A day at the dole office

‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birth right for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.’

– Oscar Wilde

I suspect the chorus of ‘captains of industry’ gracing the news are perfectly aware that Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday was not a move to the left.

More than likely the attempt to define it as such has the purpose of encouraging the Labour leader, running scared of the media echo-chamber, to propose a set of capital-friendly policies more to their own liking.

Rather than the British people being intrinsically conservative, it has often been the ability of the right to get the Labour Party on to the back foot that has in the past allowed it to define the political landscape so effectively.

It is also why, when attacking the culture of greed at the top, Ed Miliband feels obliged to dedicate equal air-time to the denunciation of ‘benefit scroungers’, as if they and the bankers constituted a similar problem with comparable consequences.

On Monday morning I went down to my local Job Centre, ostensibly to look for jobs but also to examine the claim that many of those on benefits simply don’t share the same ‘values’ as the rest of us. This was never going to be an empirical study of course, and mainly involved a number of off-the-cuff conversations with claimants; but if there really are a significant number of people who are cheating the benefits system, it seemed reasonable to assume that a small proportion of them would be at the job centre on a Monday morning signing on.

I arrived at my local job centre branch in Bridgwater at about a quarter past nine. Walking past the row of tightly partitioned staff sat at their desks beckoning people over for their weekly sign-on, I noticed a young man having an argument with a female member of staff. The problem, as I understood it, was that he had signed on a day late several weeks ago for his benefit. The man was told at the time to do something called a rapid re-sign - which took two weeks - and was subsequently asked to repay the month’s Jobseekers Allowance he had claimed, due to the fact that he had been automatically signed off during the two week period and was therefore not eligible for it. He was now being pursued by debt collectors for the return of the money, which he said he no longer had.

After he had finished arguing with the female member of staff, we talked, and he told me that he had a baby at home and a girlfriend who is three months pregnant with their second child.

Looking over the people in the job centre you suddenly realise what different universes some people inhabit. My own job search (I am also unemployed) showed up a number of manual jobs and a few clerical positions, receptionist work mainly. I printed the more tolerable of these and made my way outside to smoke a cigarette, in the process starting a conversation with a man who had been claiming jobseekers allowance for the past two years.

He was non-committal in response to my questions at first, but began to talk more freely when I opened up my cigarette packet and pointed it in his direction:

‘I had a few interviews, ya’ know, factories and that, but ain’t got nuffin lately; they never calling me back. I did get a job for a couple a days last year, like, but the boss was a real prick, ya’know, and the work was boring as fuck, so I got myself fired’.

When I asked the man how he managed to get himself fired all he would say was that he ‘gave lip’ to the manager. This, he admitted, was an act of provocation to intentionally lose him his job. That way he could re-sign on for Job Seekers Allowance, something he could not have done had he simply left the position of his own accord.

The job was as a ‘Production Operative’ – a glorified term for repetitive unskilled work that involves packing food on a production line for around 10 hours a shift. The pay was £7.75 an hour and, as he pointed out to me several times, was a considerable improvement on the weekly £51.85 he was receiving on Jobseekers.

He informed me that the real problem was the nature of the work itself, rather than the fact that Jobseekers Allowance was, as the tabloids like to put it, ‘free money’: ‘Why should I do that sorta work, ya’know? I don’t wanna be stood in some factory packing yogurts all my life; I wanna be doin somefin worthwhile’. When I asked him what was wrong with the work he became somewhat aggressive: ‘It’s meaningless, you don’t get no respect doin that, ya know? No-one respects a fucking yogurt packer’.

The funny thing is that I also do not feel cut out, if I can put it like that, for repetitive, manual work. I don't know anyone who really does. On the other hand, most people appear to be automatically of the belief that there is an imaginary group of people who will be very happy with such work, and are baffled to learn that in most cases the so-called ‘underclass’ subscribe to exactly the same set of ‘aspirational’ values as they do.

When I asked some of the people I spoke with why they had not worked - for several years in many cases - they gave the impression that they were willing to do so only if the job was a relatively good one; good being defined by what they saw on television, in magazines and on the radio.

The long-term unemployed certainly appear to share the values and aspirations of modern Britain. The difference is that they grasp aspirational politics in the context of their own lives, which are filled only with the prospect of mundane and unglamorous drudgery.

