Understanding britain Contents

1. The British: Who They Are and Where They Came From

2. Social Structures: Living and Working Together

3. Personal Relationships

4. Class

5. How a Democratic Society Works: People and Policies in Action

6. British Leisure

7. Living With the Market

8. Britain and the World

9. The Realities of Choice

Introduction

Although British society, like Russian society, is in continual change and development, the changes have not altered much of the day-to day living. Concerning certain problems and crises, there are still ferocious debates about policy and progress.

Until a few years ago, almost all Russians knew nothing about Britain except information from school textbooks. Those textbooks portrayed a Britain which either disappeared a long time ago, or which never existed. Our dedicated teachers struggled to keep alive a sense of British culture and literature and what they taught you was often misleading and sometimes simply wrong.

We, Russians, are now enjoying (or can enjoy) a Western style of life. We know about it from videos, music, cheap novels, erotic magazines and advertisements which have arrived along with Western luxury goods and a speculators’ market in currency. But this is nonsense. The daily lives of ordinary citizens in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, America are quite unlike those half-lit glittering images. It is true that all these countries are, at present, more prosperous than Russia, and that in significant ways they are more comfortable to live in from day to day – but that does not mean that they all live in a new, shiny plastic world, or, for that matter, in a world of sexual vice, drugs and ‘detective’-style violence.

In this course we will study and discuss a much more complex truth about the British society, about the lives that are really experienced in this country and not about those media –inspired dreams. We will not study the ‘customs and traditions’ which used to fill the pages of your textbooks and which, though fun for the tourist, are not part of the fabric of daily living.

There are three common reactions of many Russian visitors to Britain: academics, students, businessmen, politicians, journalists, social workers, and other professional people. First, the visitors fix on two or three small details and describe these as significant phenomena of this peculiar society. The details may be significant, they may be trivialities; how is a stranger to distinguish between the dominating realities of a society and the accidents of everyday life? A second response is to select what seem like familiar landmarks and construct a picture of the country from them. England then becomes a country important for its quaint rituals, curious idioms and public school education. This is roughly equivalent to ‘understanding Russia’ as a country of bear hunts, Khrushchev’s famous ‘proverbs’ and the trans-Siberian railway. A third reaction, very popular with youth leaders, is to declare that people are much the same all over the world and that therefore British and Russian young men and women will easily understand each other.

All three reactions are failures to respond to the huge differences between our societies, because it is too difficult to search for ‘the truth’. All countries have distinct cultures. Their typical patterns of everyday life, social and political structures, class systems and attitudes to the rest of the world differ one from another. So this course is about Britain.

Lecture 1. The British: Who They Are and Where They Came From

Of Citizens, Passports and National Misunderstandings

Let us suppose that you, a Russian citizen, have made arrangements to visit Britain. The all-important visa application form issued by British Embassy in Moscow is in front of you. Question 7 concerns your passport: one section asks for your ‘Citizenship/Nationality’. The question is familiar although you might be surprised that you are asked to squeeze both answers into a tiny space. And there are official answers to the questions.

Imagine now a British citizen who has arranged to visit Russia and who is trying to fill in the visa application form issued by the Russian Embassy in London. To his surprise, the very first question he has to answer, even before writing his name, is ‘Nationality?’ So he writes down ‘British’. The second question is ’Citizenship?’ What to do? What do these terms mean? He’s a British citizen – so isn’t his nationality British? Do the Russians want to know whether he has a Welsh grandmother? Or a French grandfather? Or is this a strange way of asking whether he has a black skin? Or maybe they are asking if he is a citizen of a particular town?

Issues about citizenship and nationality in Great Britain and Russia are not the same. Here are some facts.

First, passports in Britain are based on citizenship. If you are a British citizen you are entitled to a British citizen’s passport. Whether you claim to be Scots, Irish or Welsh, whether you think you have a French grandmother or a Russian grandfather is quite irrelavant. The law on citizenship has changed several times since 1962 and it is now quite difficult to prove citizenship or become a citizen if you have not already acquired the right by birth. But if you are entitled to a British citizen’s passport, you have no other official ‘nationality’.

Secondly, British citizens only require passports for going abroad. There are no internal passports, and a strong resistance to any form of ‘Identity Card’ such as is carried by the citizens of most European countries. In Britain, identity cards are a traditional symbol of improper state intrusion into the privacy of the individual, so that efforts to introduce them in order, for example, to control football hooliganism, have been fiecely resisted. It is supposed to be the proud boast of the British citizen that he or she does not require official papers of identification until he or she chooses to go abroad.

Thirdly, it follows that nobody in Britain has to worry about a propiska, a residence permit. They do have serious problems about where to live, but these problems are nothing to do with official permission. Consequently, several of the questions in the Russian visa application form are puzzling to the British applicant: so many questions about who he is and where he comes from – questions he may have not thought about much. The British no longer need visas to go to America. Nowadays Americans question very carefully those entering their country about whether they have enough money to support themselves – or, if not, whether other people can support them properly.

The fact that there is no official concept of nationality which is separate from citizenship can lead to serious misunderstandings in discussions about ‘nationalities’ and ‘minorities’ and ‘autonomous republics’. Paradoxically, most British people do not think of themselves as ‘British’. They have strong emotional feelings about the countries which make up Britain, and they will privately think of themselves as ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ or ‘Scots’. What seems strange is that ‘Russians’ live in ‘Russia’ and so do ‘Chechens’ and ‘Bashkiris’. This is surely colonilalism, a concept which is treated with deep suspicion today.

Once an individual has established his British citizenship, either by birth or by later legal recognition, and has his British passport, there is no legal way in which his colour or ethnic origin can categorise him. Individuals can answer the questions in sociological polls about ethnic minority groups as they wish.

There is, however, a new problem and a new set of legal rights and obligations. Passports of the British now show that they are citizens of a member state of the European Union. This is very convenient for crossing the frontiers of other member states but the implications of ‘belonging to Europe’ worry some of them. Does this mean that they will lose their sovereignty as British citizens, or is it possible to be a European citizen and remain as ‘British’ as ever? They are struggling with integration rather than disintegration.

When the British travel abroad, most of them become more patriotic. This is understandable. Everybody criticises their own country at home (it’s the country they know and care most about) but feels some responsibility for it when abroad. However, some Russians sometimes insist to their surprised and embarassed hosts abroad that Russia is (or was) uniquely crazy, barbarous or criminal. There is certainly a place for criticism, even bitter criticism of one’s own country, but it is not in a foreigner’s house in the first few hours of your visit. Now about the British. Britain is the centre of the world. Consider the Mercator projection of the world map. The Greenwich meridian runs through London. And to celebrate this fact, Britain is in the longitudinal centre. And then, the world is ‘tipped forward’ as it were, so that the Northern hemisphere is brought into importance. London (about two thirds of the way up – ‘eye-level’) is the central feature of this world map. Europe nestles round them, the seas lap their shores and everything is neatly to hand. No Russian should rest under the delusion that Russia is the centre of the world! It isn’t; they aren’t; the British are!

England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales...

The national flag of Great Britain is the Union Jack. Sporting leagues arrange games among the four countries, and stamps are regularly issued which distinguish Scotland and Wales from ‘standard’ England.

