Who Pays For The Deficit?

It's really quite simple.

The UK has a lot of debt, yes? We know this. We know the banks made a massive cock-up and lost loads of our (our) money, and we know that they've all been talking about how we should rectify this, how we need to stop borrowing, start saving, cut the deficit. Let's be a prosperous nation once again.

David Cameron and George Osborne had a little light-bulb moment some years ago and came up with this idea about how we might achieve this. David said, "Hey George, let's keep all the money for ourselves", and George said, "What a jolly good idea, David." And so that is what they did.

They took money out of services. Apparently, we shouldn't be spending money on services - pssh, what a waste, people don't need to be looked after! Lewisham Hospital is one thoroughly-documented example for us living in South London, but there are many other examples throughout the UK, too. Services for sick people, old people, young people, people with children, disabled people... Everyone knows someone who's been affected, unless the only people you know opt to always go private because, as they well know, "The NHS is shit!" Maybe it's shit because there's not enough money put into it, or because the money's being put into the wrong places. You can usually find the money in the blazer pocket of the dude wearing a suit. Just a guess.

When you cut money from services, people lose their jobs. Cutting back on stationery supplies isn't really going to save you money like cutting the job of someone on £25k a year, is it? That person who's just lost their job doesn't then evaporate along with their tax contribution; they still exist, they still have to feed and clothe themself (and maybe their family, too) and heat their home. And so, they go on "jobseeker's allowance", aptly titled as such because yes, they want a job. Being on jobseeker's allowance isn't fun. You have to work your way through two sets of security guards to get into the building to sign on (hey! I think I just invented a new video game!), and it's not lottery figures you're getting paid every week. It's a pittance, and you're made to feel by all the rest of the society that you are a worthless, lazy bum. Which simply is not true.

If you're on jobseeker's allowance, you might be entitled to other benefits, too: housing benefit, for one. Only, because Margaret Thatcher decided to sell off shit-loads of council property back in '80s and not build any new ones, most people live in privately rented accomodation these days, which as we all know is pretty damn expensive. Landlords can charge whatever they like, and if you're on benefits, guess who pays for that rent! Yep: the state does. The taxpayer. You, most likely.

So currently we have:

• a decline in services and quality of services,
• someone who was once paying tax now no longer paying tax,
• yet another person on benefits, and
• a chunk of those benefits going into the pocket of someone who already makes a decent sum.

They might tell you that unemployment figures are going down, but they choose not to include people out of work but not on benefits, or people put on "work schemes" or apprenticeships which pay next-to-nothing, or people forced to register as self-employed because they might find some work (not a lot, but some), or people only working part-time because something is better than nothing. And oh, this list is not exhaustive. There's more.

There's the impact cutting these services has on the people of the UK. There's the old person who sits in their own excrement for hours because no one's being paid to come and clean them. There's the graduate who sits, at the age of 21, with thousands of pounds worth of debt and no hope of a job, only of "work experience", if they're lucky. There's the parent of that student, who grew up in the '80s and has been there, done that and now has to support their adult child to get by. There's the parent who can't afford childcare and so only works part-time, or not at all. There's the child who grows up in poverty, being made to feel as though this is somehow the fault of their people; don't bother with an education, it doesn't get you anywhere.

And then there's David Cameron and George Osborne, and a few of the other lucky elite. Tax breaks for millionaires, and rich politicians charging the cost of their family holiday to France to their expenses, sending their children off to Eton and then Cambridge, hiring a personal carer for their parent when they become too old to take themself off to the toilet alone, telling us, "We're all in this together." And then they turn around and point the finger at you. Or maybe not at you, but at your immigrant neighbour who bought a new lawnmower last week (holy shit! Not a new lawnmower!), or the single mother down the road who just got pregnant again (because vaginas seem to make a habit of causing massive economic crises). Maybe it's their fault, maybe you should blame them. Blame anyone, but do not blame the twats who got us into the mess in the first place.

That's the last thing they would want you to do. 

Capitalism & Insecurity

Sometimes I think about insecurity. I think about it because of my own, about the things that I don’t like about myself, physically, mentally and emotionally. I think about how I allow it to hold me back, about all the instances where I have been offered an opportunity that I have turned down because I didn’t think I was ready, or that I could do it, or that I could do it as well as someone else could do it and the people I might let down if I did it wrong. And then, just for the briefest moment (because the briefest moment is all it takes), I stop looking inward and I see the same misery, disappointment and insecurity painted all over somebody else’s face, and very often that person is someone I consider intelligent, likeable, attractive, worthy. And I ask them, “What do you have to be insecure about?”

