Why Have We Had 50 Years of Economic Growth and Societal Collapse?

The economy in Britain is doing quite well. We have spent the last few years at a growth rate of about 1 per cent. That's not excellent but it's not a recession. There is no shortage of people who can afford a car. Most of the problems that we have with parking restrictions or with traffic jams come with having too many cars on the road. I am 59 and can remember clearly back to 1971. When I was a child, half the people we knew had a phone and half the people we knew had a car. No one we knew had ever had a holiday abroad. Now I am the odd one out because I have never been abroad. The vast majority of people have a mobile phone in their pocket.

If we're all so much better off, why is there so much homelessness and unemployment? When I was a child, the vast majority of school leavers could get a job and the vast majority of people who had a job could buy a house. Not so now. This is the first time we have had mass youth unemployment in London. 1 in 8 of people between 18 to 25 in London are unemployed. The university graduates in London are having a hard time getting a job as well. Looking at all the statistics, it seems that unemployment in London is about the same as it is anywhere else in the UK or across Europe. But that was where people used to go to find work. I had a friend in the 1980s who had a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Unable to get a job in the North East, he went down to stay in London for 2 weeks. He got a job straight away. It was the old industries of the north that were closing down and the south was booming. I am furious with an economist who said, on a radio news programme, that 3 per cent unemployment was the level of full employment. It only represented people who were in between jobs. 50 years ago that was not the case. I am just old enough to remember when unemployment went up to 1 million in 1976. Approximately 3 per cent of the British workforce. It was called something else 50 years ago. It was called mass unemployment. It should be considered mass unemployment now. I need to point out to people that unemployment is actually a real problem and that it actually exists. I am not sure that everyone believes this. Neither will mass unemployment go away if there is an upturn in the economy. The economy is not in recession.

The university graduates in London complain about AI taking away the entry positions from the companies they apply to. They're right but this is part of a computer revolution that has been going on for 50 years. In 1980 a university professor, on a radio news programme, warned that there would one day be unemployment 12 times worse than it was then. He blamed this not on AI, which in 1980 couldn't be imagined, but on the microchip. Unemployment isn't 12 times worse than it was in 1980 but it is becoming more widespread. One reason is the computerization of industry. In my small office I have a computer. Not an AI computer, it doesn't speak to customers on the phone for me, it is an ordinary office PC. It has already replaced my office assistant. 20 years ago I had an office assistant. Email has replaced the need for typed letters or to go down to the post office. Xero software has replaced the need to phone up customers to ask for money. Xero knows if they have paid the bill and sends an automatic reminder if the bill is overdue. That is an absolutely minimum form of AI. In another 46 years, computers will be a million times more powerful than they are now and AI will be able to do anything. What will happen to people's jobs then? Already we see shops closing down because of the preference consumers have for internet shopping, banks closing down as people do more transactions online and supermarkets full of automated cash tills. We are only half way through the digital revolution. We have not yet made robots with advanced visual processing. A present day robot has the dexterity to disassemble, repair and reassemble a broken electric light if someone shows it what to do. It does not have to capacity to go into a dark room, find the broken light, take the cover off and understand it the way an electrician would. In 1982 the ZX81 my friend had was fitted with an optional 16K RAM pack. My friend insisted that the RAM pack was essential for any serious programming. Why was the ZX81 made with 1K of memory? What could you do with 1K? I recently replaced a 16GB mobile phone as my use of apps like Zoom and Whatsapp had caused it to run out of memory. I replaced it with a 256GB mobile phone. 16GB is a million times as much as 16K. Imagine computer power in 40 years time being a further million times more than it is now and you have computers that don't need to be told what to do anymore. Just who will work? The self-employed millionaire who owns Asda? The business tycoon who owns all the self driving lorries on the M1?

