The role of government is to suppress anger

Could reform of the system be the trigger for the next crisis? It's time to take The Sniff Test.

Source: EPA via BBC

Anger with the social structure

There is a common theme in the best writing about political causes. Anger. Not necessarily the anger of the writer but always the anger of the subject. And the subject of the writing is the oppressor.

In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes about the social expectations of women as child bearers, ignorant and chaste. Free expression requires money and a room of one’s own. She recognises her good fortune in having both.

Woolf reads books in the British Library by men about women and is struck by how angry the authors are when women seek to break the bounds of social convention. The anger this provokes in her is temporary and gives way to ridicule as she pillories these pompous men.

The specific arguments in the essay are dated. Half of the top ten best selling authors of all time are women and child rearing is no longer a barrier to being a writer. But the idea that male anger with women is oppressive remains.

This week thousands of Italian women attended the funeral of Giulia Cecchettin, the student murdered by her former boyfriend. The prime minister referred to a culture of misogynistic violence. It’s hard to tell in translation whether this was designed to provoke anger or sympathy with the peaceful protests.

When you give something a name you seek to define it. Confuse misogyny with male behaviour and you devalue its meaning. Men are violent and not just against women.

The United Nations reports 89% of arrests for violent crime worldwide are of men. In the UK, 84% of violent crimes are committed by men, while in Italy the figure is 93%.

One in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organisation. That’s a huge number but it also means two-thirds of women never suffer at the hands of a male partner. That is not a culture of misogyny.

Woolf was addressing a social structure that was universally repressive but not necessarily violent. What about structures in which violence is inherent.

Anger with the system

James Baldwin’s essay Notes of a Native Son is about his anger at the anger of white people towards blacks in America. There is violence throughout the essay. Baldwin’s step father is cruel, a race riot takes place outside the church on the day of the step father’s funeral and the author reacts violently to being denied service in an upmarket restaurant.

Baldwin’s anger does not dissipate as Woolf’s does. He learns to control his hatred, because this is far worse for the hater than the hated, but anger remains as motivation and cause. Seen as such, it may be rationalised.

Baldwin comes to appreciate that his step father wanted to educate his children as a defence against an outside world that was more cruel and unjust than anything served up at home. The cynicism of the man, who was a respected pastor, defined him and created the repression he was trying to escape. When you feel the world is against you then the world is against you.

The social structure that Baldwin despised has not changed as much as the one Woolf wrote about. In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote The Case for Reparations, published in “The Atlantic” for which he was a correspondent. This is a call for financial redress for the oppression of black Americans in a culture of white supremacy.

The argument is about much more than slavery. This was long abolished by the time Baldwin attempted to be served in a northern restaurant. The 13^th Amendment passed in 1865 at the conclusion of the Civil War, but in 2007 the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that 40% of sub prime loans in the US were given to African Americans and 23% to Hispanic.

The system remains rigged and this is Coates’ case for reparations.

Poverty is a trap

The poor get a rough financial deal everywhere. Pay as you go utilities are more expensive than monthly billing in arrears, while payday lenders and fringe credit card issuers target those least able to pay with eyewatering interest rates. Even the quality of food available is lower in poorer areas, as the assumption of the unaffordability of better nutrition means it is less accessible and more expensive as a consequence. There are few Waitrose south of the river.

Results of Google Search for Waitrose south of the river

How does it feel to be poor? You may be angry with the system but this is because you do not understand why the system is angry with you. In the UK we talk about the postcode lottery, which is the differing standards of healthcare depending on where you live.

Life expectancy in north Manchester is 10 years below that of the highest areas. Kensington and Chelsea has the longest life expectancy in London for women, and second to Westminster for men. This is between 6 and 7 years higher than in Barking and Dagenham.

The white British population of Barking and Dagenham is between 44% and 50% depending on the survey, but always above the 37% average across London in the 2021 census. Poverty is less of a racial issue in the UK than in the US but that does not mean race is not an issue.

The migration mistake

This week the Home Secretary proposed new rules that minimum income of £38,700 would be required to qualify to have a foreign spouse. The principle is that if you bring someone into the country you must be able to support them. Last year the average salary in the UK was £33,400.

Rules like this are necessarily arbitrary and there will be edge cases and oddities. If a nurse married an Argentinean they may not be able to live with them in the UK, while an Argentinean doctor coming to Britain would receive an exemption from the rules.

We might argue that this is as it should be. We want to attract the brightest and the best and immigration should be bringing above average talent to the UK. This is a category error.

