John Harris | ukwatch.net

Outsource till you drop

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What exactly is the point of John Hutton? Every week seems to bring news of Labour’s dread political predicament: the loss of support not just in the supposedly affluent marginals, but also at the heart of Labour’s core constituency, as demonstrated by government shivers about the looming Glasgow East byelection.

For the business secretary, however, this is evidently no time to be moving away from the old Blairite behavioural tic of defining yourself against your own side. Having already counselled his party against any move on the mega-paid new olympians who are making Gordon Brown’s call for pay restraint all the more difficult (“Rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country,” he said back in March), today found him enthusiastically launching a report from his department’s public services industry review, a funny old document that amounts to a brazen call for New Labour’s privatisation drive to be accelerated.

Despite protests from such union leaders as Mark Serwotka, the old “ideological battle” over the relentless extension of the private sector is, Hutton claims, long over. In the report, the multitude of “service companies” who have sprung up to make the most of 30-ish years of outsourcing are grouped into a “public services industry” that now accounts for 6% of GDP, and is in the midst of what Hutton sees as an admirable export drive, advising foreign governments about how to break up and sell off their public services, and then reaping the benefits. In the UK, says the report, handing these firms all manner of contracts has led to cost savings of between 10% and 30%. It acknowledges that evidence on what outsourcing does to the actual quality of services is “weaker and more limited” than the financial stuff, but that doesn’t get in the way of the essential point: that “Government authorities need to reinforce and demonstrate their long-term commitment to open up public service markets” – whatever “public service markets” actually are.

On the ground, of course, it does not take much effort to discover how those miraculous savings come about, and what such cost-slashing causes. One thinks, for example, of the burgeoning private prison industry, in which average pay rates are a third lower than in the public sector, and staff turnover runs 10 times as high. In my home turf of Cheshire, there was a flurry of outrage a few years back about the grim reality of one of privatisation’s most mind-boggling aspects: its extension into police custody, and the replacement of scores of local holding cells with outsourced “custody suites”, often several miles from where people might be arrested.

You might also cite the experience of hospital caterers like the woman I once met at private finance initiative hospital in Carlisle, told by her new private sector employers that preparing food in the traditional way was now prohibitively expensive, and it was time for the staff to get with the “cook-chill” method: that reassuring cheap culinary technique whereby hospital patients are now served up a grim version of airplane food.

Under duress, the government has occasionally – and belatedly – tried to smooth over the worst effects of its privatising zeal, which has often only served to point up the near-lunacy of what’s been done: in 2005, for example, the Department of Health finally made moves to ensure that outsourced hospital staff would be employed on the same wages as their NHS counterparts, which involved local health trusts paying subsidies of £75m a year to the private companies who had taken over so-called “ancillary” services. Even with that wheeze, however, the essential problems remained. The best example, as demonstrated by loud noises from the Royal College of Nursing, is that of hospital cleaning, and a story that comes up time and again: that when you outsource, you fragment the workforce, standards tend to drop, and the wards get dirty and diseased.

Against an unbeatable combination of New Labour zeal and corporate lobbying, unfortunately, all that counts for precious little, and we continue our passage into a grim future – in which schools, hospitals and jobcentres are adorned with the flash logos of the aforementioned service companies (Serco, Capita, Sodexho, Interserve), accountability counts for very little at all, and the public service ethos is superseded by a dried-up combination of output-specified contracts and the profit motive.

Thinking about all this, my mind goes back to a trip I made in 2006 to the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), the free-market think tank where the ongoing privatisation drive of the last 30 years partly originated (“We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy”, its president, Madsen Pirie, once boasted. “The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”). While I was there, I spent a couple of hours talking to Dr Eamonn Butler, ASI’s co-founder and director, who exhibited the unflappable confidence of a man who reckoned that history was on his side.

“For many years,” he told me, “people have said to us, ‘Well, where does it all end? Would you privatise the army, or the police?’ And I say this. Mrs Thatcher did the easy ones first. It took her a long time to get on to health and education, which were difficult. There’s no such thing as an easy, simple privatisation. Every one has been a very complicated political process. And if you look at things like the police, Post Office, health, education, welfare services, all of those things – in theory, all of them could be outsourced. But how should it actually be delivered?”

His conclusion crisply proved what John Hutton will never tell us: that all this has less to do with anything “evidenced based”, than the most hare-brained kind of dogma. “All you can do is try,” he said, “and see what happens.”

An Arresting Encounter

eddie — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:53:47 +0000

Things were getting so unremittingly damp and miserable yesterday that something dramatic was desperately needed to raise the spirits, and it duly arrived: an appearance by the sometime American UN ambassador and neocon poster-boy John Bolton – and an attempt by George Monbiot of this parish to try a citizen’s arrest on him for war crimes. This being Hay, the scenario turned out to be equal parts polite and pantomimic – and as it turned out, Bolton’s interview was sufficiently compelling to mark this session down as one of the week’s real highlights, well before Monbiot made his move.

