London Briefing: One of the great internet success stories of recent years has been the decision to place online the results of the 1901 census of England & Wales. Initially, the host server was overwhelmed with hits and had to be shut down pending a redesign.
Now, with the site up and running, there is a very clever pricing structure that will, I am sure, generate a surprising amount of revenue for the Public Records Office, an organisation not often associated with entrepreneurial flair. Researching our ancestors is a popular pastime and there is something strangely compelling about seeing the names of grandparents and other relatives in copies of the original census documents. I found myself filling in credit card details with more alacrity than at any other moment of online spending.
Reading bits of the census at random provides a fascinating insight into life 100 years ago. Some pundits talk about change as if it was something invented in the 1990s. A brief look at the typical jobs a century ago serves as reminder that the world has been changing for a very long time. In an unscientific survey I looked at the list of occupations on the pages that contained the entries for my two great-grandfathers who lived in Cardiff, a reasonably typical industrial city of the time.
My Welsh great-grandfather gave his occupation as 'dock grain weigher'. This involved weighing sacks of (Canadian) wheat that were filled by gangs of piece workers who emptied the holds of the grain carriers. He ended up bequeathing his very coveted job to his son, who subsequently became a victim of technological change when the wheat started to be emptied via a suction pump.
The other occupations listed on this census page include a lot of general labourers, a gas stoker, telegraph messenger and coal trimmer. My other Cardiff-based great-grandfather (born in Clonakilty) gave his occupation as 'labourer, mason' (which is odd since his daughter, my grandmother, always reckoned he was a cooper back in Ireland and a binman in Wales). Other jobs listed on his entry page include railway porter, blacksmith, grocer's assistant, confectioner, baker apprentice, errand boy, office boy and railway lampman.
The point here, of course, is that many of these jobs seem to us to belong to some era belonging to a pre-civilisation period. But they all existed only a very short time ago. And they were real jobs, many of them proudly owned, that were destined, in relatively short order, to be rendered obsolete by technological change and what we now call globalisation. As a matter of historical fact, there was probably as much globalisation in the three decades prior to 1914 as there has been in the last 30 years.
Because we believe change to be unique to our own lives we fear it. Or, at least many commentators and pundits tell us we should be scared. The latest doom-mongering focuses on the supposed threat posed by Asia and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs to China and, more recently, the potential for outsourcing of service jobs.
The lessons of the 1901 census are that we cannot imagine the types of jobs that are likely to replace the ones we are about to lose. But we will lose them. History is an infallible guide on this. Planning will do little to stem the tide. We cannot plan for things we cannot even imagine. The lesson from those economies that have succeeded and failed (and sometimes both, several times) is that once we replace flexibility with economic rigidity, we are doomed. That's why Europe is slowly dying, economically speaking. Success will only come from a culture that embraces change and can figure out, quickly, what to do with it.
Flexibility is one of those terms that verges on cliché but is central to all our economic futures. It embraces acceptance of market mechanisms still anathema to large swathes of our chattering classes. It means that we applaud entrepreneurs rather than ostracise them; they didn't all work for Enron and some of them do pay their taxes.
In 1901 Britain was enjoying the fruits of empire. Economic success can no longer be bought that way. Hence we have had a century of economic decline, arrested only by the Thatcherite reforms. Europe's economic renaissance lasted only as long as post-second World War reconstruction lasted and is now going the way of the British Empire. We are faced with a real choice, albeit one that few care to acknowledge: growth or resumed decline?
