3: ‘It’s Human Capital, Stupid’

Readers will be familiar with the historic analysis of the socio-economic make-up of society by the great economist, J.K. Galbraith (1958). At the time he was formulating his thesis, and for some decades afterwards, whilst gross inequalities existed, they were not perceived by those worst affected as clearly as might have been expected, because the common experience of large swathes of the population separated them from the wealth and privilege of a tiny minority.

For Marxists, the mantra remained: it was workers versus bosses, or labour versus capital (Marx, 2007). Historically in Britain, palpable disparity of income and living space between the well-off and the majority did not lead to revolution. A combination of clever One Nation conservatism, deference and generally rising living standards were sufficient to avoid the reaction seen in other parts of the world – where the creaming-off of surplus, profit or rent led to a level of inequality between the very rich minority and the very poor masses that formed the breeding ground for genuine uprisings.