If you watch a moderate amount of TV news, you will know Bolton: lush-haired, moustachioed, largely unrepentant about the Bush administration’s serial misdemeanours, and quiet happy to pop up on any number of television networks – but mostly Fox – to make his case. Prior to his shortlived UN appointment, he served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs in Colin Powell’s State Department. His memoir, published last year, is subtly titled Surrender Is Not An Option; the blurb describes him as “one of America’s outstanding statesmen”, and makes mention of his self-professed fight to “preserve American sovereignty and strength” – not least at the UN, which is allegedly guilty of “bias against Israel and the United States”.

And so to business. In the absence of the BBC’s Nik Gowing, the event was chaired by Hay festival boss Peter Florence, who played something of a blinder, first leading Bolton through his lack of repentance about the invasion and occupation of Iraq (“a fascist dictator is dead, and his regime is just as dead”), and on through the tangle of questions surrounding the absence of WMD. The latter prompted answers that blithely bypassed the distortion of intelligence, and ended with the somewhat disappointing conclusion, “What’s the story? I don’t know the story.”

From there, after a brief exchange about Bolton’s role in the sacking of Jose Bustani (more here), the conversation was pushed towards one of the most remarkable episodes in Bolton’s personal history – the decision of this supposedly stout conservative patriot to try to avoid service in Vietnam by registering to serve in the Maryland National Guard, a move he attempted to explain in an essay written for his 25th anniversary college reunion (he went to Yale).

“By 1969 or 1970,” he explained to the crowd, “it was apparent to me that there was no chance of victory in Vietnam … My feeling was that many, many people were going to Vietnam and having their sacrifice taken away by people in Congress who wanted to end the war … I felt in those circumstances the best thing was to join the National Guard, so I signed my name on a waiting list and that’s how I got on.” There may be an implicit logic in that argument that a reservist called to serve in Iraq might want to think about, but that’s probably another story.

The main event – before the Monbiot incident, at least – came when he was asked his opinion on the use by American interrogators of the technique known as waterboarding, placed on the Hay agenda last weekend by Jimmy Carter. He began with the claim that the unit responsible for the grim goings-on in Abu Ghraib had been “out of control”, before Florence pushed the point: is there any justification for what anyone of sound mind would consider to be torture?

“It depends on the circumstances,” said Bolton. Was that a yes, then? “No. It depends on the circumstances … I don’t opine on things I haven’t studied. This is a complex and difficult subject … I have not studied it to my satisfaction.”

This was also his line on extraordinary rendition, which rather beggars belief, but there it is: a Bush administration high-up who went on to make a second career defending the neocon position in the world’s media claims to have chosen not to work through his thoughts on two of the most controversial US policy stories of the last five years. They were, he said, “not my responsibility”.

Twenty or so minutes later, after questions from the floor had tumbled through the UN, Britain’s relationship with the EU (too close, Bolton seems to think), and another exchange on extraordinary rendition, time was called, and Monbiot made his move.

Clutching a charge sheet accusing Bolton of “the crime of aggression, as established by customary international law and described by Nuremburg Principles VI and VII”, he sprinted for the stage. Bouncers intercepted him and he was led away, while a gaggle of protesters chanted, “Arrest John Bolton!”

Not even the ubiquitous Marcus Brigstocke could help.

The obligatory book signing had obviously been a non-starter, but I spent my £18.99, and am currently making my way through 486 pages, which thus far prompt one thought more than most: notwithstanding the fact that John McCain’s foreign policy rhetoric prompts all kinds of worries, it’s a profound relief to be reading it as a work of history.

Rushing to Disaster

Tim Holmes — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:06:51 +0000

With that briefly infamous field in Middlesex now restored to suburban anonymity and the cadres of the Camp for Climate Action presumably considering their next move, the airwaves and news wires once again carry a depressingly familiar sound. Last week, the actress and alleged green convert Sienna Miller did the radio and television rounds, refusing to countenance the idea of reducing her air travel but advising the public to turn down their central heating. We now learn that the BBC has been planning Planet Relief, an eco-telethon set to feature tireless environmental campaigners such as Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross. Meanwhile, David Cameron is apparently preparing to add to the noise by returning to his own eternally confused kind of greenery.

If any credible environmentalist should be speaking the hardened language of priorities, one much-overlooked story surely deserves a lot more attention: what may soon be known as the new coal rush, and developments so at odds with the imperatives of climate change that they suggest a fast track towards irreversible disaster. The ubiquitous reduction of green politics to ethical consumerism means we’d probably rather carry on talking about cars, thermostats and lightbulbs. Faced with a resurgence that spans most of the planet, even the most righteous green activist could be forgiven for feeling powerless. No matter; what with skyrocketing gas prices and the fractious state of geopolitics, the stuff responsible for a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions is on a roll, which surely represents our biggest environmental headache of all.

