While little is achieved without hard work and personal responsibility, the narrative around idleness has been cursed since the Eighties, largely because the conditions of the post-war consensus (partly established by Beveridge) have been dismantled from above. The poor are expected to honour their side of a social contract that no longer exists and was destroyed without their consultation for the great profit of others.

The Tory rhetoric of “get on your bike” did not just fail to motivate but seemed designed to demoralise, as any gaslighting would. Here was a form of magical thinking that we might now call “manifestation”, but this was a particularly unholy form of magic, given it was being proposed by many of those who had presided over the de-industrialisation of the areas and populations they were now hectoring for their “idleness”.

This attitude persisted longer than might be expected, with the tabloids providing salacious moral panics around single mothers and benefits cheats. These were designed to enrage anyone striving to work through increasingly precarious conditions. The problem was that, unlike money, moral lessons do trickle down. In place of the now-dishonoured social contract came a society run by and for rentiers and lenders, a place where tax evasion and asset-stripping were not as rare as they may or should have been.

What incentive is left for those struggling to patch together a living wage from what had once been side-hustles, who have little job security in the age of zero-hour contracts, where the differentiation between work and life has been obliterated, where effective unions and collective bargaining are for most industries ancient history, where savings will be eaten away by inflation, where there is a chasm between wages and affording a home, where an accident or sickness might spell financial ruin, and having a child is an unaffordable luxury? What moral instruction about idleness and hard work are they expected to believe in?

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Again, Beveridge is instructive here. For all his paternalism, he was right in identifying that one of the primary ills of his time was not just unemployment but casual employment, which trapped many people in an inescapable cycle of poverty. Worryingly, this trend of “flexibility” appears to have returned, and even when there is relatively secure employment, the results can be disastrous, calling to mind Mr Micawber’s sterling advice in Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, there were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2020-21. The same study states that “75% of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works”. This was the environment I grew up in, watching my parents work hard and with great dignity only to be punished at each turn. This was echoed in the pride and resilience of our town in Northern Ireland, which was not so much left behind as scuttled. One of the major factors was institutionalised sectarianism, against Catholics, in almost every aspect of that society as well as the murderous bloodshed of the Troubles that had erupted. Having to listen to lectures, full of callous piety, about the idle poor from the idle rich added insult to injury. Across the UK, the situation remains, with condescending talk of “populism” from elites, who switch around their seating arrangements periodically.

Many politicians and commentators have the luxury of ignoring how most people live, never mind those who live below the poverty line. There are, however, groups of people paying to the poor, which brings us to the reason why the Giant of Idleness is so destructive. When the best prospects for young people in a city or town are stagnation through unemployment or badly paid jobs with no prospects of career or life advancement, the mind turns to other routes of betterment. Fringe groups such as gangs and drug-dealers fill the vacuum, offering a way out and a way up, as corrosive as they are. When society fails to utilise talent and drive, more nefarious entrepreneurial agents will take advantage.

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In the town where I grew up, paramilitaries served this role. Initially, recruitment was organic. There was a low-level though bloody civil war, which affected every aspect of life, and harassment, discrimination and the massacre of civilians sent many into the arms of Republicans and Loyalists. Now in deprived areas of Northern Ireland, even maintaining the pretence of a cause has largely fallen away for these groups, who to varying degrees have embraced gangsterism. I was watching the Northern Irish news one evening with a friend when a well-known paramilitary and “community spokesman” appeared and gave a talk on “the plague” of drugs in Loyalist neighbourhoods. My friend burst out laughing and informed me that the gentleman was their first point of contact when procuring substances.

The Troubles may have abated, or rather been placed in a medically induced coma, but power-sharing is paralysed, the communities are still largely segregated, and the fundamental economic and social issues go unacknowledged and unsolved. Poverty is endemic in many areas of Northern Ireland. In a sense, the conflict and division continue in an even more degenerated form. First as tragedy, then as farce.

In the Nineties, I saw this process first-hand. Many of my childhood friends were bright, sometimes brilliant, young men who had few legitimate paths open to them. The paths they chose, while they were underage admittedly, were an abomination. One of them killed a man, a father of four, outside a Chinese restaurant one night. Another was exiled from the city for drug-dealing. I lost count of how many ended up damaged by seeking escape through drink and drugs. With all of Beveridge’s Giants, there’s a haunting sense of contingency. My suspicion as to why Idleness is placed last is that it’s the one ill where, at its worst, one conspires in the ruin of oneself and those around them.

