Diary of an unemployed person

In June of this year I became unemployed. Nine weeks and six days later and I am still without work. To date I have submitted something like 50 job applications - of those I have received around five rejection emails; of the other 45 I have heard nothing. In the last week or so I have started to slack a bit on this front – for practical reasons as I have university work to finish (I have not yet officially graduated), but also because a job application can take an hour or so to complete, leading one to question the very effort it takes when it brings so little in the way of a return.

To save money, instead of buying a newspaper I make the short trip each day to my local library and read the papers there. An increasing number of unemployed men have had the same idea of late, and have begun congregating in the seated area each morning sipping pale cups of tea. This has increased to such an extent that the librarians have had to enforce a strict time limit on how long a person may spend with the Daily Mail - 15 minutes they agreed upon - there being only one copy and it being very much in demand amongst the town’s out of work men-folk.

Early morning argument in the library often breaks out over the newspapers - a popular topic of discussion being “spongers” and “asylum seekers”, whom everyone professes to dislike immensely. A man whom I regularly bump into - an unemployed butcher with an incredibly small head - draws huge pleasure from reciting a story about his family who, he insists, “couldn’t get a house because it was earmarked for an illegal immigrant. Fact.” I have heard him repeat this story on a number of occasions, always with a ferocious emphasis on the word “fact” at the end. Paedophiles are also a popular subject, the ensuing discussion revolving mainly around what each of the men would like to do if ever they caught one messing with their kids, or if such a person were to move close to where they live. Favoured methods of torture for the perpetrators of such crimes are often discussed, with general agreement that the death penalty would be “too soft”.

At around midday I sometimes visit the shop where I used to work, to pick up groceries on a tight budget. The thing I remember about this job, which I did for four years before going to university - and something which I think is familiar to any job in which one must deal with the general public on a regular basis - is that it led me at the time to a place where I began to detest the public in a very liberal sort of a way. I think in my own case this was due to the mixture of appalling and repetitive jokes customers would insist on telling me, the creepy celebrity fixation, and the fact that people would lap-up the Sun and the Daily Mail in such huge quantities, taking each hairbrain story and repeating it ad nauseum until it became “common sense” - whether that meant the MMR jab was responsible for autism or that foreigners were unapologetically weeding English genes out of existence in their conquest of “our jobs and our women”.

For those of us on the political left, much mental energy is often spent expunging this side of the public from our minds in an attempt to mentally align ourselves with the majority in the on-going class struggle. I think it was John Steinbeck who once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Because British pessimism has always prevented such an attitude taking root, the front pages of our most popular tabloids operate more effectively along the lines of divide and rule – while the US press has the American dream, ours has a policy of distracting with the left hand while the right makes off with the family silver.

Five years since leaving my menial job in the convenience store, I find myself a member of the bourgeoisified youth without the bourgeois career ladder on which to clamber on to. My parents’ generation appear to have kicked that away. I went to university and paid my fees (“you will make lots more as a graduate”), worked hard (ok, drank hard) got my grades, did my MA (accumulated more debt for that, too), and now, like Gordon Comstock, I appear to have sunk to the bottom rungs of society - only with no attempt on my part to actively try and do so.

I’m not alone in this respect of course. As the rich sail away on their gold-plated yachts, we are rapidly discovering that they’ve left more than a few of us behind with little more to do than sit at home and stare at what we will never have on endless television property shows.

The worst part of all this is that, rather than the descent of increasing numbers into the underclass (for want of a better term) empowering the left, it has instead energised and invigorated the populist and anti-intellect right. All of the people I met in my local library disliked the bankers, some even called for them to be punished for what they did; but their overwhelming anger was saved for those at the bottom of society - the people on the benefits of £50 a week, the asylum seekers, the immigrants, the Muslims - not Vodafone and other tax avoiders, or the bosses who lobby for the destruction of what remains of workers’ rights, but the men who "incited a riot" on Twitter, or the woman who fiddled her child tax credits for an extra tenner.

The most depressing trend amongst those I spoke was their lack of sympathy for the people they called “chavs” – the undeserving poor by another name. I encountered not one positive attitude towards this group of people; instead the debate was conducted very much in the vein of them being in some way sub-human.

It did dawn on me as I was walking home from the library, however, that if you create an underclass, the most effective thing you can do as a politician is to run against it, because it doesn’t take people long to work out that what you've created is actually quite scary. Perhaps I will say that the next time I bump into the butcher with the tiny head, that is unless I get a job first of course, which seems unlikely.