Standing on a podium and trying to fool them into identifying their interests with those of their would-be exploiters, as Ed Miliband did yesterday, is more delusional than spiteful. Those who earn several hundred thousand pounds a year often sincerely believe that anyone can make it if only they exhaust enough sweat and work hard enough. Let's be clear though, those at the top only believe in aspirational politics up to the point when they have to send their own children off to the factory.

Christopher Hitchens is no George Orwell

A review of Christopher Hitchens's Arguably

In 1947 George Orwell wrote "every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Today, many right across the political spectrum like to pick and choose from Orwell according to taste, stressing either the democratic, socialist or anti-totalitarian current in his work at the expense of the whole – the resulting "legacy" depending very much upon the political persuasion of who is doing the accounting.

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time darling of the left, has in recent years skirted this same political dividing-line: at once attracting the scorn of former comrades for his alleged shuffle to the right, while in the process gathering a substantial number of followers whose admiration rests almost entirely on the premise of him having "come to his senses". On the surface the nature of Hitchens’s politics depends, in a similar fashion to Orwell's, upon who one is talking to.

Hitchens's latest effort is a collection of essays spanning the last decade on politics, literature and religion. The book comes with an added element of tragedy due to the fact that Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer before he wrote a substantial proportion of it. This may, in fact, be his very last book.

Hitchens's reputation as controversialist par excellence has been cemented in recent years with his repudiation of the left and his articulate opposition to monotheism. Importantly, were Hitchens alone in rejecting conventional left/liberal, post-9/11 politics, his bravado and bluster would likely be much less potent. (Hitchens’s politics were never about posture alone; but one should not underestimate the importance of showmanship to the Hitchens brand). As it happened, there were others on the left who also viewed the attempt on the back of 9/11 to conflate John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden as crass moral equivalence; or as Orwell put it 70 years ago, "the argument that half a loaf is no different from no bread at all".

The problem with the notion that Hitchens did the obligatory shuffle to the right, or as David Horowitz puts it (underwhelmingly, considering his own political trajectory), had "second thoughts", is that a substantial proportion of the left really did climb into bed with reaction during this period, and continue to do so whenever a group points AK47s in the direction of the United States and its allies.

This was not confined to the debased remnants of Stalinism, either. The editorial of the liberal-left New Statesman of 17 September, 2001, written by then-editor Peter Wilby, appeared to blame Americans themselves for the 9/11 attacks - for "preferring George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader". A few weeks later, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in the London Review of Books about the "feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming".

Arguably, however, also shows Hitchens at his dogmatic worst, and at times he resembles Isaac Deutscher's description of the ex-Communist who, having recanted on his previous belief system, is "haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society," and who "tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness". In Hitchens’s essays on Iraq, as Jonathan Freedland points out, "the absence [of WMD] is deemed not to be evidence of absence but, on the contrary, evidence of the presence of WMDs in the immediate past".

Simply writing Hitchens off as a "Neo Con" would be simplistic and crude, and would fail to do justice to the considerable contribution made by him to the critique of totalitarianism. That being said, he has very little to say on traditional left-wing domestic concerns these days, and it seems increasingly clear, if only by omission, that interventionism is not the only consensus he now uncritically accepts.

In a 2008 interview with Prospect, Hitchens, a man who lives in extremely comfortable surroundings in Washington, showed a thinly-disguised contempt for those whose lives are made bearable by the British benefits system, dismissing it as "little more than Christian charity". In an article for Slate in the aftermath of the UK riots, Hitchens took the establishment line that the unrest was "sheer criminality" (as one Tweeter put it at the time – "yes, we know it is sheer criminality; the question is why are our youngsters sheer criminals?"). While much of the British left is right now mobilising against the greatest cut in living standards in a generation, in the same article Hitchens glibly put "the cuts" in brackets and ridiculed the term as an "all-purpose expression...used for all-purpose purposes".

Without embracing the denunciations of Hitchens that prevail on the far-left, it is perhaps necessary to acknowledge that he no longer much notices the struggles of the working class. If it is not part of the dramatic fight against totalitarianism (which I have no wish to downplay), then it doesn't seem to appear on his radar.

Orwell, in a reply dated 15 November 1943 to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, rejected the invitation on the basis that he didn't agree with their objectives. Acknowledging that what they said was "more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press", he added that he could "not associate himself with an essentially conservative body", that claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say about British imperialism". His closing paragraph stated: "I belong to the left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."

