The Cost of Living crisis 1840s-2020s
I was at one of the People’s Assembly Protests over the cost of living and the sacking of P&O workers on Saturday. On this occasion I was in central Cardiff at the Nye Bevan statue. Fair to say Nye would have had a few well chosen words to say to Rishi Sunak.
Of there are statistics. Energy costs are doubling while in France they are rising 4% and in Portugal not at all. Same energy crisis, different Governments. Many will struggle to pay bills and a millionaire Chancellor has no conception what that means let alone the will to do anything about it.
Of course Parliamentary challenges can and will be made and it can only be hoped that Labour has an impact whatever one may think about its current direction.
But the real work has to be done from below in workplaces and communities. The TUC has called a national protest on June 18th and that will be an important display of resolve. It needs to go further than that. We know after 10 years and more austerity that those who have the most cause to protest also have little energy to do so. They are too busy just trying to survive day to day.
But protest is needed and it does need to be rooted in people. In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson grappled with the standard of living debate in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thompson was not an economic historian but disliked the pro-market perspectives that many who were held. His views were challenged at the time and there has been a lot more research since.
However some basic points remain. Thompson wondered why, if it was the case that working class living standards were rising in the 1830s and 1840s when Booth surveyed working class areas much later in the century so many were found to be in abject poverty.
He turned to Mayhew whose work on London Labour and the London Poor moved beyond official statistics and sought to engage workers and understand what their actual experiences were. For example standard of living stats might be based on people in regular and reliable employment but the reality for many both in the 1840s and 2020s was very different.
Thompson noted in a fact finding age he looked for the facts the enumerators forgot: he wrote consciously against the economic orthodoxies of the day, discovering his own outrageous ‘laws’ of political economy- ‘under-pay makes over-work’ and ‘over-work makes under-pay’
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