Fixing A&E

Scene: A plush riverside office.

[Sound of irritating iPhone ring.]

“Hello. Joseph Bloggs.”

“Hi Joe. It’s Jeremy.”

“….Minister! Good to hear from you. Er…how’s things?”

“Bit fraught actually Joe. This A&E thing is a right mess.”

“Yes, I saw the Twitter storm about it. Bad business.”

“Look Joe, I’ll cut to the chase. I’m giving regional managers until the end of May to sort this out.”

“Regional mangers, Minister?”

“YES! It’s about time you lot were held accountable for this chaos.”

“But Minister, I don’t work for you any more. You sacked all the regional managers at the end of March, remember?”

“Bugger! Oh crap….er…look…can you come back for a while?”

“Of course Minister. I work for PoshblokeSmythe Consulting now. We’ll come and see you and get a proposal to you by the end of next week.”

“It’s a bit more urgent than that Joe. Can’t you just send me a quick email and get started? We’ll sort the details out later.”

“No problem. My fee rate is £4,000 a day.”

“Blimey! That’s a lot more than we used to pay you.”

“Yes but top talent and cutting edge management development don’t come cheap, you know.”

“(Groan) OK, we’ll just have to go with it for now.”

“Just one question, Minister. Wasn’t the whole point of the reforms to leave all this to the market? Weren’t the weak hospitals supposed to go to the wall and the strong ones pick up the slack, thereby making the system more efficient? Wasn’t the government supposed to butt out and let market forces drive up standards?”

“Yes but we don’t have time for all that now. There’s an election in two years time and the last thing we need is an A&E meltdown just before it. If I don’t get this sorted PDQ, Dave will have my plums on a skewer.”

“OK. Better get to work then. I’ll get my team ready.”

“Team?”

“Yes, this will need a few of us. Normally I’d bring them all round and introduce them but we’re pushed for time and, in any case, you know most of them already, as they used to work for you.”

“Er…oh, right….good. Anyway, we’re setting up Urgent Care Boards to co-ordinate things regionally across the country. I’d like you to help get them going.”

“Doesn’t ‘Boards’ sound a bit 1970s centralised welfare state?”

“Yes, I suppose it does. Do you have a better suggestion?”

“How about ‘Strategic Health Authorities’?”

“Yes, that sounds….oh, hang on….”

“Ha ha. Just my little joke, Minister.”

“(Hollow laugh) Yes of course….now I’d like you to start in the North East.”

“Fine. I’ll get my team up to Newcastle on the first flight next week.”

“Flight? Can’t you just jump in the car?”

“Don’t do that any more Minister. Strictly business class only these days.”

“Business cla….Oh alright then!”

“And I’ll need you to sign off some expenses before we go. We usually stay in the Malmaison when we’re up there.”

“Fu…… OK, just do it.”

“Right we’ll get started then. I assume you have plenty of budget for this.”

“Budget…yes (cough) of course…er… budget is, er,  no problem.”

“See you next week then. Have a great weekend Minister.”

“Er, yes, and you Joe. Bye.”

[Click]

How to reduce your gender pay gap

Sometimes you come across counterintuitive facts that make you step back and wonder if everything you thought you knew was wrong, like America spending more per capita on healthcare than Britain or Stephanie Flanders not being head girl at school or Italy being the first country to eliminate its full-time gender pay gap.

Yes, that’s right, Italy. Not Finland, not Denmark, not some other bastion of female friendly social democracy but Italy.

Gender pay gap by working profile, %, 2011

At least, that’s what the latest EuroStat data says.

For full-time workers pay gaps varied widely in the EU, by 20 percentage points, between the highest ones observed in Slovakia and Germany (20 %) and the lowest pay gap, actually no pay gap at all, in Italy (0 %).

So mind-blowing was this that I decided to check out the OECD’s figures for a second opinion. These show Italy having a slight gender pay gap for full-time workers but it is still the lowest in the group.

It gets even better. We know that the gender pay gap increases when women get to their 30s and leave work to have children. This is the case, to varying degrees, across Europe. But according to a recent OECD survey, Italy is the country where motherhood has the least impact on pay levels.