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Northern Ireland is a place that has been continually othered for decades by the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. While it is a unique province in many ways, it is not quite as distant as people would like to believe. I see similar dynamics at work in London gangs and with Islamist extremists in terms of how and who they recruit or groom. In county lines cases, I’ve witnessed a familiar pattern, not just in the incentivising of drug-dealing and evasion of the police, but in the use of drugs as a temporary “escape” from places where there is little to do.

We were those kids and the devil made plenty of work for us. If we’d been approached then with sanctimonious lectures, or panaceas like a community centre, or “just talk to your friends about your feelings” platitudes, we’d have replied with laughter and scorn because even as children, we knew that, for things to change, there had to be a fundamental reassessment of the way the entire society had been stacked and who was benefiting. In our inarticulate way, we knew that it wasn’t a question of work or idleness but the right work and the right idleness, and that, ultimately, though we didn’t then know its name, it was decadence that we had to avoid, by which I mean, doing that which is harmful even catastrophic to oneself, either as an individual or a society. And this is why Idleness will be the last, and not the first, Giant to go. Only when we have begun to confront all the other Giants will this final one begin to collapse.

As new authentication and surveillance technologies, such as vaccine passports and track-and-trace apps, were rolled out during the pandemic, civil rights organisations and activists raised the question of mission creep — that is, the likelihood of governments clinging on to these technologies and using them for unanticipated ends, heralding a new era of normalised state surveillance.

Even the United Nations warned that the potential for abuse was high and that “what is justified during an emergency now may become normalised once the crisis has passed”. Some went even further, claiming that the pandemic was being deliberately exploited by global elites to usher in a “great reset” of human societies — a shift towards an increasingly propertyless, cashless, ultra-digitalised economy. At the time, such concerns were dismissed as groundless conspiracy theories. And yet, like so many other claims that were initially ridiculed and censored only to be proven correct over time, events are corroborating many of these fears.

Following the recent G20 meeting in Bali, the leaders of the world’s largest economies issued a joint declaration that, among other things, called for the establishment of a global vaccine passport and digital health ID scheme. The statement reads: “We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods, under the framework of the IHR (2005), to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognising digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”

The International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 are a legally binding agreement of 196 countries developed under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The IHR, which entered into force in 2007, required countries to strengthen surveillance capacities at border crossings and introduced a series of health documents, including international certificates of vaccination. The G20 leaders further stated: “We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalise and build on the success of the existing standards and digital Covid-19 certificates.”

During the Business 20 (B20) panel held ahead of the G20 summit, Indonesia’s Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin made the same recommendation in even starker terms: “Let’s have a digital health certificate acknowledged by WHO — if you have been vaccinated or tested properly, then you can move around.” In a 132-page document that contains a series of recommendations for the G20, the B20 urged the widespread adoption of digital Covid-19 certificates that would be part of a “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure”.

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Sadikin added that G20 countries have agreed to the proposal and now plan to introduce it as a revision to the IHR framework at the next World Health Assembly, scheduled for May 2023 in Geneva. The idea is that the WHO should be given legally binding powers to implement such measures in the future. This is an attempt to revamp the WHO’s so-called international pandemic treaty — an effort to give it sweeping powers to dictate public health measures to countries with the full backing of international law, potentially overriding their national sovereignty.

This reform would effectively transform the organisation into something akin to a “world health government” with unprecedented powers to overrule the decisions of national governments in all matters of public health. Given the highly questionable role it played throughout the Covid pandemic and its well-known dependence on private “philanthrocapitalist” institutions — first and foremost the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — this is a rather alarming prospect.

Mainstream “fact-checkers” have been quick to point out that, even if the treaty were approved, the WHO would have no capacity to force member states to comply with public health measures. But while it is true that any law that isn’t backed by force is ultimately a paper tiger, such rebuttals ignore the way in which such a treaty could bolster the ability of governments to implement overreaching measures under the guise of public health precisely by engaging in “blameshift” towards the WHO (“It’s out of our hands — we’re just doing what they’re telling us to do!”).

