Well-being

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on securing this debate today. I would like to plug what I am doing tomorrow, which is introducing the Second Reading of my Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill. It was very peculiar for me when we started to talk about future generations. I could understand entirely the idea that we should not create laws and do things now that, in 10, 20 or 30 years, will cause all sorts of problems—the laws of unintended consequences—bearing in mind that this House, and the other place, are full of attempts to reverse the mistakes made in former times.

When we looked at the idea of a future generations Bill, lo and behold, around the corner came my staff and they added on the “Wellbeing”. Unfortunately, I did not understand it, because I had never really thought about well-being. The reason that I had never really thought about it was that I thought it was a bourgeois trap—one of the kind of things that you do when you want to avoid talking about the real world of work, the real world of class and the real fact that in the world you have people with too much GDP and others with not enough. You could put it another way: you could say that well-being is out there, but there are some people who have too much of it and some people who do not have enough of it.

One of the problems for me is that, when I look at the world, because I am a very old git—I am 74 now —I have passed through this tremendous 70-year change and have seen people from the working classes and middle classes getting more and more complex in their needs. It is not enough simply to be alive, be healthy and have loads of fun: you have to have well-being and happiness. I find that a very difficult thing: I am struggling with it and I am willing to go to evening classes to learn about how I can stop looking at well-being as a kind of chimera of not facing up to the real issues.

When I was 18 years of age, I was blessed by Her Majesty’s prisons allowing me to leave custody and go to Chelsea School of Art. When I went there, my well-being went through the roof: it was absolutely enormous. At the same time, my parents moved into another council flat, where their well-being also went through the roof. I am trying to make the same point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat: well-being is assessed in the context of where you are looking at it from and what position you hold in society. It is not something you can just leave to chance. I would love to kick the concept around, look at it very carefully and ask if it is a ruse or something that we can actually measure. Is it something that we can bring to our children and say, “Actually, simple financial advantage is really only a basis on which you can build change”?

I believe that well-being is very far away if you are in poverty. The first thing you need in order to build the basis of well-being is to be as far away from poverty as possible. If you go to India, you will find that many people have been lifted out of feral poverty: feral poverty is when you get up every day of the year and you do not know how you are going to feed your children. If you move into exploitative poverty, meaning that you get three or four dollars a day, it means that your children can go to school and that you have a regular life. Anybody looking at that kind of well-being—that sense of “my children have a future”—from the West, or a particular class aspect, would say, “That’s not well-being”, but it is. My father and mother lived practically the whole of the last stages of their lives in a glorious council flat, fully worked, fully fed; they had more well-being than virtually anyone else I know.