China, that rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black and miners are killed at the rate of 5,000 a year (witness this month’s coverage of the 180 trapped and probably killed in Shandong province, and the two brothers who dug their way out of a collapsed shaft near Beijing), is building an average of two coal-fired power stations a week, and in six years has doubled its annual coal production. India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade. Panicked by the possible policy repercussions of George Bush’s departure, US power corporations are desperately pushing ahead with plans for about 150 coal-fired stations and leaning hard on presidential candidates – as evidenced by Rudy Giuliani’s recent suggestion that the US should “increase our reliance on coal”.

Moreover, the new coal rush is truly global: in the next five years, 37 countries – among them plenty of Kyoto signatories – will build additional coal-fired capacity, while world coal production heads towards a peak that will apparently materialise in about 25 years’ time.

In Britain, with policy in part driven by EU environmental regulations that will bite in 2015, our oldest coal stations are on the way out. But with sobering historical echoes, the coal-fired power industry is also looking resurgent. If a planning decision due next month goes its way, the power giant E.ON will be on the way to building the first new UK coal-fired power station since 1974, at Kingsnorth in Kent. RWE Npower wants to follow suit with two more, in Essex and Northumberland; Scottish and Southern Energy may yet submit plans for a plant near Pontefract. Judged by the criteria of the balance sheet, who can blame them? Drax, the vast coal-fired Yorkshire plant that formed the backdrop to last year’s inaugural climate camp, might be built around a single chimney that pumps out more CO2 than 103 countries, but at the last count its annual profits came in at £650m.

Perhaps most remarkably, thanks to a company called EnergyBuild, two deep coal mines will soon reopen in the Dulais and Neath valleys of south Wales, and more such projects are being mooted in the other “uneconomic” coalfields of yesteryear. By way of encouragement, what used to be called the DTI threw the Welsh scheme £3.5m from a subsidy pot which totals around £60m, in keeping with a government policy that attracts surprisingly little attention. Emissions targets, after all, are one thing, supposed security of energy supply is quite another. The recent energy white paper says as much: it talks not only about securing “the long-term future of coal-fired power generation”, but the imperative “to optimise the use of our coal reserves”.

There is, admittedly, accompanying material about “stimulating investment in clean coal technologies”, representative of a stock line peddled not just by Whitehall and Westminster insiders, but the kind of greens who, usually thanks to an ideological antipathy to the nuclear industry, dreamily look to a future in which the black stuff’s eco-credentials might miraculously be transformed. Here, no end of faith is focused on the coal industry’s shiniest silver bullet: carbon capture and storage (CCS), whereby billions upon billions of tones of CO2 will one day be pumped underground.

Talk to the advocates of CCS and you soon bump up against a weird kind of public relations that somehow combines evangelistic hype with all kinds of qualifications. They cite a handful of pilot schemes (which, just to soothe green hearts, often aim at using CO2 to release untapped oil and gas reserves), though the volumes involved are for now trifling. Even on the most optimistic projections, CCS won’t become viable on any convincing scale until well after 2030, and how much additional energy would be required to put the technique into worldwide practice remains a mystery. Whether it will be economically workable is another matter, not least for the countries whose room for manoeuvre is far less than that of the industrialised west. One UN study has estimated that obliging the coal-fired power industry to embrace CCS could push up the cost of the electricity it produces by anything between 40% and 90%.

Tellingly, CCS is to the mainstream environmental movement what transubstantiation is to Christianity. Friends of the Earth are CCS enthusiasts; Greenpeace see it as an illusory diversion that should be “way down anyone’s list of priorities”. Even some captains of the coal industry have their doubts: when I spoke earlier this year to the chief executive of Drax, her line on CCS was that “sitting here today, it’s quite a challenge to say it’s going to be economically attractive, and feasible, and viable”.

The essential point is this. Carbon capture might have some appeal as a means of managing the emissions of a coal industry that could thereby be slowly scaled down, but it is currently being transformed into the justification for a hair-raising level of expansion. Besides, as things stand, the vast majority of the world’s coal-fired newbuild – including those power stations due to be constructed in the US – will not even be CCS compatible.

So, faced by a world apparently gone coal-mad, what to do? Britain’s best bet would be to make a modest stand for environmental best practice and leave King Coal and his deathly, dystopian ways well alone. You cannot badger people into recycling, composting and fretting about their footprint while prolonging the hegemony of the dirtiest fossil fuel of all. To pilfer the name of the ethical consumer’s favourite indulgence, the future can’t be both green and black.

john.harris@guardian.co.uk

Bottom of the Class

Alex Doherty — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 13:15:52 +0000

The headline inside was “Future Bling of England”; the strapline screamed, “Wills wears Chav Gear in Army Snap.” Over two pages built around a snap of 30 trainee officers at Sandhurst, yesterday’s Sun gleefully recounted how the heir to the throne “joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term”. Wills, we were told, “went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear” (white baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to “put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal”. Apparently, he struggled to sound quite as proletarian as required, though he was said to be “making hand gestures and swaggering from side to side as he walked across the parade square”.

