Читать книгу Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy - Rod Liddle - Страница 10

A house for ninety-seven down,

And once a week for half a crown,

For twenty years.

I watched the homosexual historian David Starkey on the BBC’s Question Time programme a while ago, talking, with great certitude and conviction, out of his arsehole. He was in the middle of some long peroration about the bone-idle working class of today, how they don’t know how to work, or won’t work, or think work is beneath them, or can’t spell the word work, or don’t understand work in a semantic sense, or something – the usual fucking boring guff you hear from self-important well-off right-wingers, especially the heads of industry, but also sometimes from backbench Tory politicians when they’re too far from the Central Office twat-zapper to be effectively restrained and have begun to froth at the mouth and gibber and writhe like demonically possessed spastics in front of the TV cameras or their local constituency association. David went on to tell us what his old dad did when he was short of work. Do you know what he did, Mr Starkey Senior? He walked a hundred miles, or something, in order to find a job. Or it might have been five hundred miles, or a thousand, or fifty. I can’t remember. And actually, now I come to think of it, he may not have walked – he may have cycled, or pursued new employment a great distance from home via the conduit of a pogo-stick, or by swimming the entire length of every watercourse that hove into view, or by hopping, while beating himself about the body with a birch switch. The exact mode of self-propelled transportation detailed by David now eludes me entirely, for which many apologies; that’s bad research, really. Something very fucking arduous, anyway, all in order to find new work, all in order to maintain his pride and provide for his family, to be a man, to be a worker.

That’s what he did. He conformed to the Tebbit principle and, metaphorically or otherwise, got on his bike to seek out employment. And the point Mr Starkey Jr was trying to make, the same point made by Lord Tebbit a couple of decades previously, is that the feckless scumbag British worker just doesn’t do that any more. He expects work to come to him, he lolls around whining about a lack of work, but he won’t go out looking for it. What we need, Mr Starkey Jr implied, is an infinitely flexible workforce.

We already have one, of course. The British worker puts in more hours than any other in Europe, with the exception of the Irish. And look where that’s got the poor bastard. Indeed, the least flexible, most regulated and least hard-working people in Europe live in what we once knew as the Hanseatic League – Germany, Norway, the Netherlands; they are also the most affluent countries in the world. Perhaps the British worker should work less hard, then, and be a damn sight less flexible about his working arrangements. Perhaps we’d all be better off that way. But as soon as the unemployment rate creeps up because the government will not invest in anything, and the working classes start getting a bit restive, there’s always someone like the otherwise rather wonderful David Starkey to come along and tell them that the reason they can’t get a job is that they’re not flexible enough, they won’t put themselves out – and so that’s why the jobs go to the Poles and the Slovaks. Look how flexible and vigorous they are, these broad-faced Slavs! They’ve hopped all the way from Łódz and Košice, and now Brasov and Plovdiv – and here they are right now, doing the jobs you could have had, you mugs.

Flexible, then, as understood by Mr Starkey, is a synonym – a euphemism, if you like – for ‘fucking cheap’. The reason British businesses employ Eastern European labour is that they can pay them three fifths of fuck-all and get away with it; it is nothing to do with a reluctance on the part of the British worker to shift his indolent fat arse and travel a few miles for a job. The Poles and Slovaks have very low overheads here, and a much lower cost of living back home. They don’t have families to support in this country, by and large, so they work for less. Have you noticed how minicab fares haven’t risen much recently, or have sometimes gone down? You can probably work out why that is when you listen to the driver’s accent.

We’ll return to the immense joys occasioned to the poorest people of this country by large-scale immigration in a later chapter, and leave the subject for now, after I’ve told you about the two lads I met outside the Job Centre in Middlesbrough. Skilled labourers, they’d been on the dole for months, and were desperate for work. They took themselves off to the Olympic site down in London, where there was loads of construction going on, but they couldn’t get a job, turned away from every site. And, one of them told me, shaking his head, the signs outside the site offices were all in Polish. The Poles had nicked all the jobs.

Yes, yes, I know, you mithering authoritarian bien pensant, I can see those hackles rising along your spine, I can see your wet lips forming themselves into the ubiquitous ovine bleat of raaaacisttttttt. Of course I know that none of this is the fault of the Poles, I know they are blameless. It is not remotely the fault of the Poles, OK? But once you’ve said that, where does it leave the lads from Middlesbrough? Or doesn’t that matter? Just raise your glass and offer three cheers for the free movement of labour and capital, like any good socialist would. Anyway, we’ll come back to this interesting topic. I don’t know, incidentally, how those Boro boys got themselves the 260 miles down to London. Maybe they borrowed David Starkey’s dad’s pogo-stick. Or maybe they took the fucking coach.