A few years ago I was traveling with the CEO of a large UK bank. He told me that while the government view of a small business was a factory outside Cambridge making contact lenses for deep sea divers, in reality it was a kebab shop.

The primary purpose of migrant labour is to fill cheap jobs. The government may want to attract highly skilled surgeons and technicians for those fenland factories, but that’s not where the demand for migrants comes from.

The technology and communications sector has the highest demand but hospitality, financial services, transport, warehousing and utilities round out the top of the list. I’d hazard most of these jobs are customer facing or inconvenient hours that locals don’t want to work.

Arrivals in the UK by industry (source: Labour Force Survey)

Once these workers arrive in Britain on low wages they are subject to the discriminatory practices that penalise the poor. Southern blacks fled north to escape physical oppression and face financial repression in the US. How different are African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing north to Europe. The distances are similar and so are the reasons. The main difference is when you get citizenship.

We enshrine these differences in the language we use. Migrants are either political or economic and that naming is enough to justify different treatments. The stigma is to be an economic migrant but those are the people in demand in British businesses. The lesson from the US is that if you treat these people as second class citizens after they arrive, then anger and resentment will continue to rise on both sides.

The purpose of post war democracy

I have written a bit and referred a lot to what I call the Doomsday theories. These are a series of arguments based on historical patterns concluding that around 2030 there will be an eruption of violence across Western societies. Yet there is a major difference between the current cycle and all the others.

Since World War II minimum standards of health and retirement have been promised and in more recent times minimum wages have been introduced. Much of this is achieved by transfer payments, meaning the taxes of the better off pay for the benefits of the rest. As the population has grown and aged, the cost of payments has risen and long since stopped being covered by tax receipts alone.

There is resentment among many who pay net taxes, even while they most often benefit from better education and health in the areas where they live. Mostly this is aimed at welfare payments which are not the bulk of government outlays. Health, education and a minimum pension are the big spending categories.

There is resentment among those who receive transfer payments. Post war democracies wanted to ensure that the depression and poverty that preceded the war would not be repeated and that those who did battle for freedom were rewarded. The reality is that handouts create a dependency from which it is difficult to escape when you are trapped in poor areas that receive lower quality services.

This creates anger with the social structure. Marx called this class consciousness and expected it would lead to the proletariat rising up and overthrowing capitalism. That it didn’t he called false consciousness, whereby poorer people support the system for the crumbs it throws them, rather than trying to climb up to the table.

Marx called religion the opiate of the people. Organised religion that teaches tolerance and acceptance of suffering prevented people from developing class consciousness. It’s a wet blanket thrown over smouldering embers to prevent the blaze taking hold.

Post war government spending plays a similar role.

The role of agency in happiness

Happiness has three roots. The first is pleasure, but alone this is not enough. We must have both satisfaction and meaning. A purposeful pursuit that results in positive outcomes is more important than dopamine hits in bringing us happiness. This is called having agency.

Health, education and social security are vast redistributive programmes but they are also big employers. The public sector employs nearly one fifth of the workforce, slightly less in the UK than in France, and a few percentage points more than in the US where healthcare is privatised.

Source: Office for National Statistics

While London has the most public sector jobs, its large private sector means it has among the lowest percentages of workers employed by the government. The statistics are five years old, but public sector employment is highest in smaller cities with concentrations of health and defence staff. In Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, Southampton and Chichester more than one third of the workforce is in the public sector.

Over half of Oxford’s population are white British. Overall public sector employment skews to ethnic minorities, but not by much. 15% of the public sector is ethnic minority compared with just over 13% of the workforce. 78% of healthcare workers are white British compared to 56% of construction workers.

The migrants are coming to do the jobs where there is economic demand. The public sector is providing a blanket over the smouldering resentment about the class divide across all ethnicities. Government spending creates false consciousness that stops the riots breaking out. This is the difference between now and all the other Doomsday cycles.

Be wary of reform

Health and education are an entitlement. So too is a government job if you live in certain areas or come from a particular background. Many of us like to complain about the service we get from the public sector but these are jobs largely without agency and employees have no control over rules or outcomes. Most government jobs involve processing people and dealing with those edge cases the media likes to highlight as injustices.

The combination of pensions, social security and public sector employment are the painkillers of modern society. They do the heavy lifting that prevents the next outbreak of mass warfare. This is modern democracy, unequal, unfunded and smothering anger at source.

Attempts to reform the system may spark the next crisis.