If the Sun’s coverage of the wheeze suggested nothing more worrying than innocuous hijinx, one might wonder how a fair share of their readership responded not only to the news, but the way it was delivered. Within four paragraphs, Wills’s “working-class accent” had mutated into a “silly accent”; by way of hammering home the Sandhurst chaps’ close resemblance to what the Sun called “any bunch of lads from your neighbourhood street corner”, they printed a shot of Michael Carroll, a man from Norfolk who won the lottery but is now serving nine months for affray – as if he were the typical representative of the working class. The snobby tone of the coverage, in fact, was much like the underlying spirit of the episode itself. An episode in which the Eton-educated heir to the throne – along with some aristocratic mates – has a right old laugh dressing up as a member of the working class surely provided conclusive proof of the blatant, shameless return of snobbery.

There is a lot of this kind of stuff about, as proved by a conversation with Matthew Holehouse, an 18-year-old A-level student from Harrogate and occasional Times Education Supplement columnist. Last year, he found himself dispatched by his state school to a debating seminar organised by the English Speaking Union. It was staged at Oakham, a private school in Rutland, whose website lays claim to “forward-looking educational thinking”. The fact that he was from a comprehensive put him in a noticeable minority, he tells me, a sense of disorientation compounded by a set of pictures he found hanging on one of the school’s walls.

“There were various things on display,” he says. “Pictures of rugby teams, of parties and discos. But the one that really jumped out was of a chav-themed school disco: all these rosy-cheeked, foppish-looking public schoolkids dressed in baseball caps and Adidas tracksuits. It looked a bit pathetic; at first I suppose I felt slight pity for them. But then I thought about it another way: here were the most privileged kids in Britain pretending to be poor people.”

Holehouse is preparing to take up a place at Oxford University, where he will study history. His perusal of the entertainment currently offered to undergraduates has only confirmed that the so-called “chav bop” – a disco where you dress up as a working-class person – is an immovable fixture not only at public schools, but also throughout Oxford’s colleges. Google the phrase and you receive instant pictorial proof that such events have taken place at Lady Margaret Hall, Trinity and St Peter’s: predictable snaps of well-bred young men, with captions like “Rock ‘ard”, mugging for the camera using poses they have presumably learned from Goldie Lookin’ Chain videos.

The chav phenomenon – the mass mockery of a certain kind of young, Burberry-check wearing, borderline criminal, proletarian youth – has been with us for more than three years. Its collision with public schools, military academies and high-end universities, however, surely serves to confirm what some people suspected all along: that the C-word actually denotes the mind-boggling revival of privileged people revelling in looking down their noses at the white working class, that social entity whose mere mention in certain company can cause either a palpable frisson of unease or loud ridicule. In last year’s Christmas bestseller, Is It Me or Is Everything Shit?, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur crystallised this sea change as “Nu snobbery”: the belief that “the poor are a right laugh. But there’s a downside, too – they sometimes have bad skin because they don’t use the correct sea salt-based exfoliant scrubs, and they can be violent.” They went on: “It’s clearly enormously liberating to rant on about single mothers and lazy workers like some gout-ridden Victorian bishop. Let’s hope that soon there are just two words on everyone’s lips: ‘work’ and ‘house’.”

To illustrate their point, the authors made reference to an often-quoted passage from the Daily Mail, bemoaning the kind of women who “pull their shoddily dyed hair back in that ultra-tight bun known as the ‘council house facelift’”. In fact, they could have drawn on any number of examples of Nu Snobbery, going back to the notion’s genesis in the mid-1990s. In retrospect, the germ of the idea was evident in the press’s gleeful response to Wayne and Waynetta Slob, the degenerate, perma-smoking welfare claimants who became a fixture of Harry Enfield’s BBC1 show. You could also detect its beginnings in some of the supposed social comment associated with Britpop – not least the snide songs about forlorn proletarian lives that were briefly the calling card of Blur’s Damon Albarn, who affected a mewling “Essex” accent, but was in fact raised in one of that county’s more upscale corners. “The strange thing about Damon’s songs,” said the critic Jim Shelley, “is that, unlike a writer such as Morrissey or Ian Dury, he has no sympathy for his characters … Albarn’s attitude is totally uncharitable, a kind of snide contempt.”

From there, it was a short hop to the repopularisation of the kind of archetypes that, in the 80s, were the preserve of boneheaded Tory MPs – not least that of the “Pram Face”, defined on the website Urban Dictionary as “a girl who is a little rough round the edges and wouldn’t look at all out of place at 14 years of age pushing a newborn through a council estate”. In turn, the duty to combine haughtiness with supposed humour duly fell away, and the acceptable voice of snobbery started to sound uncomfortably sharp: in Tourism, the much-hyped new novel by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, a rather clumsy attempt to come up with a voice that might shine light on modern Britain with the same odorous scorn you find in Michel Houllebecq presents a principal character nicknamed Puppy. “I hate poor white people,” runs one of his more unpleasant lines. “No one is more stupid or useless.”

