Of all the ways in which Reform is upending the rules of British politics, the most fascinating is its reliance on the support of a single demographic. Nigel Farage seems to address himself exclusively to pensioners. The audience for his speech in Birmingham on Monday told its own story: row upon row of retirees. And how they applauded as Farage vented against the fecklessness of Britain’s workers:
Being chained to the desk, going to the pub and only getting home once the kids were asleep might have been acceptable in the Eighties
‘It is an attitudinal change that Britain needs. An attitudinal change to hard work rather than work-life balance. An attitudinal change to the idea of working from home. People aren’t more productive working from home, it’s a load of nonsense. They’re more productive being with other fellow human beings and working as part of a team.’
This is nothing more than updated Tebbitism: get off your Peloton and go to work. Farage certainly has strong views on productivity for someone who has spent much of his life working in or seeking to work in the least productive sector of the economy: politics. What is truly striking is to hear the de facto head of the British right dismiss the concept of work-life balance. It underscores a point I’ve made before: Farage is not a conservative, but a malcontent of boomer liberalism.
For Farage – and many of his supporters – work-life balance is woke, something for snowflakes, a therapy-speak excuse for the bone idle. And the crown jewel of this racket is working from home, a necessary evil during the pandemic (to those Reform supporters who don’t consider the pandemic itself a racket) which has been stretched out because Broken Britain is work-shy and no longer prepared to pull itself up by its bootstraps.
This is wholly at odds with the reality of the labour market. Just 14 per cent of Britons work from home all the time and 35 per cent do so only some of the time. Fifty-one per cent do not. But the vast majority (72 per cent) want the option and roughly the same share of the population (69 per cent) have a favourable view of working from home. This is to be expected: house prices have driven families out of London and other big cities and ever-lengthening commutes are expensive, emissions-heavy, and snatch away precious family time.
However, one demographic stands out for its unfavourable attitude towards work-from-home: the over 65s, one-third of whom are against. Unsurprisingly given the elderly skew of their voter base, supporters of Reform and the Conservatives express the same level of opposition. Those who get most worked up about work-from-home policies are the very people who will likely never have to use them.
What explains this? Well, many of us grow grumpier as we get older and begin to resent the next generation. Not me, of course. Other people. Though, since we’re on the subject, Spectator staff writers keep getting younger, more talented, and they use unfathomable terms like ‘mogging’ and ‘maxxing’ and ‘fleek’ and it makes me feel ancient, which, in fairness, I am. That might be what’s at play with Reform’s base and working-from-home. A generation never given the option begrudges its children’s good fortune.
It’s more than that, though. In the last few decades there has been a fundamental transformation in attitudes towards career and family, the accursed work-life balance that irks Mr Farage so. Two decades ago I did a lot of late shifts in newsrooms where colleagues would call home at 7 or 8pm night after night to read a bedtime story to their young children. No doubt those children appreciated daddy or mummy’s phone call – this was pre-FaceTime – but they would have benefited more from their parent being there for them in person.
Looking back now, these were the fumes of an Eighties work culture finally running out of fuel. Parents ambitious for their children worked long hours to give their offspring a better start in life than they had – a bigger house, more material goods, perhaps even private schooling – but in doing so they deprived their progeny and themselves of time spent together, playing and reading, forming bonds and making memories. Reform-voting baby boomers would probably consider such thinking soft, but if they want to understand why their children’s generation has produced the phenomenon of ‘going no-contact’, they might ponder the emotional impact of their work-first mindset, among other things.
Because their children are doing things very differently. Between the 1960s and the 2010s, the quantity of time parents spent with their children doubled. Fewer than one-third of Britons would apply for a vacancy that did not allow flexible hours and 55 per cent would consider quitting their job to work for a more flexible employer. Research shows that British fathers work longer hours when they have young children, unless their spouse is working part-time, in which case they tend to reduce their hours.
Being chained to the office desk from nine to five, then going down the pub, and only getting home once the kids were asleep might have been acceptable in the Eighties, but Maggie’s gone, the Human League is no longer in the charts, and parents have different priorities now. Working from home accommodates those priorities, allowing mothers and fathers to be economically active while placing the emotional interests of their children ahead of the outmoded people-management of their employer. A political party that aims to lead Britain back to growth should spend more time listening to the workers who generate growth and less time pandering to retirees who want to dictate the rules of a labour market they are no longer involved in.
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