First, let me recount an anecdote, not funny or hugely interesting, but just bare with me. I was to meet two long standing friends last weekend. We each live in different parts of London so meet in a central location. The weather had turned cold. I check the credit left on my gas meter and the amount left with a week to go before the next JSA payment, £9.50. Its impossible, the fare is £4.20, one round of drinks will be £10. It cant be done. That is the reality of the 'lifestyle' of being on basic benefits in the UK. I cancelled.
Now come the reforms, predicated upon the lie that it is an easy option to live on benefits. There will be mandatory work placements and real cuts in entitlement, the most extraordinary being the arbitrary 10% cut in Housing Benefit if out of work for a year, to 'incentivise' taking a job. Beware a crap word that is not in the Oxford dictionary, it means punish for not having got a job.
While announcing these IDS said ' it is always better to work.' Why ? That is a subjective opinion. Is it really better to work for the paltry £65 a week than not? In the former Communist countries it was often said, as an example of how their regimes treated people terribly, that dissident professors were sweeping the streets because they would not toe the party line. Now what is the difference if I am told to go and sweep the streets for £65 a week because I dissent from our system which cannot allow an individual to receive an already inadequate two weekly sum without working for the privilege, meanwhile rewarding others that engage in dubious financial transactions with vast sums and immunity from sanction ? Am I expected to be grateful for this corrective measure, this re-educative work at poverty wages ? Sorry, fuck off.
On what basis do most members of our government assert that work is the holy grail and something which everyone must take part in to justify their very existence? How can any two occupations, being a merchant banker or a sheet metal worker, for examples, be compared and simply called ' work' ? They are clearly not the same thing. And they are not equally rewarding for those who undertake those activities, nor are they both necessarily good things in terms of the larger society. You can guess which one I regard as useful.
Are the rights to shelter, food and an existence in basic dignity to be entirely dependent upon work ? Working for whom ? Working for what purpose ? People work manufacturing weapons and assorted military hardware, in fact, during wartime employment is always at historic highs, suddenly there is enough money to create thousands of jobs. There is no question in my mind that this is not constructive or useful and is not something that I would undertake whether paid or not. Selling mobile phones is another random example of a singularly pointless activity. In what way can it be said that these are necessarily good things to be doing ? It is work, and if one is prepared to do it fine, but my view is that they are not good things to be doing and I do not agree that all work is self-justifying.
Someone said in the debate that work was a habit, yes, well, but why is it the habit of working one that a government wants to coerce everyone into ? Smoking is a habit, but it is discouraged. To get up at the same time every day, similar to everyone else, to get in a car or on a train at a similar time to everyone else, to devote the great majority of the day to whatever one's ' work ' is and then travel back at a similar time to everyone else and then get up and do it all again for a week. Explain please why this is such a wonderful habit to have ? And, moreover, why is it being proscribed by regulations that will mean that if one actively dissents from this view that is an absolute an unchallengeable good thing, you will be left high and dry with no means of support ?
For three years, the new rules will say, as if you will last for three weeks with no money at all.
Everywhere the message is the same, on the BBC endless programmes supposed to show how
'hard work' is good for you, how you need to think like a business, behave like an entrepreneur, walk like an Egyptian, no, that was a song by the Bangles, but about as meaningful. These mantras from the C18th are the detritus from a discredited utilitarianism that still infects the lame brains of the Tory party, they mean nothing in the current corrupt, inequitable and morally as well as practically bankrupt late-Capitalist excuse for an ideology. There is nothing left which can justify or assume the right to coerce people into its way of ordering society.
All commentators laughingly still defined as left and right chorus disapproval of the 'workshy.'
Well, in their terms I am workshy and proud of it. How the hell would I find the time to listen to symphonies on the radio, read the complete works of Oscar Wilde and Phillip K Dick, collect stamps, write the occasional poem, waste time in the pub, go for long walks by the river, go to the library to keep abreast of the latest trends in flower arranging, skirt length and trouser shape, write this garbage, um, stimulating prose, and the million and one other things that make life worth living, just.
Oh yes, and one more thing to stick in the pipe of utilitarianism and smoke thereof, why is it that at 65 ( or whatever the arbitrarily chosen age is this week ) it is suddenly perfectly alright to sit at home all day and receive just about enough to live on ? How is it that the great panacea of work immediately becomes entirely forgotten once past a certain birthday ? No one calls a pensioner a workshy layabout.
Anyway that's quite enough for today, there are other things not to do.
