The Road To Weakened Fear

While I have been stuck in hospital over the summer, I have been struck by a new phenomenon, deliberately engineered by the government, to keep us all cowed and apprehensive. Austerity anxiety.

I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”

Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.

It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.

I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.

The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????

Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".

I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!

How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.

Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-

*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?

Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)

Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?

I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:

When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.

This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.

Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.

"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.

And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.

Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.

Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation

This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.

Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing

The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.

There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.

Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!

The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.

And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.

So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.

Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?

This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.

At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do

Women in the Workplace

This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.

Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.

Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.

I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.

Waged versus Unwaged

The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.

Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.

Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.

One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.

Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.

On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?

The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.

Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?

Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.

It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!

In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.

In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]

Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.

This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.

We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!