or not, but… in Ireland South it seems that there is a hegemony – not necessarily a neo-liberal one but certainly unquestioningly pro-business, pro- privatisation, etc, etc which is unquestioningly adhered to. Much indeed as Tomaltach and sonofstan point out. And there is a structural problem to all this. Because the left has traditionally depended upon a party arguably further to the right than FF to get into power this has entirely distorted the area of possibility of the left because when in power it is tied to an essentially conservative party. Crumbs from table result. Delegitimisation of the party/project. Back to square one…again and again and again…arguably the definition of madness.
Mark thanks for the link.
Re Gaelscoileanna, I’ve instinctively felt that was a good ‘fit’ although I agree though that there are many reasons why kids are sent to such schools, and indeed Educate Together and some of those reasons are far from benign.
Michael Taft, above, makes an important point. Sherlock, the Labour TD who made the remark that “we must become the party of the marginalized and the millionaire” is the son of Joe Sherlock-the first S.F-W.P. TD. And Joe was from rural Ireland.
Ownership of property is not by itself productive. Talk about the ‘property sector’ and its contribution to national wealth is economically meaningless. Ownership of property allows the owner to extort value created by the value-creating sector. And its a main cause of the growing inequality. A reading of Marx on the distinction between productive and unproductive labour throws light on this issue. Even Adam Smith is useful on the sources of economic rent. The monopolization of the ownership of land in Dublin and elsewhere is a form of legalized extortion and is the source of the endemic corruption of the Soldiers of Destiny. Deputy Sherlock needs to read Das Capital and begin his education in political economy.
To be honest, I reckon the Prospect article is just a load of total rubbish (as usual). Firstly, the elite do not send their kids to gailscoileanna. They send them to the Holy Ghost schools (Blackrock, Michaels) or to the Jesuits (Clongowes, Belvedere, Gonzaga) or to a small set of other private schools in Dublin. Confusing the liberal urban middle classes, who do send their kids to Gaelscoileanna, with the ruling class who don’t, is a category error. Calling journalists and artists “Dublin’s old elite” is just total fantasy.
Dublin’s old elite – people like O’Reilly, Ryan, Sutherland, Mountcharles (all jesuit educated) and so on are the very same people as Dublin’s new elite, there’s just a few more of them (O’Brien, O’Leary, Dunne, Quinn). Since we have had a property-related boom, some of the new members of the elite come from wealthy rural backgrounds rather than wealthy urban backgrounds.
The insight of the article pretty much boils down to “property boom causes property owners to grow rich, rather than journalists or artists. Many people think these newly enriched tycoons are materialistic ego-maniacs”. Well duh.
Landords, said Adam Smith “love to reap where they have not sown”.
Chekov,
As in most countries, when you look closely, Ireland’s elites are pretty closely linked by family and educational bonds; but that doesn’t preclude differences across, and within, generations – so the men now in their 50s who went to the schools you list and control most of the country’s money, are liable to have kid brothers and sisters who are journos or artists and who might send their kids to GS, and even vote Green or something; a look at the extended (Garret) Fitzgerald family would be instructive in this regard. Money, politics (right and left), academia, property and more money; i can think of three families where I know a few members with relations who are or have been TDs (in more than one party), where there is some ancestral money as seed capitial for new fortunes and where there’s always one who’s ‘artistic’.
You’re right that most of the new wealthy are from much the same stock as the old – another part of the same problem is that a large part of the public service/ cultural/ academic/legal/ ‘intellectual’ life of the country is also controlled by people from similar backgrounds and who are much too intimate with the wealth ever to stand clear enough apart from it.
Chekov,
As in most countries, when you look closely, Ireland’s elites are pretty closely linked by family and educational bonds; but that doesn’t preclude differences across, and within, generations – so the men now in their 50s who went to the schools you list and control most of the country’s money, are liable to have kid brothers and sisters who are journos or artists and who might send their kids to GS, and even vote Green or something; a look at the extended (Garret) Fitzgerald family would be instructive in this regard. Money, politics (right and left), academia, property and more money; i can think of three families where I know a few members with relations who are or have been TDs (in more than one party), where there is some ancestral money as seed capitial for new fortunes and where there’s always one who’s ‘artistic’.
