There has been an inconsistency between two highly prominent policy areas that has been niggling away at the back of my mind for quite some time now. UKIP needs to take note.
So, take two policy areas and also take into account the temperature (at least according to the Daily Mail, etc) of the voters.
The first area is education. Schools that do not match up to the floor levels at Key Stage 2 and at GCSE are pounced upon by Ofsted. They require improvement or are put into special measures. All children must get 5 good GCSEs. They must progress and they must aspire. Think of the slogans that populate the UK and US education policy discourse: “no child must be left behind; “every child matters”; and social mobility is regarded and upheld as a kind of rebalancing panacea to address all social ills and help narrow the gap.
According to our friends at the Mail, the education system is failing us and is exhorted to go further—we need to go back to the “golden days” of selective education and we must emulate the private system, held up as THE model for how to educate children. There has been a “race to the bottom”, manifested by the comprehensive system that must be addressed through individual school accountability and competition between schools—ie, academies.
Everyone—teachers, pupils, parents—must do better to ensure we have the skills fit for the “knowledge economy” which will ensure we are leaders in the “global race”.
The second area is immigration. The current policy proposals demand point systems, which mean that the only immigrants we are prepared to allow in are those with skills. Those who come in, unbidden and unwanted (by the Mail readers), through free flow from the EU and work in our strawberry fields or on our assembly lines or wait in our bars and restaurants, are frowned upon. They are taking our jobs! The jobs of our young people, in particular—at least, according to the Mail. On the doorstep people tell us that immigration must be stopped, that these incomers are not needed, that we can fill the gaps with our home-grown citizens.
Yet by our own national policy priorities, our young people must get 5 good GCSEs and aspire to skilled jobs. They must not take the unskilled jobs, as if they do, both they and the system will have failed.
So if we keep out the low skilled immigrants and stick with our current education policies, logically we will have to stop producing strawberries in our fields, as there will be no-one to pick them, and we will have to further denude our manufacturing sector, as there will be no-one to man the production lines.
So, what do we do? Do we regressively alter our education priorities and accept that some people will work in the low-skilled sector and should not aspire to move up the social mobility ladder ?
Or do we accept that immigration of low-skilled workers in particular is actually important in our economy as it means that people come here, work hard in low paid, low skilled jobs and, if they do decide to stay, usually aspire to get their second generation into skilled jobs?
Maybe the Daily Mail will come to accept that the price of civilization and progress, at least when seen within the context of a system of national borders, is immigration? Otherwise it’s back to the feudal days of lords and peasants.
Ah, but maybe that is what UKIP is all about, after all…….
* Helen Flynn is an Executive Member of the LDEA. She is a former Parliamentary Candidate and Harrogate Borough Councillor and has served on the Federal Policy Committee and Federal Board. She has been a school governor in a variety of settings for 19 years and currently chairs a multi academy trust in the north of England.
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26 Comments
Helen Flynn
Or do we accept that immigration of low-skilled workers in particular is actually important in our economy as it means that people come here, work hard in low paid, low skilled jobs and, if they do decide to stay, usually aspire to get their second generation into skilled jobs?
And then we bring in more immigrant labour to do the unskilled jobs that have to be done. Repeat generation, after generation after generation. Can we REALLY do this for ever and ever? Or should we instead stop using snobbish language like “Do we regressively alter our education priorities and accept that some people will work in the low-skilled sector and should not aspire to move up the social mobility ladder?” and actually accept that there is nothing wrong with good hard manual work and the people who do it, and we should stop abusing them by regarding them as some sort of failure?
” Yet by our own national policy priorities, our young people must get 5 good GCSEs and aspire to skilled jobs. They must not take the unskilled jobs, as if they do, both they and the system will have failed.”
