Roy Hattersley really is rather confused in this piece today. Leave aside the joy with which he paws over the fact that greater equality means punishing the rich: a group that includes him by the way. We expect nothing less from a socialist, the desire to punish in the name of whichever bee is in his bonnet today.

There’s also some very odd assertions indeed in his piece:

The rhetoric is as old-fashioned as the overt class antagonism, but the
essential point remains. Lloyd George was not advising the coal owners
to subscribe towards the cost of a pension in order to improve
productivity. He was saying to the world that security in old age is a
moral necessity and has to be financed by the wealthy. Politicians who
run away from the underlying principle that greater economic equality
penalises the rich will never have the nerve necessary to bring about
economic equality.

But that isn’t actually what Lloyd George brought in now is it? He brought in National Insurance. That is, that the working man financed his own pension by paying in an insurance amount from his wages each week which then, in time, paid his pension. This was not punishing the rich in order to pay for the poor at all: it was mandating that the poor paid for their own pensions.

As an aside, we would do very well to return to something akin to the system that L-G set up (copying from Bismark). Stop calling it a pension and start calling it what it was, a form of insurance. Insurance against living long enough to outlive your savings. It was paid out (at 60 I think? Or was it 65 for the UK?) at the average lifespan of that generation (subtracting infant mortality I think: so we’re talking about the expected lifespan of someone of working age). Transfering that to today would mean that the insurance payments started at 76 or so for men and 79 for women.

That’s the social insurance we should have, not this insane idea that people should be economically inactive (nor living off their own savings from when they were) for an entirely predictable decade and more.

But this is even sillier:

The same is true of social equality. It was WS Gilbert who wrote: "When
everybody is somebody, then no one’s anybody" – thus anticipating, by
almost a century, the battle for "positional goods". In our consumer
society, the well-off often acquire possessions not because of the
intrinsic merit of the particular goods, but because owning a certain
type of car or clothing indicates social superiority. One of the great
attractions of private education is the class superiority that is
proclaimed by a striped blazer or a straw boater.

Yes, of course. Humans are status seeking animals. It’s what we do. We’ve tried a number of different ways of marking status, from proficiency at hacking the heads off peasants to order of birth, religiosity, ability to suck up to the Monarch and even our more modern ability to make oodles of cash. The latter is the least offensive, least harmful of them all. Quite apart from chavs remaining headed, the production entailed in making cash means goods that others can consume: it has a positive externality, you see?

If you think that there will ever be a human society which does not seek status then you are, I’m afraid, off somwhere in La-La Land.

And this is truly insane:

Tony Crosland argued that the "distance factors" – the institutions
that divide society – were second only to disparities in earnings and
capital as barriers to the creation of a unified society. But were we
ever to reduce their effects – let us say by ending the charity-status
subsidy to public schools and thereby squeezing numbers – the sons and
daughters of the middle classes would be denied the right to feel
different from their working-class contemporaries.

So we’ve now defined a private education as a positional good. Something which those seeking status will aspire to. We’re now going to make this more expensive. That is, more of a positional good, more of a symbol of status. Doing so will reduce the value of such status and thus the number who aspire to it?