Not only is Italy’s gender pay gap relatively low but having children seems to make very little difference to women’s pay.

It all looks impressive. Last month, the Huffington post listed Italy as one of the countries putting the USA to shame on gender equality.

So how has Italy done it? Has it brought in strict laws on equal pay and strengthened maternity rights? Are employers in Italy complying with both the letter and the spirit of equality legislation in a way that happens nowhere else in Europe? Unlikely isn’t it?

Italy is 80th in the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index. The countries at the top are the ones you’d expect to see: Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden. It’s the same story whichever gender equality index you look at. The Scandinavian countries are near the top and you have to scroll down quite a way to find Italy.

If it’s not due to equality legislation, then, what is the secret of Italy’s low gender pay gap?

The figures on employment rates give us a clue.

Italy has one of the lowest rates of female employment in Europe. Furthermore, the inactivity rate among women in the 25-54 age group is also one of the highest in Europe – around 35 percent compared to 12 percent in Sweden and Denmark.

Italy has a low gender pay gap and a low impact of motherhood on pay not because of its female-friendly policies but because many Italian women simply leave the labour force. As the Bank of Italy’s Roberta Zizza says, Italy’s low gender pay gap is due to positive sample selection:

When the cross-country comparison deals with the gender wage gap, Italy stands as one of the countries where the gap is lower. This is mainly due to a positive selection: in Italy the women who work are those whose characteristics are better rewarded by the labour market (for example, the more educated).

The high flyers who can hold their own in a male dominated labour force go back to work while many other women withdraw from the labour market.

A 2008 study by Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo found a correlation between low female labour force participation and low gender pay gaps. When they corrected for the rates of labour force participation, the gender pay gaps in southern European countries looked less impressive.

Gender wage gaps in the United States and the United Kingdom are much higher than in other European countries, and especially so with respect to France and southern Europe. Although at first glance this fact may suggest evidence of a more equal pay treatment across genders in the latter group of countries, appearances can be deceptive.

[W]e note that gender wage gaps across countries are negatively correlated with gender employment gaps and we illustrate the importance of nonrandom selection into work in understanding the observed international variation in gender wage gaps.

This goes some way to explaining the paradox that the countries with the most female friendly laws and working practices have relatively high gender pay gaps, in some cases above the OECD average, while those of the more ‘traditional’ countries are low or even non-existent.

Even in enlightened Scandinavia, women still do most of the childcare so, as in the UK, they go back to work part-time or get lower paid jobs locally to be on hand for the school run. Encouraging women back into the workforce, then, has the paradoxical effect of raising a country’s gender pay gap. Countries like Italy, by contrast, take more women of child-bearing age out of the workforce completely, which removes them from the calculations and lowers the gender pay gap.

Now before you get shirty with me, I’m not actually suggesting this as a policy, though doubtless the removal of mothers from the workforce would find favour in some quarters. These nuances in the gender pay gap calculations are important for a couple of reasons though. Firstly, it shows just how far social norms and conventions impact on pay levels. The gender pay gaps in different parts Europe arise from varying assumptions about the role of women. Secondly, it shows how important it is to dig deeper when presented with what looks like solid statistical data. If something on a graph or report looks wrong it’s always worth looking a little closer. Italy’s gender pay gap isn’t really embarrassing America or any other country. It might look that way on a graph but, as so often, the truth is a little more complicated.

Thatcherite zeal? Or just a re-enactment?

Boris Johnson and some Conservative backbenchers called for ‘Thatcherite zeal’ against the trade unions, as they renewed demands for tougher strike laws.

I’ve already had a go at Boris about this in a previous post but let’s just recap on what the current law on industrial disputes says:

• No-one can be forced to go on strike;
• No-one can be forced to be a member of a trade union;
• Unions can’t discipline people for refusing to go on strike;
• Pickets are restricted to six people so it is impossible to physically prevent people from going to work and there are criminal sanctions against threatening or intimidating behaviour;
• Those wanting to strike can’t do so without a ballot and they need to get a majority of those voting to agree with them; but
• (And this last one is really important) An apathetic majority can’t stop a committed minority from going on strike.