How important are these national identifications? How United is the United Kingdom?

Let us start with some definitions, for which a map would be useful.

On the north west coast of Europe lie two substantial islands. The larger one, a straggling irregular triangle about 1,200 kilometres in length is called Great Britain. The other, to the west, which is roughly rectangular is Ireland. Since 1922 most of Ireland has been an independent republic which took the name Eire in 1937. Eire has a separate (Roman Catholic) history and culture, although the two countries are very close and citizens of one country can vote in the other, for example. The north-east corner of Ireland, sometimes known as Northern Ireland, sometimes as Ulster, is a part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Officially it is not a country but a province or ‘constituent region’.

Great Britain is divided into three countries: England, Scotland, and Wales. Citizens of the United Kingdom are known as British, and a useful short form for the United Kingdom is Britain. But the people who live in these islands tend to think of themselves as ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ or ‘Welsh’. Since there is no category of ‘nationality’, statistics can tell us how many people live in Scotland, but nobody can tell us how many of them think of themselves as Scots; and no statistics will tell us where the Scots live outside Scotland.

Statistics can, however, tell us something about the comparative importance of the meber countries of the United Kingdom. Consider this:

England is about the size of Lithuania and Latvia combined, but it has almost as large a population as Ukraine (47-48 million).

Wales is less than half the size of Estonia but it has twice the population (nearly 3 million).

Northern Ireland is about one-third the size of Estonia but it has almost the same population (1.5 million).

Scotland is rather larger than Georgia but has about the same population (5.1 million).

As we see, even Wales, a deserted country to English eyes, is four times more densely populated than Estonia. Only Scotland which has sometimes been described as the last wilderness in Europe is less densely populated than that other mountainous area, Georgia. Scotland has been losing population to emigration for decades and the Hghlands are indeed deserted. But in England people live ‘cheek by jowl’, with about five times the population of the other three countries combined. The English, for example, take for granted the United Kingdom; they never worry about the fact that London is the capital of both England and Britain, they contemplate Wales and Scotland as wonderful wild places for holidays, and they consider Northern Ireland to be a miserable, problem-area. These countries are on the periphery; England is at the centre.

For the other countries in the Union, the ‘centre’ needs to be questioned. Wales, the mountainous area in the west of Great Britain, was the refuge for the Celtic population at the time of the Saxon invasions (6^th-7^th centuries). To judge by their descendants, the Celts were short, dark, curly-haired and vivid, with a passion for rhetoric, song and language. Wales is rich in medieval poetry and mith, and is the reputed home of King Arthur. Many mountains, caves and wild corners are associated with him, though it is not at all clear that he was a historical character. More important, the Welsh have their own language, which is still the first language of some hundreds of thousands of Welshmen, especially in the north-west of the country. It is the language of teaching in many schools and some university colleges. However, the majority of the Welsh, especially in the industrialised southern coastal region, do not speak the language. What they share is a strong sense of being not-English which derives partly from the fact that Wales was once an independent principality that was conquered by the English in the early fourteenth century, partly from their long poetical and musical traditions that are distinctly un-English, and partly from their solidarity associated with a hard industrial life in the mountains that was lightened by political and religious fervour.

Feelings of nationalism are expressed almost exclusively in cultural terms, for the Welsh are not economically strong and there is little support for economic independence from England. Occasional outbursts of violence and arson have been protests against English cultural ‘colonialism’ and arrogance. Wales feels like a distinct foreign country (and a very beautiful one) to the English. Dylan Thomas was only one of many poets to celebrate this distinctiveness.

Scotland has a long history of vigorous independence. When the Romans marched northwards across the country in 55 A.D. they found it impossible (or impractical) to subdue the Pictish tribes who lived in the north. Eventually they built a wall (Hadrian’s Wall, some of which still stands today) right across the country, separating Roman Britain from an area which roughly corresponds to present-day Scotland. The kingdom of Scotland has existed for many centuries (Think of Macbeth, based on a historical character in eleventh century Scotland!) and, despite repeated attempts by the English at conquest and endless border raids from both sides, the two countries were eventually united peacefully. In the early sixteenth century an England princess married a Scottish king, and a century later after the death of Queen Elizabeth of England, the Scottish James inherited the English throne as well. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots about whom Russians , like Germans, are absurdly sentimental. Mary Queen of Scots was a menace to everyone including herself (this was the view of her son as well as almost everyone around her), capable of treason, murder and sheer stupidity. After James united the thrones in 1603, the two countries continued to be independent, and sometimes at war with each other until they were united in the Act of Union in 1708.

Scotland has its own legal and educational systems, but there is no autonomous Scottish Parliament. Once elected, Scottish members of parliament go to Westminster to the British House of Commons. From the Scottish point of view, London is a long way away, and the small group of Scottish MP’s can do little to advance Scottish interests. Recently the Scottish Nationalist Party has been very successful at elections. It demands a separate Parliament for Scotland and much greater independence in economic affairs. Scotland, like Wales, has much mountainous country and a central valley, once heavily industrialised but now suffering from unemployment and the decline of industry. Nonetheless, the Scottish Nationalists argue that Scotland produces and passes on to England more than it receives in goods and social benefits. They believe they would be better off if Scotland was independent and directly profiting from the fish, oil and gas in its coastal waters. The British Government argues that Scotland gets money and other government support for its poorer regions which would suffer from economic independence. In any case, central governments tend to favour a strong ‘United Kingdom’. If there were a referendum tomorrow, probably the majority of Scots would vote for a Scottish Parliament and greater autonomy.

The Scots also insist on their national cultural distinctiveness, although the Highlands, a beautiful depopulated region of poor farmers and foresters among whom Gaelic (the old Celtic language) is still sometimes spoken, is culturally quite different from the Lowlands, central valley and eastern coastal regions, areas of strong Protestantism and a tradition of hard, practical work. The Scots can certainly claim that they take education more seriously than the English: more of their pupils stay on at school, more go to University, and even today, the cities of this relatively poor country show great official respect for traditions of learning. Edinburgh and Glasgow are both cultural cities.

As for Northern Ireland and its one and a half million people, the country – mountains, lakes and wild sea coast – is beautiful as Wales and the Highlands of Scotland are beautiful. The people are friendly and hospitable to outsiders, and show all the enthusiasm for language, poetry and fantastic stories of their fellow-Irish in Eire. But for the last quarter of a century, Northern Ireland has been synonymous with ‘the Troubles’, the guerilla fighting that has claimed hundreds of lives and shown the intractability of sectarian conflict. The province has been occupied by the British Army for twenty five years and a generation has grown up knowing that their lives are and will be defined by their identity as Catholics or Protestants. From an outsider’s point of view, the problem can be described as follows:

The English have been eager to colonise Ireland since the Norman Conquest (the eleventh century) and efforts were made to do so for centuries, although the Irish were always rebelling against the English rule imposed on them wherever it was more or less successful. Consequently, the Irish showed no interest in the conversion to Protestantism of the English in the mid-sixteenth century. Their Catholicism (and Catholic allies) became a crucial part of their defiance of the more powerful country. In the 1650’s Cromwell put down an uprising in the northern Irish province, Ulster, with considerable brutality, and then, to keep the region loyal, settled there large numbers of Scottish Protestants. In Ulster the descendants of these Protestants became a majority, whereas elsewhere in Ireland they were virtually non-existent.

