Even after two world wars, crumbled city landscapes still largely spoke of a nineteenth-century provenance. Rows of back-to-back terraces built by industry sat next to tenements built for the poor. A window into the appalling nature of living conditions is given by Ron Charnick, a former health inspector in London’s Southwark: “Littered with bomb sites, overcrowded, badly damaged, poorly repaired and much unfit housing … Overrun with rats both within and outside public sewers, needing 12 rodent operatives to control. No DDT so infestations of bed bugs, fleas, lice and cockroaches prevalent … Air pollution heavy” (Historia Sanitaria 1954).

Tenants of slum landlords could count on very little regulation or assistance. On those occasions when health inspectors such as Charnick turned up and followed through with enforcements, many landlords abandoned their property, placing the responsibility for the home or its demolition onto the local authority.

In Chapter 2 we noted that Charles Booth’s nineteenthcentury street survey of London effectively conjoined each class to the space that it occupied such that squalid areas inferred squalid peoples. In Chapter 4 we noted how postwar Commonwealth migration was parsed through the same calculus such that areas populated by Black and Asian peoples were considered squalid due to the racialized demographic. In what now follows we show how a new topography of squalor became integral to the postcolonial political imagination.

In this chapter we examine the politics and strategies of slum clearance in the postwar era, a process that ran parallel to the suburban and New Town building initiatives discussed in the last chapter. We have already noted that slum clearance was always accompanied by a segregation of the working class into “God’s” and the “devil’s” poor, or, those considered hygienic or dysgenic to the imperial and national project of capital accumulation. However, with New Commonwealth immigration, these segregating logics took on renewed and sharpened racial lines.

Thus far we have argued that social and economic development never followed slum dwellers displaced from their habitats, and so squalor merely reproduced itself down the road. But in this chapter, we turn towards a novel vertical answer to the horizontal reproduction of slums – the high-rise tower block.

So far, I’ve been talking about the type and level of financial support that's on offer in our social security system. But when you talk to people living in poverty, it's clear that it is equally important to consider non-financial support and how people are treated when they access both financial and non-financial services. An abstract view of poverty tends to focus purely on amounts of money and modelling behavioural responses to taxes, benefits, the labour market and so on. But the experience of poverty is as much about feeling powerless, dismissed and despised as it is about material hardship.

Public services – social security, employment support and health, social and local authority services – can build people up or knock them down. They can be a forum within which people are treated with dignity, listened to and respected, and where they are empowered to change their circumstances and realize their ambitions. Or they can be a place where people are made to feel they are problems to be fixed and are further disempowered and infantilized.

Before Beveridge and the reforms of the 1940s onwards, our public services were made up of a patchwork of voluntary and mutual organizations, Church provision and some limited local government funding and services. The Elizabethan Poor Law, introduced at the end of the sixteenth century, provided a legal underpinning and baked in the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. It ensured that the evolving system included detailed assessments and harsh conditions to prevent those classified as undeserving from receiving help that might encourage idleness and immorality. There were basically three roles available within this system: wise benefactor, passive supplicant and roguish malefactor. There were some positives to this system, particularly its localized nature and close involvement of what we would now call grassroots voluntary and community sector organizations. However, it failed to protect many people from hardship or provide the help that would enable them to build a better life for themselves. It was also wholly unsuited to the new industrial age.

The development of the industrial economy transformed all parts of society. Workers were collected in large numbers in cities, working in factories and on production lines and living in close proximity to the elites and middle classes. The growth of city slums gave rise to fears of disease spreading not only through the new working classes but also to the middle classes.

So, what would my four-year-old self think about the state of ignorance in education in 2021, almost 80 years after the Beveridge Report and Rab Butler's Education Act? What would be my future if I was four years old now? For starters, I would no longer be an “infant”. I would be a pre-schooler in an early years foundation stage, with teachers who know all about cognitive development and social learning skills, as well as crayoning and singing songs. They would be following government guidance on whether I had achieved my early learning goals. Ofsted would soon be checking up on whether my reception class was good or outstanding, especially in preparing us for the literacy and maths skills we would need in Year 1 and the first Key Stage tests. But my present and future achievements and levels of ignorance would still depend heavily on my social class and ethnicity, my family or care background, whether I had been told I had SEND and especially the schools I would attend. Would they be expensive or cheaper private, part private academies, local authority maintained, selective grammar or comprehensive, faith-oriented or agnostic, urban or rural, well-resourced or starved of funds and much else? I would also have started my schooling not with actual wartime bombs falling, but with the bombs of a pandemic still falling all around and a government that had not responded well to the Covid-19 pandemic and its mutations. I would not have had a full year's schooling in 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic took hold, and 2022 and beyond was looking shaky. Although early ignorance of the implications of a pandemic were understandable, the public has been subjected to much deceit, evasion, fabrication and lies affecting all public institutions and the well-being of the whole population. A YouGov poll in December 2021 “revealed huge public cynicism” over trust in politicians to act in the national interest (Helm & Savage 2021), but the view presented by Nish Kumar in his Daily Mash programme was that “the British public are now so used to lies and stupidity that the entire country has become immune” (Kumar 2021).