Now that, to me, all sounds very reasonable. If you want to go on strike, you can, if you can make a case to enough of those who give enough of a damn to vote. If you don’t want to strike, you don’t have to and no-one can force you to do so or discipline you afterwards. The old excesses of trade unionism – the closed shop, the mass pickets, the show-of-hands in the car park – have all gone.

This position is, by and large, the result of measures taken by the Thatcher and Major governments. The grandees of that period have advised the current government against changing any of it.

What Boris and the self-styled new right seem to have missed (perhaps deliberately) is that this is a battle that was won by their predecessors. Industrial disputes are a minor problem now and strikes with poor support will have little impact anyway.

Chart via FullFact using ONS data.

I wonder, though, if this is another symptom of the half-remembered Thatcher mythology that led to the ridiculous shares for rights legislation. Those of us that were at university during the Thatcher years, a cohort which includes many in the government, tend to have a stylised view about Margaret Thatcher. Whatever our views, we remember her government as being more ideologically driven than it actually was. It is only with the benefit of hindsight and the insights of older and wiser heads, that we realise the 1980s Tories were, in may ways, old-fashioned pragmatists.

As the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman says, the Conservatives have been gripped by
‘What Would Thatcher Do?‘ fever without really understanding the subtleties of the Thatcher years. She quotes the venerable T. E. Utley:

When talking to her friends or addressing a party conference, she is the philosopher queen, although the impression, as far as her public oratory goes, springs rather from the manner of its delivery than from its actual content; listen hard enough and you will always hear the qualifying clauses, often uttered rapidly and with an almost palpable physical revulsion. Then something happens in the real world — the need to bring the Rhodesian crisis to an end, the need to avoid a miners’ strike before the government is ready to cope with it, the need to placate a divided Cabinet over trade union reform — and Mrs Thatcher yields to necessity, often swiftly.

Much of the ‘Thatcherite zeal’ was in the rhetoric. What her governments did was usually more pragmatic.

Worse still, though, in their attempt to recapture this mythical Thatcherite zeal, today’s Conservatives haven’t even found anything new to which they can apply it. They seem to want to fight the same old battles on the labour market and trade union reform, even though trade union laws work and our employment regulation is among the lightest in the developed world.

This is rather like re-enacting a battle or watching a football match from the days when your team were good. It’s great; you can enjoy a good fight and you know that you get to win at the end of it. But, fun though it may be, it wins no prizes. For that, you have to  fight real battles and play real matches in today’s world.

That so many in our governing party want to go over old ground and re-fight old battles makes them look pretty desperate. Are they really so short of ideas that they have to summon up the ghosts of their enemies from the past? Is the ‘What Would Thatcher Do’ malaise just the sign of a party that really has no idea what to do next?

Who lost the 20th century?

In the end, after a lively debate, the New Statesman’s audience decided that the left won the 20th century. That still seems slightly odd to me, given that the left has suffered considerable reverses on the economic front since the 1970s. (See previous post.) I wonder if the vote would have gone the same way if they had held the debate in Barnsley.

I’ve finally found the source of that quote about who won what; it was from the very end of the 20th century. In 1999 Professor Alan Wolfe declared, “The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war…” or, as David Goodhart put it, the two liberalisms dominated politics for a generation, the social liberalism of the left and the economic liberalism of the right.

I have no data for this but observation says both these strands of thought tend to be more dominant among party activists in London. In the Conservative Party, its members in the shires are more socially conservative, while its liberal Economist reading tendency is concentrated in London. The Labour Party’s activists in its northern heartlands tend to be more interested in the economics – jobs and trade union rights. For for its metropolitan supporters, though, the social agenda is more important. That’s why, at the New Statesman debate, they declared that they had won the 20th century. In terms of what is most important to them, they did.

David Goodhart noticed something similar:

The two liberalisms have reflected too closely the interests of the mobile, secular, graduate elite that dominates Britain, both politically and culturally. It usually favours loose, wide commitments and has generally embraced globalisation.