When, after centuries of struggle, Ireland finally won the right to independence in 1922, part of the settlement with Britain was that the province of Ulster should separately decide whether it wanted to join the Irish Republic or stay with Britain. Since the majority of the population (about 60%) were protestants who did not wish to join a Catholic Ireland where they would be a minority, they voted to join a ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. Under this arrangement the minority of Catholics in the province were badly treated politically and legally for many years, and the terrorist Irish Republication Army (which is NOT supported by Eire) gained cosiderable sympathy among the Catholic population. Eventually, in the late nineteen-sixties, resentment turned to violence, the Protestant para-military groups and the IRA turned on one another using terrorist tactics which killed civilians – and the British Army was sent in, originally to protect the Catholics and to keep order. They are still there. The Army is resented by both sides, and has added its own share of violence to the situation – but nobody knows whether things would be worse if it was withdrawn. Most people in Great Britain would be perfectly willing for Northern Ireland to be handed over to Eire; the province for outsiders is simply a ‘problem’, a running sore which will not heal, and few soldiers in the British Army enjoy their turn of duty in the area. But if one part of the democracy consistently votes to stay in the United Kingdom, by what right can the other parts of the Kingdom turn them out? There will always be a majority of Protestants in that corner of Ireland. They have been there for three hundred years and more, so it is their home as much as it is the home of Catholics. It is impossible to know how many individual Protestants would be willing for Northern Ireland to join the Republic, and how many individual Catholics are happy to remain as part of the United Kingdom. There comes a point when individual preferences get swallowed up in religious or national identification – which itself becomes a cause for bitter fighting. And that, for all the efforts of many many people, is where the situation rests today. (Since September 1994 a precarious, much desired peace has existed in the Province.)

A Mixed Population

If you stand in a street in central London you will be instantly aware of its mixed population. The streets of London are full of white, black and brown people, who originated from all over the world. Moscow is still, essentially, a white city. Forty years ago London was much more like Moscow: seeing a black man on a bus was a rare excitement. Then large groups of Protestants from France and the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, small groups of French Royalists after the Revolution, and individual radicals and revolutionaries of all kinds in the nineteenth century have settled here. Irish Catholics emigrated in their hundreds of thousands to Britain after the Great Famine of the 1840’s, bringing with them a Catholic culture which is quite different from English Protestantism in its traditions, values and family patterns of upbringing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many Jews from Poland and Russian came here, often working as whole communities in the clothing trades of east London.

But Britain has also been a colonising power. Living on an island with many national resources and instant access to the sea, British traders, from the sixteenth century onwards, established contacts with the Indian subcontinent, with Africans and Arabs, and the settlers in North America. Trading soon meant colonisation. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain built up a powerful Empire which was ruled from London. You can read about attitudes of the British towards their Empire in many novels, especially Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

Consequently, thousands of people left Britain to work as administrators and officials in the British Empire, and as civil engineers, teachers, farmers, missionaries and traders. Emigration was always greater than immigration in this period.

After 1945 Britain suffered from a shortage of labour, especially in unskilled, poorly-paid jobs. West Indians, and then Indians and Pakistanis were invited to come and work in the country. Between 1955 and 1962 about a quarter of a million arrived in Britain on British citizen passports. Such numbers alarmed many of the white population, partly because they feared for their jobs and housing , partly because they disliked these non-white people coming into ‘white’ Britain. In 1962, the Government, in response to this panic, passed the first of a series of laws restricting right of entry into Britain and changing the status of British Commonwealth citizens. Commonwealth immigration was much reduced. Small groups of Hong Kong Chinese, Africans and Vietnamese were also accepted into the country during these years.

Why should four million people among fifty-five million make such a difference to the life in Britain? And why are so many of them in London (far more than 5%)?

First, some definitions. The polite word for describing people whose ancestors came from Africa used to be ‘Negro’. This is no longer so. The standard polite word is ‘black’. It exists as both noun and ajective. Most blacks came to Britain from the West Indies, and a currently popular term is ‘Afro-Caribbean’. The immigrants from the Indian sub-continent can be devided nationally and culturally into Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The current general word for decsribing them is ‘Asians’ though ‘blacks’ is also used. For the Asians themselves, one word is not sufficient because the major distinction is between the Muslim population (mostly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) and the Sikh and Hindu population.

When the blacks and Asians arrived in Britain they settled in the big cities where they were required to work: London, the urban West Midlands and (for Asians) West Yorkshire, especially Bradford. Blacks and Asians have suffered higher unemployment, poorer living conditions and discrimination of many kinds. From the literature of the British Empire it is known that colonised black peoples were regarded as less capable, less intelligent than the white people, more like children than adults. The first language of the Asian population is not English. The younger blacks are not of course immigrants at all. More than forty per cent of blacks and Asians were born here and are as much Londoners as their white neighbours. Meanwhile, the white British eat different kinds of food, enjoy different kinds of parties, music, festivals, learn directly about different religions and traditions. They are simply less narrow than they were. Racial prejudice still exists and occasionally flares into violence, but somehow the British have become a society of mixed races. The only way to reduce racism is to increase awareness, educate people. Variety of experience is the best way of education.

What Do the British Know About Their Own History?

In order to understand the people of another country, you may not need to study their history in detail, but you need to know about their own idea of their past.

The British (apart from those in Northern Ireland) live in a country which has not been invaded for 900 years.Monuments to their past cover the countryside: bronze age burial mounds, Roman walls, churches from the tenth century onwards, castles, palaces and simple country homes are all part of their landscape they take for granted. Because much of their building was in stone or brick it has survived better than the wooden buildings in Russia, for example. A ‘story of Britain’ is crude, simple and not very accurate, it goes something like this:

After the stone age, bronze age, iron age, Romans, Saxons and Danes, England became England. William the Conqueror invaded England from France in 1066 (this is the date that everybody knows), killed King Harold and became English King. In the Middle Ages they built beautiful churches, started limiting the power of the King, died in millions of the Black Death and beat the French at Agincourt (though they forget that the French won the war). In the sixteenth century they had Henry VIII with his six wives. He abolished the Pope as the head of the Church in England and made himself Head instead. (This was a popular move.) Under Queen Elizabeth they fought and beat the Spanish; under James I they captured Guy Fawkes just before he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, an event which the English population celebrated every year on the fifth of November with big fires and effigies of Guy Fawkes. Under Charles they had a Civil war, executed the king, had a Republic briefly under Cromwell and in 1660 restored the monarchy – on conditions. Power passed into the hands of Parliament and was – more or less – enshrined in law. In the eighteenth century they invented new scientific, agricultural and industrial processes, such as the steam engine. Then they beat Napoleon. During the nineteenth century they extended their Empire even further, produced learned men like Darwin, refined their sophisticated Parliament, increased Britain’s riches and went into battle in 1914 with all banners flying... At this point the triumphant story falters. Many of the conscripts in the First World War had to be rejected for mal-nourishment and ill-health. The consequences of industrialisation had been horrific (and in any case America and Germany were beating them). Yes, they won the war, but the soldiers returned to unemployment and even hunger. Some people, anxious that the poor at last would have rights, hoped for a revolution such as had happened in the Russian Empire. The colonised peoples of their Empire were growing restive too. But Britain, unlike Germany, was never poised on the edge of revolution. Despite a General Strike and a recession, many parts of the country were getting more prosperous. Between the wars, millions of people moved for the first time into decent housing, and electricity, roads and other public services became widely available. Their politicians wondered whether to fight Hitler. The people seem to have known that war was inevitable and that it would be grim and necessary.

