Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and am very glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, managed to secure it. Two and a half hours is certainly not long enough to talk about what the young people of tomorrow or today should be getting out of society and life—I am sorry about my voice, I have a bit of a throat.

I am interested in the word “equality”. Is it equality before the marketplace? Is it equality in the democratic sense of everybody having a vote? Is it the equality that often does not happen, around people’s ability to have social mobility and to move on? Is it the equality we associate with being highly educated and knowing the difference between certain things? Is it the equality that comes from what I call a cognitive democracy?

What is the difference between a cognitive democracy and the democracy we now operate under? We operate under a representative system that, at the moment, seems unrepresentative because it cannot bring enough people together to share this representation. The Brexit issue is a confounding of what we have come to see as representative democracy. That is a great fear for the future and for our children, because it devalues this House, the other House and the whole process of what we call representative democracy.

Let us move on to participatory democracy. Why should young people be involved in participatory democracy? Why should they get off their rears and do things? Why should they study? Why should they burn the candle at both ends when, at the end of it, there is no opportunity to have a fuller life? We need to look seriously at the problems associated with the fact that many young people will do all that—go to university, go to college, do their apprenticeships, sweat both ends and burn the midnight oil—but at the end they will get some crummy job, because the crummy jobs are the only ones on offer.

I would love to see the equality of opportunity that comes from future generations not being controlled by the claptrap of the division between left and right and the division in society between rich and poor. We spend so much time trying to square the circle of the fact that a handful of people can own half of London while other people move along in a very shadowy sort of existence. These are the kind of things that the next generation are going to sort out, because we have not. We have not been able to develop the methodology or the pedagogy that would enable us to do so.

We fail 33% of our children at school. We can go on about public schools and private schools and all sort of things. We can say that, because there are private schools and public schools and privilege for some, we fail 33% of our children. I do not know if it follows like that. I come from the failed 33%. I failed many years ago—50 or 60 years ago—but even in that failure there was something quite grand. It was called Her Majesty’s custodial system, which took children who had done wrong and gave them a second, third and sometimes fourth chance. It moved them on, out of crime and wrongdoing. If they wanted to climb Mount Everest, as long as they did not rob old ladies in the process they would be encouraged to do that. I was encouraged to become an artist, a printer and all sorts of things by a system that worked: the system of rehabilitation. For those 33% now, we do not have that system. We have a system that is clogged up, full up and has a real problem: people go in bad and come out worse.

I was in the care system between the ages of seven and 10. We were fed, looked after and marshalled. There was no individualism, but at least we came out untainted at the other end. The care system now is open for perverts to abuse. Now, if you have been through the care system, you have more chance of ending up in prison, on the streets or in the kind of job that will never, ever lift you out of poverty but actually keeps you in poverty—earning £6, £7 or £8 an hour means that your children will never get to university or get the opportunities of true equality.

I have been working very much on the idea of dismantling poverty. That is why I came into the House. It was a most grandiloquent thing to do: why would anybody come into a House that believes in and runs a system and say that it does not work? This system does not work. When I look around, I am astonished and appalled at the number of people who really want to help the poor have a little more comfort or opportunity but do not want to actually get them out of poverty. This ideological war is taking up too much of our energy. We should be addressing whether we can bring about equality using the old, ideological arguments that have brought us to a situation in which 69% of the damage done to the planet has taken place in the last 40 years.

I am running out of time, but I need to say this. Today, I am launching a very important magazine about social literacy, which to me is one of the central things; we have to pass social literacy to our children. Unfortunately, I have to skedaddle; please forgive me, but at 5 pm we close the magazine. Noble Lords will all get free copies in compensation.