How apposite of John Harris to compare 21st-century Britain to that of the 19th century (Opinion, 28 November). Back then, the Liberal MP John Bright spoke against the welfare reforms that limited the hours children could work in the factories, saying this would increase costs, making businesses uncompetitive.
This belief that “welfarism’” was an unnecessary burden on industry has remained a firm belief in business and political circles, but a belief that stayed largely dormant until 1979. Since then, ending welfarism is believed to be the means of creating an efficient, dynamic economy. All public spending on people’s welfare has been reduced; even the NHS is under attack from Conservative reformers.
What was never mentioned by Brexiters during the EU referendum campaign was their wish to move away from the welfare standards and employment protections of the EU, seen as an unnecessary cost to business. It is no coincidence that the gig economy has boomed, largely devoid of any welfare or employment protections. Industrial Britain in the 19th century polluted its waterways with industrial effluent; 21st-century Britain pollutes it with human effluent and agricultural runoff. Coincidence or a turning of the circle?
Derrick Joad
Leeds
• My late friend, the punk singer songwriter Vi Subversa, once said of the 1980s: “We – ordinary people – had come too far, and must be put back.” In the UK, broadly, there was more equality in the 1970s than in any decade before or since. We know that in the 1980s, one ideological tool for “putting us back” was to disparage the very idea of society.
We are coming to realise the extent to which privatisation – selling off public assets such as energy, railways and social housing – is theft. John Harris’s image of Tories spending thousands on their dinner round the corner from underfunded food banks is indeed Dickensian. We have been put back: what now?
Janet Dubé
Peebles, Scottish Borders
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