Beveridge was clear that maintaining full employment was necessary to his plan. It was a good in itself but was also vital to make the welfare state affordable and ensure workers would only need their unemployment payments for short periods. All that is still true, but the problems we now face in our labour market have changed.

Mass unemployment, although not necessarily gone for ever, has ceased to be the big challenge facing us. After the Great Recession and before Covid-19, the employment rate recovered amazingly strongly, but more and more workers were still pulled into poverty. The big issues now are low pay, lack of progression, insecurity and underemployment. Our central concern should be the quality of work that those at the lower end of the labour market are able to get, not just how many people have a job. So how do we prevent workers getting stuck in low-quality jobs?

One answer is to improve their skills and qualifications so that individuals can compete more effectively for better work and move employer to increase their pay, security and treatment. That is certainly necessary. The majority of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds reach the age of 16 without the baseline of five good GCSEs or their equivalent. The gap in attainment between children from richer and poorer families has remained stubbornly large and the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out a decade's worth of (very modest) progress in narrowing it (Education Endowment Foundation 2021). Five million adults lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Accessing the next stages of education and getting a decent start in your working life is incredibly difficult without these basics.

Once adults are in the labour market, those with low levels of qualifications are far less likely to then get further training from employers than those who already have higher qualifications. The payback for doing training as an adult, in terms of getting better work or higher pay, is uncertain and very variable depending on the qualification, sector and where in the country you are. The barriers to low-paid workers getting more qualifications without the support of their employers are high; many people experience difficulties with finding the time to study when also working and caring, avoiding falling foul of benefit conditions or facing unacceptable hardship or debt if they try to reduce current work to allow training.

Previous chapters empirically established the fact that Korea’s development state had been notoriously hostile to labour unions while disciplining chaebols, by suppressing labour movements forcibly and punishing chaebol families who failed to comply to the state’s preferences. This chapter revisits that important topic in more depth, by focusing on the violent suppression of the labour movement from the 1970s to 2018. Some of the years covered in the chapter overlap with the initial phase of democratization and the legal recognition of labour unions. The chapter explains why such state violence was needed for economic growth, while we also analyze why it is related to economic inequality and wage structures in Korea in the 2000s. Furthermore, as we will explain, during both the democratization and post-democratization periods, state-sourced violence and repression of the labour movement and other niche markets shifted towards privately supplied violence specialists, which acted, and continue to act, implicitly, and at times explicitly as proxies for state power.

THE LABOUR FORCE IN THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE

The issue of labour has long attracted the attention of social scientists from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines and approaches. The case of labour issues in Korea is no exception and especially so regarding scholarship focused on explaining Korea’s rapid economic miracle. When Park Chung Hee assumed power following the 1961 coup d’état, as already explained throughout the preceding chapters, he did so under the pledge to instil economic growth and order. Moving away from the import-substitution approach that had been adopted, much to the detriment of the economy by the Rhee Syngman regime, Park first focused on the development and promotion of labour-intensive EOI, mostly from 1961–72 (Haggard & Moon 1993: 54). This move towards EOI was rewarded with remarkable growth until the end of the decade when the GDP began to decline, coupled with rising inflation and wages among other worrisome economic conditions. In conjunction with an economy in decline, and thus with Park’s reduced legitimacy, politically the regime was increasingly being challenged by opposition seeking to capitalize on the weak economic performance.