Right now, I’m packing up for a move myself, got the removals people coming round in a week. We’re off, sixty or so miles from where we live at the moment, on the edge of London, to near Canterbury (and dangerously close to David Starkey, as it happens). I counted up, and the new house will be the nineteenth different place I’ve lived since leaving home in 1978, meaning that I’ve spent an average of one year and nine and a half months in each place. I’ve lived in the north-east, the south-west, South Wales, London and Kent. I pester my wife on an almost daily basis to move to the north-east of England, but she won’t do it because she thinks there are no Starbucks there and she won’t be able to buy tampons, batteries or shoes, so it doesn’t look like we’re going there any time soon.

I think my yearning for the north-east, where I always feel at home, comes from this berserk thirty-four years of rootlessness, a peripatetic existence, a sort of domicile equivalent of fast food. Only during the four years I spent in the small Wiltshire village of Heytesbury did I do that thing you’re meant to do – participate in the community – to any extent.

I am hardly alone in this wandering however: the amount of time people spend in any home has reduced enormously over the last thirty or so years; if you’re in the private rented sector (where I’ve been most of the time) the average stay is now little more than a year. Even for home-owners the average duration has fallen and fallen, until it is now just under ten years. We have become every bit as mobile as David Starkey would like us to be; we move hither and thither, packing and unpacking our accretions, for a multiplicity of reasons – not least that we are proud to be participants in a flexible workforce. Like Starkey, the government wishes us to be infinitely flexible workers, to move where the jobs are, to get on our bikes – but the jobs are increasingly short-term contracts with scant possibility of tenure, and so we move on again.

The government, however, also wants us to be participants in something the Prime Minister christened a ‘Big Society’, a nebulous and ill-defined concept which seems to mean, insofar as it’s possible to understand what seems to be a vague aspiration, helping out with stuff in your neighbourhood. But you don’t help out in your neighbourhood if you don’t know who your neighbours are – and these days one in eight of us do not even know the names of the people living next door. An average of a year spent in a place does not give you the chance to become involved in your neighbourhood; you’re basically squatting, looking nervously about you, locking the door tight and pulling back the bolts on the windows. Your involvement with those around you extends only to pushing past them at the bus stop on your way to work. With every year that passes we are leading a more atomised existence, in which the people we meet day to day are of value only for fleeting, instrumental reasons.

My parents, by contrast, moved home a total of three times in fifty-five years. And in each place they settled, they settled. There was attendance (and in my parents’ case, involvement) at the local church – a social centre as potent as the local pub. My mother also joined the local amateur dramatics groups in Bexleyheath and Middlesbrough, and was even for a while a member of a Black and White Minstrels troupe – as I have previously mentioned, she had always had a soft spot for African-Caribbean people, whom she thought of as ‘cheerful’, and I think joining the Black and White Minstrels was her way of paying an appropriate tribute to them. Foremost, though, she was the ‘Akela’ of a local cub pack, later rising to become a district commissioner, a job that took up all of her spare hours (because during the day she worked). My dad, who was somewhat insular, played a subordinate role in all of these ventures, driving people about, doing the accounts, printing stuff on the Gestetner. In such a way we were connected, as a family, to everyone we lived among; through the cubs and the drama groups and the church. This is not a reworking of Family and Kinship in East London, where the doors were always left open on a terrifying extended family who’d welcome you into their ’omes, gawd bless em, ’ave a banana. It was a 1950s commuter suburb of Middlesbrough, with probably a more transient population than was then the norm. Although, saying that, it was a shock and an upheaval if someone we knew moved – and in the ten years we were there, they didn’t do so very often. The place had, despite itself, a sense of permanence and belonging; crime was low, there were no gangs. There was, mind you, a community wanker – the Nunthorpe Wanker – who gained a certain notoriety for a brief while, by wanking at people. I saw him once, in a bush, wanking in a rather leisurely manner. Probably I did not excite him. But the Nunthorpe Wanker aside, we all felt part of a community and looked out for each other. Actually, I suppose the wanker did too, in his own fashion.

In 1975 the Liddle family received 284 Christmas cards – I can remember counting them, slightly in awe and slightly sickened – of which all but forty or so were from the people we lived among, the rest having been despatched by the Liddle diaspora. By way of contrast, last year I got about thirty Christmas cards, and most of those were from fucking PR companies. I realise, incidentally, that this is neither an important nor a scientific gauge of anomie and alienation. I’m just, you know, sayin’.