They equally ignore that “peer pressure” exists even among nation states — countries can be cajoled into taking certain measures simply by painting refuseniks as pariah states (as Sweden knows all too well). And the refusal to implement a legally binding international agreement would certainly put any government under enormous pressure. This is especially true in the context of highly uneven relations of power between states. This explains why the main opposition to the treaty has hitherto come from African countries — a likely reaction to global Covid policies that have come to be seen by many on the continent as a novel form of medical colonialism.

Yet this doesn’t appear to concern developed nations. And this is where the normalisation of vaccine passports becomes most alarming. As we saw during the pandemic, Covid passports led to an unprecedented upending of rights and liberties that we took for granted in liberal-democratic societies. Never before had QR codes been used as a regulated requirement for entry into social life. Almost from one day to the next, millions of unvaccinated citizens found themselves stripped of their basic constitutional, civil, and human rights — the right to work, education, public transport, and social life. These policies caused massive psychological stress and economic deprivation, as unvaccinated people found themselves not only excluded from social life but in many cases also restricted from working.

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What’s worse, it is now clear that Covid vaccines have a limited impact on transmission, which means that the original rationale for vaccine passports — that of creating “Covid-free spaces” and reducing the spread of the virus — was largely unfounded. It’s hard to see how the G20 leaders could describe this as a “success”, unless vaccine passports were not just a means to an end — mass vaccination — but also, and perhaps even more importantly, an end in and of themselves. It’s no secret that tech companies saw Covid passports as the gateway to all-encompassing digital IDs.

Corporations and international organisations such as the World Bank and World Economic Forum have long been promoting biometrics-based digital identity and health wallets — “digital passports” assigned to each citizen at birth that contain a person’s vaccination status and other health data (such as genetic tests and mental health records), as well as, potentially, their demographic, financial, location and biometric data. As researchers noted in the BMJ, this creates the potential for all sorts of rights infringements and discrimination based on personal status by governments, employers, law enforcement, and financial institutions.

This is exactly the “new normal” that many had warned about: one in which access to social life and the enjoyment of basic human rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, would become linked to the positive scanning of a digital ID containing all manner of personal data. As the WEF predicted in a 2018 report, this digital ID will one day “determine what products, services and information we can access — or, conversely, what is closed off to us”.

Projects of this kind are already underway across the world. India, for instance, has the largest biometric ID system on the planet, with 1.3 billion digital IDs issued, covering 92% of the population. Aadhaar requires Indian citizens to submit their photograph, iris scan and fingerprints to qualify for social services, benefits, compensation, scholarships, legal entitlements and nutrition programs. According to one report in the Financial Times, there have been “several cases of cardless individuals starving to death because they could not access benefits to which they were entitled”. As its author notes, some critics argue the Indian Aadhaar system “now acts as a tool for social exclusion and corporate influence”.

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The notion of a digital ID that “gives you access to services” is also troubling because it implies that your right to access the services in question could be “switched off” at any moment. This is not some dystopian hypothetical scenario — in countries such as Italy, France, and Israel, double-vaccinated citizens lost their “status” when passports came to require a third booster dose in 2021-22; in Chile, that status was extended to a fourth dose in May 2022. A glimpse into what this may mean for the future was offered in June, when a protest planned by hundreds of bank depositors in central China seeking access to their frozen funds was thwarted when authorities turned their health code apps red, several depositors told Reuters, making it impossible for them to travel.

How is this connected to the “Great Reset” — a term which has come to encompass all the allegedly nefarious plans being hatched by the World Economic Forum and by its cartoonishly villainous chairman, Klaus Schwab? Well, for one, Schwab was invited to speak at the G20, where he claimed that the current “economic, political, social and ecological and institutional crisis” represents an opportunity for “a deep systemic and structural restructuring of our world”. A fundamental aspect of this brave new world envisioned by Schwab is the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, which in his own words consists in “the fusion of our physical, digital and biological identities”. Digital IDs, in this sense, should be understood as just the first step in a “revolution” aimed at completely blurring the lines between our bodies and emerging technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, and so on.

It’s not hard to see how such a system would hand corporate elites and their technocratic henchmen almost complete control over our lives. Yet this future is far from guaranteed. The pandemic has also shown that our increasingly digitised reality hasn’t suppressed humans’ basic need for physical connectedness, intimacy, nature — not in everyone, at least. The battle between the human and post-human therefore seems far from over. If introducing a biostate is the answer to Beveridge’s second Giant, it doesn’t seem like a very convincing one.