In Britain far fewer people were killed than in the First World War (about a quarter of a million, of whom some tens of thousands were civilian victims of bombing). In Britain every able-bodied adult was conscripted; women were sent to do war-work; gardens were turned over to vegetables and spare pieces of land were cultivated. They needed food. Although never invaded, they suffered considerable bomb damage, and many people, especially children, were evacuated to safer parts of the country. Everybody was affected.

After the war, the world position of Britain altered. Their Empire collapsed around them – and they conceded that they no longer had the right to rule other countries. They joined NATO and became part of the ‘American sphere of influence’.

Lecture 2. Social Structures: Living and Working Together

The Land

Living in the market system, what the British are doing all the time is calculating how to live within the system, making use of its advantages and avoiding as far as possible its disadvantages. Life in Britain has changed greatly over the last two hundred years, over the last hudred, fifty, twenty, even ten years.

Rounded chalk hills, bare of trees, covered with a tough thin grass and grazed by sheep. This countryside is very different from a region of river meadows with long lines of poplars and willows, and a region of beech-covered hills with lanes twisting between high chalk banks shadowed by large trees and thick with leaf-mould. These regions are, perhaps, forty kilometres apart from one another, and each of them is quintessentially a part of southern England. As you go north – or east – or west – the landscape changes continually, through ironstone country, limestone country, East Anglian fens, northern moorlands, the red earth of the Welsh borders or the slate mountains of north-west Wales.

Britain may be a small island by Russian standards, but geographically it is immensely varied. Nobody lives more than one hundred and twenty kilometres from tidal water; the Thames is tidal right through London and beyond. The British, wherever they travel, are constantly bumping up against the sea, and when they get there they may find long sandy beaches, rocky inlets, chalk cliffs, mudflats or placid coves. The geological structure is complicated and convoluted. Children at school learn that the northern part of Scotland used to belong to Canada, but sailed away until it collided with Britain – and this explains the long diagonal rift across Scotland that includes Loch Ness and its monster. The bones of the country are close to the surface, so that even though the climate is officially ‘mild and damp’ throughout Britain, we know that within a distance of less than one hundred and thirty kilometres they can struggle with sub-arctic conditions or enjoy a subtropical forest garden. None of the rivers are large but it is possible to trace the course of a river from mountain spring to tidal estuary in one day’s long walk; and if you stand on the top of the highest mountain in Wales and look east towards the Urals on the other side of Europe, there is nothing higher in the way to obstruct your hypothetical view.

Their agriculture and their industry were (and, up to a point, still are) intimately related to these variations in the geography of their country. To understand how they live, work and distribute their products, you need to consider the relationship between the land and the fifty-five million people who live on it. Perhaps because they are an overcrowded island, land is thought of as something to be used, to be developed, to be given a purpose. Much, but by no means all, of that purpose is to make money. If you were to fly a low-flying aircraft over England you would see a land-use pattern unlike that of any other country. It is a pattern of eighteenth century agricultural changes, nineteenth century industrual development, and twentieth century adaptations to what had become out-dated established usage.

In England, unlike most of Europe, they never developed a peasant culture of more or less self-sufficient family units farming their own bit of land and living limited but independent lives. Most people were employed by landowners, either as tenant farmers or as agricultural workers. The workers would improve their poor wages by spinning and weaving cloth, by growing their own vegetables, and by grazing their cows or sheep on common land. But new methods of farming invented in the eighteenth century made the land much more productive, and therefore the common land much more desirable as a source of profit. So landowners began to enclose the common land, depriving workers of their traditional rights to raise animals. The land was enclosed by planting hedges round it, creating small protected areas of irregular shapes, according to the line of ancient boundaries and the haphazard development of the scheme. The delightful effect of patchwork green, characteristic of their countryside, is a tribute to early efficient farming and landless labourers.

During the nineteenth century, the landowner farmers felt constantly threatened by the possibility of cheap imports from abroad. Parliament passed laws to protect their high prices – until at last the urban poor, supported by those who believed in free trade forced Parliament to allow cheap food into the country. The advantages for the city-dwellers were obvious, but in the countryside British agriculture suffered a great depression. You can read about it in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.) The new machines also encouraged depopulation of the countryside. But during the First World War, and especially during the Second World War, Britain became much more dependent on what it could supply itself. An island is difficult to invade but easy to blockade. From 1940 onwards, Britain was more intensively cultivated than any other country, and although they still needed supplies from the convoy ships, they managed to produce the major part of the food needed for forty-odd millions of people.

Since then, with the extensive use of fertilisers, technology and improved ‘breeds’ of plants, their ability to feed themselves has actually increased – even though of course they do import lots of food from climates which grow vegetables and fruit that they cannot grow. There are prices to pay for this efficiency: fertilisers can get into the water and damage health; hedges torn up for greater land use and profits make the soil less stable; and fruit and vegetables cultivated so intensively can be almost tasteless. But the British have cheap food and plenty of it.

You could see tidy fields, with hedges and fences in good repair, weed-free crops and blooming orchards, well-cared-for outbuildings and farm machinery, and an air of prosperity over all. But you can’t walk over some grassy pasture-land to some woods on the crest of the hill. All the land is private. A system of public footpaths exists throughout the country, and where there are such paths you may walk along them – but you may not stray off them. Where there is no such path you must keep away. The land belongs to landowners and to their descendants, the agribusinessmen.

About three-quarters of their land surface is used for agriculture, and about seven percent is woodland – and that 7% is declining as landowners are tempted into quick profits by clearing the land. On the other hand, they are constantly experimenting with crops to find out what the people would like best – and what would therefore be most profitable to them.

Cheap and varied food is immensely valuable; on the other side, the chief disadvantage is that ordinary people are kept out of eighty per cent of their land. They have a few National Parks in hilly areas for recreation (though the land is mostly private). They also have an organisation, the National Trust, which buys land and opens it to the public. It is an extremely popular organisation which raises money from its own supporters. Fifty-four million people on a small island need areas in which to wander.

The British have one other valuable source of exercise and pleasure – the shores of their island. Most of their beaches are public. Unlike those in America or much of Europe. Since their coastline is thousands of miles long, they have wonderful opportunities for solitary walking along beautiful beaches. But since much of their seashore is rocky and unsuitable for walking, the National Trust has bought land to establish cliff-top public walks along their coasts. If such access were more often available inland, many of them would be able to enjoy even more their common home.

Industrial Britain: Are They Leaving It Behind?

Britain is a rich country, one of the richest in the world. Goods of all kinds are available in vast quantities, and people can afford to buy them. Cars, clothes, consumer goods are everywhere – and so are good roads, decently equipped public places, and the materials needed to construct all these things. Nevertheless, the British often complain about the economic state of the country, the decline of industry, the creeping poverty. In Britain, they compare themselves with those countries around them with whom they have long been in competition. And by Western European standards they are a declining power, less rich than their neighbours where once they were richer.

