What is the worst—the very worst—government policy can do to you if you have a job in an industry with a strong future, live in a pleasant and well-equipped part of the country, and have enough money to have always thought of shoes as a necessity rather than a luxury? Push the highest rate of tax to 90 percent, and let the bin men go out on strike. Annoying—but not fatal. If you are generally secure, a government can certainly inconvenience you, make you poorer, or make you angrier—it can be, let’s be frank, a massive, incompetent, depressing, maybe even immoral pain in the arse—but you, and your family, and your social circle, will survive it. It is unlikely the essential course of your life will be much different under one government than the next, however diverse their ideas.
By way of contrast, what’s the worst—the very worst—a government policy can do to you if you’re poor—food-bank poor? Dependent-on-the-government poor? Well, everything. It can suddenly freeze, drop, or cancel your benefits—leaving you in the panic of unpayable bills and deciding which meals to skip. It can underfund your hospitals and schools—death in a corridor, no exams passed: no escape route into private hospitals or tutors when your purse is full of buttons and old bus tickets. It can let your entire industry die—every skill learned and piece of knowledge earned left useless. It can leave your whole city to “managed decline,” as Geoffrey Howe’s recently published suggestion for Liverpool revealed.
You know when middle-class people feel “absolutely devastated” by the government’s policy on the EU? They’re not devastated. They’re just annoyed.
You know when poor people are “absolutely devastated” by the government’s policy on housing benefit? They are absolutely devastated. They’re in a hostel, with their children. It’s not just words to them. It’s the reporting of a fact.
Because if you are in the wrong town, in the wrong job, in the wrong class, the policies of a government can ruin you. And all those around you, too—so that you are all in fear. I don’t know if you ever went to a former manufacturing town in the 1980s, but that’s how they felt. The sadness and fear was everywhere—it saturated estates like greasy fog. It saturated the people like greasy fog: even now.
Whenever people reminisce about the eighties now, they always mention how the prospect of nuclear annihilation was a palpable thing. We were thoroughly and repeatedly talked through what it would be like to live in a postnuclear wasteland: the lack of resources, the lack of hope. We were all conversant with what would happen when the wind blew. We knew what waited for us if diplomacy failed.
As a nine-year-old when Threads—with its bomb blast, and melting St. Paul’s, and evaporating, screaming citizens—was broadcast, I had that hazy, childish thing of half believing, half not believing, that the dropping of the bomb had now happened. In Wolverhampton, it looked like diplomacy had failed. So much of what was promised for the apocalypse appeared to have come to us, bar the radiation burns—and, in the 1980s, antibiotic skincare for acne was so in its infancy that, often, one saw a particularly unlucky, gangling, pustule-crippled adolescent who looked like he really might have been at the epicenter of the mushroom cloud.
We would drive into town, and my father would start the same rattled monologue: “When I was a kid, at this time of the day, all you’d hear was the ‘tramp, tramp, tramp’ of people’s feet as they walked to the factories—every bus would be full, the streets would be seething. This town had something to do, and money in its pocket. People used to come here for work, and get it, the same day. Look at it now,” he’d say, as we went right through the center: boarded-up buildings, buddleia growing out of windows.
“A ghost town. Where have they gone? Where have they all gone?”
We were here to shop, at the cheapest place in town: the big, empty supermarket by the retail market, where someone had thrown up shelves inside what used to be a factory, and piled goods high and sold them cheap. Mice would run from the sacks of rice. Ghosts seemed to live up in the roof, in the tangle of pipes they’d simply painted over, in a sickly, unlikely turquoise.
It was only driving back home that you’d see where “everyone” was—queuing outside the job center, heads down. The old fellas, like my dad, who’d always thought they’d work jobs wet with sweat, who could only sign their names with an “X,” and who knew they were, in the resettling of the economy, fucked. The younger men, who looked poleaxed by knowing that 2,999,999 people had signed on before them—although part of their discombobulation could have been their jeans, which were still, at the time, worn very tight, and without the mercy of a Lycra mix.
I was, accidentally, in the town center when the riots happened—when it seemed like every man in the city ran down the main road, screaming, and the police vans boxed us in, and our dad pulled us into a doorway, and pushed us to his chest, under his coat, with the shrill, sour smell of his sweat, as he panicked and tried to hide us from screaming men under his padded Burton’s anorak.
