Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 12

Each generation born after 1955 has accumulated less than the one that went before. The ownership of property has also declined with every succeeding generation since the 1950s, and so has net financial wealth in the form of current and savings accounts, equities and gilts. The richest 10 per cent of people in Britain now own 66 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Glacially but surely, the pattern of reward in capitalism has shifted towards the mill-owner and away from the foreman, let alone the worker on the shop floor. Over the last four decades the share of national value which has gone into the pay packet has fallen from 59 per cent to 54 per cent. The suppliers of capital have seen their share rise from 22 per cent to 27 per cent.

This would matter less if everyone was being paid more, but alas they are not. The promissory note of British politics was that higher labour productivity would be rewarded with higher pay. All over the developed world that link has broken. It broke abruptly in the United States in 1970. Median earnings in Canada have been flat for thirty years, even though productivity has grown by 37 per cent. Real monthly income fell over the past decade in Germany. Mechanisation and the premium paid for skilled over unskilled work has now broken the link in Britain. Wage growth has been lagging productivity improvements for two decades. In the five years before the recession of 2008 the economy grew more than 2 per cent each year and productivity by 1.6 per cent each year. But the workers did not get paid for their smarter work. Median incomes were flat apart from at the top, where they kept rising. Until 2002, average wages grew in tandem with GDP. Not now: average wages stopped growing in 2003 and are not expected to pick up before 2020.

Deprived of pay progression, most people now earn what they might have expected to earn ten years ago. A decade has been spirited away. The young have had it even worse; for people in their mid-twenties, fifteen years of pay growth have disappeared. Nearly half of the people affected have no qualifications beyond GCSEs. They spend a lot of their disposable income on food and petrol and two-thirds of them are not saving a penny for their pension. It is quite possible that the fortunes of those who start work in a time of stagnant pay growth will never fully recover. These are the people for whom housing takes up too much of their income and whose hopes of ever becoming home-owners are receding. Housing is the third urgent question.