Everything is, we always read, in an accelerating swirl of change. So it is reassuring to discover, from the annual editions of Social Trends, that the Cubs and Brownies, at least, are unmoved. Membership has grown, year on year, through the never-had-it-so-good 1950s, the swinging 1960s, the catastrophic 1970s, the boom-and-bust 1980s. They entered the uncertain 1990s with their chins held high and their uniforms as pressed and shiny as ever. On Social Trends' 1996 reckoning, Britain has about 350,000 Cubs and more than 400,000 Brownies, compared with 187,887 Cubs and 170,539 Brownies in 1950.
Channel Four recently ran a smart-arsed documentary, mocking Baden-Powell for all the tired old reasons (it is true that, for adolescents, the appeal of neckerchiefs and woggles is definitely on the wane). But somebody out there feels warm about a movement which was, undeniably, launched to combat public anxieties about national degeneracy in the neurotic years between the Boer war and the Kaiser's war.
Perhaps the motives which prompt parents to send their daughters to sit at the feet of Brown Owl are the same as those which make them, in the teeth of educational fashion, so keen on schools having uniforms. A dress code is one line of social defence in an era when, with so uncertain a job market, the chances of sliding down into the abyss of the underclass seem as great as (or greater than) the chances of moving up a rung or two.
Relevantly, the last edition of Social Trends (1996) quotes surveys of what people want from their trade union. Between 1989 and 1994, the proportion who thought better pay was the top priority sank from 28 to 15 per cent. Those who thought the priority was to protect existing jobs rose from 28 to 37 per cent.
Ten or 15 years ago, such a view might have been strongest among steel workers or dock labourers. But their jobs, and their union cards, have already gone. Trade unions are increasingly a white collar and public sector phenomenon. The country's largest, Social Trends reminds us, is the public services union, Unison, which is led by a polytechnic sociology graduate, Rodney Bickerstaffe; it is no longer the once almighty Transport & General Workers' Union, created by Ernest Bevin, who left school at 11. The rate of union membership in general is now highest among professionals. Today's Tolpuddle martyrs would be a teacher, a nurse and a council tax official. But they would send their daughters to the Brownies.
The great virtue of Social Trends, now in its 27th year, is that it arranges a public marriage of facts and figures which would otherwise remain in the purdah of separate specialist publications. A cost-cutting study in the Thatcher years judged public statistics of any kind to be an expensive luxury. For a moment it looked as if Social Trends would be closed down, or priced out of existence. But the threat passed.
When the first issue appeared, in 1970, its begetter, Claus Moser, then head of the government statistical service, said he saw it as a counterpart to the older Economic Trends. The idea had appealed to the former statistician, Harold Wilson, who was prime minister when Moser proposed it. But the launch party at 10 Downing Street was presided over by the new prime minister, Edward Heath, to the background strains of the Amadeus string quartet. (Heath had to dash away early because of the news that Rolls-Royce was threatening to go bust-a first sign, for trend spotters, of the way his regime would be buffeted by recurrent crises.) With 1960s optimism, Moser wrote that economic progress should be measured, "in part at least, in terms of social benefits."
The first issue was rather severe. Its many tables and charts were presented without much editorial commentary. There were only the first seeds of what, for many people, became its most appealing side-its often quirky information on the way we live now. We do learn, however, that Milton Keynes-as good a symbol of a new world as any-was edging up towards a population of 50,000. "MK," as its inhabitants always call it, in conscious homage to LA, would soon open the first covered shopping mall in Britain and, eventually, the first multiplex cinema-an innovation which, Social Trends told us a couple of years ago, helped buck the seemingly inevitable downward trend in ticket sales.
The 1987 edition printed a graph which showed cinema attendances plunging from 21m a week to 1m over 30 years. Then came the multiplexes. The new edition records that in 1994 ticket sales were 10 per cent up on the year before. But it also reports that, as a social celebration, film going has been deeply changed. In Britain it is no longer, in any obvious sense, a mass medium. Its audience has become predominantly middle class, which may account for the success of films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Sense and Sensibility. Even Hollywood blood-and-guts films, such as Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or DePalma's The Untouchables, increasingly require a film buff's knowledge of earlier thrillers-from the days when it really was a mass medium-in order to pick up all the cross-references. The first fine careless rapture is over.
