Читать книгу Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy - Rod Liddle - Страница 9

It’s no go, my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;

Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever.

But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.

Louis MacNeice

Sometimes, although rarely, the speeches Prime Ministers make are interesting and revelatory. More revelatory and fun altogether are the speeches they planned to make but, for one reason or another, didn’t. Take the speech that David Cameron planned to deliver on 5 October 2011, his little shiny red face set in a very grim, self-flagellating these-are-hard-times-but-we’re-all-in-it-together austerity mode, with the economy mired in recession and a vast public debt that was not reducing at quite the speed he, or anyone else, might have liked. Some well-meaning aide had presumably mentioned to him something like, ‘Hey, Dave, never mind the public debt – have you seen the household debt for the UK? Staggering, mate. Gobsmacking. You ought to have a word with the public. Shocking state of affairs, get something done about it.’ At the time, Britain’s total household debt was a fruity £1.6 trillion, representing 160 per cent of household income, nobody saving anything, the whole thing predicted to rise and continue rising, the entire population living on the never-never like the fat, idle, feckless and spendthrift layabouts they are. Suitably appalled, Cameron planned to say the following stuff, which was duly leaked to the press by his office:

The only way out of a debt crisis is to pay your debts. Households – all of us – paying off the credit card and the store card bills.

This brief injunction did not immediately reach the ears of the public, however – presumably because someone showed it to the Chancellor, George Osborne. I would imagine that, upon reading it, Osborne will have remarked something along the following lines: ‘Christ on a fucking bike! What is this mad bastard thinking of? Get him on the fucking phone right now before he destroys the entire Western economy.’ The speech was subsequently rewritten to remove any reference to people being enjoined to pay off their store cards and credit cards. Indeed, if the British public had listened, suitably rapt, to the Prime Minister making the speech he had originally intended, and had thought to themselves, ‘Yes, Mr Cameron, you’re quite right – I shall pay off the Barclaycard this very moment,’ then the country would have been bankrupted by tea-time.

The entire economy is built upon debt. Further, in order to climb out of recession, the government requires us to spend more on stuff – probably useless stuff, but stuff all the same – which means that far from urging us to pay off our bills, the Chancellor would have wished the Prime Minister instead to herd us all down to Argos to buy loads more white ephemeral electronic cockshit, just to get the economy moving. And thus increase our collective household debt, exactly as the oxymoronic Office for Budgetary Responsibility has predicted it will. Hell, read your Keynes, Cameron: you spend out of recession. Or at least, forgetting Keynes, you enjoin the public to spend out of recession, and then charge the gullible bastards a crippling rate of interest to pay it all back, which of course they cannot possibly do. Such as Barclaycard, charging, for example, an advertised initial APR of nearly 30 per cent. And when the mugs have defaulted on that – and, what’s that glib little modernist phrase, ‘maxed out’ their various extortionate store cards – they can ‘consolidate’ their debts with all manner of Doug and Dinsdale Piranha Loan Shark companies, and lose their houses, or their cars, or their legs. As John Lydon once put it: ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Credit for the working classes has never come cheap, and their despairing efforts to pay off their debts keep the country afloat. Debt sits on the shoulders of the poorest, and makes their lives a misery. And Britain’s gross household debt is now the fourth biggest in the world. In little more than a year after I got the idea in my head to write this book, incidentally, back in early 2011, the amount of unsecured loans and debts owed by the average family in Great Britain increased by a scarcely believable 48 per cent. It now stands at an average of £7,944 per family, or 32 per cent of net annual average income. Tacitly, the government does not wish this state of affairs to end, even if in his more enlightened moments the Prime Minister betrays touching misgivings about the rather beastly workings of modern unrestrained capitalism; it wishes, indeed fervently hopes, that the never-never balloon will keep on rising, that the poorest will keep taking out loans to buy shit things and then bugger themselves senseless trying to pay for them.