So if the two liberalisms won, it therefore follows that the losers of the 20th century, or at least, of its last few decades, were the socially conservative right and the socialist/trade unionist left. The fact that we tend to apply the prefix ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ to both just serves to emphasise their defeat.

Outside London (mostly), there are a number of Labour supporters wondering why their party was in power for thirteen years, yet their neighbourhoods are decaying, their incomes are falling and their employment is increasingly precarious. Likewise, there are Conservatives who wonder why, after eighteen years of Tory rule, political correctness took root, progressive education triumphed in schools and we ended up being drawn ever deeper into Europe. Their party is in power again but it doesn’t seem to be that keen on resolving any of these issues, preferring instead to ‘mess about with things like gay marriage‘. And now their incomes are falling too.

After the Eastleigh by-election, which UKIP came close to winning, the Guardian’s John Harris wrote, “No mainstream party in England truly understands conservatism.”

As he explains:

Serial defeats for the Labour party eventually led to the arrival of the cult of the so-called modernisers, pledged to force their party to swallow the fact that Thatcher had changed the country for keeps…..the unions – and, by extension, millions of voters – were decried as hopeless throwbacks.

Then, it was the Tories’ turn to be taken over by modernisers, passionately in thrall to Blair and his disciples’ example. David Cameron’s early stabs at offending Tory traditionalists – hugging huskies and hoodies, the contemptible W10 wind turbine – were barely serious, but their effect still lingers, and the same approach was seen when he picked a fight over same-sex marriage.

His remains a politics rooted in upscale capital postcodes rather than the shires and suburbs.

As he also notes, many UKIP voters, while opposed to immigration, were also supportive of the NHS and in favour of re-nationalising the railways – in other words, they were very much at odds with the prevailing political climate. The right may have won the economic war and the left the culture war but there are a lot of people who wish it had been the other way around or, at least, that the victories hadn’t been quite so complete. There is a constituency that is to the right of David Cameron on social issues and to the left of Tony Blair on economic ones. Mix up some anti-immigration rhetoric with some banker-bashing and vague talk of getting things back to how they were and you’ll get an audience.

And that is pretty much what UKIP has done, as Max Wind-Cowie put it yesterday:

Bringing together the dissatisfied of Tunbridge Wells and the downtrodden of Merseyside is a remarkable feat, and it stems from UKIP’s empathy for those who have been left behind by the relentless march of globalisation and glib liberalism.

But if they looked closely enough, many of its voters might not agree with UKIP’s policies. Its founders were economic libertarians whose main gripe was regulation. I suspect that many of the UKIP old guard would be happy to see large numbers of unskilled immigrants, provided they could put them to work in unregulated sweatshops. Many of UKIP’s voters, on the other hand, seem to want more government, not less. This is the root of UKIP’s policy incoherence – it is trying to be all things to all men.

At the moment, though, few people are looking that closely. UKIP’s leaders are happy for people to project their frustrations onto their party and believe what they like. For this reason, UKIP is set to take votes from both major parties.

This wonderful story from Andrew Rawnsley explains what happened when a Labour strategist ran a focus group to try to find out why:

One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: “The past.” The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

A Ukip vote is not mainly, if at all, about making a choice based on an assessment of policy. More than anything, it is about expressing an emotion – usually a feeling of intense rage about how Britain has changed and how they are served by the established political parties. It is a howl against the modern world, a scream against the establishment. There’s no arguing with that. Or, if there is a way of dealing with it, none of the main parties has yet discovered what it is.

None of this is to say that all the anger against politicians is justified. At least some of what people don’t like about the modern world can be put down simply to the way things have changed – everywhere. To an extent, immigration, economic decline and even rising inequality are the results of globalisation. The extent to which politicians can solve them, without resorting to draconian policies with unforseen consequences, is limited. This, though, is an argument for another blog post.

There are two reasons why a viable party of the populist right, like those in some other European countries, has not appeared in Britain. Firstly, our electoral system is less favourable to small parties. Secondly, until now, our populist right-wing parties have been thuggish, utterly incompetent and tainted with fascism. UKIP, whatever else you might think about it, is none of these things.