That said, comedy remains Nu Snobbery’s most influential vehicle – and in 2003, its decisive arrival was proved by the most successful British comedy programme since The Office. Little Britain (along with the inexplicably popular comedian Jimmy Carr – sample joke: “The male gypsy moth can smell the female gypsy moth up to seven miles away – and that fact also works if you remove the word ‘moth’”) was emblematic of that post-PC nihilism whereby a little misogyny or homophobia was all part of the fun, but its fondness for laughing at the people now fashionably termed “the disadvantaged” was surely its most insidious aspect. It is hard to cry foul at these things without sounding hopelessly po-faced, but still: somewhere in the characterisation of Lou and Andy, the hapless carer and his wheelchair-using charge, there surely lurks the whiff not only of welfare fraud, but the idea that people so obviously at society’s bottom end are so stupid that they probably deserve their fate.

And what of Vicky Pollard? Her portrayal might shine light on Matt Lucas’s comedic talent, but her transformation into a signifier for a pretty hideous archetype – that selfsame Pram Face, supported in her fecklessness by a generous welfare state – speaks volumes about the people we now consider to be fair game. On one Little Britain web forum, cited last year by the columnist Johann Hari, the link between prime-time tomfoolery and social attitudes became crystal clear: “Down here in Bristol,” wrote one subscriber, “we have an area called Southmead, which is absolutely packed with Vickys wearing fluorescent tracksuits. I was coming home on the bus today, and as always, there were millions sat at the back all holding their babies that they had when they were 12, and every other word ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fuck that’, and that’s just the babies! They all have council flats and not a GCSE to their name. Do the Vickys out there not watch television, because if they do they surely would have seen Vicky on TV and thought, ‘That’s me!’ Do they not realise we are taking the piss out of them?”

If “we” are doing exactly that, it might be an idea to remind ourselves of the social backgrounds of the people who invented the joke. Lucas was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in Elstree, which charges parents around £10,000 a year; David Walliams went to Reigate Grammar, which rates itself as “one of the top independent co-educational day schools in the country”.

Naturally enough, the New Snobbery is not restricted to the more frivolous end of our pop culture. In the eyes of an increasing number of people, those who define our politics – led, of course, by two more public schoolboys – have pulled off a remarkable trick: scything the working class out of mainstream politics, and using them as an embodiment of all the fear and failure that our politicians claim to hold at bay. To back up the stereotypes, they need look no further than the nearest TV: as the dissident Labour MP and former Blair adviser Jon Cruddas put it in a recent issue of the centre-left journal Renewal, “in popular culture, the working class is everywhere, albeit successively demonised in comedy or in debate around fear, crime and antisocial behaviour – seen through caricature while patronised by reality TV. Arguably, the cumulative effect of this is that the working class itself has been dehumanised – now to be feared and simultaneously served up as entertainment.” Stranger still, despite five decades of the supposed decline of deference, the rise of David Cameron suggests that simple poshness might still be a very potent political asset.

A 20-minute chat with Cruddas – who finds Little Britain “wretched” – proves to be very enlightening indeed. As he sees it, the three main parties now build their tactics around the “very precise calibration” of crucial voters who live in a mythical middle England, and thereby leave the kind of people who live in his Dagenham constituency out of their calculations.

Worse still, when things get sticky, they reach for the ghoulish stereotypes that spread fear through Daily Mail-land: benefit scroungers, feral youths, problem families. Throw in Cameron and Blair’s celebration of “meritocracy” and both parties’ pursuit of a social mobility that the economy stubbornly refuses to deliver, and you end up with two very important questions. If, as Alan Milburn put it just before the last election, it’s one of the government’s main objectives to “give more people the opportunity to join the middle class”, doesn’t that imply a very negative judgment on those they might leave behind? And if no leading politician wants to depart, just occasionally, from the dreamy rhetoric of aspiration and opportunity, might that not leave a gap for some very unpleasant people indeed?

Cruddas’s stomping ground, he explains with no little urgency, is currently the focus for an ongoing battle with the BNP. As he fleshes out his fears about May’s local elections, I’m rather reminded of a passage from Michael Collins’ memoir-cum-biography of the white working class, The Likes of Us, published in 2004. In his account, the early New Labour period saw the final confirmation that as far as what used to be called the proletariat was concerned, “middle-class progressives who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs’ corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence them, or bury them without an obituary. They loved Gucci; loathed the Euro. More important, to their pall-bearers in the press, they were racist, xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial. All they represent and hold dear was reportedly redundant in modern, multicultural Britain. It was dead.”

The strange thing is, society is perhaps not quite in the same shape as most of the political elite – or for that matter, the siren voices who would have you believe that “everyone’s middle class nowadays” – suggest. As Cruddas points out, people in manual occupations still account for a relatively stable 10.5 million of the population. Throw in clerical and secretarial work, and what he calls the “traditional labour force” stands at around 15 million, and represents nearly two in three jobs; small wonder that according to a Mori survey published four years ago, two-thirds of Britons said they were “working class and proud of it”.