The availability of credit – first hire purchase, then credit cards such as ‘Access: Your Flexible Friend’ (I once had a girlfriend who rejoiced in that nickname) – was heralded as a step forward for the working classes, a sort of democratic capitalistic spirit which would enable them to buy all the useless shit they ever wanted but had previously been unable to afford. The shit they’d gazed at wide-eyed in the shop window. And so, to a limited extent, in the early days it was; as wage rates for the working class rose quite sharply in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small wedge could be carved off each week for the HP or the savings club in order to acquire a small bunch of hitherto unexpected luxury – a TV or a holiday, say. But, no such thing as a free lunch, etc. etc.; credit, as it exists in its ubiquity today, is a con trick perpetrated upon the poorest and the most vulnerable in society. It doles out an illusory wealth which has, over the decades, disguised the extent to which the incomes of the richest and the incomes of the poorest have become ever more polarised, the trickledown that never really happened and was never really expected to happen, if we’re being honest. The poor get their shit stuff, for a while, until it is repossessed along with their oldest daughter, and maybe they forget that they’re earning only one two-hundredth of the salary – excluding bonuses – of their chief executive, whereas forty years ago they’d be on about one twentieth as much as the boss.

What follows is certainly not an attempt to condemn the mass of ordinary working Britons for the crisis in personal debt: it is, palpably, not their fault. So relentlessly have they been told to borrow, assured that borrowing’s perfectly fine and dandy – the banks do it, the country does it, so why not you? – and so ubiquitous is the availability of credit (as ubiquitous as its crippling rates of interest) that the blame cannot reasonably be laid at their doors.

Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that credit is an officially sanctioned instrument for ensuring quiescence among the plebs, the worker bees, the lumpen-proles, for making them get on with their arduous work and shut the fuck up because Argos or Currys is only around the corner and you’ve got that nice loan sorted out from that Russian company, haven’t you? Credit has taken over from religion as the opium of the people. Which I suppose is the point. The aim of this chapter is to attempt to explain how and why this happened culturally, rather than economically. We know how it happened economically, and a bit of stringent regulation of the loan sharks and the credit agencies wouldn’t come amiss right now, along with an agreeable mass civil-disobedience exercise consisting of a refusal to pay back extortionate interest on loans. Oh, and a much higher minimum wage. And a more equitable distribution of income within private companies, and more, much more which we will come to later in this book. But first, how did we get set up like this? What was the process by which we became ready and willing to spunk our meagre incomes paying back a bunch of avaricious wankers like Wonga.com, or that grasping shitehawk company that used to be advertised by the arsetastic TV Countdown kitten, Carol Vorderman? What softened us up to be so easily gulled? And why is it my generation that has succumbed so easily, when my parents and their peers looked on the whole business a little balefully?

By the time I got born in 1960, my parents had risen a little; they were perhaps upper-working class, even teetering on lower-middle. My father was no longer working for the railways, like his brother was still doing and like his father had done before him (they were from Darlington, you understand, a railway town like no other), but now had a job as a clerk working for the Inland Revenue. My mother worked part-time as a secretary in an accountancy firm in Bexleyheath, which was a hell of a step up for her. My dad came from a very respectable, solidly working-class family – chapel, Labour Party, no drinking – in the north-east of England; my mum was from perhaps less obviously reputable stock – orphaned, broken home, evacuated, from Sarf London. But now they were all right, pretty much – now they were doing OK. They had saved for years for the unending pleasures of having me (of which more later), and had moved out of council accommodation and bought their own home, a frowsy 1920s semi-detached house in Bexleyheath. Like 40 per cent of the population in the late 1950s, they had no TV. No telephone either, and no refrigerator, no vacuum cleaner, no car. They did however have a strange, mottled green-and-black washing tub, bought third-hand, which made a noise like Zeus had just seen his VAT bill for the quarter.

But still, they had an inside toilet in a home they owned – both things which my dad’s parents, when they were his age, would have regarded as the apogee of bourgeois luxury. My paternal grandmother, in the early days, had only an outside privy – which I liked, as I hate shitting within earshot of other people, and will sometimes go days without attending the toilet if it’s near other people, out of the sort of nervousness and self-consciousness which I daresay Freud would have found revealing.

