Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  The chief statistician in the NHS wrote to one of Gordon Brown’s inner circle, to assert that the data should not be released because ‘they are potentially inaccurate and may give the wrong impression.’

  This was the last thing Number Ten wanted to hear. The whole knife crime strategy — the PM’s date with soap and soccer stars; the photo opportunity; the launch of No to Knives; the chance to get some positive publicity on a story that had been causing immense damage to the government — all of it was now jeopardised by some jumped-up data wonks in Leeds arguing that the figures were ‘provisional’ and might ‘give the wrong impression’.

  The Home Office had pulled together some other numbers but these, frankly, were pretty thin, if not outright dodgy. ‘Number Ten are adamant about the need to publish this statistic,’ the NHS team were told in an email. Even a desperate call from the National Statistician herself would not get Mr Brown’s team to budge.

  The following morning the Home Office released their knife crime ‘fact sheet’, with an accompanying press release proclaiming the 27 per cent fall in stab victims. The government news machine had effectively decided that the only way to counter an unhelpful myth was to manufacture another.

  Over the next few months, official figures were released which offered a clearer idea of what had really been happening with knives on Britain’s streets in 2008. In London, where many of the high-profile stabbings had taken place, police had been keeping records of knife crime, even though it was not required by the Home Office. When they compared what had happened during the ‘epidemic’ with the same period a year earlier they found that crimes involving knives had actually fallen 14 per cent. When the hospital admission figures were finalised they showed that, while Britain was in the middle of its knife crime panic, the numbers of people admitted to hospital with stab wounds was 8 per cent lower than it had been the year before. In the areas targeted by the government’s programme, the number of stab victims taken to hospital didn’t fall 27 per cent. No, it also fell 8 per cent — a slower reduction, it might be noted, than had been recorded in the months before TKAP.

  The Tackling Knives Action Programme kept its name but, less than a year after its launch, it was quietly broadened to cover all violence, whatever the weapon. In other words, police went back to doing what they had always done.

  Every stabbing represents an individual tragedy. But there was no knife crime epidemic in Britain in 2008. What we actually saw was an exercise in urban myth-making that may well have left Britain’s communities more anxious, more suspicious and more vulnerable. Far from helping to counter ignorance and expose falsehood, the media became an accessory in undermining the truth.

  L is for Learning

  The youth of today! What are they like? Can’t sit still for a minute: constantly clicking and flicking channels on the TV; tapping and typing three simultaneous conversations on Facebook, text and Twitter; chit-chatting incessantly on their mobile while managing to listen to some new dance track they are downloading onto their iPod; one wonders that the computer’s processors don’t explode, such is the speed and ferocity with which they career about the Internet, like psychotic honey bees buzzing from bloom to bloom with no time to dwell. Why can’t they just sit quietly and read a book, for goodness sake?

  OK. I have got that off my chest. Now let us address the title at the top of this page — learning.

  My point is, of course, that the way we access, absorb and use information has changed radically within a generation. Growing up in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, the era of the baby-boomer, was to inhabit a linear world where we read a book from cover to cover, we watched a television programme from beginning to end, a film from title to credits.

  The new Internet generation, the so-called ‘NetGen’, inhabit a hypermedia world with fewer straight lines. Rather than reading, listening or watching in a pre-ordained order, my children and their peers routinely engage with information interactively. At the touch of a button they create their own TV schedules; on the Internet they are free to roam — picking up an idea here, researching it there, road-testing it somewhere else and, if they wish, publishing their conclusions too. All text can be processed, all sound can be sampled, all images can be formatted and manipulated.

  It is not the end of narrative, thank goodness. Members of the Internet generation, like those from every generation before them, make sense of their lives through stories. They still go to movies, listen to music and read books from start to finish. But new technology has allowed the NetGen consumer to use knowledge in ways my generation, at their age, could not even imagine.

  That is what is going on when I see my teenage daughter surfing and texting and listening and reading and chatting, all at the same time. She is participating in a hypermedia world, which has a different relationship with knowledge to the one I recognise. Or at least that is what I suspect my children will now say to me when I find them downloading YouTube clips when they should be revising their French verbs. It is understanding that changed relationship with knowledge that will be key to deciding how the British NetGen fares in an increasingly globalised world.

  We talk about globalisation as though it is something new. One could argue that the process began some 5,000 years ago when trade links were forged between Sumerian and Harappan civilisations in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. But one has to turn the clock back less than two centuries to see new technology transforming the global market: the steam engine was shrinking the planet. The railways revolutionised domestic communication and the development of steam-powered ocean-going ships dramatically accelerated business in the expanding worldwide web of trade. Farmers who would once have taken their crops to market on the back of a cart were able to sell goods around the planet. Huge quantities of agricultural products from as far afield as New Zealand, Australia and the United States were shipped to Europe to feed the hungry masses driving the industrial revolution. The cargo vessels then turned around, packed with new technology, consumer goods and ideas.

