Hi ,
It's easy to feel negative about how things are going in society and, from a personal point of view, it's easier to write jokes about despair. But what if we're winning? New research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and FrameWorks has found evidence of a massive shift in social attitudes towards inequality over the last decade, as well real opportunities to build a more equal UK.
One of the core questions they look at is British attitudes towards individualism. Historically, we've been keen to attribute success or failure to an individual's merit rather than look at the societal structures that shaped them. Young people in particular, with little or no experience of the collective structures that used to exist, have been blamed for the growth in "hustle culture" individualistic attitudes. Which, ironically, is a way to blame individuals rather than the system that shaped them, but I digress.
On that question, they find that two thirds of the population are still more likely to think about individual merit before structural factors – but when thinking about particular issues, structural beliefs are more prevalent than before. In their previous work in 2016, they found, there was a roughly 50/50 split between people who thought that the most successful in society got there by hard work, and those who thought the system gave them an unfair advantage. Now around 7 in 10 believe it's an unfair advantage, and the gap is widening. This means we're making an impact by telling individual stories and linking them to the context and structures that created them. This is what we're trying to do with our local organising in Birmingham, Derby, and London.
Similarly, they find a dramatic shift in attitudes towards poverty. In 2016 they found people saw Britain as post-poverty; poverty was viewed as a historical or foreign phenomenon. This caused, and was caused by, a lot of the narrative at the time about people living on "Benefits Street" with brand new TVs, or the relative success of governments in regenerating/gentrifying inner cities after grimmer memories of the 80s and 90s. Not only is this no longer the case, but people also have a much greater awareness of their vulnerability to poverty now. Poverty exists in Britain and it's a threat to almost everyone.
This allows a solution that people weren't considering before: sharing the wealth. People are now keenly aware of the enormous wealth held by the super rich and the huge disparities between their stagnant pay and financial struggles, and the high salaries and affluence of CEOs. Another massive shift is that 8 in 10 now believe the economy has been designed, instead of the previous dominant belief that it was a natural force. This means people are supporting change that would never have been considered 10 years ago. Now, sharing the wealth is overwhelmingly popular across political parties, nations, and demographics.
This is a huge change in the mindset of British society and one that opens the way for a lot of deep, radical change to make the UK more equal. It mirrors a lot of distrust in the system that has allowed the far right to set the agenda across much of the world. Believing the economy is rigged, after all, is easy to exploit by blaming outgroups or shadowy individuals. That's why we've launched our community economist programme, to help people understand the economies around them and how they can be designed to be fair and equal.
This shift isn't top-down from the rich and powerful – it's been led by activists and campaigners like you. Not only is the ground shifting, but it's increasingly clear that the conditions are right for energetic political and community campaigns to rapidly change a lot of attitudes and upend an established system. Maybe we are winning! |