How long do you expect to live for? Babies born when Beveridge was outlining his system of social security, as we saw in Chapter 2, could expect to celebrate around 60 birthdays. That is if the mortality rates that existed at their birth remained the same throughout their lifetime. Of course, with the advent of the NHS, those babies enjoyed substantial improvements to mortality rates. In fact, by the time they reached their sixtieth birthday in 2002, increases in life expectancy had risen so that they might enjoy another 20 or so years of life (Office for National Statistics 2021a). At the population level, the benefits of Beveridge's welfare state, particularly the NHS, are truly remarkable. Even for individuals, the extent of provision for welfare established by Beveridge was unprecedented. Improving living conditions through better housing, expanding education and the full-scale attack mounted on poverty stood alongside better and growing access to ever-developing medical interventions. That we now tend to live longer than our great-grandparents is no surprise. But the gains heralded by Beveridge's vision are in danger, while some have already been lost. The collective participation and shared sense of responsibility fanned by the shared trauma of two successive world wars weakened as the neoliberal, capitalist ideologies of contemporary society came to regard welfare as a costly burden. The system has, to invoke Hilary Cottam's (2021) arguments on welfare reform, always been designed with humans imagined as self-interested, self-maximizing individuals. But this has now overtaken any sense of a shared fate in the creation of the system of social security, which is now hollowed out, overburdened and in peril. For some the consequences are severe, whereas for others high incomes, high wealth and high self-esteem are sufficient buffers. To understand the scale of work needed to now launch a new attack on our contemporary and more monstrous giant of Disease, we must understand its uneven pursuit of the population.

UNEQUAL HEALTH

In 2021 a baby boy born in south-east England might live to be 80, but if they were born in Scotland they may not live past 77. What is so different about the experiences of that boy in south-east England from those of that boy in Scotland? It isn't just between countries and regions of the UK that such differences emerge. They also play out between postcodes within cities and regions, often to an astonishing degree.

As the 2008 financial crisis spread across the global economy, the Labour government intervened to prop up the housing market by supporting mortgage lenders and offering tax concessions to those purchasing homes. Despite many commentators accrediting Labour with “saving the system”, the 2010 election resulted in a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, who promptly made it their priority to tighten the proverbial belt.

British people, the new government claimed, had “lived beyond their means”. Chancellor George Osborne announced that it was time to “cut the waste and reform the welfare system that our country can no longer afford”. As part of this austerity agenda, Osborne and Prime Minister David Cameron confronted a housing benefit bill that had mushroomed from £2 billion in the early 2000s to £20 billion in 2010. Logically, they sought to cut expenditure on the four million council and housing association homes where almost a fifth of the population still lived.

At the same time, lobbyists and Conservative politicians claimed that the Labour government had stifled the housing market by subsidizing council and social homes. Incredible as it might seem, Conservative ideologues judged the deregulation and outsourcing of the Blair years to have been insufficient to the task of unleashing the full potential of that market. In short, the coalition government was dead set on turning Thatcher’s property-owning democracy almost fully over into a landlord’s oligarchy.

Recall the definition we gave to squalor at the start of this book: your habitat kills you. In the previous chapter we considered New Labour’s strategy of public–private financing, deregulation and outsourcing to have led to an organized negligence practiced by the state and its local administrations. In this chapter, we track the logical endpoint of such a strategy, a form of what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2003) has called “necropolitics”. For Mbembe, contemporary politics is defined not necessarily by a straightforward desire to kill populations, but by a right to expose particular populations to deadly conditions.

We argue that after 2010 the British state has effectively divided the population into those who cling to a category of “life” – people who comfortably own habitations that are constructed safely – and those deposited in a category of “death” – those occupying habitations that they can ill afford and are unsafe, as well as the homeless and asylum seekers.

Today's labour market is very different to the one in which the Beveridge Report was conceived. Commissioned in 1941 at the height of the Second World War, it was written as part of the efforts of the wartime government to “plan the peace” but drew on prewar experiences. Almost the entirety of the 1920s and 1930s had seen very high rates of unemployment in the UK. The years after the First World War saw a prolonged slump that was exacerbated by the fallout from the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

As shown in Figure 1.1, it was only at the very end of the 1930s, shortly before the onset of the Second World War, that unemployment had returned to more typical levels. Beveridge addressed, therefore, what the government should do to support those looking for work – to avoid “Want” – and what the government could do to help people back into work – to avoid “Idleness”.

These questions are still part of our policy conversation today, but perhaps with insufficient recognition of how the UK labour market has changed over the past few decades. Contrary to the comments of Iain Duncan Smith that opened this chapter, the UK is not facing a situation in which “idleness is institutionalized”. In fact, we have the highest employment rates ever seen and the key issue facing the UK is that too many people are trapped in low-paid insecure work.