You’re right that most of the new wealthy are from much the same stock as the old – another part of the same problem is that a large part of the public service/ cultural/ academic/legal/ ‘intellectual’ life of the country is also controlled by people from similar backgrounds and who are much too intimate with the wealth ever to stand clear enough apart from it.
Sorry, about that… and while we’re at it, the word ‘artistic’ in scare quotes at the end of the first para is not the old fashioned homophobia it sort of looks like…
I think though that we have seen the emergence of new “elite” groups, as happens all the time. It’s not that unprecedented. My point above was to point up the discourse that is used to support their emergence… a very contemporary (albeit almost identical to the one used by the Thatcherite s in the 1980s) one at that.
I think embedded elites are always prevalent, and in that sense you’re correct Chekov, but, elites expand and contract. The upper middle class, particularly the upper percentile is on a roll now. The increase in private school take up is altering the dynamic as well… It’s sort of a confused picture but… one where mobility into the superrich is increasing. On one level I don’t care about them, just tax ‘em. On the other I think this has dismal impacts on the broader society.
one where mobility into the superrich is increasing
But of course it’s still only a tiny, miniscule minority. And you may find that (as in the UK) upward mobility in general actually decreases because the financial inequalities created in a meritocracy actually end up outweighing the capacity of merit to overcome inequality.
Incidentally I wouldn’t go overboard about how Thatcherism changed the nature of the wealthy classes etc. Firstly, Britain wasn’t run by some sort of effete non-working aristocracy until 1979, far from it. The most powerful people in the UK, then as now, were financiers and industrialists and this had been true for a very long time indeed. Secondly, it shouldn’t be overlooked that just because Britain had (and has) a more visible class sytem than other countries – because of our titles and the longevity of our public schools – doesn’t mean that it’s really structurally different to anywhere else. Neither the US nor Australia, for instance, supposedly classless societies, look any different once you drop the Lords and Sirs from people’s names. Oh, and thirdly, it’s odd how in the supposed classless society that Mrs Thatcher supposedly made, these welf-made men who despise the Establishment are all desperate for honours themselves. And send their kids to public schools.
Talking of discourses, it’s usually one about success, about not punishing success (i.e “tax ‘em” is out) and one about “wealth creation” which is at least less of a crock then the one about “rewarding risk”. (How many “entrepreneurs end up broke and jobless compared to their employees, and this being so, who’s really taking the risks?) But the thing about “success” is, the largest element by far in success is access to capital, and that’s something you only have if you’re from a well-off background. My guess would be that the largest single route out of the working class isn’t entrepreneurship. It’s professional sport.
David Harvey treats class as a fluid concept: the composition of the ruling elite can alter over time, especially under a neo-liberalism regime.
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9655
You see, my big problem is that, according to the discourse of Propsect, you guys are the urban elite. When they talk about the cultural elites with their airs and graces and counterpose them to the nouveau riche, they’re actually talking about anybody who thinks that materialism and self-enrichment do not provide an absolute answer to the problems of philosophy.
This elite of which they speak – journalists, artists, senior civil servants and lawyers – stands for those people who have the cultural cheek not to worship those who are successful at accumulating wealth. One is a member of this intelligentsia by virtue of being thoughtful, not rich or powerful.
Of course, there is a small elite circule of culturati in this country and they are, to my mind anyway, totally useless and annoying. But these analyses are eliding them with anybody who has a non-materialist thought at all. It’s the same sort of analysis which sees Michael Moore versus George Bush and sees a privileged poseur versus an honest son of the soil – only the wrong way round.
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying chekov.
ejh, I’m still talking about the discourse, how sub elite groups attempted to portray themselves – tellingly – in a faux revolutionary light. Of course Thatcherism wasn’t a break with the pre-existing situation. It was a continuation albeit with new groups appropriated.
[...] importance, and provides an opening, for those who will take it to start acting, as Mick Taft suggested yesterday ‘relevant and rowdy’ or to quote him in full: But because the Left (and I [...]
This elite of which they speak – journalists, artists, senior civil servants and lawyers – stands for those people who have the cultural cheek not to worship those who are successful at accumulating wealth. One is a member of this intelligentsia by virtue of being thoughtful, not rich or powerful.
Quite. Just considering that there are values other than market values somehow makes one part of the elite.