The exhortation to move to where work exists, endlessly following the job market like a dog chasing its own tail, is only one reason why we have far less of a sense of community today – and probably not the most important, at that. We travel more generally, and do so a lot more lightly, than was the case fifty years back. It is genuinely hard to convey the upheaval, the sense of occasion, the excitement of long-distance travel for people outside the top echelon of society before the late 1960s. My family went by train from London to Darlington once a year, to visit my grandmother and those other assorted ageless northern relatives – and that trip would need to be saved up for, long and hard, for months before we departed. Train travel was, in real terms, ruinously expensive, and laborious. Later we got the car, primarily for the purpose of saving money on train fares – and before such a voyage my father would be out busy tinkering with his vital little instruments, his tyre-pressure gauge and his dipstick and so on, because driving 260 miles was a huge undertaking – anything might happen. We would leave home at 5 a.m., me dozing on the back seat next to the dog, for an unimaginably – it seemed to me at the time – lengthy journey up the A1, which was still, for a substantial part of its route, a simple two-lane road, slow and windy, snarled up with traffic as it made its way through the high streets of dimly remembered outposts of the east Midlands – Long Benington, Retford, Newark. Eight hours later we would arrive in Darlington, the Anglia with an exhausted look on its fly-spattered face, Skipper gasping for water and farting like a wizard. We usually stopped for something very nasty to eat somewhere in Nottinghamshire, and then for something even nastier at the Little Chef near Doncaster.

Travel then was not something which many of us were habituated to, and there was little joy to be gleaned from it. One tended to stay where one was; the psychological impulse to stay in one place was much greater, and by and large people were content to do so; hence they had longevity and tenure in their communities. In the late sixties and early seventies this changed a little; the roads improved rapidly, car ownership hit 75 per cent, and suddenly moving around a bit became a reasonable option, both practically and, more crucially, within the mind. The horizons were opened up; a change of scene gradually became a possibility – especially now that the family and friends you’d be leaving behind were more easily reachable, should you want to reach them, by that newish thing the telephone or via the car. And then – in the south-east particularly – there was immigration, and the resultant white flight. The indigenous working class of London saw their communities change around them and, with ever greater haste, got the hell out – south to Bromley and the Medway towns and Thanet, north to Broxbourne and the increasingly paved-over county of Hertfordshire, east to Hornchurch, Billericay and the new towns of Harlow and Woodham Ferrers, west to Woking and Reading and Basingstoke. They left some behind, of course – usually the older members of their former communities, who were reluctant to up sticks – and, ironically the incomers, Asians from Bangladesh and East Africa, India and Pakistan, began creating the very same tight-knit, mutually dependent communities that their arrival had helped to usurp or replace. I suspect that if the sociologists Young and Willmott returned to parts of the East End they would find people living in a very similar manner to the one they had documented in Family and Kinship in East London; only the colour of the skin has changed. And they probably wouldn’t be eating pork chops, as the pair lovingly described the white folks doing back in 1957.

But the effects of large-scale immigration were, in this regard at least, comparatively regionalised and minor, certainly compared to the next impulse which gripped hold of us all, first mildly in the mid-1970s, and then with an atavistic fervour in the awful decade that followed. I can think of nothing which has contributed more to the winnowing away of a sense of community than the deliberate implanting of the poisonous notion that a home is not primarily somewhere you live, but a means of collateral to be ever traded upwards.

House prices first began their maniacal upwards spiral in the 1970s, and not, as is popularly believed, in the 1980s. My family moved from South London to Middlesbrough in 1968. We received, by our standards at least, a large cash windfall for having traded a 1920s two-and-a-half-bed semi in Bexleyheath for a 1950s two-and-a-half-bed detached in Middlesbrough. I think the London house was sold for about £3,500 and the new one bought for £2,200, there or thereabouts. Eleven years later, that Middlesbrough house was sold for £19,000, a rise of roughly 750 per cent. But a good proportion of that was down to the Argentinean levels of inflation that pertained throughout Ted Heath’s guileless tenure as Prime Minister and the only marginally less inept Wilson/Callaghan regime which followed.

People were moving more than they had done before, for sure, at least in part for the reasons I mentioned above. But the endless, consuming avarice of flogging your property and buying a new one, and then flogging that property, having improved its value by adding a fucking study in the attic and an open-plan kitchen/diner and decking in the garden – that madhouse was all still to come, and largely at the hands of the next generation. Certainly it is true that when my mother and father bought their first property it was not out of a wish to make large amounts of money from it – the house in Woodlands Road, Bexleyheath, was a family home which they would have been happy to stay in forever, were it not for my dad being transferred with his job, and the pull of home, to the north-east.

When I bought my first property, it never occurred to me that this was the place in which I would spend the rest of my life, or even more than a very, very small part of it. I was on the ladder. Everyone was on the ladder. There were countless TV shows about the ladder, and how to get up it and how to screw the vendor out of a few thou, or add a few thou to your own selling price. Everyone was buying houses, and selling them, and then selling the next one, and the next one. Officially sanctioned, institutionalised venality which effectively began with the sale of council houses, the ‘right to buy’, which has left us with almost no council stock at all, save for the residuals – the piss-stained skagheaded shitholes nobody in their right mind would want. Of course you only bought your council property in order to sell it: that was the point, to cash in just like everyone else was cashing in. Flogging your house became an obsession which, regardless of the predictable property slumps, has still not yet abated.

