A lot is said about money at the moment — with good reason. The economic prospects of England look fairly bleak, and such sectors as farming and the hospitality industry have been dealt very damaging blows by political decisions. The situation with housing is tough, the roads are coming to pieces, councils everywhere are struggling desperately. These are not affluent times.
In this context, envy and resentment are often apparent. I often hear it said that pensioners are unreasonably well off — that the triple lock on the pension is crippling to the economy, that paying the state pension is too great a burden for those in work, and that "statistics show" pensioners spend their money on booze and cigarettes, cruises and restaurants and generally having a good time. Young people cannot afford to buy a home and start a family, while the older generation live comfortably on their savings and state pension, and this is not sustainable.
It intrigues me that this is a common enough scenario to be universally accepted as accurate, because it's not my own experience of life.
In the family I was born into, people worked together. Married couples built up affluence through hard work, from very lowly beginnings, and they were self-employed so they could pass on the family business. My uncle inherited my grandfather's farm, but a bungalow was built for my grandmother on the edge of their land, and my unmarried aunt who had fragile health lived with my grandmother who was blind. So everyone benefited from everyone else. My other aunt married an accountant farmer, and their daughters married but their unmarried son lived and worked the farm together with them. My aunt lived to be very old, and stayed at home living with her son after she was widowed, to the end of her life. In budgeting, the needs of all of them were considered.
This is the way of thinking I knew growing up, and it also characterised the family I married into, in which context my children were born. My mother-in-law used her savings to pay for the deposit we needed to buy a house, and every Sunday as a matter of course we — my husband, me and our five children — went to church with his parents and then ate a massive roast lunch with them at their home. We never had to pay for childcare because they baby-sat for us, and when my mother-in-law did her grocery shopping she used to include a bag of groceries for us, too. Plus each time I had a baby, my husband's aunt would leave peeled vegetables on our doorstep for several days, to help make supper preparation easy.
In this family context the older generation, having earned and saved all their lives, would help their adult children buy their own homes, and help financially with big purchases like cars, and do as much as they could afford to ensure that bills were covered for the whole family. The older family members kept aside enough money to ensure they were not a burden on the younger ones — enough to pay their bills and cover any necessary care costs — but apart from that, whatever they had was channeled down into the next generation. In many cases adult family members continued to live together, so elder care happened naturally as the need arose.
I thought that was how everybody lived, but maybe not. There was no scenario of rich old people spending extravagantly while the younger generation couldn't even afford a home or to start a family.
Each person took responsibility for themselves, but always with a view to helping each other and contributing to the whole. Each one valued the opinions of the others and would be proud to play their part and make the most of their abilities.
What I find disturbing about articles and podcasts on the topic of finance in modern life, is that they seem to carry the assumption of everything being only about the individual. The assumption that it will be normal for some family members to be comfortably wealthy while others have too little to eat. I read about people going to food banks or couch-surfing because they are homeless, or a parent with children managing in temporary accommodation in a hostel, and I wonder — where is their family?
I feel something similar about all these tales of sexual abuse of girls on a grotesque scale currently dominating the new, both Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and the rape gangs in England: I wonder, where were the families of these girls? Was there no warning, protection, advice? Were they not helped to read between the lines of invitations and opportunities? Where was the wisdom of older sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers? How did people end up so vulnerable in such massive numbers? I know that in some cases fathers tried to intervene at a late stage, to get their girls back — but surely what would have protected them in the first place would have been collective wisdom and tradition within the family. I realise that there are many people in the world and most families have someone who makes unfortunate choices, but on such a large scale? Incidentally, the political establishment and mainstream media have for the most part turned their backs on the victims of rape gangs in the UK, and those who have tried to bring it to public attention have been smeared and persecuted. Rupert Lowe MP has now put in place a crowdfunded public enquiry to bring to light what has happened, with a view to prosecuting the perpetrators. If you would like to learn about the enquiry and financially assist it, go here.
In my family, the people know that the others will always have your back, that home will always be a sanctuary. There is no question of it being just about the individual, of calmly watching other people struggle. My children have varied income levels, but the ones with more will treat the ones with less to lovely outings, the ones who can drive will give lifts to the ones who can't. We mostly live near together, but the one of my children who lives at a distance will always say, if anything problematic occurs, "Do you need me to come home?"
When the pandemic lockdown happened, there was a deadline after which we could not travel and had to stay where we were. My daughter who lives away dithered about what to do. At the time she had a rented ground-floor room in someone's house. Not wanting to disturb them after bedtime, she made a last-minute decision, and used the window to go in and out to pack her car, leaving them a month's rent money and driving through the night to come home. My daughter who lives alone was the permitted member of our family bubble through lockdown, and we used to walk round to my married daughter for doorstep visits, chatting at the required distance. The rest of us all lived in one house anyway, and those of us with savings helped those whose incomes were affected; the pandemic lockdown was just ike a lovely holiday for us.
None of this requires anybody to have a big income. Everyone is okay because we all look out for each other. It's what most people used to do. But evidently in society as a whole this is no longer true. In our borough the main cost, almost half the budget, is temporary accommodation for homeless people, and the main driver of homelessness is family breakdown.
This isn't surprising. If you have a family with three children living in a three-bedroomed house, with one boiler (furnace, US) one television, one internet provision and one car, with both parents one way or another supporting the household, and the parents split, what happens? Now each parent wants part of the custody of the children, so now they need two three-bedroomed houses, each with a boiler, a telly and internet access and a car, but now with only one income for each household. Of course it can't work. There's no wonder we have a housing crisis and people made homeless.
It feels to me that I am watching the systematic dismantling of traditional family life — assisted by the aggressive promotion of pick-and-mix sexuality.
The breakdown of the family unit will lead to the economic collapse of society, because the costs of trying to do life on your own are beyond the reach of most ordinary people. The more you split, the more you have to pay for.
A similar set of attitudes applies to expectations of citizenship. In my childhood, if it snowed all the men of a street would be outside with shovels, clearing the snow from the pavements (sidewalks US) to make them safe for pedestrians. People took a pride in their homes, growing vegetables in the back garden and flowers at the front, and they weeded the pavement in front of their home. Now, nobody clears the snow, they wait for the council to do it. Nobody weeds the pavement, the council comes round once a year and sprays with glyphosate (which happens to be a neurotoxin) so the weeds are still there but dead now.
The council workmen have to be paid, and their wages are raised from the public purse. The result is that less and less gets done but costs more and more, all because we have abandoned the habit of working together.
One final example. Net Zero — the political aspiration in the UK that by 2050 our carbon emissions will reach net zero. Ha! It cannot work. It will tank the economy, and all we'll have done is export our industrial activity, making in fact a net increase in dirty technology, while losing our manufacturing independence and economic resilience.
But that doesn't mean we have to give up and just "Frack, baby, frack!"
We could approach it differently. Let industry continue with use of fossil fuels, let development of renewable alternatives be assiduously pursued, but in the meantime let the citizenry work together to reduce pollution and reliance on dirty energy — informally, not by government mandate and regulation. Let all those of us who can afford solar panels put them on our houses, our churches, the buildings of our businesses. Let all of us conserve energy as much as we can, heating the person not the space at home, using modern technology that is less energy hungry — for instance, cooking in an air fryer not a big oven. Let those of us with gardens grow our own fruit and vegetables. Let us reduce waste and manufacturing by buying second-hand and sharing. We could travel fast in the direction of Net Zero and adequate housing provision and clean streets (with no fly-tipping, thank you), at the same time as taking pressure off the local and national government budget, if we simply prioritise working together for the good of the whole.
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