  ‘Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and goodwill toward men’: the first message sent across the transatlantic telegraph cable by Queen Victoria on 16 August 1858 to US President James Buchanan. ‘May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty, and law throughout the world,’ he replied. The following morning, there was a grand salute of one hundred guns in New York as the church bells rang.

  Unfortunately, the bond of perpetual peace literally snapped a few weeks later and it wasn’t until 1866, thanks to the engineering genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the doggedness of the crew of the SS Great Eastern, that a lasting connection was eventually made. But connect we had.

  This communications revolution allowed for the integration of financial markets and provided a massive impetus for the expansion of international business. While the profits from global trading accounted for just 2 per cent of the world’s wealth in 1800, by 1913 it was 21 per cent. Not only a global market, but also a global consciousness had arrived.

  The UK, of course, fared very well during this round of globalisation. The invention and innovation of Britain’s educated elite provided the cutting edge that saw it become the richest nation on earth. But British success was also built on harnessing the labour of millions of unskilled workers, people with often little or no education, who were moved from the fields to the factories. This was the formula upon which an empire was created, and it worked a treat in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century a different formula was required: innovation and invention, yes, but in the new era, industrial development would be founded upon technically skilled workers.

  The UK did not find it easy to adapt. Britain’s sense of its own social architecture was essentially bipolar: gentlemen versus players, bosses and workers, upstairs-downstairs. The rivalry and tension that flowed along the d
ivide hindered travel between the two distinct camps and prevented development of a respected technocratic class.

  When in 1944 a tripartite system of education was proposed for England and Wales, the vision was at odds with the simple adversarial structures that had defined the country’s politics, justice and commerce for centuries. The Education Act introduced three types of state secondaries: grammar schools for the intellectual and academic, technical schools for engineers and scientists, and modern schools to give less-gifted children practical skills for manual labour and home management. It was recognition that twentieth-century development required specific investment in technical and vocational skills. But Britain fluffed it.

  Such was the lack of priority and money given to technical schools that very few were ever opened. Instead, state education reinforced the divide between the educated elite and the rest, helping create a schools system in Britain that still produces greater levels of educational inequality than almost any other in the developed world.

  Vocational and technical training was usually left to private firms that often resented investing in young workers who might take their skills elsewhere or use their expertise to increase the bargaining power of the unions. Other industrialised nations, meanwhile, were spending heavily in the skills training of their workforces. By 1975, only 0.5 per cent of British secondary school pupils were in technical schools, compared to 66 per cent of German youngsters.

  Britain experienced dramatic industrial decline and much bickering about what had gone wrong. Right-wing analysts tended to blame the bloody-mindedness of British unions. Left-wing analysts tended to blame the class structure and a poor education system. In truth, they were two sides of the same inflexible coin.

  As the American historian and economist David Landes wrote of Britain: ‘For every idealist or visionary who saw in education… an enlightened citizenry, there were several “practical” men who felt that instruction was a superfluous baggage for farm labourers and industrial workers. These people, after all, had been ploughing fields or weaving cloth for time out of mind without knowing how to read or write… All they would learn in school was discontent.’ Even today you hear the same arguments. Britain clung to a belief that its traditional approach had won it an empire, and if only we could be true to those principles we would be great again. One consequence of this conviction was that the UK found itself with a higher proportion of low-skilled and unskilled workers than most other developed countries.

  In 2006, a government review reported that ‘as a result of low skills, the UK risks increasing inequality, deprivation and child poverty, and risks a generation cut off permanently from labour market opportunity.’ More than a third (35 per cent) of adults were found to have low or no skills, double the proportion in competitors such as the US, Canada, Germany and Sweden.

  That 35 per cent represented tens of millions of people whose livelihoods were increasingly threatened by higher-skilled and more motivated migrants or whose jobs would simply disappear when companies shifted manufacturing operations to countries with cheaper labour. Consider what happened to that most iconic example of British manufacturing greatness — the Cadbury’s Creme Egg. Despite assurances that the factory in Somerset where these eggs were laid would stay open, when Kraft took over Cadbury’s in 2010, they announced production would indeed switch to a new factory in Poland with a loss of 400 British jobs.

  Tempting though it is to believe that a manufacturing nation like Britain should stick to what it knows, the numbers suggest this is a doomed strategy. The proportion of people employed in making stuff has fallen dramatically in virtually every developed nation since the 1970s. In 1978, almost 30 per cent of UK jobs were in the manufacturing sector. By 2009 it was 10 per cent, the lowest proportion since records began. There may be profit in making niche, high-tech or patented products, but churning out widgets or Wispa bars is not the way to go.

