Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

128 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket were highly individualised. Moreover, the entirety of cultural experience increased in tempo, creating a nervy whirligig of fast-moving, ephemeral, ever-changing activity. ‘Freedom to choose what is always the same’ is the verdict of one commentary. 2 It should be added in parenthesis, given the rather gloomy tone of these pronognostications, that there were many faults in the older regime of the integrated culture. It could be and often was narrow-minded, censorious, discriminatory, puritanical, oppressive and much else besides. The point at issue is that it was ‘congregational’ in foundation and that it was replaced by a social structure that was more self-based. This ‘desegregated culture’ was, of course, an echo of an economic and political tone in which self and money were the reigning arbiters. For good or ill, and particularly after the oil price crisis of the early 1970s, there was a wholesale abandonment of regulatory processes for the banking and financial markets, the privatisation in whole or part of public utilities, a reduction in state expenditure, especially directed at the welfare budget, and a major lowering of taxation. This more libertarian approach, in terms of social class, created a much more unequal society materially as well as socially and culturally. Both major political parties and their leaders, be it Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, naturally sought to robe the fundamental shifts in the guise of modernisation but, in reality, it amounted to a basic reversal to the free- for-all decades of the 18 th and early 19 th centuries. For example, the zero hours contracts and the enforced spread of under-paid self-employment re-invented the severe casualisation of labour of that earlier period while the system of subsidising employers and landlords via tax credits and housing benefits was distinctly reminiscent of the old poor law before its strict restructuring in 1834. The gradual moves in the later decades of the 19 th and the opening decades of the 20 th centuries towards a more egalitarian society were drastically reversed. The United Kingdom is now the fourth most unequal of the OECD’s 34 nations. The top fifth take 60% of the available income and the bottom fifth 0.6%. To be in the top one per cent now requires a couple with no children to be earning £160,000 a year. In 2015 Oxfam suggested that the five richest families in the UK had as much wealth as that of the 20% of the population that comprised its poorest section. The Poverty and Social Exclusion Group produced in 2014 Poverty Now , billed as ‘the most detailed study of poverty in Britain.’ It showed that the number of households living at or below minimum living standards, defined as being without three or more of the basic necessities of life, had risen from 14% to 33%. The number living in temporary accommodation in 2015 was 49,000 families, a rise of 25% in five years, and inclusive of 93,000 children. Early in 2015 the Joseph Rowntree Trust published findings that showed that four in ten of British families with children, in all 8m people, were on incomes below the minimum required to participate adequately in society. 22% of the actual work-force earned less than the