From her bench facing the sea, one elderly lady rearranged her sleeping bag and sat up to light her first cigarette of the day; another rough sleeper was angry as he stumbled, yelling into the waves: “Yer English, yer oughter to be ashamed of yersain.”

He has a point. Britain’s biggest seaside resort is home to a sharp and uncomfortable paradox: while it accommodates millions of visitors every year, several of its wards are among the most deprived in the country and with the worst life expectancy. This is a place which, for all its beauty and associations with pleasure and fun, results in shortened lives blighted by debt, ill health and substance abuse.

When William Beveridge set out to eradicate five “Giant Evils” from Britain, “want” was first on his list. In the early Forties, as the social reformer gathered his data and prepared his plans, this priority seemed straightforward: people needed basics such as food, shelter, warmth and clothing. His plans for a social security system “from cradle to grave” would ensure that no one would go short. But 80 years on, Blackpool provides a grim example of deprivation not seen since the Thirties. Food banks report a 54% increase in the need for food parcels in the last year, dependence on charity has become normal for hundreds of families in the town, and the rise in energy prices brings particular hardship in a place with poor housing stock, well-known for its bitter winds and rain sweeping in off the sea.

Further up the coast, in Morecambe, a similar story is playing out. The North Lancashire Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) has seen a massive rise in clients desperate for help — in some places, a staggering 566% increase in the last year. The most common issue is struggling with utility bills, followed closely by problems with debt. Households get caught in a pattern of borrowing and relying on charity because levels of benefit are not sufficient, suggests Joanna Young, the CAB’s head of research for North Lancashire. She adds that their clients talk of how one “mini-crisis” — it can be as routine as the need for a new pair of school shoes — can set a family back for months. Precarity has become a way of life.

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What would Beveridge make of places such as Blackpool and Morecambe? No doubt he would view his dream as a failure, despite a huge increase in the country’s GDP in the intervening 80 years. But what would also have surprised Beveridge are the causes of that poverty, and the fact that at least some can be traced right back to gaps and mistakes in his original plans.

Beveridge was no socialist, and he believed that work was the true solution to poverty (after all, he listed “idleness” as one of the other five Giants). But, as Professor Jonathan Bradshaw has noted, he overlooked the issue of low pay. Roughly 40% of the CAB’s clients in North Lancashire are in work — and this figure is supported by nationwide data, such as research by Joseph Rowntree Foundation which found that three out of four children living in poverty have a working parent. Chronic low pay particularly affects coastal resorts because so much of their employment is in the worst-affected sectors such as care and hospitality; the average wage in Blackpool is a third below the national figure. The result is a coastal pattern of some of the lowest average wages, highest levels of indebtedness and insolvencies. And this was already getting worse well before the devastating economic damage of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

But Blackpool and Morecambe do not just illustrate the failure of Beveridge’s ambition; they also demonstrate forms of “want” that he never envisaged. Beveridge’s interpretation of poverty was strictly material, but in the 21st century the relevance and importance of another form of poverty has become starkly apparent. Blackpool and Morecambe are just two of the dozens of seaside resorts struggling with what are known as the “diseases of despair”.

Seaside towns have been left to cope with a disproportionate number of the most troubled in society. When relationships break down, when prisoners are released, when people with substance abuse issues want a new start, the childhood memories of a seaside resort can appear to offer hope, and every year thousands arrive on the coast looking for a new start. A major driver is housing costs: as they have soared out of affordable reach in most cities, many of the poorest and most vulnerable are effectively forced out. They get on a train to the end of the line. In the South-East, this includes towns such as Clacton (where the neighbouring resort of Jaywick has held the designation of the poorest place in the UK since 2010), Hastings, and the Thanet resorts of Margate and Ramsgate. Similarly, rising prices in Manchester and Preston ensure that people end up drifting to Blackpool and Morecambe. And this holds for countless other resort towns, from Scarborough to Skegness, Ilfracombe to Weston-Super-Mare and Rhyl in North Wales.