Hitchens, like many British journalists of his generation, has spent much of his career in the shadow of Orwell. He has also spent perhaps a small proportion of it waiting for his very own Orwell moment - a moment when he could take on his own side in the way Orwell took on the left over the appeasement of Stalin. The problem for Hitchens, however, is that despite the bluster and fear-mongering (not-to-mention the genuinely repulsive politics of the Jihadi movement), Islamism is not Nazism or Stalinism; and Hitchens, however good his prose may be, is no Orwell. In defending the gains of liberal democracy against its totalitarian enemies, Orwell never dumped his politics.

So what is it exactly that you’re proud of, Liam?

Today in a speech to the DSEI exhibition - otherwise known as the world's biggest arms fair -, Defence Secretary Liam Fox is expected to say that he is “proud” Britain is ranked as the world’s second largest arms exporter.

Arms fairs unsurprisingly attract their fair share of authoritarian regimes, and this one is no exception, with representatives from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kazakhstan expected to be in attendance.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010, he promised less of the previous government’s gung-ho attitude to foreign policy and a more pragmatic, mercantilist approach, even if he did refrain from putting it explicitly in those terms.

Cameron’s modus operandi was quickly exposed, however, by the fact that he adopted it precisely at a time when the peoples of the Middle East were feeling at their most idealistic.

This climate of revolution forced Cameron to dress up his crude “trade, trade, trade” foreign policy in the clothes of liberation. Most people seem to have forgotten that Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, was calling for a “return to law and order” when protests first erupted in Tunisia back in January. Hardly the words of an uncompromising democrat.

This is not of course to say that the liberal interventionism of the past 10 years has been vindicated - that the peoples of the Middle East are throwing off the yoke of tyranny with and without Western intervention suggests a more complex picture.

In respect to Cameron, however, actions speak louder than words: a few months back, while speaking in the Kuwaiti parliament on the need for Arab rulers to meet their people’s legitimate aspirations for freedom, Cameron’s Minister for International Security Strategy, Gerald Howarth, was attending an arms fair in Abu Dhabi, where 100 UK companies were exhibiting their vendibles. Elsewhere at the time, ammunition and tear gas were being sold to Libya, sniper rifles, British sub-machine guns and CS grenades were making their way to Bahrain, and parts for armoured vehicles and weapons were going to Egypt.

To have “Made in the UK” tear gas used upon you while David Cameron ventriloquizes your aspirations and speaks of you and he in terms of a “we”and “us” is probably somewhat insulting; at home, however, it keeps both of Cameron’s friends happy - he can sound-off about democracy to the interventionists in his cabinet whilst simultaneously filling the coffers of some of his most powerful supporters, all the while pretending that the two positions are completely compatible.

On the Arab street - where all of this really matters - I suspect the con-trick is wearing rather thin.

The argument one encounters when pointing out that arms are often sold to repressive regimes is always one of hindsight, usually along the lines of no one being aware that the weapons would actually be used - “oh, we know now that it was a dreadful idea to sell weapons to so and so’s dictatorship”.

This excuse is used time and time again, with all subsequent sales of arms being buttressed with weak assurances that, in future, they will be used “responsibly”.

Reading through the reports of today’s exhibition, I stumbled upon an interesting comment made by Endre Lunde, a defence consultant at HIS Janes:

"The industry is bracing itself”, he said, “It's already feeling the impact of the financial crisis and it's going to feel it even stronger soon - and that's before the whole drop related to the end of operations in Afghanistan really hits."

In other words, when the war in Afghanistan finally comes to an end we should not celebrate (we probably shouldn’t anyway - what is there to celebrate about war?), but rather worry about the profits of Britain’s arms industry.

Were there not a seemingly revolving door between the Ministry of Defence and the arms industry such self-interested rationalisation could perhaps be ignored. (Which brings to mind the darkly ironic joke about the man who worked in the factory building nuclear weapons. When asked how he could do such a terrible thing, he replied that he had to, because “a man’s got to live”).

The British government, for its part, will no doubt parrot that it is working in the “national interest”. It is well known, however, if not by us then by those on whom these "exports" are routinely used, that the profits of the defence industry will always come before the lives of those human beings unfortunate enough to be born into a certain type of despotism. To them, the knowledge that to the West some corpses are worth less than others is about as obvious as the sky is blue.

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.