You have hit the nail on the head, Helen. Manual jobs are not valued in our system any longer, as more emphasis is put on making schools and teachers ‘accountable.’ What better way than to load the burden of success on levels of attainment at the end of each key stage – the Daily Mail, and ‘hard-working parents’ will know who to blame when the children don’t get the required number of GCSEs.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the DfE does not regard any route to aspiration as valid unless it includes taking GCSEs in a narrow list of approved subjects and going on to ‘leading universities.’
This aspiration, if one can call it such, is narrow and divisive, because it disregards thousands of young people’s talents and abilities. It pours cold water on good jobs as young people are encouraged to perceive blue collar and skilled work as beneath them.
As a society, we need to accept that some people actually thrive doing practical and manual work – they should be encourage to pursue occupations that are suitable for them. Also, we need to value equally in the curriculum, practical and vocational work.
If we don’t, then immigration will continue to be necessary.
Sorry Lib Dems but 77% of the British public disagree with you. You will find out how isolated your views are in May.
I took a low skilled job when I left 6th form. My Nephew has left 6th form and still cannot find a full time job. He has 9 GCSEs and 3 A levels.
Answer that without resorting to an EU mouthpiece rant.
Trouble is, education only values the sort of skills that you can write down on paper. If you look at a piece of relatively simple technology, say, a house roof, you’ll see all sorts of knowledge embedded in it. How water flows, gravity, heating and insulation, light control, wind resistance, how to select, cut, and connect pieces of wood to hold it together, and so on. But because it’s all manual work, it counts for nothing…until it blows off and the rain comes in. What’s that saying? A society that overvalues philosophers and undervalues plumbers is in a sad way: Neither its ideas nor its pipes will hold water.
@Mark Thompson
“Sorry Lib Dems but 77% of the British public disagree with you. You will find out how isolated your views are in May.”
I don’t follow. The Lib Dems secured 23% of the vote at the last General Election. So 77% of voters voted for one of the other parties (a point that many of those without a Grade C+ Maths GCSE might have difficulty making).
Is that what you meant?
Or are you referring to a particular policy position of the Lib Dems where you think opinion polls say 77% of people diasgree? If so, which?
My whole point in this slightly tongue in cheek piece, is that current policies as they stand are a mess. Yes we should absolutely value manual skills, amd people who do not aspire to what are regarded as high status jobs. But our current education policy does not allow for this. Then we are saying we must keep out immigrant low skilled workers, but the signals we are sent is that we should not “lower ourselves” to these types of jobs. So who is to do these jobs?
So can we sort this out, please? And please don’t take this piece literally! I am pointing out the ridiculousness of things as they currently stand!
Helen inform us that :
“The current policy proposals demand point systems, which mean that the only immigrants we are prepared to allow in are those with skills. ”
Copied From Lib Dem Immigration policy (pdf)
~ A regional points-based system to ensure migrants go where they are needed.
O.K. that’s do-able.
~ A regional points-based system to ensure […….EU ……..] migrants go where they are needed.
Not O.K. Indeed impossible if you remain in the EU
C’mon Helen, is this the best you’ve got? This kind of verbal subterfuge is the very thing that has put politics into the ‘don’t trust a word they say’, category.
Tell me Ms Flynn, do you think that the people struggling would be quite so, ‘tongue in cheek?’ You must know full well that the problem in this picture is not the devaluation of education but rather the devaluation of labour. In the early 1970s, manual labour on a production line was enough for my Dad to pay the mortgage on a 3 bed semi (with double digit interest rates), raise a family and drive a car. One wage. And he didn’t have to compete with half of Europe for a job.
Who exactly is that sees the benefit of the devaluation of labour? BTL landlords, capital that employs casual labour and who else. Perhaps you could get tongue in cheek again and say that the UK workless should be happy about free movement because it means that French and German bankers pay taxes to cover the benefit bill that has resulted from the economic dislocations implicit in free movement of labour. Be glad you’ve now got pound shops because all the workshops have gone to Romania. That tongue in cheek enough?