When I visited Blackpool in September, I spoke to Ian Treasure, who has worked on a number of local projects for rough sleepers. As we passed along the streets adjoining the promenade, he pointed out the tell-tale signs of “Houses in Multiple Occupation” which dominate the area. Long lines of door bells and rows of bins mark out the bedsits created out of the former hotels. The cheap housing stock is often bought up by absentee landlords and divided up into accommodation which can be rented for a fraction of the cost. This is what draws the approximately 8,000 people who arrive in Blackpool every year; a large proportion of whom are on benefits and are disproportionately male and single. They bring with them many of their demons, lack of trust and relationship. What ties they may have had – family or friends – are left behind, making this type of coastal poverty often lonely and unsupported.

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These forms of emotional and relationship poverty were not something Beveridge grasped in the Forties, but with them comes poor mental health, and in the case of Blackpool, some of the highest suicide and self-harm rates in the country. Four Blackpool wards have the lowest life expectancy in the country at 66.6 years, compared to a UK average of 82.3 years. As the Chief Medical Officer’s annual 2021 report on seaside towns makes clear, Blackpool has “the single most vulnerable population in the country in the most inappropriate accommodation”.

Yet the growth of this desperate poverty has only accelerated in recent years; during the pandemic, the buy-to-let market in Blackpool boomed, encouraged by the relaxation on stamp duty and promises of high investment yields from tenants on housing benefits. Elsewhere, Beveridge would have been appalled by the misuse of public funds; his central argument in support of the welfare state was that it would make the population healthier and better educated in order to underpin economic growth. In contrast, Blackpool (and many other coastal towns) has resulted in the opposite; a system of farming the most vulnerable in society at government expense, with the profits sucked out by landlords who do not live in the area.

As if this were not enough, many seaside towns also face another of the great social challenges of our time — one which Beveridge did not envisage, and which is, in many ways, the result of his great achievement, the founding of the NHS. That is, the fact that we are living longer, and that many choose to spend their retirement years in coastal towns; Minehead in West Somerset and Skegness and its neighbouring Lincolnshire coast resorts have some of the most elderly populations in the UK. This will be the great test of the NHS over the coming decades; our longer lives require the management of complex chronic health conditions, leading to greater demands for health and social care. Yet vacancies for doctors and nurses are higher on such poorly connected coasts, while the ratio of elderly to people of working age is worsening, raising concerns over who will care for the growing number of octogenarians by the end of this decade.

The big picture here is the power of geography to determine lives. The British economy is driven by the vitality of cities and this has shaped infrastructure investment (disproportionately concentrated in London). Meanwhile, the periphery is neglected, only useful as a form of cheap investment or a zone to dump those whose needs are no longer accommodated elsewhere. The challenges for the coasts’ overstretched councils and health authorities are Sisyphean, with little recognition of their unique nature in Westminster or Whitehall. The Levelling Up agenda of recent years may have dominated the headlines, yet it has showed scant insight into these areas’ plight given its preoccupation with driving up productivity — always a challenge in care and hospitality. Eighty years on, the entire of Britain needs another Beveridge. But perhaps more than anywhere else, its forgotten seaside towns need a Beveridge who can actually get the job done.

The “housing crisis” has been with us for at least a decade, and house prices an obsession for the best part of two more. Today, the demand for housing so radically outstrips supply that young people can’t afford to buy. Rough sleeping has increased by 165% since 2010. One in ten British families now lives in overcrowded housing. Already by 2016, four in 10 British houses were reported to be below an acceptable standard. Last year, 2,300 people died while languishing on the waiting list for social housing, which, once you get through the door, is often profoundly grim.

Given the scale and disastrous social consequences of this crisis, then, it should beggar belief that the latest Tory Prime Minister has already balked at addressing it. Rishi Sunak pulled a vote this week on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, after around 50 Tory MPs tabled an amendment scrapping Liz Truss’s compulsory house-building targets.

But Sunak’s central, intractable problem is that the great leap forward in living standards was never going to continue indefinitely — because it was, in fact, a great economic Ponzi scheme, powered by an extractive approach to human populations, that is now running up against multiple structural limits. And the reigning political consensus on how to keep that scam running is itself contributing to the housing crisis, as well as worsening squalor and social conflict at the bottom of the social ladder, while leaving the Tories unable to effect change without also attacking the interests of their core electoral base.

But it’s easy to see how Britain mistook that Ponzi scheme for a permanent achievement, when you consider how radically living conditions improved from the 19th to the 20th centuries. In the 19th century, peasants displaced by the Enclosure Acts flocked to the rapidly-industrialising cities in search of work, living cheek by jowl in crowded, filthy slums, where families jammed in five or seven to a single room with no facilities for cooking or sanitation. This is the grimy, heartless, crime-ridden backdrop to Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), a world that soon prompted concern and middle-class efforts at social reform.

