The former prime minister has been warning for months about the threat of so-called net curtain poverty, and claimed the government needed to do more to address the quiet poverty gripping the responsible middle class. He blamed the slowdown in social mobility on Labour policies, including the abolition of grammar schools.
In a speech in Norfolk on Friday, reported on Monday by the Daily Telegraph, he claimed that pensioners' savings were being squeezed by a mix of inflation and low interest rates.
Major – who went to a grammar school in south London and left with three O-levels – said: "In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. To me from my background, I find that truly shocking."
He blamed this "collapse in social mobility" on Labour, claiming that despite Ed Miliband's "absurd mantra to be the one-nation party, they left a Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration".
Major said: "I remember enough of my past to be outraged on behalf of the people abandoned when social mobility is lost
"Our education system should help children out of the circumstances in which they were born, not lock them into the circumstances in which they were born. "We need them to fly as high as their luck, their ability and their sheer hard graft can actually take them. And it isn't going to happen magically."
The Commission on Child Poverty and Social Mobility, chaired by Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister, has found no evidence that social mobility slowed due to Labour policies.
The coalition will argue that its pupil premium is aimed specifically at poorer children and designed to help them achieve higher results than the better resourced middle class. It will also point to free childcare aimed at the poorer two-year-olds.
Major also said the government should help pensioners who had saved carefully for their retirement and were being punished by "cripplingly unfair" low interest rates. He suggested the Bank of England ought to return interest rates to "normal levels, say 3% to 5%", so that society treated "the saver as fairly as it treats the debtor".
Critics will point out that pensioners have been relatively immune from spending cuts, partly due to the triple lock on the value of pensions.
There is, however, cross-party concern about the potential impact of rising interest rates on household debt.
At the weekend the Tory MP Mark Garnier told the BBC: "The important point, I think, is that we have to remember that we're in a period of super-low interest rates: this is not normal, this is the lowest interest rates have been for 300 years.
"And actually when we go back to a normal period of low interest rates – so if they rise by 2%-3%, which is perfectly reasonable even before the three years target that [the Bank of England governor] Mark Carney has set – it's going to have a really dramatic effect on quite a number of households that are already suffering a bit of forebearance on their mortgages."
The thinktank the Resolution Foundation recently warned: "The number of families in Britain with perilous levels of debt repayments could more than double to 1.2 million if interest rates rise faster than expected in the next four years and household income growth is weak and uneven." Current market expectations are for interest rates to reach 1.9% by mid-2017.
Major said the Conservative leadership should pull their punches on the UK Independence party (Ukip), saying many of its supporters were "patriotic Britons who fear their country is changing", and would ultimately come back to the Tory party.
Turning to the Conservatives' prospects for the 2015 general election, the former prime minister said that if the party decided to "shrink into our comfort zone we will not win general elections – the core vote cannot deliver a general election majority".
Party members were right to feel unsettled by "bewildering" changes such as the coalition's decision to legalise same-sex marriage, he said.
"Social mores have moved on from the way in which we were brought up, with the values that we had. They have moved and changed," Major added. "And that is why issues such as gay marriage have proved so toxic for the Conservative party.
"Because for many Conservatives, people who are conservative because their instinct is to conserve, to change slowly and only when you know it is certain for the better, that is classically Conservative.
"For people like that who form the bulk of our party and a great deal of our country too, these are difficult issues, these bewildering social changes, and mostly it is my generation and older who are unsettled by these changes.
"We may be unsettled by them, but David Cameron and his colleagues have no choice but to deal with this new world. They cannot, Canute-like, order it to go away, because it won't."
Major called for loyalty from party members, saying: "Public criticism is destructive. Take it from me. Political parties who are divided and torn simply do not win general elections."
Source: theguardian.com
Author: Patrick Wintour
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