There is, of course, a conversation to be had about whether an increasingly diverse Britain has made the old notion of working-class identity redundant, but the numbers still point up an absurd aspect of the new snobbery. If, as evidenced by politicians, comedians and our future king, mocking and demonising supposed white trash is our new national pastime, we’re victimising an awful lot of people.

Generation Debt

Alex Doherty — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:01:39 +0000

‘Change is marching on again,” the prime minister told us last year, in a Labour conference speech that contained the now-obligatory iPod reference. “Perhaps our children more readily understand this and embrace it than we do.” In context, the C-word was shorthand for the usual ideas: education as a functional method of economic advancement, the imperative to make sure everything is personalised and priced, the notion of a career as several decades spent pinballing between increasingly fragile jobs. But who could argue with the razor-like instincts of youth? Their economic combat skills hardened by all those enterprise courses, their eyes eternally scanning the markets, this was the future into which they were speeding.

Unfortunately, things don’t seem to be working out like that. Yesterday brought news of a study by the Financial Services Authority and Bristol University suggesting a young generation snarled up in debt, with nonexistent savings and what seems to be chronic financial ineptitude. In the States, meanwhile, there is currently much fuss over Generation Debt, a crisp polemic by 24-year-old Anya Kamenetz, a Louisiana-born Yale graduate who writes with the same elegant indignation that defined Naomi Klein’s No Logo. From Ivy League undergrads to the new proletarians who see out their working lives at Subway and K-Mart, her book is built around experiences crystallised in its killer strapline: “Why now is a terrible time to be young”.

The plot goes something like this. After two decades of post-Reagan politics and economics, the under-30s find themselves in a predicament loaded with tension. Higher education brings the prospect of astronomical debt, exacerbated by being “marinated in the most aggressive advertising and marketing environment ever known” (the most crafty exemplars of which are America’s credit-card companies). Should you manage to graduate, you may well find that a degree holds out no guarantee of fulfilling or dependable employment. If you don’t make it to college, meanwhile, you’re likely to be earning pin money in a “grinding, impersonal and dead-end job”, while being told that ever more rickety welfare provision means you should be saving money you haven’t actually got. Home ownership is a distant dream; starting a family seems cripplingly expensive. “Mom, Dad – listen up,” Kamanetz implores. “Things have changed. We’re not doing as well as you did. And if something doesn’t change soon, it’s unlikely that we ever will.”

Give or take a deluge of very American detail, the outlines of the story neatly fit the British experience. The debate over tuition fees may have gone quiet, but a new reality is upon us: a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that a fifth of British students are now living with their parents. Moreover, the maths that underpinned the scheme looks to have been rather optimistic: back when the changes were first proposed, ministers made repeated references to the idea that, over their lifetimes, graduates would earn £400,000 more than those who didn’t make it to university; now researchers at the University of Swansea claim that, in the case of male arts graduates, the figure is more like £22,000.

Should you miss out on higher education, your working life will initially be made all the more unfulfilling by a respectable kind of ageism. The full minimum wage is delayed until 22. If you haven’t had kids, the working tax credit won’t be available until you’ve turned 25. Throw in the fact that it’s young people who disproportionately staff our call centres and supermarkets, and the upshot is clear enough. According to a recent report by the centre-right thinktank Reform, while those aged 30-39 have seen their average weekly gross pay rise by 79% since 1998, those aged from 22 to 29 have managed only about a third of that figure. The FSA report shows 64% of 18-30s burdened by loans and credit-card debt, and snared by historical bad luck: although their apparent lack of financial clue suggests a devil-may-care outlook, which they might have assumed was their birthright, ignoring the bills is no longer an option. At the last count, around 60% of individual bankrupts were under 30.

The picture does not exactly suggest a generation of enthusiastic free-marketeers – and if Kamanetz’s book is to be believed, the prevailing politics of the under-30s may turn out to be a lot more interesting. Certainly, the neo-liberal right could yet rejoice in their possible rebellion against a welfare state that may be able look after their parents’ generation only at a punitive cost to themselves. But Generation Debt also contains augurs of surprising moves in a more collectivist direction. In its account, “a new generation of labour organisers and advocates” is addressing the flimsiness of the American service economy by reinventing, of all things, trade unionism. At the same time, more than a few American students are trying to revive the quaint idea that education is a social good and taxation ought to fund more of it. And look at current events in France: university students renewing the spirit of 1968’s événements in response to the fact that the government’s loosening of employment regulations will start, naturally enough, with those under 26.

Therein lies a compelling spectacle: a generation tapping into the kind of politics that it had supposedly rendered obsolete. Mr Blair’s beloved change, it seems, may yet march in a rather unexpected direction.

Masculine Crisis

Alex Doherty — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 10:54:05 +0000

Remember the crisis in masculinity? Four years of the war on terror and the associated political return of swaggering machismo might have given it the look of something from a different age, but only six years ago the western male was alleged to be on his uppers. The mood was crystallised by Stiffed, the insightful treatise on “the betrayal of the modern man”, written by the American writer Susan Faludi. Men, she claimed, were in “agony” – given the decline of heavy industry, the end of the era of war-as-mass-mobilisation, and the inescapable tyranny of the image, they were now “at the mercy of cultural forces that distort their lives and plague our culture”.