Over time, this concern spurred the government to action, and in 1875, the first Bill was passed aimed at slum clearance and redevelopment. By the early 20th century some 80 towns had borrowed £4.5 million (around £432 million in today’s money) to demolish and redevelop slum areas. The American writer Jack London gives a sense of the atmosphere still prevalent in turn-of-the-century Whitechapel in The People of the Abyss (1903). Here, slum-dwellers were still living one family to a room, often sub-letting floor space to a “lodger”: the book recounts fights, pollution, grime, malnutrition and hand-to-mouth life amid a relentless pull down to the condition of degraded underclass hopelessness.

A concerted programme of slum clearances in the run-up to the two World Wars sought to tackle such misery, and replace the slums with cleaner and less crowded accommodation. In the interwar period this provided the impetus for Lloyd George’s “Homes fit for heroes” speech, and again for Beveridge’s famous report in 1942. And, for a while, as living standards continued to rise throughout the mid-century, it seemed as though the battle might be winnable.

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But there’s a hitch – and we find a clue to it in Jack London’s description of how cities work. As he describes it, the metropolis is “a huge man-killing machine”, which sucks in healthy rural workers, who are then worked to exhaustion and degradation by the squalor of urban life.

When Jack London was writing, this supply still mostly came from the English countryside. But by the 20th century England’s urbanisation was largely complete and the supply was dwindling. Shortly after, to make matters worse, the two World Wars decimated the nation’s working-age men: 880,000 soldiers died in the First World War: a full 6% of the working-age male population, and a further 384,000 soldiers in the Second World War. This posed a problem for an urban profit machine that depended on new influxes of fresh-faced, ambitious or simply poor people to jostle for opportunities on the bottom rung.

Faced with a choice between halting the engine of growth, or finding a new supply of fodder for the prosperity machine, Britain opted for the latter. After the Second World War, Commonwealth citizens were invited to Britain to rebuild the “mother country”. These new arrivals played the role formerly filled by displaced rural workers: crammed into slum-like conditions, and exploited in menial jobs. In turn, the visible difference between these new workers and those already there added a new and ugly twist to the struggle for survival in the urban meat-grinder: racism. By 1958 tensions between white working-class youth and Caribbean immigrant workers spilled over into vicious race riots in Nottingham; a few weeks later, the violence spread to Notting Hill in London with full-blown riots.

Not long after, legislation sought to put a lid on these simmering tensions. The 1965 Race Relations Act prohibited public discrimination against people on grounds of race, nationality or ethnicity. And along with rightly and justly shielding innocent people from violence and hostility, this political shift had a secondary effect: underwriting the interests of the urban growth machine, by taking a step toward globalising the working class. Now, anyone who questioned the right of immigrants to work in Britain could be condemned as motivated not by resource competition but thuggish racial animus.

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Fast-forward a few decades, into a Britain stripped by Thatcher of the factory jobs that sustained a (now ineluctably more multi-ethnic) working class, and the Blairite decision to accelerate growth again via another wave of immigration prompted murmurs of working-class dissent. The New Labour dismissal of this discontent as mere atavistic racism, for example in Gordon Brown’s famous encounter with Gillian Duffy, is well-travelled Brexit territory.

But if part of the motivation for less well-off Brexiters was a desire to reduce resource competition at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile, the Conservative Party is also under pressure to keep the economy growing. And for some decades now, the main way of doing that has been “supply-side reform”, a euphemism for keeping competition at the bottom of the meat-grinder sufficiently brutal that workers don’t get too demanding.

Unsurprisingly then, notwithstanding Brexit, under the Tories immigration is higher than ever. And still it’s not enough for the business lobby: just this week, CBI boss Tony Danker called on PM Rishi Sunak to “solve” Britain’s “labour shortages” (which is usually to say mismatch between the pay and rations on offer and the jobs existing workers can afford to take) by loosening immigration policy still further.

As well as deepening squalor and fomenting often-racialised resource competition on the bottom social rungs, growing the economy by growing the population also runs up against an immovable limit: building land, especially in popular parts of the country. Increasingly, this means that housing pressure can only be eased in these locations by concreting over the still relatively green and pleasant lands currently inhabited by the group that now forms the Tories’ core electoral base: older home-owners.