Part of the problem is that there has been a severe definition inflation of the term, ‘highly skilled.’ In the past this meant a 15+ year period in a niche sector, now it seems to mean, ‘a university degree.’ Take a look at the six month unemployment rate for engineers and IT graduates. Doesn’t look much like a shortage of skills to me at those career stages. Experienced specialist electrical engineer = highly skilled. Computer scientist with experience in formal aspects or cryptography = highly skilled. Newly qualified anything rarely = meaningfully highly skilled. ‘Highly skilled,’ is not the same thing as, ‘a skillset some employer might like.’
How about instead of using this question as a stalking horse for an agenda about immigration, we look at WHY it is that low-skilled jobs no longer seem to give a living for the UK citizen at large in the way it did for the boomer class. How about instead of these glib op pieces we think about the barriers that people face when confronted with housing insecurity, a casualised labour market, wage arbitrage and so on.
And this is before we get to mode 4.
Of course there will always be a need, a real need, for transient labour, it’s hardly new per se. And indeed it has become far too easy for the UK government to duck behind the EU as an excuse for shortcomings. But please don’t come on here and pretend that the devaluation of labour is something to be glossed over – it is a slap across the face to an increasingly large section of society that someone once called alarm-clock Britain.
jenny barnes – It is worth pointing out here that a big problem in the trades is that for many years (and under successive governments it should be noted) we have had a severe lack of new build. In the past the normal route that newly qualified tradespeople followed was into new build, then on. Few did yellow-pages style work. That needs things like expensive tools, a van, advertising and an address book full of contacts that come over time and with experience. The lack of new build really hit the routes for young tradespeople hard. The Polish plumber got the media’s attention, but the lack of new build is just as much a problem that no one seems to want to talk about. It’s not that the skills are undervalued as such, it’s about the work there is out there. Hence the glut of people moving into teaching.
One argument that I have heard is that low skilled immigrants do not pay much if any income tax. As we are trying to increase the personal tax allowance I can see that there might be some validity to that point. Farage was wittering on about not letting people earning less than £27500 come here to work. I am just wondering, as a thought experiment, if VAT were raised then more tax would be collected from people below the threshold anyway? I am guessing that a VAT rise would impact those on benefits most, so we should consider raising their benefits to compensate?
The standard rate of VAT increased from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent on 4 January 2011. I guess that we could next raise it to 25% then in due course 30%. It is a good way to raise revenue which even the wealthy cannot easily avoid with their tax havens etc.
The million young unemployed does bother me. The nephew of Mark Thompson for example. Evidently not lazy as he achieved 3 A levels. Laziness of British workers is often cited to explain why employers prefer eastern Europeans. Are there any other factors that account for this preference?
“So, what do we do? Do we regressively alter our education priorities and accept that some people will work in the low-skilled sector and should not aspire to move up the social mobility ladder ?” This is where libdems and all other champagne socialists fall over – because someone works in low skilled sector does not mean they dont aspire to move up the social mobility ladder. And even if it did, there are plenty of younger people who need these kind of jobs, and can then themselves “move up”. In addition, the artificially low wages paid for byuncontrolled mass immigration would not happen if it were restricted to highly skilled immigrants.
‘Laziness of British workers is often cited to explain why employers prefer eastern Europeans. Are there any other factors that account for this preference?’
I think that the term you are looking for is wage arbitrage.
First class, thoughts provoking and well-argued article. Thank you Helen !!!!
@Little Jackie Piper
” In the early 1970s, manual labour on a production line was enough for my Dad to pay the mortgage on a 3 bed semi (with double digit interest rates), raise a family and drive a car. One wage. And he didn’t have to compete with half of Europe for a job.”
I remember those days. One reason that your dad could this was that building societies (the only lenders ) assumed that the any married woman of fertile age could fall pregnant at any moment; therefore she couldn’t have a career or a stable income. So any salary or wage she had was ignored in mortgage applications. This limited the pool of house buyers and kept prices down, so many more people lived in rented council accommodation. People without the sort of record that entitled them to a council house lived in private rented accommodation that would be condemned today.
