by Kevin Meagher
My dad’s just turned 67. Like many people these days, he’s still working. But he’s not sat in a cushy office hunched over a laptop; he’s up on a scaffold, or knee-deep in mud and clay in the footings of a house.
He’s a bricklayer; and still finds himself out in all-weather doing the job he’s been doing for 50 years. He can’t afford to retire. When you work in a speculative industry your pay goes down as well as up. In a non-unionised industry, the rate is under constant negotiation. In the 1960’s and 70s it was a good job – paying well above average earnings.
During the 1980s, two biting Tory recessions wiped out construction. Try saving for retirement when you’re not earning enough; keeping the wolf from the door is the name of the game. So work on he must.
That’s partly because the past decade hasn’t been much better for construction workers either. Even during Labour’s boom, the wealth didn’t trickle down to people like him. There were two crushing forces at work: the Labour government’s general failure to build enough homes and the impact of low-cost immigrant labour, following the accession of the Visegrad countries to the EU in 2004.
The first issue is well chronicled – and indeed championed by the Left. Construction of new homes dropped to a post-war low under Labour. Having fallen by two thirds since the heyday of the 1960s, just 156,170 houses were built in 1997-8. By 2009-10, this had nearly halved to just 88,690. Not enough houses mean not enough jobs and flat pay.
Of the second issue – immigration – you will hear ne’er a squeak.
There’s been a self-denying ordinance in even talking about the issue for as long as I can remember. Like actors who won’t say the name of “the Scottish play” for fear of bad luck, the centre-left has been utterly mute on the subject of immigration for years.
Of course there is a familiar form of words about ‘valuing the contribution immigrants make’ but no discourse on the other impacts. The downsides must remain unspoken; such is the paranoia about feeding the far right.
So Ed Miliband’s speech was hugely significant, if only for its topic. Stacked full of caveats and careful formulations, he did, however, manage to throw off the veil that “worrying about immigration, talking about immigration, thinking about immigration” does not make people bigoted (“not in any way”). People are simply “anxious about the future” he said.
