To say that Owen Jones's 'Agenda for Hope' is a bloody brilliant idea..?

[Scarletohello]

www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/owen-joness-agenda-for-hope-we-want-a-fairer-society--and-heres-how-we-can-achieve-it-9086440.html

The link will be active in the following post but essentially it is the proposals devised by many groups to create a fairer society for all...

Please read!

'Wait til he has children'

Was that a joke Cailin?

Read the other day that the majority of senior executives in Ftse 100 had earned the £26,000 average wage by 8th Jan! There is a lot of sound evidence that the more unequal a society is the more dysfunctional it becomes. We really do need to sort this out for the sakes of us and our families. Owen Jones may not have got it all right, but his ideas are a step in the right direction.

No lotta, does he already have children?

he's gay

So? Gay people have children.

What does his not having children have to do with anything Cailin?

I have genuinely never met anyone who was too stupid to pursue further education after 16 or 18 in one shape or another.

Seriously Bruthas? You must live in a very privileged environment.

In my dreams I'd like us to return to some sort of thriving manufacturing economy where young people could access real apprenticeships with genuine prospects. Or at the very least a decent living wage working on the factory floor.

That ship has sailed though. I actually believe the West is in long term decline.

Lotta - throughout history the people generally who tend to hold strongly right or left wing views are men with few loving connections. Idealism thrives when you are a lone wolf so to speak. Once you start to develop your own family you realise how much of life is about compromise. Also having children in particular makes you much more selfish in terms of wanting the best for your children in particular. It's easy to argue for free universal childcare when it's not you who has to place your young baby in overcrowded poorly resourced state nurseries. It's easy to argue that Mary's 19 year old son should have the same opportunities until it's your son he's competing against and your son has a first from oxford while Mary's son barely scraped one gcse and gets drunk three times a week.

Caillin has it.

I was always amazed how people's left wing principles flew out of the window when it came to giving their own kids a leg up. I'm talking everyone from Dianne Abbott to Paul Weller.
Now I have my own kids I really get it.

We rent out a flat in London and just about break even. Buy to let mortgages have quite high rates. We also have a service charge to pay to the LA, fees to letting agent etc etc. I think we make about £40 a month, all told.

My point is, it's easy for priviledged intelligent elite young men to theorise about an equal society. In practice how many people would be ok with a poorly educated young man earning £26000 for working a till while their degree educated son earns only £1000 more having gained a PhD and a job in a university? Our society has two ways of valuing people - through class and through merit. Most people would claim at least to want an end to class assumptions so that leaves merit. Merit is all about competition - at school, in the workplace etc. If you limit competition you demotivate people - this is the main reason communism doesn't work.

No one actually physically needs £100k to survive. People work very hard, too hard in many cases for that money as it confers status and priviledge and allows their kin to "get ahead." It is a very strong motivator. Once people get in the cushy position of having priviledge they take care of themselves and their family and peers first. Others come after. That's human nature.

Well said Cailin.

So why did Mary's son scrape one GCSE and why does he get drunk three times a week? In lots of cases it's not through choice, it's because he never really had a chance from the start. Why then should he be at a disadvantage to someone who had a steady childhood and comparatively so many more opportunities?

There is just nothing out there for kids who can't make uni for whatever reason.

Starburst do believe all children are equally able, given the right environment, to gain the same amount of gcses?

In practice how many people would be ok with a poorly educated young man earning £26000 for working a till while their degree educated son earns only £1000 more having gained a PhD and a job in a university?

To be honest, I reckon most PhD graduates wouldn't mind, providing their education was free (ie. they don't graduate in a shit-ton of debt).

Doing a MA / PhD is a kind of work in itself. You produce new research and develop new knowledge from which the rest of society can profit. Because competing postgrad study requires a kind of nerdiness and almost blinkered interest in the subject field, it is obviously of limited interest - ie if PhDs suddenly became free, you likely wouldn't get a mass stampede of people elbowing one another out of the way to get back to University. So if you get to study something you're really interested in for 3 years, at no expense to yourself, and graduate debt-free, I reckon a lot of PhD students would be pretty happy with that.

Fwiw I do like his ideas - especially his ideas about the railways, a living wage, and housing. But I do also think he's a bit of a rampant idealist and I'm not sure it would all work.

1. Yes.
2. Rent cap: no, good luck moving house if they did that! Build more houses: of course.
3. No. They may be rich, but it is their money, not ours. 50% is too much. Take 40% of their money and be grateful for it.
4. Yes.
5. No. They'd lose billions.
6. Make lots of great jobs. Well, yes, that would be nice.
7. Yes.
8. Ban zero hours? Yes. Do we need more union activity to "help" us out? No.
9. No. The cost would be incredible. One full-time (equivalent) working week between two parents is the solution, not expanding the state to replace parents.

Is there anyone out there who is proposing:
a) the fairer sharing of the burden (a la Owen, Labour, et al)
AND
b) a smaller state (a la the Tories)?

I'd go for that!

Erm is it me or is all he's done is flower up the general bollocks of "the rich are bastards TAX THEM TAX THEM HARD"

What a load of claptrap

Cailin, but they're not all given the right environment. And a kid whose only source of learning is school is at a massive disadvantage to a kid who is given help by educated parents and access to books and museum trips etc. I think it's difficult to deny that class can be a clinching factor.

Oh dear me. Im a MNer without children and I have always found this place refreshingly free of the 'when you have kids you'll understand' mentality. How disappointing to see it on this thread. I work with parents and plenty of them do not appear to give two figs about their children or anyone else.

No they're not all given the right environment. Because their parents don't value education.
But if we could somehow force all parents to value education or say raised all children in a state home, do you believe that all children would be capable of getting the same gcses?

Lotta that only serves to reinforce my point. You have the parents who will do whatever it takes to have the best for their children above all others (selfish) and parents who couldn't care less (selfish).

Lotta - throughout history the people generally who tend to hold strongly right or left wing views are men with few loving connections.

Any examples, Cailin? Because a roll-call of the world's top dictators (should be a top trumps game...) wouldn't appear to bear that out.

Speaking as a soon to graduate PhD, DavidTwattenborough, I agree with you. I don't consider myself hard done by. I've been paid roughly £14,000 a year for 3 years to conduct my research, with fees waived. For many people of my age (I was 24 when I started), that's a pretty good deal. Don't get me wrong - the work is hard, can be exhausting and you need to be incredibly disciplined. But I'd never earned that much previously, and felt happy with that.

My funding has run out, so I'm living off very little right now (into my overdraft, thankfully DH is paying my share of the mortgage too). I've never laboured under the illusion that my PhD is going to get me a big bucks salary. It's an arts PhD. It was my choice to do it. I looked at it as a decently paid job for 3 years and now I have to find something else. Anyone who does a PhD in the arts for the money they'll command at the end of it (as opposed to the money they earn while doing it, if funded) is barking up the wrong tree, IMO.

No I don't, but I do believe that lots of working class kids who are now unemployed or hating their dead end, low pay job could have done better for themselves- whether that's scraping more than one GCSE or university or an apprenticeship or whatever. So many children are written off, and write themselves off. They just don't have a chance like middle class kids do.

And not having children does not mean that you have 'few loving connections'! Thats a really arrogant thing to say. Again, I have to say I am shocked to read this sort of thing on MN