Joe King
VAT has a devastating impact on low-paid workers, those in receipt of entitlements etc. becuase of the falling marginal utility of money. £2 on an item if you earn £100 p.w. is 2% of you income. On £600 pw it is less. So you are in favourof higher tax-rates and greate burdens for the poor.
As for skilled immigrants, if we recruit them we are stealing the human capital from often poor countries of emmigration; if we use them in unskilled agricultiral jobs ( as is reported) we are also wasting that investment once we have it. If we recruit unskilled labour and they are paid cash-in-hand and repatriate their earnings, living in squalor to build a nest-egg back home, we are exdploiting people to subsidise propfits.
The situation needs a more radical analysis: I suggest we might start by analysing the impact of free flows of labour and money-capital on wage-levels and as against profit rake-offs by rentiers. It explains, I think, the current decining value and share of labour’s slice of the national cake..
There will always for what ever reason people who will only be able to manage a low skilled job. In the “good old days” you had the opportunity if you wished to take it of going to evening classes doing City & Guilds and progressing up the ladder and if your employer wasnt willing to accept your increased qualifications then others were.
Now we have a problem where training appears to be offered less and our apprenticiship schemes are fragmented.
Industries that were abundant inthe 60’s and 70’s have mainly gone
We need to support are small manufacturers so thatthey can expand and be able to offer jobs and training to our young people A finaly comment that someone made about mortgages. In those days you were expected to have saved regularly with a building society and they then gave thee times the mans and a proportion of the womens and that was after checking with your employer what your salary was
@ LJP “we have had a severe lack of new build.”
Yes I agree. This government pretends to think the “help to buy” bubble policy will address that, when any sensible economic analysis says it won’t. So many things would be addressed by a serious house building programme of both public and privately owned housing. Housing benefit, ridiculous house prices, jobs, and by building to high insulation standards we would be able eventually to eliminate some of our energy hungry old houses, with a reduction in energy demand, cheaper energy bills…. It makes so much sense it’s difficult to imagine why we don’t do it. Unless, of course, we’re just having a neoliberal scam to destroy the welfare state by permanent austerity. LibDems wouldn’t support that, would they?
Roger Roberts: “There will always for what ever reason people who will only be able to manage a low skilled job.”
Only? I think that is the key word. There is a fine line between ‘aspiration’ and ‘progressing up the ladder’ and valuing manual work without being fatalistic about the people who do them.
In the past, under the old selective schooling system, there was a fatalism about children from certain social backgrounds. No sensible person wants to return to that. However, there is no shame in wanting to do manual work, wanting to do a good job and actually thriving in doing so. My grandfather did so and brought up a family through it – why should hard-workers who were not white-collar be looked down on – because he didn’t go to university?
If someone feels that they can branch into higher skilled work, fine but Helen Flynn points out that only those who take exams and who look to go up the ladder are valued.
What we end up with as a society are a lot of chiefs and not many indians. Hence the need for immigrant labour.
As others have pointed out, we need to reward and those who do essential manual and practical jobs well. How about paying these people a living wage and valuing their effort?
A polite request for clarity in phrasing – can posters in this thread not assume that ‘manual’ jobs are automatically ‘low skilled’; the two terms are not synonymous? Similarly, there are desk- and office-based jobs in our current economy which are low-skilled, low-waged and low-status.
I have a degree and I sit at a computer and wear a shirt when I am doing my job; these two facts are not related at all. But nursing work (for example) requires both hard, manual, physical work, and a degree.
I agree with those posters who point to the collapse of the quality of training available from your employer for younger workers; a factor in this is the lack of permanence and decrease in length of contracts. But this is true also for ‘high-status’ jobs, too, where there is an expectation in many industries that you (or your parents) will pay for your own training and organise your own work experience (often unpaid).
My ability to make opportunities happen for myself in later life would have been enhanced at GCSE level by being provided with work experience in ‘manual’ positions alongside being encouraged to aspire to desk jobs.
