Work, actually

When I was just turned twelve I started a paper round. Legally, I should have been thirteen but I stalled for a year before producing the suspiciously new work permit. In that year I saved up enough to go halves with my parents on a bike. At the time, running that round didn’t seem like hardship – I was earning a wage. At weekends, following horse racing meetings I regularly picked up sodden, torn-up race cards, half-eaten pies, broken glass and the general detritus following a boozy event I was far too young to attend. Both jobs were done in all weathers and I was happy for the work.

When I was around fourteen the potato picking became available to me, along with riddling, hoeing and the general gathering in of various harvests. No paid work was beneath me; I knew no different. As far as my generation, up in rural North Yorkshire, were concerned any and all ways of earning a dollar were legit. Strawberry picking paid the best – four or five weeks of kneeling between the rows, picking for all we were worth, would fund the rest of the summer’s shenanigans. Work... it’s bloody good for you.

When I went to a university in the big city, as a provincial lad I was intrigued by the students who spent all their time in the union bar instead of going to lectures. I was fascinated by the Women’s Society although I could never quite work out what their grievances were – “Pay us attention!” they would demand, quickly followed by “How dare you stare!” The union president – at nearly-thirty, positively geriatric to my nineteen year old self – was an object of some awe. He had yet to complete his bachelor degree having obtained paid sabbatical after paid sabbatical to... well, to sit on his arse in the union bar and convince himself he served a useful purpose.

Although I was dimly aware that tins were being rattled in aid of this cause or that, it had little relevance to me or most of my fellow students. We were there, I supposed, to get an education and then get a good job, not to go on marches. Whenever reports came in about the latest gathering of the clans the chatter was all about what a great laugh it was; I rarely heard about dragons slain, or hydras beheaded, just an endless stream of anecdotes, exaggerated with each re-telling. At the time of my graduation, characters who had seemed to be big figures on campus when I was a fresher were still there, in a state of suspended education, apparently no nearer to whatever they thought they sought, but clinging on to their imagined higher status.

Seeing the massed ranks of teary-eyed youngsters on the streets of London, bleating about how their future had been taken from them I wondered how some of them even managed to continue breathing day after day without some form of encouragement. One thing’s for sure and that is few employers are going to be impressed by a CV padded out with a list of the demonstrations you’ve attended for all the crusades you’ve espoused while having little real idea how anything in the world actually works.

You going on the Trans-body-image-gender-fluid 

Day of Action march, Fred?

I was berated recently for referring to the working class; informed that nobody today is defined by their job. No? How about farmers, fishermen, policemen, nurses, builders? It strikes me that it is far nobler to be recognised for what you actually do, than for how you think you ought to be defined; at school, one classmate told us what nickname he wanted us to use – that didn’t end well. So, you ask, what have I ever done to further the causes of social justice, tolerance, law and order and society in general? I went to work.

Work

So, I spent my weekend at my day job, teaching electricians to do what you should all hope electricians already know how to do. Once more I am struck by how un-British we are becoming. While the majority of my students are ready and willing to get on with the task, an increasing number seem to expect an easy ride and an assured outcome, regardless of their aptitude. They pay the price, they gets their ‘sustiffcits’. Whatever happened to the age old principle of matching square pegs with square holes and letting them settle into it? Maybe we need another war on home soil to resurrect some sense of unity, some sense of purpose?

Of course, it doesn’t help when we see politicians apparently making large via the trappings of office while selling our sovereignty down the river. Forget the blitz spirit, “All for me and you’re on your own,” might be the motto of today’s so-called leaders. In encouraging wanton individualism I really think there’s a danger we largely forget what it means to belong. David Cameron seems to want to dilute what we’ve got still further as he suggests ethnic quotas for Westminster. And the voice of the establishment, the BBC, long ago forsook appointing the right person for the job in favour of ticking boxes to meet some diversity target.

As for me, while I sometimes enjoy what I do (although work has only ever really been work for me; a way to pay the bills while I wait to retire and wither away) I have a vague unease that in making that living I may be contributing to the problem. Whatever happened to our technical industries? Apprenticeships that once took five years were reduced to four and then three and now you can take a fourteen-week course and be spat out of the sausage machine as a brand new electrician – live and dangerous. Years ago, the system took in school-leavers and gradually made tradesmen out of them, paid for by a combination of the state funded further education colleges and investment by employers in on-the-job training.