University is not the answer. Getting a job is very competitive but it's not academic qualifications that people are competing on. I have a degree in Electronics. I couldn't get a job when I left university and 30 years later I work in Architecture. I remember a letter I got from an employer. "We found somebody with fewer qualifications and more experience." That sums up the whole of my life. I am self-employed. I don't employ people but I subcontract work to others if I don't have a skill myself or if I have too much work. This is effectively the same thing. Some of my subcontracted assistants have a degree but many don't. One had a PHD in Architecture but preferred me to do his low energy building design. Academic qualifications are no substitute for someone who does the job every day and has done so for several years. As one university teacher told me, an employer who takes on a graduate knows they have someone who can learn. That would be all right if an employer had any intention of training anyone to do anything. But we don't. I would take on a trainee but I don't make enough money to expand the business. Other people do expand their businesses but they expect to pick excellent employees off the shelf. They rarely train people. Business has a philosophy of making maximum profit. That might sound sensible but it means employing as few people as possible, working them as hard as possible and having very few trainees as trainees cost money. If I was going to give you a job to do, I wouldn't even ask if you had a degree. I subcontracted one man who befriended me when he was doing a training course to be a SAP assessor. I used to answer questions about his homework assignments. He was friendly, he was enthusiastic about what I was doing, he was easy to work with. Today I pass on quite a lot of my work to him during busy periods. I had a similar person who wanted to work for me who didn't get any work because he sounded fed up when he was on the phone. If you want to get a job know how to do something, be warm and friendly, and remember that you're not competing on academic qualifications.

Believing that the future of industry depended on computers, I did several college courses in computer programming. I can program and have done some short term contract work but I'm not up to the level that is required today. I remember one advert that said, "If you're a self taught genius get in touch anyway, we'd still like to hear from you." I am not a self taught genius. I belonged to an amateur radio club where I met people who were. One of them had worked in programming. I have no desire to take my interest any further. Apart from the feeling that I am not very good at it, I know plenty of good computer programmers who have been made redundant or who are self employed and can't get enough work. On the news, I read of American software houses are laying people off or not giving them sufficient new contract work. The problem is that software is now mass produced. There are millions of copies of any piece of software. Writing a program on your bedroom PC and trying to sell it is like recording a song in your garage and expecting it to become a hit record.

Another cause of unemployment is the industrialisation of developing countries like India and China. Nearly all of our manufacturing industry has gone over there. I remember being in political meetings where people thought this was a great idea. An Indian family would earn money and they would eat Heinz baked beans and buy a Vauxhall car. The removal of tariffs would work both ways. Western countries would benefit. But an Indian factory worker doesn't earn enough money to buy either Heinz baked beans or a Vauxhall car. The only result is that small family electronics companies of the kind my father used to run, repairing television sets, and, with my degree, I might have expanded into building radios or hi-fi amplifiers, are closing down because prices on the world market have collapsed.

A South African man wrote in the comments section of a news website that he wanted to emigrate to the UK. He didn't have a car and he couldn't walk to the supermarket without at least 3 homeless people asking him for money. I laughed at this. The same thing happened to me once when I lived in Sheffield. I remember one Saturday afternoon when I was really fed up with the number of homeless people who had approached me asking for money on my way to the shops. But Britain isn't South Africa. We haven't ever lived under an oppressive government. We have a welfare state. How could this happen here?

In 2007 house prices rose to insane heights. The banks were selling houses to people who couldn't afford them and this continued until they ran out of money. The government attempted to prevent an economic recession equivalent to the 1930s by bailing the banks out. This caused house prices to stabilise at a very high level. House prices can only go on rising as long as people can afford to buy them. There must be a point where they will stop rising. That point was not reached until the average rent in Britain became half the average wage. The average wage in the UK is about £30K a year and the average rent is about £15K. Single people don't need to have their own flat. They can live in a shared house. People don't have to live in the city centre. They can live in a village outside the city. If most people can't afford to buy a house they can rent. I work in architecture and have a customer who built a whole row of houses and is selling them one at a time. It will take six years from the time of the planning application to sell them all. The building trade has also adapted to high house prices.

Landlords are reluctant to rent to unemployed people as benefits are no longer paid directly to the landlord. Unemployed people are seen as bad payers. You can find landlords who rent to DSS on the internet but the properties are in out of the way places like villages 10 miles from the city centre. One such landlord said, "I am open to families. I am open to pets. I am open to DSS." I had the impression that he had a property he couldn't let and was desperate for a tenant. Benefits are also capped. You have to find a property to rent which is below the DSS permitted amount of money. It would also be helpful if benefits were paid weekly. An unemployed person gets £900 in benefits all in one go. Let's buy some new clothes. Let's go night clubbing. By the end of the week all that money is gone. If they got £90 in benefit once a week, and £500 a month went to the landlord, budgeting would be so much easier.