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No wonder, then, that a Commons report earlier this year shows the Tories are nowhere near their own manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new homes every year. And no wonder Sunak has opted to kick the can down the road yet again. The trouble, though, is that both sides are right: the economic liberals are right to point out that in its current form, the “growth” engine structurally requires ever more human bodies. And, the conservatives are also right that over time, if you keep adding people to a smallish island, eventually it will create tensions over how to allocate finite resources – especially in-demand land.

Beveridge’s dream was to abolish squalor, along with the other Giants, by dint of rising prosperity and improved social conditions. But even as this promise was made, post-imperial decline and industrial competition from overseas began to undermine the material underpinnings of that prosperity. And since Beveridge, sustaining a sense of ongoing improvement has been bankrolled by cannibalising the postwar infrastructure created to shield its own citizens from squalor, whether via selling off council houses, breaking the unions, privatising utilities, or financialising everything.

The ensuing loss of real, widespread prosperity has been papered over via a synthetic “growth”, largely powered by population increase from elsewhere, and whose benefits have been (to say the least) unevenly distributed: a property boom for some, and for others new forms of squalor. And this fact has been obscured variously by ignoring the plight of Britain’s low-wage peripheries, by ignoring mounting protests from the young, and by mystifying the bums-on-seats growth strategy as “diversity”.

Our political settlement depends on growth, but the policies required for that growth to continue are now chipping away at that political settlement. Something will have to give. And whether that’s social cohesion, living standards, or growth, its political fruit will be bitter.

These people may not have known much about algebraic topology or the history of post-Impressionism, but they knew how to organise. They were not the objects of Beveridge’s benevolent paternalism but self-determining actors. They also knew about want and hardship, justice and solidarity. The truly ignorant were those highly-educated undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge who acted as strike-breakers, and who knew nothing of the conditions in which most of their fellow country people had to live. Ten years later, a new generation of the erudite and educated would boo the hunger marchers.

You don’t need a doctorate in maths to know that your wage packet is shrinking. People who are politically apathetic because they believe with some justice that Westminster politics will never do much for them can become knowledgeable overnight when you threaten their jobs or try to run a motorway through their back gardens. Few traditions are as admirable as that of self-taught working people, including the women mill workers in Victorian Lancashire who would rise an hour before work in order to read Shakespeare together. It was for these patronisingly named “autodidacts” — a category which sometimes included anyone who hadn’t been to Oxbridge — that Ruskin College, the Workers’ Educational Association and the so-called “Extra-Mural” departments of universities were to provide.

What, in any case, if knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? The literary education that the Shakespeare-reading mill workers would have received, had they by some miracle broken into academia, would have been pretty worthless. Literary studies at the time were a combination of bone-dry scholarship and extravagant waffle. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, a stone mason who tries to get into Oxford, is rebuffed by the dons, advised to stick to his lowly station in life, and, in a typical Hardyesque irony, goes back to repairing the very college walls which shut him out.

Yet Hardy makes it clear that Jude’s ambitions are wrong-headed as well as unrealistic. He is better off outside this citadel of antiquated learning, exercising the practical skills which his author so admired. Hardy himself was no country bumpkin but was trained as an architect, and had a deep respect for manual labour. When, as a grand literary celebrity, he unveiled a plaque to open a new building, he was seen to run his hand across the stone and smell it. He, too, was described as an autodidact, even though he received a better education than the vast majority of his compatriots. It was that Oxbridge thing again.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

There is another sense in which knowledge is overrated. Socrates taught that we only do wrong out of ignorance; if only we had the right understanding we would be virtuous. Hardly anyone has ever fallen for this vastly improbable doctrine, least of all St. Paul, who in his Epistle to the Romans claims that we don’t understand our own actions: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…” What Paul sees but Socrates doesn’t is that we are torn, self-divided creatures, whose knowledge is out of sync with our desires. There is nothing wrong with reason — in fact, without it we will perish — but it doesn’t go all the way down. If it is to prevail, it must sink its roots into our senses and affections and shape them from the inside, so that what we ought to do is also what we want to do. Duty and obligation alone simply won’t hack it. The alternative is for reason to repress the senses and affections; and if this happens too violently, we tend to fall ill. The sickness in question is what Freud calls neurosis.

