POLITICS
Hippies, Workfare and the myth of Total Mobilisation
FERD INAND MO UNT
Idon't call this country,' says the ill-starred Lilia in Where Angels Fear to Tread after walking through the intensely cultivated Tuscan landscape of vineyards and olive groves. 'Why, it's not as wild as Sawston Park!' For E. M. Forster students today, this passage probably needs a foot- note to explain that, before the first world war, the English landscape with its swamps, commons and coppices could look positively unkempt compared with abroad or the bits of abroad that most people visited. It has taken two wars — and their legacy of total agriculture, the Forestry Commission and the siege mentality of self-sufficiency in food — to enclose and cultivate almost every available square yard in England, leaving only an erratic network of rights of way and a few shrink- ing patches of common open to the public.
It is the race memory of the old wilder- nesses that softens and sentimentalises many people's attitudes to the hippies (and gives the hippies themselves that peculiarly irritating self-righteousness). Vague thoughts of hedgehogs baked in clay, of Mr Toad and Augustus John begin to stir. The police had to use the greatest delicacy in breaking up the New Forest convoy, apparently going to the lengths of laying on vegetarian snacks for them.
An overblown, silly-season story, yet one which does hit a nerve — the opposite but connected nerve to the one stimulating the Prime Minister's new-found interest in 'Workfare' as a means of chivvying hippies and other layabouts off the dole. Workfare is the blanket term for the schemes now operating in several American states: quite simply, under Workfare, you only qualify for the dole if you accept some kind of community work offered by the State which would not otherwise be done. The work itself is thus not so very different from the existing Community Programme — in Britain — which offers variously cleaning and sprucing jobs. Indeed, the germ of the idea has been present over here ever since Beveridge in the condition — rarely enforced — that, in order to qualify for the dole, a person must be 'available' for work and cannot repeatedly turn down suitable jobs. The difference is in the simplicity of the choice posed by Workfare: take the job or no dole.
Lord Young, the Employment secretary, has already ventured a step in this general direction by arranging, under the 'Restart' programme, that every long-term unem- ployed person will be invited for interview and will be offered something to do, if at all possible: a job of some kind or a training place. But this, argues the irrep- ressible Professor Patrick Minford, 'lacks a crucial ingredient: compulsion'.
Now a year or two ago it would have been politically unthinkable for a politician — even Mrs Thatcher — to talk with even qualified approval of any scheme involving compulsion or near-compulsion. Workfare might produce economic benefits, but it would be politically disastrous. Indeed, that would still be the consensus in Whitehall.
In reality, I suspect that the opposite may be nearer the truth. Workfare might be politically quite popular, if gradually introduced; but it would be economically irrelevant and even damaging. It would perpetuate the myth entrenched by two world wars that a country must be totally mobilised in order to flourish. It remains the awkward truth, for example, that although Britain was more intensely mobil- ised than Nazi Germany throughout most of the second world war, our industrial performance was far from superior, in- deed, according to Mr Correlli Barnett, decidedly inferior.
There is a sharp distinction to be drawn between those unemployment measures which are supposed to benefit the unem- ployed themselves and those which are supposed to benefit the nation. Workfare clearly belongs to the second category, for it involves the assumption that idleness is morally wrong and corrupts and impover- ishes society as a whole.
In the same way, keeping land in good heart and keeping as much land as possible under cultivation have been generally assumed to be sacred national duties and were once legal duties too. Who now remembers the dreaded 'War Ags' which dispossessed thousands of farmers on grounds of incompetence, or Mr Walden, the Hampshire farmer who was shot dead by police in 1940 while being evicted for refusing to plough a four-acre field of his? Every conceivable method has been thought of to reduce the milk lakes and cereal mountains: quotas, levies, price cuts. The simplest and most obvious method — let marginal land go out of cultivation — is now being resorted to only in desperation and with a sense of shame. Professor Colin Spedding of Reading Uni- versity reckons that, ten years hence, as much as 2.5 million acres will have been taken out of cultivation, an area the size of Yorkshire.
Farmland is thus being gradually de- mobilised, stood down. With luck, we shall even begin to move away from the pre- tence that unfaimed land is serving a serious function — as recreational space, nature trail and so on. More and more land will simply be there, as it used to be, as it is in other countries. And this surely suggests a rather wider and more careful compari- son with countries such as the United States which are widely invoked by enter- prise enthusiasts. For it is not true that the American land and the American people are all fully mobilised. Large quantities of both are sitting in the sun doing nothing very much. America is not only the land of hustle and zip; it is also the land of the ghost town, the deserted farm, the weed- girt vacant lot, the happy hunting ground of drop-outs and hippies the world over. Indeed, all these may be symptoms of a free market and a dynamic economy. Mrs Thatcher, like many transatlantic visitors, is not much interested in this side of America. She superimposes her admira- tion for the best of American industry on her belief in the universal application of the work ethic. The two do not fit. In most years since the war, if not at present, American registered unemployment has been far higher than in Britain. And even that understates how much more mobilised Britain remains than most other Western countries, where far fewer women are at work. The most successful economies have not been based on forced labour and total mobilisation — which tend to produce a resentful, skiving workforce as in Eastern Europe — but rather on freedom of contract between employer and employee. Of course, Workfare would 'solve' the unemployment problem; so would expand- ing the size of the armed services by a few million people. But I doubt whether either would contribute much to the sum of happiness or prosperity. The extra cost of arranging, at public expense, two or three million extra temporary jobs does not bear thinking of. In any case, the political problem is the hundreds of thousands of people who want work but can't find it, not the others who could find it but don't want it.
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