Class and Mobility
ROBIN HOLTOM
The Independent Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Neal, recently revealed that 10 private planes a day arrive in London without proper passport checks. He was sacked the next day.
This reminded me of a visit I made with students from Hastings College to New York in 2002. One of the students was prevented from flying with us because the first name on her ticket was different from the name on her passport. I asked the Virgin Airways staff member if there was any way round it – although it was understandable that the Twin Towers attack had recently increased security concerns. Surprisingly, I was told that if the student could buy a first class ticket, they would let her through passport control. This was far too expensive – about four times the cost – but it made us all aware that there were rules about mobility for rich people which are different to the rules for the rest of us.
Up until the First World War, it was possible to travel throughout most of Europe without a passport. One reason for this was that the railways had made travel so easy for so many people that it was simply too complicated to impose passport controls on every journey. Evidently, in the minds of governments at that time, the benefits of freedom of movement outweighed security concerns; but the War stopped free movement and passports were required thereafter.
During the Second World War, it became a patriotic duty in Britain to give lifts to hitchhikers since many servicemen would hitch lifts while travelling to or from their barracks. A remnant of this willingness to give lifts continued well into the 1960s. A backpacker disembarking from the ferry in Calais would be faced with the prospect of a long queue of perhaps 50 hitch hikers lining up along the main road to Paris. Nonetheless, it would only take about an hour before getting a lift.
Now the queues in Calais are very different and coming in the other direction. And no one gives lifts unless they are part of a criminal gang or prepared to risk a jail sentence. At the same time as mobility is easy for many of us, it is extremely difficult for others. Among those moving from countries laid waste by war or suffering from famine resulting from climate change, 8,500 migrants died last year attempting to be more mobile.
Mobility has become the new marker of class difference. Whereas class differences used to be defined by inheritance, wealth and education, now the differences are defined by mobility. Our Prime Minister travels by private plane rather than train. Expensive cars and foreign holidays denote middle class mobility, while the rest have to depend upon buses and trains. Of course the super rich, the ‘new aristocracy’, travel by rocket to circumnavigate the world and even consider colonising Mars. From their new vehicles they will be able to look down on the rest of us from an even greater height
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