Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

129 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket ‘living wage’ and many districts had food-banks. As in Hanoverian days, the under-class received punishment, not socialisation. These changes have produced what some sociologists are calling an ‘hourglass society’, although, in truth, the British version does not have the symmetry of its twin globes. Nonetheless, a form of social exclusion at both top and bottom of society has evolved, with both a large sub-class and a very wealthy elite engaged in extremely different life-styles. The late Victorian/early 20 th century ‘middle way’, where there was the reality and the self-perception of common ground among what amounted to the bulk of the population has vanished. And it was during that period that first- class cricket enjoyed its finest hours. The concomitant of a low-tax society - the decline of public expenditure and services – was tangible. Alongside this was a wholesale demolition of local government, the potency of which had been so remarkable a factor in the Victorian and later eras. A much more centralised regime evolved. The proportion of British public spending controlled by the central state as against that of local government is 72%; it is 35% in France and 17% in Germany. In the late 1890s the central contribution in the UK was only 14%. The historian Jose Harris claims that the United Kingdom has moved ‘from one of the most localised and voluntaristic countries in Europe to one of the most centralised and bureaucratic’. 3 Both impoverished public services and stricken municipal administration are well illustrated by the fate of a communal and municipal amenity which had earlier served cricket admirably: the park. In 2014 86% of parks departments reported cuts of up to 50%, parts of the £42m reduction in local sports and leisure budgets over the 2010-2015 parliament. It is a short-sighted view castigated by the Sport and Recreation Alliance as ‘storing up problems for the longer term.’ Local authority sport and recreation spending was cut from £1.4bn in 2009/10 to £1bn in 2013/14 and prices increased dramatically leading to a sharp decline in sporting participation. The main comparison to be drawn between the pre-1850 and the post- 1950 epochs must be the high rate of lawlessness. After a long era of abnormally low crime figures, criminal activity grew alarmingly. It jumped from under 0.5m yearly criminal offences in the 1940s to 15m reported and unreported offences in the 1990s. There has been some slight decrease since but crime remains very high by earlier standards. There were 21 woundings formally recorded in 1921; there were over 100,000 in 2002. The relevant demographic ratios show there were in the 1940s 250 estimated annual crimes per 100,000 of the population compared with 11,000 per 100,000 in the 1990s. Whatever variables there may be in these figures, the astronomical scale of the figures removes all doubt about the extent of the crime wave. In 1939 200,000 crimes were reported to the police; in 2004 it was 5.7m. The term ‘nonconformist conscience’ is often used to define the mind-set of the population in the hundred or so years before 1950. It is difficult