Many people feel that they are on the losing side of politics. Maybe this is simply frustration about the modern world but it is no less potent for that. A political party has now appeared that can exploit that howl of rage – to the extent that it can do serious damage to the major parties. Similar political movements have appeared elsewhere in Europe. The real surprise is that it has taken so long to happen here.

Lambic and geuze – a success story with a sour taste!

Last weekend, I was over in Belgium for the biennial Toer De Geuze, when the brewers of geuze and lambic beers open their doors to the public to show off their beers.

Geuze and lambic beers are, to say the least, an acquired taste. I worked in Brussels for over a year and never touched the stuff. I thought it was horrible. It was only ten years later that I finally learned to appreciate it.

Lambic and its derivatives, geuze and kriek, are brewed using the wild yeast Brettanomyces Bruxellensis that comes from the marshes of the River Senne, to the south-west of Brussels. Rather than using cultivated yeasts, the brewers expose their wort to the open air and let it get infected. It is then left to ferment for a year. The result is a sour but very refreshing beer. Geuze is a blend of one, two and three-year-old lambic, making it one of the most complex beers you’ll ever taste.

Here is Tim Webb, author of the Good Beer Guide to Belgium:

Your first encounter can be astonishingly awful. It may make you want to send it back immediately, but then persuades you to hold on for another mouthful. Having solidiered through the bottle and awarded yourself a gold rosette for adding painfully to your knowledge of brewing history, it should make you vow never to try it again. Then you order another just in case you got it wrong.

And then another and another.

As you can guess, I’m a convert and I heartily recommend the stuff to anyone who loves good booze.

Geuze and lambic are more than just great beers though. They represent a great success story for a few people who had the vision and the passion (in the true sense, not the “I’m 120% passionate, Sirallan” sense) to revive a brewing tradition that was nearly dead.

For, by the 1970s, lambic and geuze were dying. Many of the Belgians we spoke to last week blamed the Germans: firstly for literal imperialism – nicking all Belgium’s brewing equipment and shipping it back to Germany during the war – and secondly for cultural imperialism – flooding the country with pilsner. Others blamed hygiene laws for sterilising breweries to such an extent that the wild yeasts wouldn’t grow, or the EU for saying that the lambic brewing process was a health hazard and attempting to ban it.

Whatever the reason, the brewing of wild yeast beers was a dying art by the 1970s. Received wisdom said that, by the end of the century, all the small brewers in Belgium would be gone.

It all sounds very familiar doesn’t it? As does what happened next. A small group of committed people revived the tradition and took the industry from near death in the 1970s, to one that now exports beer all over the world. One of those who helped to save Lambic beer was a young man called Frank Boon.

Here’s Tim Webb again:

When Frank Boon took over the De Vits lambic brewery in 1975, he was considered either an idealistic amateur or a crank, who had not realised lambic was dying.

Last Saturday, that idealistic amateur (or crank) saw his spanking new brewery opened by Herman van Rompuy. One in the eye for all those who said lambic was doomed.

In a movement that has parallels with real-ale and craft-brewing in Britain and the US, a new generation revived the brewing of wild-yeast beers and revitalised an industry that seemed to be heading inexorably towards consolidation and standardisation.

Sometimes it was new brewers buying old breweries, in other cases, a new generation took over an old family brewer. Three decades on and lambic beers are thriving. It’s newest producer, Tilquin, was started just two years ago by a 37 year-old bioengineer.

Many of the beers are now exported and there is growing interest in them in the US. Once the Americans discovered that beer didn’t have to be yellow and tasteless, it seems they couldn’t get enough of…well, anything that was different. I loved this blog post Where to Drink Sour Beer in Chicago. Something like this would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

OK, it’s still a niche product and it is unlikely to make anyone a millionaire but at least the future of this rare and wonderful beer and of the people who make it, now looks secure.

I could draw this post to a conclusion by making some glib comments about following your passion and not believing pundits when they tell you something has had its day but all that should be obvious from the story. Instead, I suggest you just try the stuff and see if you like it. You probably won’t at first but have another one and just see what happens….