At the same time, they are on average as individuals richer today than they were ten years ago, with more actual money to spend. Their worries concern the source of that wealth – how solid and stable is their industry? – and the consequences of relative decline. In an international economy, once you strart declining, you may decline faster and faster. It is most unlikely that Britain will suffer that kind of fate, but failure within a system of capitalist markets can bring its own kind of disaster. How has this come about?

Historically, the industries which made England for a period the richest and most developed country in the world were never (as in Russia) state industries. Private landowners, traders with capital, and successful small employers were those who built factories, set up machinery and developed the necessary transport – canals, roads and railways. The ‘factory system’ was a phenomenon of early nineteenth century England, eloquently praised by factory owners and many observers for its contribution to the nation’s prosperity, eloquently attacked by novelists, sociologists, journalists and social reformers (not just Dickens and Engels). It is significant for what has happened to modern Britain that the developing major industries were mostly located outside the old prosperous trading areas of London, the south and the old ports. The lives of whole communities were suddenly shaped by the qeography of a region: ship-building in the north-east, cotton mills in Lancashier, woollen mills in West Yorkshire, coal-mining, together with the associated iron and steel works in Scotland, South Yorkshire and South Wales, potteries in the Midlands, tin-mining in Cornwall and slate quarrying in North Wales. Everywhere these were private industries, dependent on local conditions, suitable technology and, of course, customer demand. The workers who moved to these areas were not forced by the state but by economy necessity. The sense of being pushed around by forces beyond their control must have been equally strong.

Here is a brief account of one of their ‘World Industries’, the roofing slate industry of North Wales. The geological structure of North West Wales has produced mountainous rock which can be quarried or mined and then turned into slates made by skilled men splitting the layers of rock into sheets which can be as thin as 2 millimetres. These sheets are then shaped into roofing slates, dark blue or purple in colour and virtually indestructible. At first the industry supplied only local builders, but then, as thousands of rows of workers’ houses went up all over Britain, the demand for roofing slate suddenly soared. Private owners and firms put money into the quarries; railways, dams and ports were constructed; and thousands of men worked on the ingenious machinary required to get the slates down the mountain sides. Miners built barracks where they lived all week extracting slate, and from which they returned over the mountains to their own villages on Sundays. Despite the hard life of the workers, slate was increasingly profitable to the owners throughout the nineteenth century. When demand gradually fell in Britain, slates were shipped to the Baltic, to Buenos Aires, to Cape Town and as far as Western Australia. Back came food from the tropics; life was hard, but the people did not starve, and some of them felt that in these harsh industrial valleys was a promise of better things.

And then, in Britain and elsewhere, people started manufacturing tiles – less durable, but cheaper and lighter than slates. As they say, ‘The bottom dropped out of the market.’ Suddenly nobody would buy slates any longer. The workers were turned away, and as they went they took up the rails, cut up the machinery, seized whatever could be salvaged. The two largest quarries – on opposite sides of the same mountain – continued producing small amounts of slate until very recently. Now the valleys are beautiful again, but they are depopulated. Roofless stone houses collapse into the hillsides, rusting machinery trips up the walker, and the scars of the old railway tracks can be traced by anyone prepared to explore the abandoned workings. At the foot of the world’s largest slate quarry is a museum, and the last of the old quarrymen demonstrate their skills for tourists.

The community in these valleys lived a life in which skill and suffering, hard work and exploitation, disease and beautiful landscapes, poverty and precarious prosperity co-existed. How much was lost – and how much was gained – when the industry died? Nobody knows. Similar stories are happening all over Britain and all over the world unless one happens to live in a country where the government decides to protect industries against financial logic. On a small scale that happens everywhere; on a large scale it has happened in the Soviet Union – which is one of the reasons why now all the industries are collapsing together. There is nothing strange, in our world, in industries rising, being very profitable and employing hundreds of thousands of workers, and then declining again as the products are rejected by former customers. As customers we benefit, but as workers we are often faced with enforced changes.

As far as Britain is concerned, what happened to the slate industry has been characteristic of their large-scale heavy industries in the last forty years. Either demand for the product has declined, or, more often, employers discover that it can be produced more cheaply in some other part of the world (such as South Korea). In place of their coal, iron, steel, wool, cotton and shipbuilding on which the wealth of the country was founded, they are trying to establish smaller, up-to-date industries, such as food processing, specialised textiles, machine tools. Nevertheless, the conurbations of northern England remain areas with endemic unemployment. The countryside is beautiful but bleak, the old straggling induxtrial towns are half-silent now.

What does it mean to be a northerner in England? It’s certainly different from being a Scot who can identify with his own country and capital. London is a long way from the northener who traditionally has no love for the centre. In the nineteen fifties, northerners still held proudly to the belief that they provided the real wealth of the country and that the south were all idle layabouts. The north sent lorries to the south every week laden with pig-iron; the lorries return loaded with cat-food. A warm neighbourliness, a readiness to sympathise in time of trouble, a natural and fast-acting generosity mark off the northern communities from the southern. In 1852, a working-class parish in Newcastle raised, in one church collection, over £2000 for the relief of the Sudan; a rich middle-class parish in London managed £250: this was not an isolated example. In the early years of this century the north enjoyed an industrial culture and produced many beautiful things, creating its own aesthetic as it developed. Hard work, local pride, generosity and a great industrial heritage which has declined and which may be reviving: that is the self-identificationof the north today. If you come further south to the Midlands, traditionally the area for manufacturing cars, for light engineering and components for consumer goods, some of the problems which hit the old industries will be obvious to you here as well.

The British used to build their own cars; in the fifties, almost everyone who owned a car owned an English car. But their old firms were bought up by multi-national companies which, for good market reasons, build their factories wherever they can get cheap labour and materials. In South East Asia for example. Also the Japanese started making better cars, so customers naturally bought theirs. Now the Japanese are building Japanese cars in Britain – excellent news for the individual to buy a good car, bad news for the country which needs to invest profits in developing industry.

Obviously, the British, like every other nation in our internationally-organised economy, ought to concentrate on the industrial activities where they excel, but ironically, intelligent specialisation produces its own problems. Recent developments have been in pharmaceuticals, sophisticated plastics, food-processing and some electronic equipment. In addition there has been a huge increase in jobs connected with finance – with organising the financial side of the international market.

Such industries do not, on the whole, require large factories and work space such as exists in the north of England. They require skilled and clever young men and women who are in close contact with London (and therefore international links) and with major universities that can co-operate on research. So, for example, in the market towns that lie along the old road and rail links from London to Bristol or from London to Cambridge, new houses are being built and the new industrialists and entrepreneurs are moving in. The factories are small scale, and often set on the edges of these towns or even in green fields. Their work is specialised and profitable. But whether in the long run it can restore the solid wealth of England (let alone, Scotland and Wales) remains an open question.

One consequence that you will be able to observe if you visit England is that where the country is prosperous, it manages to be rich, discreet and attractive. Dirty smoking chimneys no longer exist. People live in great comfort. But not so far away there are areas of serious unemployment where people are struggling in an expensive environment without wealth. Their economic future is uncertain and unless the government can relate the prosperity of the south to the difficulties facing so many in the midlands and the north, the precarious position of Britain as an industrial power within the international economy will become ever more unstable. Fifty-five million citizens should be responsible – somehow – for their future.