Freud had a profound respect for reason, which he thought would win through in the end. That he did so comes as something of a surprise, given that he is generally seen as both a pessimist and an irrationalist. But reason will only flourish if it is aware of its limits. Beyond those frontiers lies what Donald Rumsfeld, in his sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom, would call a known unknown, and Freud called the unconscious. Because they are unaware of what goes on in this dark region, human beings are opaque to themselves.

This isn’t only Freud’s view, but one of the most typical beliefs of the modern age. There was a time when we thought that other people might be hard to decipher, but at least we were transparent to ourselves. From Nietzsche to Freud, however, there was a dawning recognition that this is the last thing we are. Not only don’t we know ourselves, but this ignorance is vital if we are to operate as individuals. Ignorance is good for you. Just as we couldn’t speak coherently if we were thinking about the rules of grammar which govern what we say, so we can’t act, feel and think without repressing a good deal that goes into our making.

So repression is good for you as well, though not too much of it. What makes us what we are must necessarily fall outside the scope of our knowledge. Trying to examine it would be like trying to jump on your shadow, or pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. There is a fissure in our being which runs right down the middle. Or as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan enigmatically puts it: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

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Is Rishi too rich to be PM?

By Phil Tinline

Throughout the ages, human beings have been labelled the rational animal, the laughing animal, the labouring animal and so on. Now it appears that we are the sick, ignorant, neurotic, self-oblivious one, which is not the most inspiring news. We can have knowledge, of course, but this knowledge is a kind of fiction. For Nietzsche and his post-modern progeny, it consists in carving up the world in ways which facilitate our interests and desires. Knowledge is an instrument of power — a tool for mastering and organising our environment. For this purpose, Nietzsche argues, a falsehood may be more effective than the truth. In any case, truths are simply fictions that have forgotten the fact.

It would be possible to draw a line all the way from this assault on truth to the US election-deniers of today. The difference is that whereas Nietzsche and Freud argue a sophisticated case for ignorance, the election-deniers are just ignorant. Truth for them is whatever it is most convenient to believe. This is a sterile, unproductive kind of ignorance, but there are superior forms of it as well. Nobody, for example, can know the future, in the sense of what is inevitably going to happen. Not even God can do this, because there’s no such thing as what is inevitably going to happen, and therefore nothing to know. Ignorance of the future is a cause of regret to the markets. In ancient times, rulers hired soothsayers and fortune-tellers to peer into the future and assure them that their power would endure down the generations. Wall Street has its equivalents, but they are just as fallible.

In the end, however, we are not forced to choose between absolute knowledge and abysmal ignorance. There are important ways of knowing which fall somewhere in between: so-called tacit knowledge, for example, which involves knowing more than we can tell. You may know how to hum one tune while whistling another simultaneously, but just try telling someone else how to do it. Or think of bodily knowledge — the fact that I know where my left foot is without the need to visit a library or conduct an experiment. Most of our knowledge is of this kind. There’s also knowledge of other people, which doesn’t conform to scientific models. You can know others only if they disclose themselves to you — if they are present to you in a way that the furniture isn’t. Volcanologists may be present at volcanic eruptions, but volcanic eruptions are not present to them.

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Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

Practical knowledge, of the kind Thomas Hardy admires in Jude Fawley, is a question neither of ignorance nor of the disembodied intellect. Instead, it represents the point at which knowing and doing are bound indissolubly together. In fact, the word “know” is related to the word “can” (from the Old English cunnan). It is this unity of thought and action which the activists of the General Strike demonstrated. In doing so, they created such a bogeyman that TV journalists interviewing trade unionists today tend to ask, heart in mouth, whether this dreadful event is to be repeated, no doubt ignorant of the fact that it only lasted for nine days.

Yet one shouldn’t conclude from this that knowledge is purely instrumental. There are times when people need to know in order to be free, and other times when knowledge is an end in itself. There used to be places known as universities where this kind of study could flourish, but they have mostly been wiped out, even if the buildings have been left standing. Even so, there’s no reason to learn about Balzac or Beethoven or black holes other than the delight and fascination of it. The playwright Bertolt Brecht looked forward to a future civilisation in which, he remarked, “thinking could be a real sensuous pleasure”. We have a fair way to go.