All that stuff I mentioned above would come in time, my parents knew, when they could afford it – and so it did: vacuum cleaner in 1961, telephone in 1964, TV in 1965, car in 1966, refrigerator in 1968. Despite the encumbrance of having a vile and demanding child, their standard of living improved with graduated ease; these were the days when incomes really did rise, when to whisper the concept of social mobility was not a trigger for immediate hilarity, or bitter anger. Holidays, once a year, to a cheap Methodist guesthouse someplace – Hastings, Bournemouth, Llandudno – and then maybe a yearly trip to see my dark-clad northern relatives, and what I still feel is my real home, in Middlesbrough and Darlington and Bishop Auckland. So this was, by the standard of the times, a certain wage-slave comfort, hard fought for, collectively and individually, grindingly acquired – and for them a merciful release from the post-war years of austerity. We were still, by the measures of the time, poorish, I suppose, but certainly never crushingly so. There was always enough to eat, even if it was stultifyingly dull food; Christ, I can see my grandmother now, dipping bread and butter into the juice of a tinned fruit salad at tea – a weekly treat – at five on a Sunday, before low church Evensong. But I digress.

I would guess that the maroon Ford Anglia, with its pitiful pseudo-Yank grimacing radiator grille and sharply angled back window and light-grey roof, was almost certainly bought on tick, or something like tick; a loan. Its registration number, 123 MKL, and model, dates it between 1959 and 1962, so it was at least four years old when my mother and father bought it in 1966. (I wanted them to buy a racier Triumph Herald, incidentally, but they wouldn’t listen. Triumphs, my dad averred, break down too often.) Even so, it would have cost a packet, and money was always tight, so I would guess that some sort of HP deal was involved, although I may be wrong about this. Certainly my parents, and particularly my dad, were very sniffy about HP, about borrowing money in general. It was something done by the impecunious, the rash, the cavalier, the shady. OK, the house was bought on tick, but on a respectable sort of tick, they thought – a thirty-year mortgage with a reputable company (which nonetheless fleeced them). As far as borrowing was concerned, it was sort of OK to pay into a holiday club (we didn’t) or a Christmas club (we did), but that was saving for something with your own funds, and not being liable to pay someone back at a rate of interest. Borrowing money was a bit dirty, a bit desperate, and made no economic sense, because you ended forking out so much more. You wanted something, you saved up for it. There was nothing, really, that couldn’t wait a while, often a long while, once you had your food and shelter. And this rather stringent view was shared by a majority of the population at the time; HP was used, in the main, very sparingly, and its demands rested much more lightly on the shoulders of the not-so-well-off. Household debt back in those days rose only slightly during the 1960s and 1970s, rarely creeping above 40 per cent of average income; it was in 1979 that it really took off, like an atomic dildo – which is, uncoincidentally, the year in which my generation got its paws on the credit cards. We are the generation that intended to wait for nothing, and could not see the point in so doing.

Something restrained my parents’ generation, more than simply the fact that credit was less easily come by, and there were no credit cards as such.* Something more intrinsic stopped them, or limited the extent to which they were prepared to get themselves into debt. Look at the slow and painful rate with which those household ‘necessities’, as they would be deemed today, were acquired by my family, and other families like them. They were married, my mum and dad, in 1954; it took them fourteen years to buy a fridge. They were available, these things, and had been mass marketed since the 1920s (and vacuum cleaners for still longer). Partly it is the case that they were not seen as indispensable, because earlier generations had cheerfully done without them: my grandmother still didn’t have a fridge at the time she died, in 1972.

Clearly my parents’ generation was defined not merely by the war, and post-war austerity, but by the privations endured long before then. Most of the goods I detailed above would have been unimaginably expensive in the 1930s, and continued to be so into the 1950s. They came down in price in relative terms, but there was still no compulsion to buy them immediately, nor was there the easy means to do so. And debt meant, in the backs of most people’s minds, and maybe sometimes at the front, ignominy, bankruptcy and – if your memory was long enough – the workhouse. I mean, my mother wanted a fridge, of course she did (although its only use, at the beginning, was to keep milk chilled in hot weather, and in summer to keep crisp the ingredients of those hideous 1960s ‘salads’: tomato cut in half, cos lettuce, spring onion, beetroot out of a jar, slice of ham, acrid salad cream), and would occasionally nag my father about the social embarrassment caused by our lack of one. But in truth there was no real social embarrassment. And more crucially, there was no sense in which she felt she had a right to such consumer durables, as if they were something which should automatically accrue, or be immediately available on demand. It was a case, we all understood, of waiting. Saving and waiting. Waiting fourteen years, in the case of the bloody fridge.