Helen Flynn,
There is, I think, a larger question than the issue of some taking low wage jobs. It is that the economy simply isn’t generating enough jobs on the one hand or people qualified to do them on the other hand. Mark Thompson’s nephew is by no means exceptional – I also know people like that and I also know older people who have started consultancies or retired early which are often (not always) polite middle class ways of being unemployed. And for years governments have bored on about how they want more people to go into science and engineering careers but somehow it never happens.
Since much of the domestic economy doesn’t work properly successive governments have repeatedly taken the path of least resistance and, rather than get to grips with the underlying issues, have simply imported whatever is short even when we could have a perfectly adequate domestic supply – e.g. manufactured goods (with which we used to supply the world), know-how (Hinckley Point for instance), even capital (Hinckley Point again – what does the City actually do?) and now PEOPLE – just what we need in one of the most overcrowded countries on Earth with the smallest homes in Europe, not to mention a housing crisis.
In education taking the path of least resistance – or at least the most obvious one – has taken the form of building a centralised, top-down, target led system remarkably like the former Soviet approach except for us it’s the Goviet system. As in the Soviet system targets must be met (or else!) but it doesn’t actually work. So we have the waste of lives and hopes amid shortages of labour that can only be met by imports. And all this despite ever-rising spending.
As for those that employ low-skilled workers to pick strawberries or whatever I wouldn’t worry too much. We are now very close to seeing commercial deployment of autonomous field robots to weed or harvest according to season and driverless cars. Already factory production lines employ very few people and those they do have are mainly maintenance. Few people realise that the industrial revolution happened in Britain in substantial part because low end wages were HIGH, not because they were low. Entrepreneurs had to find alternative ways of doing things; they did, they made lots of money and then they made even more by exporting the know-how and machinery. It’s the exact opposite of pandering to industry and farmers and hence following the path of least resistance that has been (and remains) the strategy of UK governments over several decades – which is why we now have to import solutions to our future energy needs.
The nephew of Mark Thompson for example. Evidently not lazy as he achieved 3 A levels
Well, that (and his employment prospects) depends on what the three A levels are, doesn’t it? As well as the grades. If he has As in say, Maths, History and French that’s one thing; if he has Cs in Media Studies, Photography and PE then he’s going to be waiting a long time for a job.
Just saying he ‘has three A levels’ doesn’t tell us anything useful.
Michael Parsons,
Do you think we should get rid of VAT altogether? It would save a considerable amount of administrative effort and if your argument is correct would benefit the most financially struggling in society. Thinking about it, why do we have it anyway? And if it is not a good thing for society, why did our coalition government increase it? We in our party are responsible for this increase too, since we are in the coalition.
Tom,
Even in these times of dumbing down the education system, it does take some effort to achieve 3 A levels. If someone has the work ethic then they should be employable doing something. The tragedy of our time is that there is an over-supply of workers and it is making it difficult for for younger people to even get started.
@Joe King
The previous comments about VAT are incorrect.
Anybody who considers that VAT has a devastating impact on low-paid workers and on those on low incomes generally should investigate what goods and services VAT applies to. Anybody who thinks that VAT is “devastatingly” unfair then needs to spell out which of those goods and services they think the poorest in society buy to any great extent.
As it happens that there is something subject to VAT of which the poorest proportionately buy a lot and that is gas and electricity. However that is only subject to 5% rate of VAT and the rate was not increased under the Coalition Government.
The tragedy of our time is that there is an over-supply of workers
There is most definitely not an over-supply of high-calibre workers for intellectually demanding jobs. I promise you, I’ve had to interview some of them. An over-supply there is not.
I am not convinced it takes that much effort or ability to get low grades (C or below) in three A levels. Pretty much turning up to the classes, taking in a minimum of information, and regurgitating it in the exam seems to do the trick.
“in the early 1970s”
Low skilled jobs were done by people from Spain, Portugal and Cyprus.
Mark Thompson
GCSEs in Maths and Science?