The idea might have fallen from fashion, but the phenomenon seems as real as ever. Last week the consumer research company Mintel released its latest snapshot of British men, in a hail of headlines – “Life crisis hits lads”, “Fellas hit midlife crisis – in 20s”. “The challenges of modern living, including career issues, time pressures and financing desirable but costly lifestyles,” ran a report in this newspaper, “are combining to burden 25- to 44-year-old men as never before.” No fewer than one in seven men in this category were held to be “anxiety ridden”, particularly when it came to the deficit between aspiration and the hard reality of their lives. The modern quest to “have it all”, it seems, is no longer a female preserve: these men want better homes, jobs, holidays, and more “time for themselves”, and fancy racking up such achievements while reducing their debt. Small wonder that, among the 25- to 34-year-old demographic, one in five worry that they “do not earn enough money for the lifestyle they would like to lead”.

With the kind of unintentional irony that comes with stating the obvious, a Mintel spokeswoman advised that “adopting more realistic ambitions would result in many men feeling happier and less stressed”. Therein, unfortunately, lies an apparently insurmountable problem, rooted at the very heart of the modern male condition. For centuries it has been the unique fate of women to be controlled, manipulated and rendered hopelessly inadequate by the alleged possibilities of supposed perfection; now, thanks to the variety of gender equality best suited to modern turbo-capitalism, men are well on the way to joining them.

Some of this, of course, is a simple matter of the demands that have long exerted an influence over women edging over the gender divide. “Get a summer body! Your six-pack starts here,” screams the cover of Men’s Health magazine. Further along the blokes’ shelf, FQ (aka Fathers’ Quarterly, “the essential dad mag”) carries almost parodically reconstructed adverts for Silver Cross baby buggies, alongside dire warnings that, come the arrival of junior, “your social life will turn into a barren tundra”. Elsewhere, the usual impossible imperatives apply: be groomed, designer-dressed, comprehensively sport- and tech-literate, fond of beer but also suitably toned, and in a relationship with one of the pneumatic lovelies FHM terms “High Street Honeys”. When all of this collides with the reality of blokedom, the results are as grim as could be expected – as proved by the recent entry of men into a special edition of BBC1’s What Not to Wear, and Trinny and Susannah’s attempts to squeeze a portly unfortunate called Danny into the kind of metropolitan finery popularised by such high-end magazines as GQ. He looked, somewhat inevitably, like a darts player going undercover at a gay disco.

In his new book Mediated (subtitled: How the media shape your world), the US writer and academic Thomas de Zengotita shines light on some of this by snappily updating ideas once associated with the likes of the Frankfurt School of Marxism and the 60s Situationists: essentially, that the media age has squashed the last vestiges of authenticity and spontaneity, leaving most of the industrialised world’s population acting out an endless chain of cliches. His theory, crystallised in the notion of “performative habitualities”, takes in everything from the mourners at Diana’s funeral to the transformation of parenting into a set of consumer options; but it comes into its own when it grapples with the myth that drives so many men to distraction – that of the perma-busy, upwardly mobile professional. Images of washboard stomachs, expensive shirts and airbrushed girlfriends play their own role in men’s self-alienation, but it’s surely here that we encounter one of modern masculinity’s most dysfunctional aspects – the drive to avenge all that creeping inadequacy by affecting the behaviour of the alpha male.

There will surely be plenty of women who recognise themselves in De Zengotita’s description of the kind of people “who don’t just use their cell phones in public places, but display in every nuance of their cell phone deportment a sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important”, but it’s a stereotype that gives off the distinct whiff of testosterone. “These people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they had to stop,” he writes. “To plugged-in players, the feeling of being busy is the feeling of being alive.” As Mintel’s people could doubtless tell you, such self-conscious hyperactivity might be only partly based on the quest for adrenaline-soaked experience; if men are also chasing the impossible dream of zero debt, exotic vacations and eventual “quality time”, they’d surely better work until they drop.

For the modern male, Mediated’s critique also implies more vexatious problems. We all know what “performative habitualities” look like – think of the boom-voiced business traveller, yelling all that stuff about being “kept in the loop” and “touching base” into his phone before the train enters yet another tunnel. As all the inevitable cringes and eye-rolling from his fellow passengers prove, it’s behaviour that inevitably tips over into absurdity; the merest change of context, or mis-balancing of conviction and cool, and you’re David Brent. Men are thus placed in the same kind of mediated double bind that has long plagued women: just as the pre-feminist era found women navigating that ever-shifting line between domestic diligence and being a nag, so men must discover that perilous place in which they can convey swashbuckling zeal while keeping Brent-dom at bay (by way of a constant reminder of the dangers, well over a year after it was consigned to history, The Office remains a very telling staple of such huge-selling men’s magazines as Zoo and Nuts).