Houses and Homes

Every country has its distinctive housing. Cross from England into Scotland or from France into Germany or Spain, and you know instantly that you are in another country. It’s partly a matter of architecture, partly a matter of the way people choose to domesticate their immediate surroundings.

The English are distinctive in their aversion to flats and their devotion to rows of small brick houses. All countries have found that the obvious solution to cheap new housing to accomodate families moving in from the countryside or demanding improved conditions within the towns is to build blocks of flats. They stand in rows and clusters, not beautiful, not spacious, but convenient and efficient. The problems are similar: noise, cramped public areas, unpredictable water supplies, broken lifts ... but they are homes for millions of people who prefer them to the more primitive conditions they have left. In England, however, this is not so.

Of course some English people enjoy flat-life, but for the vast majority of them, the basic idea of home is a brick house with rooms upstairs and downstairs. And now about the terms. The English use the word house for a dwelling intended for one family. They would never say of a block of flats that it is a house. They always distinguish flat from house, not because a house is grander (it may be a tiny section of a row of dwellings) but because the flat is still unusual, except in city centres where it is unusual to live anyway. The word home is much more personal, much warmer: your home is the place where you live which you have created – its furnishings but also its atmosphere, your sense of other people who live in it, your feelings about its past as well as its present. Something of the Russian feeling about the privacy of kitchens is found in the English word home.

The brick house is a legacy of the industrial revolution. Employers had to build accomodation for the millions of workers pouring into the cities and at that time the cheapest solution was to build rows (terraces) of small houses, each with two small rooms downstairs and two small rooms upstairs. Lavatories were common to several houses and out in the back yard. The rooms were small because they were heated by open fires, not by stoves, and families tended to huddle in one room (the kitchen). Bedrooms were unheated, and to this day many English people find it impossible to sleep except in a cold room with the windows wide open.

Most of their housing schemes thereafter are logical improvements to this pattern. Houses became larger; millions still exist with two rooms, a kitchen and sometimes a scullery downstairs, and two rooms-plus-a-tiny-one upstairs. Before the First World War someone invented the ‘semi-detached house’ which was still cheap to build but which allowed each family to reach the back of their house down a narrow side passage, wonderful for storing things. Since the sixties, such houses have regularly been built with garages. As equipment improved, houses became more compact. Today houses are being built all over southern England which are brilliantly designed but tiny – four rooms, kitchen, bathroom and lavatory covering less area than many Russian three-roomed flats. That is the small type, and of course many houses are much bigger, with larger rooms and more of them. But essentially such houses are of the same pattern.

Today, with central heating built into all new homes, the ‘two downstairs rooms’ have often been knocked into one (though in large houses there may be additinal small rooms downstairs). Often the kitchen area is open to this large room. They have small halls (the climate means that they rarely wear heavy winter coats and in any case they do not wrap themselves up as Russians do, so they don’t need much cloakroom space), and they often have a bathroom and lavatory together upstairs, but a separate lavatory downstairs. Bedrooms are very private, very ‘family’ and used to be used exclusively for sleeping. Nowadays bedrooms have been converted to bedroom-study-playroom-television rooms, since the open-plan downstairs means less privacy. Almost all such houses will have their own back garden. However tiny, this is much preferred to communal land. They like to have their own fences, their own little garden shed and, preferably, their own strip of land outside their front door. This, of course, is one objection to flats by a nation of gardeners.

In the nineteen sixties, architects pulled down many rows of old Victorian houses with no bathrooms and minimal facilities and put up new shining blocks of flats. Within a few years many of these blocks had become slums, hated by the people who had been moved from the terraces. Many of them have since been demolished and few blocks have been built since. Architects have gone back to semi-detached and terrace houses, grouped in interesting patterns, each one neat, tidy and private. In England a house does not qualify as old unless it was built at least a hundred years ago. There are still hundreds of thousands of really old houses, built between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries scattered throughout the country. They are considered very ‘desirable’ and are therefore very expensive even if they are small. Many of them are strikingly beautiful. At the other end of the scale are ‘bungalows’. Small brick houses of only one storey, built especially for the elderly. Many older people move from a house into a bungalow.

What things do people have in their homes? There are some interesting contrasts between Russian flat life and British house life. If we have hot water at all, we have endless supplies of it. The British find it shocking to wash up dishes under running hot water. A lifetime has taught them that they have to pour a rationed amount of water into a bowl and wash up in that. Older Soviet flats and many modern ones have well-made parquet floors. These are a luxury in Britain where for a long time they have lacked supplies of suitable wood. And the Russians seem to have discovered the art of making extremely comfortable simple beds.

British homes have similar basic furniture – beds (double beds for married couples), tables, chairs, armchairs, cupboards, shelves (they are less fond than they used to be of glass-fronted shelves), lamps, radio, television, stereo record players and compact-disk players. They can choose their styles and materials; they can select their favourite patterns and shapes of lamps, crockery, cutlery, towels, linen, chairs and their furnishings, curtains and materials.

Their floors are generally carpeted with modern synthetic carpets. Kitchen floors are covered with vinyl or tiles. Kitchens and bathrooms are full of useful consumer goods and useless gadgets. In a market economy where you are encouraged to ‘buy’, it is very easy to buy first and wish afterwards that you had not spent the money.

Their cookers use either electricity or gas, and essentially much the same. Many people also have a microwave oven which can re-heat food very quickly. Fridges are smaller than ours, but families with freezers can keep prepared frozen food or freeze their own home-grown food. Hence there is far less jam-making and home-preserving. They can buy excellent kitchen knives and other tools, expensive but good-quality pans and saucepans, and all sorts of plastic contrivances where we have wooden ones. Washing machines are almost universal for family homes (individuals can take their dirty clothes to a launderette). In Britain, too, they still traditionally hang their laundry outside. Tumble driers which dry the clothes but leave them unfresh are common in America but not in Britain.

For cleaning their homes they have vacuum cleaners, as well as brooms, brushes, dusters and all kinds of polishes and creams for dirty windows, dust, filthy baths and so on. They may have all sorts of electrical gadgets (which sometimes don’t work) but daily life has many similarities: sinks do get blocked, damp wall grow mould, children spill sticky food onto carpets and telephones mysteriously refuse to make connections. They too lead lives of domestic complication.

British homes differ much more from one another than Russian homes do. This is partly because they have, on average, more room and more choice as to how to fill the space, so that individual tastes can flourish, partly because there is a much wider gap between their rich and poor than between ours. In Britain there are housing areas for different sorts of people; their separations are not official but self-chosen, and are based on money, work, social status and one’s feeling about the atmosphere of a particular district. Although Russian cities do have districts with a distinct social status, in general our blocks of flats are socially mixed in a way which would never be found in Britain. British big houses that are furnished to satisfy the tastes of businessmen and their wives can give way to a modern estate of smallish practical houses inhabited by office workers and people in the service ‘industries’ – nurses, social workers, police-officers, local government officials and the like; and beyond this estate (that is, small residential area) there might be a council-housing estate of factory workers; and beyond that the remnants of an old village, inconvenient but beautiful, inhabited mostly by professional people. Those different estates and districts may all be inhabited by people who are mostly prosperous within their different jobs, so the houses will all look clean and smart; but a native would recognise instantly what kind of area he or she was in – and appreciate the vast differences in the costs of the houses, and in the tastes and styles of those who live in them.