And that is the real question, isn’t it? What do we really have to be insecure about? None of us are perfect, we tell our friends this every single day, and yet we still expect perfection from ourselves, without really knowing what perfection is. Who decides what perfection is? I can’t keep up with whether size zero or curves are in at any given time, and I used to think that if you wore a suit to work then you meant business, but now bankers are wankers. Whatever we do, we’re not doing the right thing, and if by some miracle we are doing the right thing, we’re not doing it in the right way. Do it faster. Do it more cheaply. Do it while looking fabulous. Do it while doing 101 other fast, cheap, fabulous things.

Here’s another question for you, an equally important one: Where the hell does all this insecurity come from?

I have a theory.

In this theory, there are men; very, very rich men. Men with white skin, a receding hairline and a belly hanging just slightly over the waistline of their tailored trousers, because they can afford to eat well. I think about their wives, these faceless Stepford women who at some point in their lives made a choice to live one of comfort and safe, secure predictability rather than any real fulfilment. I think about their children, privately educated and spoonfed the complete works of Shakespeare, but never taught any real skills to use in the real world, because with a father like these men, who needs to live in the real world?

And then I think about ordinary men and women and boys and girls who do live in the real world, and who do need real skills in order to get by in this real, difficult, emotionally and physically draining, real-world. I think about them slaving over textbooks at school, being fed knowledge they will never use and so soon forget, while their parents slave away in an office full of cogs being turned relentlessly, their raw hands gripping at the levers as the sweat pours down their faces. And they keep turning these cogs, these cogs which form part of a much bigger, fiercer machine – and no one is exactly sure what this machine does – because every turn will put a pound in their pocket, a pound in the state’s pocket, and a million pounds in the pocket of one of these men: these very, very rich men.

And these very, very rich men are happy, or at least they think they are happy, because their stomachs are well fed, their wives have no faces and their children have never been taught the skills or the desire to answer back. And so they keep going: they want more of this brand of happiness, and we, the civilians in this War on the Human Race they have invested in, must pay for it. They tell us how we should pay for it. One very, very rich man decides what we should wear, while another hand-selects what music we should listen to. Down the corridor in another room, another very, very rich man decides what our hair should look like this season, as another strengthens ties with (or around the neck of) one very desperate, poverty-stricken sweatshop that we will never get to see because their label will be torn out of our consciousness and replaced with your favourite high street’s “affordable” brand.

These very, very rich men’s very, very rich friends choose which phones we should be communicating on, how we should be communicating and what we should be communicating about, and how they might sell us other useless shit we do not need on these “social net-worth-ing” platforms, and bank on the fact that we will become so immersed in the apps, the games, the reflections of ourselves that they have painted for us that we will stop seeing who we really are, or how our neighbours too hate their lives without any real explanation as to why. And these very, very rich men choose our cars, dictate our misogynistic and unlikely pornography, turning women into plastic our daughters will someday soon aspire to set into the mould of, and infiltrate our media, our right to a “free press”, and all the while we grab hold of the levers for dear life and keep turning these cogs in motion, the sweat dripping from our starved dehydrated skin, because this is the only way to exist in this world they have created for us. And they package these commodities in colours we have been raised to think reflect us, and it’s all very shiny and new and exciting, and everyone else has one and they look so happy wearing bland smiles pulled up at the corners by invisible strings, mere puppets in this game of Monopoly, where the Ordinary People keep rolling 1s and the very, very rich men have infinite get-out-of-jail-free cards, and if only I could have what they have, live the life they lead – maybe, just maybe, I might be happy...

Because this world has become so ingrained in us that if we are not properly a part of it, if we do not blend in against the wallpaper they have chosen for us then we have not “made it”; we are not successful, we are not attractive, we are not happy and we are not worthy because we do not have what they have, or what they have told us we must have. And this is somehow our faults, because obviously we are not doing it right. We are not working hard enough, or we are simply not good enough. There must be something wrong with us.

But I have a theory.

In this theory, there is nothing wrong with us at all.