This waiting is the thing my generation no longer does, is no longer cool with. It does not wait for anything. It does not see why it should. Life’s too short, isn’t it? Paradoxically, life was rather shorter back when people did wait – but still they waited.

There’s no question that some of the reasons for this refusal of my generation to defer their gratification are bound up in a greater availability of credit, a greater social acceptance of debt, not to mention continual injunctions from TV fuckpigs to take out loans and buy stuff now, this minute, you slavering mugs. We are all of us rather more affluent in absolute terms, even if the gap between rich and poor has widened obscenely; we can, on the whole, afford more stuff. And it is true too that those devices I mentioned – fridge, vacuum, car, telephone – arrived, in a sense, ahead of the burning need for them. We had no ready meals stuffed full of chemical shit which needed to be chilled, standards of hygiene within the home were nowhere near as maniacal as they are today, and there were fewer carpets (these were the days of linoleum) – so a broom would suffice. People did not travel very far in the ordinary scheme of things – the first motorway in Britain opened as late as 1959, and the roads were slow – and in any case there was, until 1964 and that blank-faced vandal Beeching, a comprehensive if somewhat unreliable and laborious rail service. And, of course, what was the use of a telephone until everyone you knew had one? So, desirable these things may have been, but not vital. Of those modern consumer durables I mentioned, the only one for which there was an immediate demand was the television, which is why, by the beginning of the 1960s, more than three quarters of British households owned one. Lucky, lucky, British people.

But there are two or three other reasons, less frequently considered, for this marked difference in the approach between the generations, the willingness to wait and the need to have it all now. The retreat of religion, which I bored you with earlier, is partly implicated, for example. The importance of Max Weber’s notion of a Protestant work ethic has maybe been overstated as a reason why Protestant northern Europe soared ahead of its bone-idle Roman Catholic southern half in the nineteenth century, and had itself a lovely industrial revolution of its own. I have never been hugely convinced that the British working classes, any more than those in Prussia or Denmark, were convinced, in themselves, that religious salvation lay through the path of bloody hard relentless work all of your life, until you died. They may have been told that, but I doubt they believed it. Even the fucking Danes could not be that stupid.

But the other, less familiar, side of Weber’s analysis may have some truth to it. Deferred gratification, for example, was a consequence of the non-conformist tradition of self-flagellating denial; the notion that there was something inherently good in not having nice stuff, or not doing nice stuff, that immersing oneself in pleasure, and in the acquisition of things, was a somehow decadent and indecent thing to do. Sacrifice now, reward in heaven. We have no deferred gratification any more; it is as arcane and extinct as the dire wolf and the 78rpm acetate disc and the Empire; it has no force, or resonance, within our land. Children are no longer told that they must ‘do without’ – unless it is because the piece of tat they are hankering after is beyond their parents’ immediate budget; in other words, there is no ideological or moral reason why you shouldn’t have everything now, if you can afford it: go ahead, fill your fucking boots, where’s the crime, etc. Such indulgence, to my mother and father, seemed obscene. There had to be a modesty of aspiration, a limit to the ambitions of acquisitiveness; it was wrong, horribly wrong, to ask for stuff – if you were diligent, stuff would come to you only after the waiting, after the waiting, after the waiting – after the world had turned a little further on its dumb axis, after the days had traipsed through, with their heads bowed, single file, and when everything was good and ready.

But that’s not all, because the other imprecation of non-conformist Christian socialism, and of that work ethic and its injunction to save, was the responsibility each of us had to society, to our fellow men. Saving, for example, was not simply something one did for one’s own sake, or for the promise of salvation, but because there was something inherently good for society in it. So too the notion of hard work. Work hard and save, and society will benefit. Somehow. Don’t ask me how. Merely that it was deeply ingrained, the self-denial: to splash out on something was to feel guilty. All of those imprecations from the Methodist Church against spending and drinking and gambling were made partly for the benefit of the individual, and partly for the benefit of society. You knew you had a responsibility to society.