In Britain you can buy a house, or you can rent a house either from a private landlord or from the local authority (i.e. the local government departments run by the local council – the city soviet). At the beginning of the century 90% of all houses (including flats) were rented from private landlords and 10% were ‘owner-occupied’. By the late 1980’s only about 8% were rented from private landlords, 27% were rented from local authorities and 65% were owner-occupied. It became legal to buy your council house from the council. Many council-house tenants took up the option, especially since they were allowed to buy at much less than the market value of the house. Since then, inevitably, the amount of local authority housing for rent has dropped – but of course nearly two-thirds of households own their own houses.

Most people given the choice would prefer to own their houses rather than rent them. Consequently renting is usually left to the young (from private landlords) and the poor (from local authorities). But private housing means an ability to pay. Obviously most people cannot afford to hand over the full price of a house (an average, not-very-special house will cost about five to seven times an entire annual salary before tax). So the would-be owners must borrow the money. Let us imagine the couple, both working, who want to buy a two-roomed flat in the London suburbs. Such a flat would cost about £60,000, so they must find a bank or a building society to lend the money. They must then agree to pay back the sum over 20 years, plus the interest. Suppose the interest is 10% (actually it is higher than that in Britain now). By the end of twenty years you will have paid more than twice the original sum for your home.

Such sums mean little unless we can relate payments to earnings. In fact mortgage (house loans) repayments vary a great deal from year to year, but let us assume that this young couple are paying £6,000 a year in motgage repayments for their two-roomed flat (similar to a Russian one). If they are both earning full-time, their joint income might be £26,000 before tax. Tax would reduce that to about £18,500. Then they will pay for gas and electricity, perhaps £1,300 a year, £650 for telephone, £350 for insurance and water rates. Total spent on the house which is covered by a standard Russian rent would be £8,300 a year, getting on for half their disposable income. That is fine if they can use the other half of the income for living, but a great burden if, say, the girl wants to give up work for time and have a family. If they move into a bigger house, they can take with them both the money from selling the flat and the debt. For older people, as the debt gets paid off, financial worries improve steadily, but for young people house-buying is an exciting but burdensome commitment. Why not then rent a house? For local authority subsidised housing there is always an enormous queue and councils try to allot homes to those most in need – which do not include the young. So the alternative is private renting, and in this housing sector, rents are enormous. It is common to pay £45 a week for a room, £100 a week for a small, two-roomed flat. So you are paying £5,000 a year anyway, and when you move for somewhere else you have gained nothing from all that expenditure. Better at least to have a twenty-year loan and your own house at the end of it all.

From the British point of view, flats are not really suitable for privatisation, which is perhaps why the English, with the lowest rate of flat owners in Europe also have the highest rate of home ownership and one of the most expensive housing markets.

One other contrast: land in this crowded island of theirs is very scarce and therefore very precious. In the countryside there are many restrictions on building, so that ‘country cottages’ (the nearest term to our dacha) are difficut to find and expensive to buy. A much smaller proportion of their population own or have access to country cottages. On the other hand, most of them have gardens, a high proportion have cars which means easy access to the countryside, and for those who wish to grow more vegetables the local authorities offer allotments – marked-out patches of land intended exclusively for private gardening.

In Britain the major problem is not the cost or availability of basic consumer goods – on the whole these are cheap and getting cheaper – but the cost of housing. Other parts of other choices in their lives, such as where they live and what they work at are immediately affected by the decisions they take about housing. And these decisions have consequences. Though they live in a free society, it is like all free societies is hedged around by restraints, some of them being jobs, transport, and alternatives to the propiska.

The British Alternative to the Propiska – Interviews, Estate Agents and the Internal Combustion Engine

In Britain it is very difficult to find anyone over thirty among the educated middle classes who has stayed where he or she was born. Most people can expect to move at least once during their school years, to attend a university or other centre of higher education in a town other than their own, to find their first employment in another town, and then maybe a job, in yet another centre, which requires them, because of changing conditions to move once or twice more. Mobility is part of their lives.

Our propiska or registration is, in fact, a residence permit and is associated by the British with rationing i.e. with hard times but social justice. Their houses are not rationed, but if accomodation is left unused in an area of homeless people, squatters who move in illegally and start making homes will attract some criticism but also considerable sympathy. Their council house waiting-lists operate like ours, with each prospective family waiting in a queue and acquiring more ‘points’ if for example another baby is born or a child needs special help. There is always much discussion about which families should jump places in the queue because of special circumstances, and the practice of one coincil is anxiously compared with another.

In Britain when a pupil leaves school at sixteen or later he or she must find a job. School leavers without special qualifications will probably visit a ‘Jobcentre’ or look through local newspaper advertisements. Perhaps there’s a big factory in the district, or someone says there is a shortage of clerical assistants in a nearby office. School careers officers can offer advice. But ultimately it is up to the boys and girls themselves to find work.

Graduates from universities and other colleges are in the same position except that they are older and are looking for different kinds of work. Usually they start their search near the beginning of their third (i.e. final) year in college. The professional work many of them want normally requires further specialised training, so the first step is to get a place on a training course – and a grant or some other funds to pay for the course. Probably the first stage will involve some kind of exam and an interview – necessary procedures for choosing which applicants shall be given places on the course which may lead to a job in the end. Such courses are essential for librarians, computer programmers, social workers, accountants, planners and many other kinds of qualified workers. Certain organisations take graduates directly and train them while they are working – for example the BBC. The BBC is immensely popular with those graduates who are looking for exciting jobs in ‘the media’. They will eagerly study newspapers for announcements of vacancies, and apply in their hudreds for any one vacancy. A committee has to read through the papers and select maybe eight or ten applicants for interview. At the interview they will be asked their reasons for wanting the job, and have to answer questions about their academic career, other activities and – often – questions which seem to have no point but which are intended to reveal their personality and general suitability for the job. At least in theory the committee is open-minded, and each candidate is free to persuade them that he or she is the best choice. It certainly isn’t perfect, but since public organisations are obliged to advertise vacancies and interview candidates, the system ensures against the worst excesses of ‘blat’.

If the fortunate candidate is not happy with all the conditions of the job (pay, hours of work, pension rights and so on) he does not have to accept it – but once he has signed the contract he cannot leave the job without giving notice (of maybe three or six months) and he cannot be thrown out of the job without notice and without good reason.

Today, graduates can expect to make dozens of applications for jobs and get short-listed for interviews two or three times before they find satisfactory work. Some of course know exactly what they want and find the right job first time, but more often graduates can spent months searching, meanwhile earning enough to pay the rent by washing dishes or some other short-term work.

Having found your job, you certainly do not expect to stay in it for life – or even for more than a few years. Whether working in private industry or in the state sector, people assume that if they want more money and more responsibility they must expect to move from one employer to another or from one area of work to another (as in the Civil Service). In Britain very often this will mean moving not just your job but your home – sometimes from one end of the country to the other. British industries have never been static; demand for labour has always been rising or declining and men have gone where the work is. They have had to.