I don’t think this madness ever really commended itself to my parents’ generation; they found this new way of viewing where you lived as an absurdity and the economics upon which it was founded a chimera, a bubble that was sure to burst one day soon. Which of course it did, several times. But it remains a singularly British obsession – no other country in the world has this rapacious and desperate housing market, and we are making ourselves extremely unpopular by exporting the greed to France and Germany and Spain, purchasing second homes, buy to lets, timeshares, apartments and hideous villas abroad, raising the prices of property on the Continent with every year that passes so local people can’t afford to buy. And back at home moving, always moving; having an investment only in the baldest sense of the word, in the mortgage. Having no investment in the community you live in, or in the people who live around you, because you’re always ready to move on again, to buy bigger and better, and thus trouser more almost wholly imaginary money. And as a consequence, the poorest of us – an ever-growing proportion – are forced into private-sector lettings, because there are no council houses left.

Our infatuation with house prices is perhaps second only to the credit card as having had the most deeply corrosive effect upon what we – although obviously not Mrs Thatcher – might call society. And, much as with the credit card, you wonder how come my generation was so easily gulled, so taken in, and so mindless of the effect upon others. The rather sneering quotation at the beginning of this chapter is from John Betjeman, of course, bemoaning the fact that the lower-middle classes, the hoi polloi, the bald young clerks and their suburban wives, who do not know/the birdsong from the radio – were buying houses at all, ghastly little people that they were. This is pure snobbery, of course and we should not pay it much mind. But not all objections to the social calamities of the housing market should be so easily dismissed, even if that’s the familiar monetarist charge levelled against those who cavil: you are standing in the way of democracy’s perfect expression, the democracy of the free market; what right do you have to stop someone making money and, uh, bettering themselves? Ah, well, you’ve got me – none, in the end. I have no right, and so it will go on: even a catastrophic slump in the market dulls the appetite only briefly. My argument is simply that the fervid acquisitiveness has not made this country a better place in which to live; we are more estranged, physically and metaphorically, from one another than ever before.

Other stuff has also made us move around, here, there and everywhere. You might reasonably chuck into the mix the rather greater alacrity with which we got divorced, a number which has risen almost exponentially since the late 1960s. Divorce usually means someone moves out, unless you’re really weird, and often away from the area inhabited by their embittered or merely awkward former spouse. We also, since the 1970s, began to choose to live by ourselves at a younger and younger age (a process which may now be in reverse), and to demand more floor space for ourselves, because, hell, we deserve it. It is a fact not often remarked upon by the Green lobby that every single advance since 1970 in making houses more environmentally friendly – and there have been many such advances – has been entirely negated by the fact that we no longer wish to live with other people; that we want instead to curl ourselves in isolation, and fester. I don’t know why the Greens don’t make more of that; I suppose because it would require them to make non-pc judgments about how people live their lives, and we couldn’t have that.

There’s a new word the sociologists use to describe communities that recover quickly in the aftermath of catastrophe, economic or otherwise: they use the word ‘resilience’. I don’t know why, but this annoys me. It sounds like something they’ve just thought up, in a committee meeting, someone called Roz and someone called Hugo, delving around in their brains for some new concept to give to the world: resilience. Too often when they talk about resilience they mean nothing more than affluence: it will come as no surprise to you to learn that in a recent study by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Guildford emerged as more ‘resilient’ than Tower Hamlets. Well, fuck me sideways, etc. But I would bet that communities where the simple turnover in residencies is low tend to be more resilient than those in which the turnover is high, even once you have factored out differential income levels. I don’t know that for a fact, it’s just a guess. And I would guess too that there is some correlation with the crime rate.

I envy my mother and father the deep sense they had of always belonging to a community, the importance they put upon investing their time and effort in stuff like drama clubs and cub scouts. It is something I have largely neglected to do; I’ve never really been around anywhere long enough – it’s the sort of thing that requires commitment and longevity. There are still cub scout packs, of course, but many fewer than thirty or forty years ago. There are still amateur dramatic societies – but, again, fewer. The churches and the pubs have been closing down too.

So how do we occupy our increased leisure time now? After watching TV, the next most popular leisure activity is buying shit in shops. We like nothing more than wheeling a trolley around a huge shop and filling it up with shit. Retail outlets, malls, hypermarkets – you name it, we’ll spend a weekend buying shit in it. And the other thing we do these days, a growth industry almost on a par with buying bits of shit in shops – we go to the gym. We’ve replaced the communal with the solipsistic, the acquisitive and the narcissistic.