Shares For Rights – Government quietly revives one of its stupidest ideas

Remember the government’s ‘shares for employment rights’ idea? It was rejected by almost every business surveyed during the consultation, many coming to the same conclusions as I did when it was first announced.

The House of Lords thought it was a daft idea too and threw it out.

Then, on Tuesday, while everyone was busy talking about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, the government quietly re-introduced the proposal. As far as I can tell, only Personnel Today and XpertHR noticed.

It’s a low bar, I know, but this is one of the Coalition’s stupidest pieces of legislation. Almost no-one wants it and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it will make a scrap of difference to the economy. So why are they pursuing it?

Michael wonders if it is a continuation of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy.

Can the employee-shareholder contract proposals be considered a part of Thatcher’s legacy to UK employment law?

In a superb piece on the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s Government on the workplace(XpertHR subscription required) Darren Newman looks at the “step-by-step approach to reform” adopted by Thatcher’s government, and at the “chipping away” at laws on trade unions that took place.

Newman notes that “the step-by-step approach to employment law continues [today], so there are always employment law changes on the horizon.”

He also argues that “one important legacy of the changes made in the 1980s has been the shift in the focus from trade unions and industrial action to individual rights.”

The employee-shareholder contract proposals are focused on nothing if not on individual rights.

Economist David Blanchflower put forward an interesting theory as to Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy in a piece for the Independent earlier this week. Blanchflower noted that “the UK labour market is highly flexible, which may well be Mrs Thatcher’s most significant economic legacy. Strikes are largely a thing of the past.”

Could it not be argued that the employee-shareholder contract proposals, should they come into effect, might further increase the flexibility of the UK labour market?

I’m not so sure this measure is a Thatcherite legacy. I’m not even convinced that it will increase labour market flexibility. Any gain from being able to hire and fire after 2 years employment, without risk of a tribunal claim, will surely be outweighed by the additional administrative overhead and potential legal arguments over values of shares. The post-employment disputes may simply shift from one court to another.

But the other thing many people forget about Thatcher, Tebbit and most of the 80s Tories is that they were pragmatists. One of the reasons they didn’t mess too much with employment protection was that they wanted to encourage people to pursue their disputes through the courts and not through industrial action. They raised the unfair dismissal threshold to 2 years and left the rest of the system intact. As I’ve said before, the Conservative Party was quite keen on employment law, and with good reason.

As Darren says in the article linked to above:

One important legacy of the changes made in the 1980s has been the shift in the focus from trade unions and industrial action to individual rights. In 1979, if you were sacked by your employer you could go to the union and, if it backed you, the workplace could be brought to an immediate standstill until you were reinstated. Nowadays, battles over the treatment of individuals are fought in the employment tribunal rather than on a picket line. Today’s employers – which may complain that their ability to manage is impaired by complicated and legalistic employment law – would be envied by their counterparts in 1979.

In many ways, today’s employment environment is easier for employers than it was in the 1970s and, compared to that of most other developed countries, fairly light touch. Most employers seem to think shares for rights would complicate matters. Surely a pragmatist like Thatcher or Tebbit would leave well alone.

My hypothesis is slightly different from Michael’s. Shares-for-rights is not an extension of Thatcherism but of the current Conservatives’ idea of Thatcherism. It is labour market reform viewed through the prism of ideology – a half-baked ideology based on a distorted memory of the 1980s. The great woman won the day with free-market ideas and labour law reform so we must do more of that too.

The result is pointless legislation which few employers support and which the Thatcherites of the 80s would surely have canned as soon as their supporters in business told them what a crap idea it was.

Update: HR Bullets noticed too and notes the Government’s target implementation date of September this year.

John Band reckons it will be killed off before then:

@flipchartrick I’m told by People In The Know that it’ll be junked again in Lords and then lost rather than subject to Parliament Act.

— John B (@johnb78) April 18, 2013

Let’s hope he’s right.

Did the left win the 20th century?

This is the question posed in the New Statesman’s centenary issue and in a debate this Thursday. I’m disappointed that I can’t go. Fortunately my good friends Mervyn Dinnen and Niki Rosenbaum will be there so I trust I will get a full report. It’s a fascinating subject, though, and I just couldn’t resist sticking my oar in.