But in our contemporary society there are other reasons for moving. Money is naturally very important. But it isn’t just money. Job satisfaction often means taking on more responsibilty which can sometimes best be found by moving to different business or organisation in a fresh situation. Promotion up the steps of the ladder within a firm certainly happens, but the advantages to both employer and employee – stability, familiarity with the work, established comradeship among colleagues, loyalty to the firm and its workers – must be set against the advantages of bringing in ‘fresh blood’, new challenging ways of approaching the work, avoidance of intrigues and resentment among those already in the organisation about the promotion of one over the other and the hard work that can be expected from someone new in the job who has to ‘prove’ himself or herself. In practice promotions are usually a mixture of ‘within-house’ and from outside.

In the modern world , the industrial scene is changing so quickly that many workers with special skills find that these are no longer needed and that they must re-train for new jobs. Those in science-based industries are always having to adapt to new circumstances, and even those with deeply traditional skills like school teachers are dependent on the constant efforts of government and local government to restructure education in efforts to improve it.

Younger people often find themselves on short-term contracts (one or two years) at the end of which they will have to look for another job. This has become a regular practice in universities too.

Moving from one home to another one in a different town or city can be exhilarating, especially for young people without roots who enjoy exploring new neighbourhoods, confronting fresh situations, discovering the possibilities for an interesting life. But whether to move or not can be a complex and often painful decision for married couples with children. The husband is free – of course! But he and his wife will have to consider which is more important – the promotion with its extra pay and responsibility offered to the husband, or the wife’s satisfying but less-well-paid job where the family are now living? Will the wife find work in the new area? What about the children? Will they lose the happy security of the schools and friends they know or will they enjoy the new adventure? Will the new schools be better? Or worse? And what about housing? Anyone thinking of moving from one home to another one in a different town or city will go first of all to the estate agents.

In Britain, housing is very expensive anyway, but to make things more difficult, there are enormous discrepancies between house prices in one area and another. The prices are based on desirability – on ‘the market’. In London and Oxford they are much higher than in the north. For example in Oxford a local school needed a new headteacher. Among the candidates was an outstanding man, and he wanted the job and was eager to live in Oxford. But he was living in the north with a wife and family and he simply could not afford to move south.

Here is the kind of discussion he had with his family. ‘If we sell our house we will maybe receive £65,000 for it. But if we want to buy a similar house in Oxford we will have to pay about £100,000. At the moment we pay £500 a month for our mortgage on our own house here in the north. If we convert our mortgage (our borrowing from the bank) into a mortgage on the more expensive house in Oxford, we will have to pay about £1,000 a month. That means that we will have to pay double the amount of mortgage repayments each month. Can we afford it? I will be getting a bigger salary, but not that much bigger. You, dear (to the wife), will have to find another job in Oxford, and that will not be easy. So the family income will go down for a time, at least. And the mortgage repayments will go on for years. Of course, we could buy a cheaper house. What could we get for £65,000 in Oxford? A two-bedroomed bungalow outside Oxford maybe, with tiny rooms. Suitable for a retired couple. But this means that our two children would have to share a room, and transport costs into Oxford would be very high. Do you want to make these sacrifices so that I can become a headteacher in Oxford? No? Well, I’m relieved, really, because I feel nervous at the idea of having to pay £1000 a month for a mortgage, while, on the other hand, I don’t want to live in a two-bedroomed bungalow.’

Single young men from the north if they are skilled can find work in the south and live in a rented room, though it can be a lonely life. But many married men have chosen families and homes and unemployment.

The other practical restriction on the freedom of the British to live where they wish concerns roads and transport. They live in a very crowded small island with a mild climate and a history of centuries of efficient road-building. This is partly because they had excellent road-building stone and other materials. To this day many of their roads run along the same lines as the old Roman roads. They have good foundations. They rarely have winter frosts severe enough to damage the roads significantly, they do not normally suffer from excessive heat, drought or flooding. So their smooth pot-hole-free, mudless, beautifully engineered roads reach to their most distant (not actually distant) villages. And they have many roads, crossing and recrossing the country to make it possible to drive speedily from one corner of the island to another.

So where is the problem? About 65% of households have the use of a private car; 20% have the use of two or more cars. About three-quarters of all men and about 45% of all women hold full driving licences. The problem is that millions of them do drive, and the traffic crawls, often for hours. In London it is now about what it was at the end of the last century. Parking spaces are always full. It’s often quicker to walk, but walking through polluted air is neither pleasant nor healthy.

At the other end are villages where, because most people have cars, it is no longer profitable to run bus services or to run shops. So the non-drivers, usually the elderly, the young and the poor, are trapped in the village or rely on the kindness of neighbours if they wish to shop for food. Such economic logic frees some people but severly restricts others. These are the problems of a rich society. In fact the car – the internal combustion engine – is better for the individual. But for the community (of which we are all members) it may be better to ban cars in cities and have a good, cheap, efficient public transport system where everybody puts up with some discomfort, but where everybody arrives at their destination. In Milan they have banned private transport; some American cities are considering such proposals; more and more British city centres are closed to cars, and they are now re-introducing the trams and trolley buses which they abandoned thirty years ago.

In general terms they are asking, ‘What restrictions of freedom should be put on individuals to ensure greater freedom for the community? And do these restrictions operate fairly?’ For example, if we make people pay more for the right to drive a car, we penalise the poor more than the rich. An elderly poor woman with an elderly car may need it more than a rich young man needs his car. The higher car or petrol tax will stop her, not him. Is that fair? Much in the society is not fair, but every time a law is passed there is an opportunity to argue, ‘Is that fair or not?’ Meanwhile the difficulties and expense of getting to work in London and other big cities mean that more people are searching (reluctantly) for work outside the capital and the big metropolitan areas. There is some decentralisation of offices and businesses.

To summarize some of the conditions of living in Britain:

You are free to live where you like and work at whatever job you like provided that

1) you can find a suitable house or flat and find the deposit money for a mortgage;

2) you can persuade yourself and the Bank Manager that you can afford to go on repaying the mortgage with large sums of money each month;

3) you can find a suitable job and a job vacancy;

4) you manage to persuade the job interviewers that you are the best person for the job;

5) you have suitable public transport for getting to and from work or you have a car, the necessary money for its upkeep, petrol and taxes and somewhere to park it.

Once you have a house and a job and a means of transport you can start concentrating on promotion. Not everyone is ambitious for promotion, but if you are a skilled and educated person in a job in business or industry, in administration or in the professions, or if you are self-employed, you will be expected to try to improve your position in competition with everyone else. Promotion often means changing jobs, moving house, learning new skills. The rewards for the successful are great: plenty of money, interesting responsible work, opportunities to do things in your own way and influence other people, improved status and self-esteem. As for the unsuccessful in the promotion race, many of them will be quite content to go no further, while others will always measure themselves against what they might have done. And very often this measurement will be made in money. Freedom is that you can try out anything within the law – you can juggle with your assets, advantages and potentialities, you can decide which restrictions you prefer, which ones you will not accept – and take the consequences. And there will be consequences. That is the freedom.