Avoiding the real issue - again

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Last week, this blog referred to the question of a falling birth rate, and the alleged ‘problems’ it creates. The Sunday times (paywall) carried an article this week about a new report from a think tank calling itself the Centre for Social Justice on the same issue. The report itself, Baby Bust, is available here. The main factor on which it alights is that it is all the fault of immature men, who are entering the adult work force later and thus deferring parenthood for men and women alike. But it was the ‘solutions’ which caught my eye.

Leaving aside the socially conservative proposals about incentivising marriage and encouraging mothers (not fathers, note) to be stay-at-home child carers, moving to ‘household’ rather than individual taxation – all massive steps backwards, particularly for the status and role of women in society – it was their proposals for education which leapt out at me:

“Reduce the school leaving age and get most young people into the workplace as early as possible”, and

“In a similar vein, we should drastically reduce the numbers of 18-year-olds going to university.”

They didn’t suggest to what age the school leaving age should be reduced. I suspect that they don’t want to go back to sending 8 or 10 years olds down the mines (or aren’t prepared to say so), but it seems clear that they want to at least reverse the increase from 16 to 18. They also want to increase the retirement age to qualify for the state pension. My interpretation of it all was that their idea of ‘social justice’ seems to mean that working class boys, and women in general, should know their place and understand their station in life, as though the 1950s was some sort of golden age. It was a depressing read, and no surprise to find the foreword written by a Tory Shadow Minister.

But, to return to last week’s post, what it’s really all about is looking for a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ in a way which avoids the need to look at how the economy serves society, and above all at wealth distribution within society. ‘Social Justice’ which protects the wealthiest at the expense of the rest is an Orwellian use of language, to say the least.