Statistics, of course, are not neutral. At the publication's 25th anniversary in 1995 an overview article by Muriel Nissel, the first editor, was rejected on the grounds that it was too political. (It was later published by the journal of the Royal Statistical Society.) All she had done was to record the pressures on Social Trends not to chronicle the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and to focus instead on Mr and Mrs Average.
The editors were ingenious in the face of these pressures. Information about income distribution did not disappear, but it got tucked into rather obscure corners: into a couple of paragraphs and a small table in, for example, the 1986 edition. The pressures have now eased. The 1996 edition flagged up the fact that the proportion of people with incomes below half the average rose by 11 per cent between 1982 and 1993. It backs this up with some brutal charts, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Department of Social Security, showing the changes in real incomes over the years. Along the way, it knocks on the head one of the favourite political myths-that self-employment is a sign of a new entrepreneurship. Compared to people drawing a wage or a salary, the self-employed, it turns out, are more likely to slip down into the bottom 20 per cent of incomes. Many of them are on the way down, not the way up.
But politics never wholly goes away. As early as issue No. 3 Moser was writing a long article on "Statistics about immigrants." This was 1973, in Enoch Powell's heyday. Moser cautiously noted that "A good deal of interest has been shown in the relevant estimates of future populations." But he did not hazard any estimate of his own.
The 1996 edition ends with a new table the inclusion of which intrigues me. It shows the pattern of voting in general elections and by-elections. In by-elections between the general elections of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, the Tory percentage of the vote averaged 23.8, 16 and 23.8 respectively. Between the 1992 general election and last September, it averaged 18.2 per cent. But at the general elections, the Tory vote was 43.9 per cent (1979), 42.4 (1983), 42.3 (1987) and 41.8 (1992). A little statistical warning to the Labour party.
As you would expect, Social Trends is the best place to track the big social shifts: the rise in the age of marriage, for example, and the not unconnected rise in the numbers of young men living alone (Social Trends is one of the few publications which has never joined the panic about lone mothers). It casts a cold eye on sexual behaviour. If you need convincing of the difficulties of changing people's behaviour by propaganda, you can read in the 1996 edition that, after all the anti-Aids campaigns, still only 17 per cent of people under 50 use a condom for contraception. More than a quarter seem to use no contraception at all. It is not surprising that there is so much resort to abortion (up from 131,100 in 1971 to 178,300 in 1994). It is being used, partly, as back-up to contraception.
I love drifting around the small print of Social Trends. Britain is still the semi-detached society-literally: three out of ten homes are semis. About one household in 100 has a second home; I doubt if either home is a semi. In spite of the anxieties along the route of the Newbury by-pass, about a tenth of the landscape is wooded-far more than at the beginning of the 20th century. In spite of anxieties about the NHS, life expectancy is rising by about two years every decade. In 1996, a newborn baby girl can expect to live to 80 years old, compared to 49 as the century opened. If she is born in England, the favourite name to give her is Rebecca; in Scotland, Lauren.
Through the successive editions of Social Trends, one of the most important threads is the new role of women. Admittedly, in about half of homes, the woman is still expected always to do the washing and ironing; but shopping for groceries is, more and more, shared. The proportion of women driving a car (usually a small one) has almost tripled in the past 20 years. They need it to make their lives work. Their shopping is increasingly done by car-hence those out-of-town stores which drive the environment secretary to apoplexy. Campaigners against the automobile might pause to think about the gender politics of their argument.
One of the great merits of Social Trends is that it is an antidote to galloping Londonitis, the disease from which all too many commentators (who usually live in or around London) suffer. The capital is becoming less and less typical of the rest of the country. For example, Britain is not much of "a multicultural society." About half the population from ethnic minority groups live in Greater London. The rest are mostly in a few metropolitan areas, such as Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Bradford. The main outliers, Social Trends notes, are Leicester (a wonderfully vigorous Indian city), Slough and Luton. One of these days, Social Trends will have to grit its teeth and contemplate the awkward issue of white flight.