None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that in so many areas – professional advancement, pay differentials, domestic responsibility, you name it – those who cleave to a traditional model of male power don’t have every reason to stick to it. In the province of culture, however, something has undoubtedly happened. As Susan Faludi put it in Stiffed, manhood is increasingly defined by “objectification, passivity, infantilisation, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing” – the selfsame things that “women have denounced as trivialising and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture”. Such is the darkly comic promise of the modern gender truce: a world, if those survey results are anything to go by, in which men and women are just about as worried and alienated as each other.

A Convenient Delusion

Alex Doherty — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 13:27:01 +0000

Given that the Freedom of Information Act allows us fresh access to thousands of government documents, there’s one I’d particularly like to get my hands on. It was probably drafted by either Tony Blair or Alan Milburn and circulated to Labour MPs, and it goes something like this: “In the run-up to the election, tell any wavering Labour supporters they’re outmoded dinosaurs who should either vote for us or get stuffed.” It must be out there somewhere.

On and off for the last year or so, I’ve been travelling up and down the country, trying to get a grip on where once-loyal Labour people like me ought to take their votes. The questions I’ve asked MPs of all parties have taken in a range of fairly predictable subjects: the war in Iraq, tuition and top-up fees, the Blair government’s brand of illiberalism and, in particular, the steady invasion of our public services by private companies. Relatively few politicians turned out to be sympathetic – and not entirely surprisingly, plenty of Labour people have been fire-spittingly hostile.

The other week, for example, I took part in a BBC Scotland phone-in with the ardently Blairite Scottish MP Rosemary McKenna. In vain, I asked her for a conciliatory pitch to the kind of disaffected Labour voters currently feeling queasy about most of the stuff uttered by the likes of Alan Milburn. My views, she half-snarled, “had nothing to do with the modern Labour party”. I was, she said, guilty of the crime of being lamentably “old-fashioned”. I could only wonder how she approaches door-to-door campaigning: any hint of waning loyalty will presumably be greeted by a loud tut and a swift sprint back to the garden gate.

Rosemary is not alone, of course. Sneering at the party’s core support is one of New Labour’s more unpleasant behavioural tics, with a history that stretches back nearly a decade: Blair’s claim that public-sector workers had left him with “scars on my back”, Jack Straw’s distaste for “woolly-minded liberals”, the allegation that the Tories were not the only forces of conservatism. What’s mind-boggling is that, despite evident jitters about voters jumping ship, the habit remains as pronounced as ever.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reunited with an ascendant Blairite minister whom I knew back in the days when she was an ambitious (and decidedly leftwing) parliamentary candidate. After testy exchanges about Iraq, rising inequality and privatisation, she could take it no more: “I just wonder about people like yourself,” she said, “who profess to share our values and then spend their whole time knocking us.” She went on to term my misgivings “self-in dulgent” and “intellectual”, and finished her attempt to reignite my enthusiasm for Labour by telling me that fretting about the public/private divide marked me down as being “obsessive-compulsive”. Such, it seems, is the obstinacy that comes with being – to use Mr Blair’s phrase – unremittingly New Labour.

There is, of course, one possible response to all this: to spin on one’s heels and look elsewhere. The rest of the political mainstream, however, doesn’t offer much of a welcome – as I discovered when I tested my concerns on a senior Liberal Democrat. My privatisation fears originated, he said, in “old-style dogma”. “If you’re looking to create splits between the three political parties based on some of the divisions that were there in the past, you’ll have a very long hunt,” he concluded. It wasn’t quite “Sod off, Luddite,” but he was close. As for the Tories: “You are like someone sitting in the Kremlin during the Soviet era,” Oliver Letwin recently assured me. As usual, I won’t be voting for his lot.

The strange thing is, I know I’m not alone. If one widely quoted statistic is true, around three million dismayed Labour supporters claim they won’t vote for Blair again. Iraq seems to have been their tipping point, but the war surely isn’t the only reason for their unease. Among other issues, I’d also factor in a widespread sense that private companies are being waved into places where they really don’t belong (the latest New Labour wheeze, for example, is the mooted outsourcing of the fire brigade’s 999 service). In the view of our high-ranking MPs, however, such worries belong in the same museum as all the other “old Labour” relics.

It’s a convenient kind of delusion. Thousands of us are beginning to firm up a politics that takes in such 21st-century issues as snowballing corporate power, the polarisation of haves and have-nots – both nationally and globally – and the decline of our civic culture. What increasingly unites the Westminster class, by contrast, is free-market zealotry and an apparent belief in the notion of the undeserving poor, combined – as far as the Tories and New Labour are concerned – with a grim authoritarianism. Being generous, I’d root those ideas in the Thatcherite 80s. In all honesty, they date back to the era of Queen Victoria and Otto von Bismarck. So who’s old-fashioned now?

John Harris is the author of So Now Who Do We Vote For?

johnrhysharris@hotmail.com