It is important, therefore, to start with a clear idea of what has actually happened in the UK labour market over the past few decades and how much has changed since Beveridge's time.

First and foremost, recent years have seen historically high levels of employment. Figure 1.2 shows that, before the pandemic, January 2020 saw the highest proportion of people in work ever recorded. Even in the depths of the Covid-19 recession, the employment rate was higher than ever seen before 2016.

Having moved in 1978 to Lancaster University, I was nearly as busy as Margaret Thatcher through the 1980s: researching, writing, teaching, examining, administering, being head of department for three years after promotion to professor in 1984. That year only 5 per cent of allprofessors in England were women, although the late Lord Beloff did announce, when I opposed him in a Cambridge Union debate, that “the lady calls herself a professor; this is like a motor mechanic calling himself an engineer”. My promotion was announced in the Lancaster Guardian as “Mother of Three Made Professor”, so in spite of Enoch's view, I had managed it with children. I was now able to challenge much of my own ignorance, even travelling to the University of the South Pacific and meeting some policy-makers and politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. I spent time on two government-appointed committees dedicated to removing ignorance about minorities and imperialism, but the reports of both were ignored. I also chaired the parents’ Advisory Centre for Education (ACE), set up by (Lord) Michael Young, father of Toby (see Chapter 6). ACE has done great work for parental knowledge about what is happening to their children.

REGRESSIVE VISIONS

Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK in 1979. One of her early activities was to take elocution lessons to lower her voice, which she thought was too shrill. Famous actor Lawrence Olivier had suggested that voice trainers at the National Theatre would oblige. At Oxford she was president of the university Conservative Society and early on demonstrated her dislike of socialism and the Labour Party, which she equated with Stalin's version of communism.

This chapter is concerned with explaining the basis and structure, in other words, the genesis, of what has frequently been coined “Korea Inc.”. Although the focus of our analysis is certainly on the postcolonial period, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the roughly 40-year period of near complete dominance of the peninsula by Japan. This discussion, even after more than 75 years after the end of Japanese colonialism, continues to be undeniably controversial, with the majority of those engaging the Korean miracle typically avoiding altogether this uncomfortable, potentially anti-nationalist narrative. This section, while brief, discusses some of the key arguments about this period, while acknowledging the methodological difficulty of robustly linking the colonial period to the economic take-off in the 1960s.

COLONIAL AND CULTURAL LEGACIES DEBATED

As noted earlier in this text, scholars of Korean history typically trace this country’s roots back to ancient Joseon (Gojoseon) (c. 2333–108 BCE). Despite the much earlier origins of what would become Korea, most scholars point to the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) as the key point in Korea’s modern emergence as a rationalized state. The Goryeo period was then replaced by the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), which governed the peninsula until it began to slowly erode as principally a result of corruption and inefficiency (see Cumings 1997). The Joseon dynasty’s descent coincided with Japan’s emergence as a major regional power, thus setting the stage for the colonial period in which Japan replaced Korean-domestic rule by fully annexing it in 1910 and then governing the entirety of the peninsula until its defeat at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

By the time Korea had been annexed, Japan itself was immersed in its own decades-long efforts against its potential colonization by foreign powers, which had in large part precipitated the end of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and advent of the Meiji era (1868–1912), in which its traditional government and economy was replaced by a more modern, Western-influenced one, with the goal and ultimate realization of rapid industrialization.

I passed the 11-plus after extra coaching and was pushed up a year into the alpha stream of my girls grammar school. We did Latin. The “C” stream did domestic science and girls left at 15. Out of some 90 girls who started grammar school with me, six ended up going to a university. Several others who stayed for A-levels went to teacher-training colleges. The girl who did best married a builder who ended up a millionaire. My parents, like other lower-middle-class families, were desperate to take advantage of the now free but selective secondary schooling. After school I helped out at the private nursing home where my mother, a qualified nurse and midwife, was now able to work, having had to give up her job pre-war when she married. One evening I helped her bath baby Simon Hughes whom she had just delivered, which is probably the most political thing she ever did as he later became an MP and deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party. I began to learn the realities of social class, how “private” meant “more money”, and went to university to study sociology and boys. Married straight from university as girls did in those days, I had a brief career in Canada as a social worker and trained as a teacher. Then three children by age 26 and a struggle to get back into higher education. Just in time for it to be “Downhill all the way: the 1970s” (Simon 1991: 405).