Of course, the answer to this question depends on how you define left and right and the criteria you use to determine who won. It is complicated further because the beliefs of both right and left have changed over time. Is this because the left changed the right or the right changed the left or bit of both? I’d be interested to see how the speakers deal with questions like this in just a couple of hours.

We have to start somewhere though. If we restrict the debate to the UK and look simply at who won the most general elections, then the right won. The Conservatives were in power for a lot more of the century than the Liberal or Labour parties. Even the wartime and depression era coalitions were, for the most part, led by Conservative prime ministers.

But when we consider how Britain changed during the 20th century, things look a little different. If we could transport left-wing and right-wing politicians from 1901 to 2001, it would almost certainly be the Conservatives who would be most outraged by what Britain has become. Once they had recovered from the shock of the empire’s demise, our Edwardian Tories would be appalled by the aristocracy’s loss of power, the levels of taxation, same-sex relationships, the utter lack of deference for social ‘betters’ and the sheer number of ‘colonials’ who had settled here. The 1901 lefties, on the other hand, would be pleased to see that the party they had recently founded had just won a second term in office. With free healthcare, free education, a comprehensive welfare system, employment protection and votes for all adult men and women, they might reasonably conclude that they had won the 20th century after all.

Part of the reason for this is that, even though they held office for most of the century, the Conservatives rarely attempted to claw back the gains made by the left. Apart from occasional attempts to rein in public spending, the Conservatives seem to have been content simply to stop the left-wing project going any further. In time, they came to accept the welfare state, the NHS, trade unions and even nationalisation. Or, at least, they did until the 1970s and that’s when things start to get a bit more complicated. If our Edwardian lefties looked a bit more closely at what happened towards the end of the 20th century, they might feel less inclined to celebrate.

In many ways, the 1970s was Britain’s most left-wing decade. It was the time when inequality fell to its lowest level, wage earners gained the largest share of wealth relative to the owners of capital and trade union membership peaked. As Ken Livingstone said recently:

If you go back to the early 70s, my generation assumed we would have created a socialist society by now.

As well they might, because everything seemed to be going the left’s way. Many Conservatives thought so too. Their party seemed to have settled into a role of postponing, rather than challenging, the inexorable rise of the left. Some of the more bonkers elements on the right even talked of coups and counter-revolutionary militias (which always makes me think of this).

In the event, a coup wasn’t needed because Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and others came along with a new agenda and a revitalised Tory Party. Nationalised industries were privatised, markets were deregulated, taxation was cut, while the unions were confronted and, for the most part, beaten. The result was that many of the economic trends were reversed. Income inequality rose both in terms of before-tax and after-tax income. Not only were the wealthy earning more, they were losing less of it in tax.

(Chart from Dr John Bone of Aberdeen University. Full paper here.)
UK Gini coefficient before and after taxes and transfers 1975 – 2010

Source: OECD

The share of wealth tipped away from wages and back towards profits and the income share of the top 1 percent increased.

Source: Chart produced from ONS data by Chris Dillow

Over the course of the decade, trade union membership began the steep decline from which it has never recovered.

(Chart via Coutts Daily Themes.)

As these charts show, the 1970s were the left’s high water mark. The trends which Ken Livingstone and his friends had thought would continue indefinitely were thrown into reverse in the 1980s. Thatcherism stopped the onward march of the left dead in its tracks.

At least, that’s what happened on the economic front. Elsewhere, though, it was a different story. Although Margaret Thatcher was a social conservative, her governments did very little that was socially conservative. Apart from a slight reduction in immigration and the infamous Section 28 banning the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, the Conservatives made little attempt to challenge the left’s social equality agenda. Thatcher’s government even enacted some socially liberal legislation of its own, such as the ban on corporal punishment in schools and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. The Conservatives even shied away from socially conservative legislation that would have been overwhelmingly popular, such as the re-introduction of capital punishment.