However, there is a genuine reason why this sort of thing has an impact on people outside the elite, and it’s not just the generally specious idea that there is a genuine chance for working people to “make it” and become part of the elite themselves. It’s that both capitalists and their employees play, in one important way, buy their own rules: they play on the market. The capitalist sells their goods on the market, the worker their labour. The worker doesn’t have the protection that the professional classes – those who live by their educational attainments – possess and therefore will often find themselves resenting the educated and seeing them as holding unfair advanatages and shielding themselves from competition. So why shouldn’t – they ask – libraries, universities, public service television, the arts and so on be subject to the same market pressures as they are? It’s a hard question to ansewr but it’s necessary that we do.
The admirable Thomas Franks is of course very good on how this works in the US.
I do feel that even social democratic values have seriously declined in recent years among younger people in Western societies, who, having lived without mass unemployment and with the increasing availability of sophisticated consumer goods, have ceased to regard social provision (which, outside of health, they generally do not need) as a good thing and started to share the view of their finacial betters, that it’s all a drag on wage-earners and taxpayers like themselves. Politically, this is a disaster.
ejh, I’d agree entirely. Your last point is very worrying indeed… and in the article I reference by Paul Krugman he notes much the same thing as regards its impact on health insurance. More broadly, in effect, elites both professional and upper class, generate their own ‘welfare states’ through networks of privilege – schools, private insurance, pension provision, etc, etc. The point about payment is crucial. A left response is there. It’s always been there whatever the changing nature of the society.
Yesterday i listened to a young guy I know – working casually in the music business (day labour effectively) – complaining bitterly about ‘his taxes’ supporting the unemployed ’sitting around drinking all day’. This sort of thing is, sadly not uncommon, and, as I think was noted here before, Trade Unions are widely seen as a cloak for the workshy.
On ejh’s point about the worker resenting the educated middle- class professional; a corollary of that is the spread of what is effectively casual labour dressed up as contract labour or self- employment; its the way doctors and barristers effectively work, and its sold as empowering, when in fact its the opposite, taking away all the safeguards painstakingly won through generations; effectively dismantling large aspects of the public welfare state, while leaving intact the private one WBS mentions, one which is out of reach of the newly casualised lower-middle/ upper- working classes
Did you get a chance to ask him how he knew they were sitting around drinking all day?
Anyway, may hell mend them. I’m tempted to say that they’ll reap what they’ve sown when neo-liberalism demands their heads on the chopping block.
Except of course, that it will drive them towards the politics of national chauvinism.
Did you get a chance to ask him how he knew they were sitting around drinking all day?
Apparently they all do it on the street outside his window, drinking his tax euros – targettingof resources, eh?
If he’s on a casual wage, how much can he be paying in tax, anyway?
Was there any sign that this poor eejit could have been reasoned with, or like all too many young people was he unable to discuss things in a calm or adult manner, being able to express himself only in terms of violent contempt?
the same amount everyone who pays tax thinks they’re paying- ‘too much’……
Actually ‘this poor eejit’ is German (and from the East) although he’s lived here for over 10 years, so maybe his violent anti -statism has something to do with that, but it’s not an untypical attitude.
The real sickening thing about the ‘new Ireland’ is its vulgarity. The old money, coming from where it did, and it’s absolute belief in the permanence of it’s institutions, at least attempted to make its environs pleasureable to the eye and as evidence of it’s understanding of craftmanship and husbandry. The neglect of towns and villages and their historical functions over the last while, under the seemingly endless sprawl of unplanned developments and pointless civil engineering projects, exposes the extent to which our current crop of leaders are untrammelled in their pursuit of wealth and influence, and the extent to which we as people are constantly re-fighting old battles and not learning from past mistakes.
I buy into that somewhat, but… in Ireland I think it’s fair to say that the old money wasn’t terribly concerned with the public space. “fingers in the greasy till” was as true in the mid to late 20th century as it was when it was written. The reasons for this are no doubt being worked upon by some student on a post grad thesis somewhere but perhaps the broader narrative of public austerity forced private expenditure/consumption out of the public eye (and that I think explains in part why the O’Reilly/Smurfit generation went to the UK to find a larger more accepting public stage). That the public austerity was also a lot of hypocritical nonsense (for the main part) is a different issue again.