There has been a sea-change in my lifetime, by which I mean a significant change that has happened gradually.
The areas I am thinking of are health and education. To digress, my Catholic grandfather used Dr Irwin (Willie), who was Church of Ireland, and the Cottage Hospital in Drogheda. My C of I grandmother and mother used Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Drogheda, obviously Catholic. This was an unsolved puzzle to me as a child and one I have never resolved.
When I came to live in London private health insurance came with the rations as part of my package – along with a turkey at Christmas, luncheon vouchers and later a car and The Evening Standard and Financial Times brought to my desk and a managers’ dining room. (The directors’ ding room went out of action as soon as I became a director. I don’t think there was a causal relationship.) As I was rather a sickly child, my grandmother always said I was looking “pasty”, not a word I have ever heard these days, and had acidosis (madly fashionable in my childhood), it is surprising how healthy I have become. Anyway I did not get much use out of my health insurance. Now I am not working I have no health insurance and rely on the National Health Service. My trust has not been misplaced. Of course I am fortunate to have a safety net, meaning that if I cannot get a particular treatment on the NHS or there is a long wait I can pull out a cheque book and go private.
In education there are not many PLU of my generation who went through the state system. The change today is profound. Cabinet ministers, of all parties, are more often than not the product of a state education which often allowed them to go to Oxford and read PPE. This is the “open sesame” to enter public life in the UK. There is a list on Wikipedia of about ninety public figures in the Oxford PPE club and it has left some out – like Today presenter Nick Robinson. It is no longer a given for my friends’ children and my great nieces and nephews to be privately educated. The imposition of VAT on private school fees is only accelerating a migration to the state system. Now the game is not to get into Eton but to get into a good state school even if it means moving house to live in a better catchment area.
This will not lead to a Utopian Britain. Unlike Norway and the Baltic States, the UK has a diverse ethnic population, practicing diverse religions and embracing different cultures so there’s not going to be an homogenous society here any time soon.