I bought my first flat when I was twenty-seven years old, a one-bed in a mock-Georgian block on Peckham Rye, South London. So far as I remember, I’d saved fuck-all – maybe a grand or so in total. Saving seemed a somewhat tiresome thing to do, especially when, that year, I had to pay for the holiday in Bali. My dad gave me a thousand quid, and so I had a 95 per cent mortgage, secured with a £2,200 deposit. My father thought this was an absurd arrangement – to him it was almost beyond belief that anyone would be stupid enough to advance a person of my moral disreputability such an amount of money on such slender evidence. In any case, I was too young to own a property. How old should I be, then? ‘Old enough that you’ve got your finances sorted by yourself,’ my father replied with a hint of acid. The money he gave me, though, was just sitting in some account, doing nothing except growing; he spent nothing, on anything. They didn’t, that generation. More fool them.

But his misgivings were deeper than that, I knew. Because also, unvoiced, was the suspicion that the owning a flat thing was being entered into for other reasons: I’d met a girl, a lovely girl called Sue, and this was to be our flat. My father had his doubts – not about Sue, whom he liked very much, but about my commitment to this thing, setting up home. It seemed to have been undertaken terribly lightly. He had watched, with some disgust, the joyless procession of the conniving victims of my serial monogamy, in and out of his house for weekend visits; hell, he’d had to wash the sheets. And he needed to alter his Christmas-card list every year, crossing out ‘Lucy’ and replacing it with ‘Sharon’, and then with ‘Jane’, and so on, finding it hard to keep track and not enjoying trying to do so. ‘Aren’t you with Lucy any more?’ he would ask, not having heard her mentioned for some while. ‘Sort of yes and no,’ I would stammeringly reply, attempting to encapsulate in that phrase the month or two of furious deceit and infidelity which had just taken place. ‘It’s just that things are a bit complicated at the moment,’ I added on one occasion, when his enquiries pressed in more tightly down the phone. ‘They’re only complicated if you make them so,’ he replied.

But no, it seemed to us the right time to buy a place, me and Sue. To buy a place, to get on the ladder. You had to get on the ladder, back in the 1980s – everyone had to get on the fucking ladder, and then cling on for dear life. All of our friends were getting on the ladder – the ones in the south, who had jobs. It was our right to get on the ladder too, then. And not just have the place of our own, but have it furnished immediately: washing machine, fridge, bed, matt-black table, geometric rug. All of that, NOW, please. Fourteen years? We could just about wait fourteen days, and a little grumpily at that. My mum used to tell me that when they first bought that house in Bexleyheath they sat in deckchairs in the living room because they couldn’t afford a three-piece suite. I’m not sure if I believed her or not. They bought the three-piece suite just before I was born, and it went in the ‘front room’ and nobody was allowed to sit on it, except at Christmas for a bit, when the southern rellies came round, and the neighbours, and the vicar. You were allowed to sit on it then. By the day after Boxing Day the room was closed off again. They had that suite – a virulent red wool, ribbed and boxy and probably very chic now – for sixteen years.

My dad would ring from time to time to see how we were getting on in our new flat, now we were on the ladder. He would be preternaturally concerned about stuff like boilers and maintenance charges and double glazing. My replies were always pretty blithe, uninterested, delivered sometimes with the suspicion of impatience. He asked me on one occasion, a couple of weeks after we’d moved in, if we had a sofa yet. I told him we didn’t have a sofa – instead we’d bought ourselves a futon.

‘What’s a futon?’ he asked.

‘Well, Dad, it’s a sort of wooden platform, on top of which you lay a very densely stuffed thin mattress. It’s from Japan. Ours is black and white.’

There was a complete silence at the other end of the line. It went on for ages, to the extent that I thought we had been cut off. ‘Dad? Dad? …’

‘Rod,’ he broke in, sounding incredibly sad, ‘why don’t you live in the fucking real world?’

* Well, there was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1962, followed by American Express a year later. Barclaycard started in 1966, Access in 1972. Take-up was slow in those early years.