SELECTING THE POSH AND THE DIM: THE 1950S

This chapter discusses the various ignorances incorporated in selective schooling, the regeneration of private schooling in the 1950s, the breakout from much ignorance in the 1960s (which, contrary to right-wing propaganda, was actually a decade of progress and innovation) and the ignorances of the 1970s.

In this chapter, we discuss the importance of the UK's productivity problem to low pay and poor job quality. Pay rates arise from an interaction between productivity and worker power and both can contribute to improving wages. However, productivity debates have been bedevilled by a series of assumptions that have led policymakers astray. Firstly, for too long, economists have used a simplified “human capital” model of productivity that assumes that, in the short term, very little can be done about the productivity of an individual worker. What follows from this is the idea expressed by Lord Freud opening this chapter: that the challenge is to set wages at a level low enough that it is still economic to employ that worker. The second error is the obsession with the shiny and new. New inventions can improve national productivity, but often only after their usage is spread across the economy. If this was better understood, perhaps ministers would spend less time posing for photos in front of the National Graphene Institute and more time pounding the high streets of the UK's everyday economy where much of the country's productivity problem actually lies. Finally, for too long, the UK’s poor management skills have been an open secret and ignored in economic conversation, having been shut away in the “too difficult” box.

THE UK'S PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM

Productivity is the amount of output for any given level of input and it can be measured at the level of an individual business or a country as a whole. At the national level, it is normally measured by looking at total economic activity (GDP) per hour worked.

When I helped set up the Social Metrics Commission in 2016, my enthusiasm was born of weariness and frustration. Too many meetings spent debating how to measure poverty instead of how to reduce it. Too many interviews in which arguing over what poverty was crowded out discussion of how to free people from it. Baroness Philippa Stroud (chair of the commission and former adviser to the secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith) started the commission after seven bruising years in the white heat of government, having those same arguments but with much higher stakes.

Stroud and Duncan Smith had come into government with a grand plan: to sweep away seven old benefits and replace them with universal credit. They worked alongside the Conservative peer, David Freud, who had previously advised the Labour government and then joined the Conservative-led Coalition government in 2010. In his book, Clashing Agendas: Inside the Welfare Trap, Freud tells the gory story of his years in office. He details their battles with the Treasury through the Coalition years and then under the Conservative majority government from 2015.

The original plan for universal credit had widespread support among the policy and research community. It would have increased the generosity of the benefit system at the same time as making its structure simpler and more flexible. Sadly, this approach was dead on arrival at the Treasury. Chancellor George Osborne's grand plan for the UK's social security system was to suck billions of pounds out of it. He had no interest in Duncan Smith's vision until he realized it could be a Trojan horse to slash levels of support.

A backbench rebellion among Conservative MPs prevented Osborne and Prime Minister David Cameron from enormous tax credit cuts in 2015. MPs lost their nerve at the thought of constituency surgeries full of angry people who had seen their incomes slashed by thousands of pounds overnight.

Globalization has progressed in the twenty-first century to the extent that no Korean chaebol is free from international pressures of institutional and legal reforms that can meet the global standards of business. This process entails that chaebol ownership and governance structures must also change to accommodate the demands of foreign shareholders. The core of the entire problem associated with globalization is protecting the chaebol within the purview of state control, an idea that is anathema to global players. Furthermore, the South Korean state must accommodate the demands of global investors who want to protect their property rights in South Korea after making substantial investment commitments. This chapter outlines the process of globalization of the Korean economy, focusing on how it has maintained international competitiveness, while struggling with reform priorities. In addition to the repertoires of reform and their outcomes, the future of the Korean economy will also be evaluated, based on the identified strength of competitiveness as well as the structural weakness of the economic system.

PURSUIT OF GLOBAL STANDARDS

The term globalization, in the name of segyehwa, began to haunt Korea in the early 1990s when the newly established Kim Young-sam administration, the so-called “civilian government” (munmin jeongbu), launched a series of political and economic reforms upon the rapid changes of the international economic system. Kim, who managed to win the presidential election with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, attempted to pass through political opposition, both from the established authoritarian force and the challenges from the progressives he barely defeated in the election, by initiating a massive reform programme dubbed as “reform all the way down” (Kihl 2005: 103). For justification, he ordered the prosecution of the politicians of the previous ruling circle, including the military junta and the two former military general-turned-presidents, who were prosecuted with the charge of illegal wealth accumulation through collusion with chaebols. The ugly truth of state– business collusion was revealed and served as the grounds for a reform drive. Many business leaders were also prosecuted for bribery and illegal political funding.