Similarly, in public office people used to pay their dues by getting involved and joining their party of choice, volunteering later to stand for election as councillors and working their way up until the prospect of a local parliamentary seat came their way, whereas now they are selectively bred by former cabinet ministers, expensively educated, schooled in the dark arts and parachuted into safe seats – instant arsehole; just add voters.

Across the spectrum the old demands for rigour would appear to be lost. We no longer train people for a lifetime of good service but merely to shore up the short-term labour demands. Gone are the days of secure jobs and the concomitant loyalty between employers and employees, to be replaced with a production line churning out the ‘that'll do’ as cheaply as possible. In the days of the gold rush the real money was made by the companies who sold blankets and shovels. Today those equivalents are the training organisations, registration bodies, insurance companies, health and safety inspectors and others wanting their slice… with all the costs borne by the trainees themselves.

Thomas Edison said “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Today he might well say that opportunities are missed because they are dressed in branded polo shirts and welcoming grins, wielding PowerPoint presentations... and don’t look like real work at all.

Opportunity Nix

I'm no fan of Michael - Tarzan - Heseltine. I hate his juvenile hair, for a start and I particularly hate his clearly self-interest driven stance on Europe. And of course there is the small matter of his utterly treacherous plotting against the most effective peacetime Prime Minister of the last hundred years. But on BBC’s Question Time last night he said what few politicians have dared to say out loud, plainly and simply, in a decade or more.

Essentially what he said was this: It cannot be right - NOBODY could think it right - that somebody in full-time work, making responsible spending decisions and living within their means is unable to give their family the same standard of living as a family living entirely on welfare. It cannot be right for anybody to defend the supposed ‘rights’ of any able-bodied person to live entirely off the labours of others. 

There are more ways of making a living than having a job, but for centuries the model was that the husband worked and the wife ran the household and children contributed when they were able. We built an EMPIRE on that model. But somewhere in the twentieth century we managed to lose our self-confidence and kow-tow to the diktats of the equality agenda. We destroyed the sanctity of marriage, promoted wanton procreation and blame-free profligacy and allowed anybody to borrow their way into debt without shame. Are you happy now, Socialism? 

But it’s so much worse than it looks. Defendants of the dole-dependent claim that a lack of ‘suitable’ jobs, a lack of qualifications and being born into aspiration-free communities is to blame. They say that, just as it is the government’s role to feed and house and clothe them, it is the government’s role to make their lives more fulfilling. It’s an impossible task because at the heart of it all is the notion that it is up to somebody else to give you everything. 

You’re out of work and you are poorly educated? Educate yourself; the knowledge of the entire planet is on the free Internet access you have. Not a good learner? Then are you artistic? Prove it by creating something. Do you have a skill you could be practising? Can you do stand up? Could you write a book? Set up an e-commerce web site? Do voluntary work? Do… ANYTHING? 

Because if self-improvement is beyond you there are plenty of jobs out there that merely require your lumpen corporeal entity to show up and do as it is told. Cleaning, crop-picking, packing, stacking, driving, digging, gardening; all the low-level jobs being done by recent immigrants should first be filled by out-of-work Brits. Beneath you? How fucking DARE you? What else have you done with your life? 

And the real insult to working tax payers, those who have made the effort to get off their backsides and earn their place in the world? Not only are they being taxed into a life of bone-weary drudgery, they also pay a massive opportunity cost in loss of liberty to indulge in their dreams. They would love the time to hone a skill, indulge in a hobby, write a book, improve the community, set up a business… So while you piss away your worthless time on this planet, the people who pay for you deny themselves the opportunity to maybe, just maybe, do something wonderful. 

Woah there... I didn't say 

I was actually going to DO anything! 

Has Britain got the guts to tell the truth and turn the tide? Has the government got the nerve to tackle the lazy, ignorant lard-arsed elephant in the Benefit Office? Will Her Majesty’s Opposition have the balls to admit they were wrong about everything, roll up their sleeves and help out to save this country? The jury is out – given the outcome of the Vicky Pryce trial, they may be some time.

Opposing Farces

The job of opposition isn't easy... What am I saying - it's a piece of piss! You just run interference and endless criticism. Your job is to discredit the current government, whose job in turn is to prove you wrong and stay in office long enough to actually do anything useful; being slung out after one term is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to any administration because it looks like you were ineffective.

Of course, the usual sequence is one or two terms of relative contentment, followed by a final term where cockiness, sloppiness and a general wearing out of your welcome lets different policies appear appealing to new voters. This leads to electoral defeat and a term or so of jeering from the sidelines while the other lot blame it all on you, reverse your policies and set the whole thing on the opposite swing. Left-right, left-right... but now the choice is only between between left and further left. No wonder UKIP smells like a breath of fresh air.