If, during the Thatcher years, many of the left’s economic gains were reversed, its social agenda was pursued with even greater fervour than before. During the 1980s, the phenomenon known as political correctness, a term invented by the American left but now used pejoratively by the right, took root in Britain.  This was the decade when ‘racism awareness’ courses first appeared and the use of racist, sexist and homophobic language was challenged. By 1990, language and humour which had been commonplace in the 1970s was considered unacceptable. TV favourites of the Labour years, like the Black and White Minstrel Show and Love Thy Neighbour, were by now seen as embarrassing throwbacks. Even as the miners and printers fought and lost, the left was still making gains in the fight against sexism and racism. The left’s laws against hate-speech are the subject of endless right-wing moaning, yet even the Thatcher government strengthened the laws against the incitement of racial hatred.

Few people would argue that prejudice has been eradicated but the position of women, ethnic minorities and gay people is surely better now than it was in the 1970s. In general, we are a now a more diverse and tolerant society.

This aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s government divided right-wing commentators as they picked over her legacy last week. Some, like Michael Burley, would like to have seen more socially conservative measures:

[B]y focusing on the economic struggle, she neglected the insidious demoralisation of society, and the enduring hegemony of the Left in such interlinked fields as education, the media and artistic culture.

Others, like Alex Massie, celebrate the defeat of social conservatism, even if it was probably unintentional.

This brings me back to the point I made earlier; there is more than one left and more than one right. Both have changed in response to each other over the course of the last century.

The Labour Party was an alliance between working-class trade unionism and progressive social liberalism. The Conservative Party was an alliance between traditional social conservatism and free-market economic liberalism. It is the liberal sides of both that triumphed in the last decades of the 20th century. As David Goodhart said:

Whoever you vote for you get the same old mix of economic liberalism and social liberalism – Margaret Thatcher tempered by Roy Jenkins.

The two liberalisms – the 1960s (social) and 1980s (economic) – have dominated politics for a generation.

Or, as Douglas Murray put it, the left won the culture war and the right won the economic war.

Does that make it a one-all draw then?

I’m not so sure. The Conservative Party’s focus on the economic war in the 1980s was probably no accident. Given the choice between weeding out trendy lefty teachers, restoring the death penalty and reversing racial equality laws on the one hand or making lots more money and paying less of it in tax on the other, I’m guessing most of the party’s wealthy backers would have chosen the latter. While it might have Daily Mail readers spitting feathers, to the very rich, even those with socially conservative views, the left’s cultural victory is of little consequence. If you are making a lot more money and keeping a lot more of it, the fact that you have to employ an equality and diversity officer and you can’t call the dark-skinned bloke in the next office ‘woggie’ is no more than a minor irritation.

Could it be that the right chose to concentrate on the economic war and it ceded the culture war to the left as a consolation prize? Or, as a Labour activist friend of mine put it at the time:

We couldn’t stop privatisation, spending cuts and the mass sale of housing stock but at least we declared the borough a nuclear-free zone.

Since the end of the 20th century, the direction of travel has remained the same. Labour brought in more equality legislation while declaring themselves relaxed about people getting filthy rich. Blair and Brown did reduce inequality slightly but they kept quiet about it. Even while cutting public services, Cameron’s government went ahead with gay marriage and implemented Labour’s Equality Act, attracting condemnation from some on the right for both.

But, to add a further complication, how much of all this was simply due to global forces beyond politicians’ control? Once Deng Xiaoping reformed the Chinese economy and trade barriers were lifted, was the decline of western manufacturing employment inevitable? Are technology, globalisation and assortative as much a cause of rising inequality as government policies? Has Britain become more diverse because of left-wing policies and the right’s failure to stop them? Or did a lot more people come here anyway because travel is cheaper and there are more refugees in the world?

Did the right really win the economic war and the left the culture war, or was that just the way the world was going? Do politicians make the world or do they simply ride the waves, trying to steer things their way as best they can?

I’ve saved my favourite graph until the end. This is the share of income, after tax, of the top 1 percent of earners. Like the other charts, there is a dip in the 1970s and then the trend reverses. It has the shape of a broad smile doesn’t it?

Share of Income – UK, Top 1 percent, after income tax

Source: World Top Incomes Database. Chart via Knoema.

Who won the 20th Century? Left or right, that crooked smile tells you all you need to know.