The manager of Guinness homes said that unemployed people aren't the worst payers. If they're used to being unemployed, they are usually all right. The worst payers are people who are made redundant or who are divorced. They suddenly lose their salary, or their partner's salary, and can no longer pay the rent. I find this very worrying. Any one of us could find ourselves homeless. When I was living in the Jesus Army community, I received an email from a friend saying that the church were in financial difficulty and were soon going to sell all the community houses. Had I thought about where I was going to live? I told him that I regularly went on the internet and knew all the places I could find cheap accommodation in an emergency. We should all do this.

I worked with homeless people when I was in the Jesus Army and learned a lot about what they were like. Many of them have drug problems or mental problems. I suffered from depression when I was a teenager and am unfortunate enough to remember the phenothiazine group of antidepressants. Many of these people were on them. At the time they were called major tranquillisers. They are very old tranquillisers. Anyone who is on them now has had severe depression for a long time. I wasn't on them for very long. Some of these people have been on them for 30 years. If finding your way through the maze to a private landlord who is willing to rent to the unemployed is difficult for most people, it is even harder to motivate yourself if you are on illegal drugs or seriously depressed. One way depression effects people is to make them impatient and bad tempered. I had made a cup of coffee for someone who was on these tranquillisers and I had forgotten to put his usual 3 sugars in it. I said I was sorry I had forgotten. There were 27 other people that day because it was snowing outside and the place was packed. It was easy to forget. Would he like 3 sugars in it now? He said I could keep the coffee. He picked up the full cup of coffee and threw it into the sink. The problem is that people will behave that way when they're talking to people who are trying to help them. I let somebody borrow my phone to talk to someone at the DSS. He got just as angry. Someone else had to take the phone off him. Someone brought us a letter from his doctor saying he should be able to use the food bank. I said that that was the right sort of letter and he should come back on Monday when the food bank would be open. This seemed to cause him a crisis. "Come back on Monday, come back on Monday?" People don't get the help that is available to them because they talk to people like that. A man wanted my old coat and an old pair of snow boots. I said that if he attended the same church event at the same time and place next week I would bring them. I brought them. He wasn't there. Homeless people can be hopeless at keeping appointments. The majority of people have family members they could live with if they were feeling that bad. The majority of homeless people don't, either because their family members have all died or because those people are unwilling to take them on because of their drug addiction and stealing. We had a heroin addict who stayed with us a few times. He seemed like a sensitive and likeable man. Everybody joined in when he was playing a hymn on the guitar. The next week he had taken the guitar to a shop and sold it for money to buy heroin. Expensive violins, tablet computers and all sorts of things were stolen over the years by this likeable and spiritual man who might have been a genuine Christian but was hopelessly addicted to heroin.

If people are moved into a flat, how well can they cope? One man told me, "Being homeless is an absolute doddle. In the hostel, you never sleep. One man, they gave him a flat. He came back. Couldn't cope with a flat. Couldn't cope with paying the bills." Living in a flat on my own for the last few years, I can understand that. My flat is full of torches and I have a table lamp. The lights go out or the electricity goes off quite often. You have to be prepared to sort out problems and call repair men. When I moved in, the electricity company hadn't sent me a bill for 3 months. It was a new flat and the meter hadn't been registered. Sorting out a flat can be a headache. If people come from a background of children's homes and then prison they are institutionalised. They wouldn't cope with those situations at all. Neither would they be able to cook. One woman kept telling a man she could get him a cooker and a fridge. He said that he didn't want one. I asked him if he could cook. He said, "Not really." We were in a shop together. He pointed out that one of the chocolate bars was particularly good and it had a purple centre. I thought, is that what you live on? Someone said, on a radio phone in, that she had seen a sex offender, recently out of prison, go into a shop and buy huge amounts of sweets. Was he going to use them to seduce children? I suspect that he can't cook and that is the kind of food he lives on. When I first moved out of the Jesus Army community I lived on soup. Everything I made turned to soup because I put too much water in. Only after many years did I learn the exact amount of water needed for a stew. In the Jesus Army we had domestic help but you would still be expected to make your own sandwich or boil your own egg. We had someone in the Jesus Centre who didn't know how to make a sandwich. I heard of an ex-prisoner who phoned the prison governor and asked them if they could let him back inside.