  So, we prospered when the rules changed in the nineteenth century. We failed to adapt when the rule book was revised in the twentieth century. But we do have a chance to redeem ourselves in the twenty-first century. The rules are changing again.

  Just as James Watt was critical in developing the technology for Britain’s success in the industrial revolution, another Briton, Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the invention that is transforming the global economy today. The World Wide Web has powered a new period of globalisation. In the nineteenth century, it was about access to and the effective use of industrial machines. In the twenty-first century, it is about access to and the effective use of knowledge. As the Economic and Social Research Council puts it: ‘Economic success is increasingly based upon the effective utilisation of intangible assets such as knowledge, skills and innovative potential as the key resource for competitive advantage.’

  What do people mean by knowledge? A century ago knowledge was a tool. If you knew stuff you could use that to sell other tangible stuff. Now knowledge is increasingly the product in its own right. It is reckoned that within a few years, selling know-how will generate more than half of total GDP and account for half of total employment in advanced industrial economies like Britain. Business services, financial services, computer services, communications, media — these are the areas where developed countries may be able to maintain a competitive advantage.

  Knowledge is providing the new jobs too. Go back to the early 1980s and almost half of UK jobs were unskilled or low-skilled jobs. Now it is about a quarter. People working in the knowledge industries accounted for a third of jobs in the early 1980s. Now it is closer to half. Knowledge services now account for more than two thirds of what Britain sells to the world. With low-skilled jobs disappearing and knowledge jobs expanding, it is obvious that the UK needs to invest in knowledge, to educate and train its workforce. Britain has a higher proportion of NEETs — young people not in education, employment or training — than any other OECD country except Greece, Italy, Mexico and Turkey.

  The credit crunch only served to magnify the point. Unemployment figures in the depths of the recession showed that among those working in the knowledge economy — financial consultants, business managers, lawyers — the proportion claiming jobseeker’s allowance was 1 per cent. Among those who usually worked in unskilled admin jobs, the figure was 37 per cent. And for those without skills, matters are only going to get worse. Much worse.

  Globalisation doesn’t just open up new markets; it is bringing an estimated 42 million new people into the international jobs market every year — and most of those are unskilled. What’s more, the process is accelerating as the population of the developing world soars. The celebrated Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman warns that this rapidly rising pool of labour will ‘swamp’ developed countries. ‘The world has entered onto a long and epochal transition towards a single global economy and labour market,’ he argues, a process which poses massive challenges for countries like Britain.

  And it is not just a challenge for NEETs. It is a challenge for nerds too. According to forecasts by the World Bank, the global supply of skilled workers is likely to grow more quickly than that of unskilled workers. Emerging economies are educating their people faster than developed economies, albeit from a lower base. But in simple number terms, the challenge is obvious. For each Briton who graduates there are at least twenty Chinese and Indian graduates jostling for work in the global marketplace. Not every Indian degree is equivalent to a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. But then not every British degree is either.

  The noisy arguments over higher university tuition fees in England have tended to drown out the really critical point: higher education is a product in the global knowledge economy and price is a factor of supply and demand. Domestic students still get a subsidised rate, albeit not quite as generous a subsidy as previously, but the real revolution has been that UK institutions have begun directly competing with each other to sell their courses. At the same time, their student customers have been encouraged to become increasingly canny sh
oppers.

  A glance at the fees charged to overseas students has become a quick way of judging whether British undergraduates are getting a bargain or not. At Imperial College, for example, international fees can be three times what a domestic student is expected to pay. The Chinese and Indian youngsters who fork out that kind of money do so because they see it, not as debt, but as an investment in their future. They recognise the challenges of a single global economy and are prepared to spend to get the qualifications that help them stand out from the international crowd. To the business recruitment teams searching for talent, quality matters.

  I have met senior Indian executives who now argue that the quality of degrees at their top domestic universities rivals Oxford and Cambridge. Certainly, since the Indian government launched the National Knowledge Commission in 2005, there has been a determination to develop an internationally competitive educational infrastructure. The commission recently reported to the Prime Minister on its objective of how to meet the ‘knowledge challenges’ of the twenty-first century and increase India’s competitive advantage.

  The United Kingdom has in-built advantages as the global economy takes shape: an historic tradition of academic excellence with some genuinely world-class universities; the language of international trade still tends to be English; Britain has an unrivalled financial and business services sector. But does the UK have a fraction of India’s determination to shape its workforce so it is best placed to grab the opportunities of globalisation? Can its students match the work ethic of the students in developing countries?