The government is giving it a go, but with so little money left in the pot it's going to be an uphill struggle all the way. The news that IDS's scheme to get 'neets' into work for more than 6 months hasn't met its targets has naturally been met with derisory sneers by the party that spent all the money in the first place. It's almost as if Gordon Brown's role in the last Labour government was to screw up the economy as far as it could possibly be screwed. As if, because Labour weren't to rule the country any more they'd be fucked if they'd give anybody else a fighting chance. That's politics.

And it's where all socialist cycles bring us. It starts from noble beginnings; the working man, heavily exploited by ruthless mill/pit/foundry/shipyard owners from a bygone age of good old Christian brutality of man towards man, downs his tools, links arms and stands side by side with his fellow. They call each other 'comrade', for this is a war and the enemy are clearly defined. The have-nots versus the haves.

By the 1970s the Trades Unions, Labour's paymasters,  were calling the shots and crippling the country through ruinous restrictive working practices. Enforcing employment by double-manning, working to rule and threatening strike action at the drop of a flat cap. Destroying those very industries while imagining they were defending them. Those who weren't there have no idea how much they owe to the sainted Mrs Thatcher. (And repeatedly reciting, "Fatcha ruined vis cuntry" is a cast-iron indicator that you haven't a clue.)

But it's a war, remember? It's always a war and in war there are casualties and Labour can bear much of the blame. In ennobling the manual worker they were instrumental in building whole towns out of single industries and closing their minds to what might happen when the resources ran out. When those industries became bloated and inefficient and uneconomic, instead of looking to diversify, to educate, to broaden, they simply threw money at the problem and shored up a client state.

When the last Conservative administration fell out of favour the bright young Socialist things had a new messiah in the form of Tony Blair, who reaped the benefit of anti-Thatcherite rhetoric spewed from hateful mouths. With no big industries left, but with a booming economy, built on the back of taxing an entrepreneurialism that wasn't possible in the seventies, Labour set about building a new client base, opening the borders while driving their core supporters out of work and onto benefits.

Labour didn't build this; they tore it down.

If they can't hack coal, they can at least stay at home and do drugs and drink and watch Jeremy Kyle and jeer at their own. Always the same story - throw public money at dodging the issue, rather than attempting to solve it. So now it's a bit rich that Two-Eds-is-worse-than-one is heaping opprobrium on the current administration for throwing money at actual job creation, instead of Labour's traditional job-stifling practice.

It must be a more noble aim, but it hasn't gone well; getting the unemployable into work was never going to be easy, but Iain Duncan Smith has a far more comprehensive understanding of the problem than ever displayed by the Reds and let's hope he has the backbone and the time to see his reforms through.

Life's hard... then you die.

I just caught a snippet of what passes as 'news' on BBC Breakfast as I sipped coffee and planned my day.

Former schoolboy crush, Maggie Philbin was earnestly discussing the use of calculators in primary schools with a no-doubt lovely, but a bit wet and dithery teacher of the sort we'd have eaten for breakfast, back in the days when schools were for education rather than indoctrination. I believe the cases for and against the use of calculators are both settled and a matter of common sense; over-reliance on tools before you understand what they do is palpably not helping.

But the more interesting aspect of the discussion was their use of words; words and phrases like 'enjoy' or 'make lessons more fun' which put the emphasis on the teacher to entertain, rather than teach. Is it any wonder we have people who grow up to expect life to be one endless round of giddy delights, instead of the mixture of pain and pleasure we actually endure?

Some animals on earth seem to have a life of pastoral ease, grazing away until the predator pounces or old age or starvation or drought takes its toll. They shudder, roll over and die. Did they enjoy life? Do eggs taste better from happier hens? [Bad reversed joke alert: What's a hen do? Practice the oldest living religion - baboom-tish. Sorry.] What's the point of life? There appears to be no point whatsoever other than that which we make for ourselves.

And I believe we get more pleasure and reward in every sense from that which we achieve by our own efforts. People put up with unimaginable hardships to cross frozen continents, to climb airless mountains or starve themselves in search of enlightenment, truth and triumph. Schooling, formal and otherwise, should give us the personal tools to set out on our own journeys. Education should prepare us to meet the world, a world where shit happens and sometimes there is nobody at our back.

So, sod the fun. Teach them the skills and teach them that life isn't a bed of roses, a basket of cherries or a box of bloody chocolates. The fun comes after you've learned to deal with the other stuff.

Then you die.