Another Tilt At An Old Windmill

It’s funny how sometimes the truth has a habit of popping up and then in the midst of all the detail, it gets lost; like one of those photoshopped pictures that occasionally appear on everyone’s social media timelines. You know the ones; where you don’t notice the spectre hiding in plain sight in the background until you take a closer look. Well, I had one of those last week.

It was, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous piece of economic-speak; part of a speech by deputy governor of the Bank of England Charlie Bean.  In listing the headwinds faced by the UK economy in the months ahead, Bean posited that “for some households, the past accumulation of debt may weigh on spending”.

Maybe I was having a bad day but when I saw that particular phrase, my first visceral reaction was: So, Mr Bean, what you’re saying is that one of the main reasons we can’t get out this mess fast enough is because ordinary people in debt don’t want to spend money they don’t have on overpriced crap they don’t need?  

This to me seems to be one of the great lies that are central to a structurally flawed UK economy and one which has produced inordinately damaging sociological consequences.

Perhaps it’s a flaw at the heart of the wider capitalist model; one which encourages indebtedness and endlessly rising consumption at the expense of equality and sustainability.

This yoke of indebtedness, which we are all tacitly encouraged to take on, has far-reaching implications, both for the psychological integrity of the individual and for the long-term choices of a wider society. On a personal level, it is a bond of servitude which is undertaken rather than risk facing what is –  for most ordinary people – the primordial fear of being separated from the pack or the herd. People are much more likely to be compliant in the workplace if they are in debt. Taking an active stance against workplace oppression or even local community injustice quickly becomes a bourgeois luxury in this kind of climate.

Add to the mix the risible lack of inadequate union representation wherein there are no voices in most workplaces to argue against the near institutional practices of exploitation and bullying by management. It’s clear that most people, if they had even a glimmer of choice, would never turn up for work. But compliance becomes the norm because most people won’t take the Iceland route (either as an economic or a retail choice).

People will starve themselves rather than default because they simply cannot conceive of an alternative and as austerity continues to bite, our society  has become increasingly unforgiving of those not seen to be ‘playing the game’: work hard, keep your head down, get indebted to the eyeballs with a mortgage or home-improvement loans and keep spending.  As long as you keep servicing that debt, you can look down at your neighbour’s older car and you can keep congratulating yourself as a graspirational success. Or so the thinking would seem to go.

And of course in order to characterise ourselves as such exemplary products of this successful system, we need to define ourselves in opposition to a conveniently polar antithesis. And this bête noire we find in the ‘welfare-scrounging’ indigenous working class and the immigrant communities, who we in turn keep at each other’s throats. At the heart of this worldview is a dangerously smug misconception, one that seeks to copperfasten the notion that it was our hard work and fortitude alone which were the real drivers behind our success, rather than the fact the we are merely mediocrities that lucked out in the cosmic crapgame and got born into the upper echelons in the Western World as opposed to being flushed down a Shanghai u-bend.

I have to laugh at the idea that somehow all the problems of the country (UK, Ireland, you’re your pick) would be solved if only we could get more of these scroungers (both homegrown and imported) off benefits. And the way forward? Why to cut benefits even more of course. In the eyes of this government, there is absolutely nothing wrong with penalising the vast majority of welfare recipients (who are both deserving and clearly in need) in order to punish a minority of transgressors who account for – on at least one reading – less than 1% of the total welfare budget. It will almost certainly take more than that to set up the machinery to retrieve the monies allegedly lost to fraud.

This is a dangerous road and while I don’t propose to sally forth into the jurisdiction of Godwin’s Law, there is nevertheless something deeply worrying about a government which is prepared to demonise groups in society that are already dangerously marginalised. When taken in the context of advisers to the Education Secretary suggesting that genetics had more impact than education, it’s hard not to feel that lines have been drawn and this government is intent on an ideological showdown.

And on at least one reading, that is pretty clear from the way the government manipulates the public agenda. As has been amply demonstrated on occasions too numerous to mention, the Great British Public has a real habit of calling it wrong on the big questions. Most recently in July 2013, The Independent reported that: “a new survey for the Royal Statistical Society and King's College London shows public opinion is repeatedly off the mark on issues including crime, benefit fraud and immigration.”

It’s the old story well understood by financiers and statesmen alike, most people – in the markets or of course in society as a whole – are primarily motivated by fear and greed. Our fear of poverty and exclusion is institutionalised by indebted servitude and crystallised by our revulsion for the deprivation of those we try to ignore further down the chain; whether in the estates of our towns or faraway in the sweatshops that cater to our consumer fetishism. Our greed is appealed to and our egos are flattered by entrees to the great game;  hardwon passes into the great capitalist casino.

But increasingly, it’s becoming apparent that for most of us ordinary Joes, we’ve been playing with a rigged wheel. Across whole swathes of the corporate landscape, there are worrying signs of markets being managed by cartels of the major industry players and this is clear in sectors as diverse as banking, energy and one might even argue, housing. Whether it’s interest rate manipulation, gas-fixing prices or house-price inflation, the public is beginning to weary of the lies and manipulation and there is a rising groundswell of dissatisfaction across this green and pleasant land.

How and when this disaffection will find voice remains to be seen. Certainly, the levels of apathy across our society remain stubbornly high; a product of what has been described as learned helplessness among other things. Through failings in state education and perhaps even more importantly in terms of social engineering, a consumer culture has been allowed to run rampant with the benediction of governments of all persuasions. The vast majority of people don’t even know how to start thinking about a society beyond the confines of the current paradigm.

If one could pick a time when Britain really lost its soul to the markets, the Big Bang of 1986 might be as good a time as any. It was perhaps one of the pinnacles of Thatcherism’s dubious achievements. Bit by bit after that, the great industrial icons of Britain were bought up and stripped out while successive governments cashed in on privatisation bonanzas and the chicanery of public private partnerships. And at the end of it, we live in a country where vast swathes of the infrastructure is owned and run by foreign companies, the national car industry sold, shipbuilding left to wither, lost along with countless other areas of hard-to-replace expertise.

So while the pursuit of profit and the doctrine of small government and the deregulation of industry were pursued with evangelical zeal, many of the UK's European neighbours judiciously held on to their flagship national industries and in the case of countries like Germany or the Nordic nations, workers's rights were protected, education was invested in as a national resource and not as an ideological tool of social engineering. And what has happened in these countries? Quality of life on all metrics has increased as has worker productivity.

The answers aren’t particularly revolutionary, unless of course they continue to be ignored. But 'the beast' is already aware that there are disgruntled murmurings abroad. The chief economists at the major global investment banks have for some time now been briefing their top people about the changes that need to be implemented to the global financial system before they have the choice to act taken away from them.

It could take five months or it could take fifty years for the ‘99%’ to coalesce and for the 1%’s grip to loosen sufficiently for real change to happen. But in the end it does come down to personal choice for all of us: let’s not pretend it’s about ideological niceties of left and right because it’s not. It’s about whether you’re a selfish greedy fucker or whether you believe the people at the bottom should be helped; even if that could be at your expense.

Les jeux sont fait? I don’t think so, everything’s still to play for…