The Pitchforks Are Coming

I love being a Chartered Surveyor. It’s so enjoyable in fact, that it’s easy to forget that for many young chaps growing up on the Brighton and Hove border, it’s often the only route out of the ghetto.

But being a Chartered Surveyor, I think, sometimes gives you a perspective on society that other professions perhaps don’t always see. Obviously this is not exclusively true: but most people spend their time mixing with people of more or less their own socio-economic grouping, at home and work.

Lots of jobs come into contact with people across the spectrum, but within specific spheres, and within their own field, and perhaps only one or two groupings: lawyers might deal with criminals, police with drunken Chartered Surveyors etc, but what I mean is this: I see where everyone actually lives, from the poorest in our country, to the very richest. I sometimes survey a slum in London in the morning filled with a dozen migrant workers with no hot water, and in the afternoon survey a £10 million penthouse.

Anyway, what I’ve learnt so far is this: the pitchforks are coming.

From my daily meandering around London’s residential areas, it is clear that the city as a whole is transforming into roughly two parts: vast swathes of dormitory housing for migrant workers (which has replaced the former middle-class suburbs surrounding the core, pushing the former middle class inhabitants outside the M25) and these migrant workers daily service the second part: archipelagos of increasingly elite housing areas.

This process is not yet complete, but the transformation has been extraordinarily swift.

Our society is as unequal as it has been in modern history, and grows more so by the day. There are a higher proportion of people in London in servile jobs (domestic cooks, cleaning the houses of the rich etc) than there were 150 years ago, and the inequality I see every day is just…extraordinary.

Downtown Abbey portrays a socialist utopia that Londoners can now only dream of. An individual’s wealth – and whether or not they have a chance of buying a home – is now pretty much entirely down to their parent’s economic status, as it was a century ago. Some areas of housing in London now would not be unrecognisable to Dickens, and these areas are spreading rapidly. And in contrast, the wealth I see in some areas is mind boggling: pricing-Croesus-out-of-Mayfair type-wealth.

And, speaking as a former Archaeology undergraduate (I applied as it was near the front of the UCAS book) there has never been this level of regressive inequality in history before that hasn’t led to the masses taking up pitchforks, literal or metaphorical – the only alternative paths have been where authoritarian regimes have emerged, and managed to postpone the inevitable (by buying all the pitchforks first. Can you buy a metaphorical pitchfork? I think I’m getting lost in my metaphor’s metaphors).

Why else are the government proposing to collect all of our emails and internet browsing history, if not to pre-empt this dystopia?

At some point people will realise: our economy isn’t a game that is rigged, it isn’t even a game: it’s an activity, where wealth is transferred from the many to the few. And when they realise this, they’ll appreciate that the only option they have left is to go to the few that have the wealth, carrying pointy-objects, and…take all their stuff.

London now is a random group of people, who share nothing non-geographical in common and often don’t even speak the same language, and who live in a society with income and asset inequality not seen for over a century. The rest of the country will be the same soon.

How do you govern that?