And then, in times of calm, the attempts at pleasure. We went to West Park—Wolverhampton’s green space—once. We were the first people in the park that day. As we walked through the gates, the muddy banks of the lake became animated, and the water began to churn, and there was a chittering sound that made you want to wipe your hands clean over and over and over again. Hundreds and hundreds of rats were fleeing at our approach—they were swimming out to their nests on the island in the middle of the lake, while emitting odd rat screams.
So that’s where I grew up. The riots and rats and ghosts and sad, silent queues. It seemed like diplomacy had failed in Wolverhampton, in the 1980s. Like some kind of bomb had dropped.
And when an entire city falls—when you live somewhere that feels like the ruins of a civilization; when your elders tell you, with a look of shock that is still new, that it did not use to be like this: that things were better, that things were pleasant, but not in your lifetime; and you see that they mourn the childhood you are having, and want to cover it up with their big, hard hands—you look, as all ruined, bombed cities must, to your leaders, to see what their reaction is to your unhappiness. You look to see what their solution is.
And the government of the eighties did not come and help. I sound as pathetic as a child when I say this now, but that’s how we all felt. It was made clear that governments do not help in these matters—that the spores of private enterprise blow as they may, and that everything else was down to the individual. That is your city that was ruined; it was because not enough citizens were being dynamic, and opening wine bars, or starting up tech firms, or trading on the Stock Exchange. If a city was inferior, it was simply because its people were inferior. We were the problem. We—in Liverpool, and Sunderland, and Glasgow, and in the Welsh Valleys—were just . . . wrong. We should have turned into something else, and we hadn’t. And, as a consequence, we were disliked by our own government.
I grew up knowing that Margaret Thatcher disapproved of my entire existence: a family of eight children, in a council house, with a union-leader dad: home-educated, bohemian, scared of arguments, immersed in gay culture, with Welsh mining relatives sitting in the front room, talking about their picket lines. We were the kind of people holding people back.
In recent years I’ve frequently been told that my childhood dislike and fear of Mrs. Thatcher was deeply ironic—as I am, in actual fact, a classic child of Thatcher. “Look at you! Self-made! Working since you were thirteen, from a council estate in Wolverhampton! Pulled up by your bootstraps! A strong woman in a man’s world! You are the absolute proof of everything she was saying! Margaret Thatcher made you!”
To which I always reply, very quietly: “Yes. But look around. How many others like me made it out? How many ascended into the world of boys from Eton and Cambridge and the Home Counties, at ease with walking into big rooms, and making things happen? Where are the other working-class kids from my generation? Because I look around, and I don’t see them. The barriers did not come down. Indeed, compared to my father’s generation, they appe
ar to have gone back up again.”
So this is where all that anger started—the anger that confused so many, on the announcement of Baroness Thatcher’s death. All those people childishly downloading “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” or throwing parties to “celebrate” her passing. Among many commentators, there was bewilderment over the fireworks that were set off, and the champagne—put away in cupboards for so many years, waiting for this day—being drunk. Why would you celebrate a death? The death of someone hardworking, old, and confused? It is, surely, unnecessarily crude. It’s spiteful.
But for all those who were left behind, to mourn their own towns, the sadness and the fear had turned to sour anger, as it always does. And that is when so many impotent but determined entries were made in diaries. Entries made when a factory closed, or Section 28 was brought in, or a relative came back from a protest, bleeding. Entries made when politics seemed to get very, very personal—in your wage packet, and in your bed. Entries when politics became dangerous, and destructive, in so many towns.
And they will all have been written differently, on different days, in different pens in a thousand different ways, but what they all boiled down to was this: “I can’t do anything else, now, but outlive this. Outlive you. All I can do is outrun you.”
And that is what all the cheap, unworthy, yet ultimately heartfelt celebration was on April 8. It was the simple astonishment and relief of people—in the Valleys, on the estates, in the hostels and on failed marches—who felt they had, against all their own predictions, survived something.
The Rich Are Blithe
I was brought up to shout “CLASS WAR!” at any opportunity—particularly if someone in a Mercedes cut my dad up on a dual carriageway—but I’ve learned it’s more . . . complicated than that.
This column was written after Ed Miliband—the now-former leader of the Labour Party, cursed with the air of a sixteen-year-old boy continually bullied for being too open about his love of maths—gave a Labour Conference speech where he basically called the Tories dim. And, as I say, it’s more complicated than that.
So, Ed Miliband’s conference speech—which, unusually, abandoned the usual accusations of Tory maliciousness in favor of a wholly new tactic: calling them divs, instead.
“Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out-of-touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower?” Miliband asked, in a speech that frequently looked like it might end—like the 1980s McDonald’s advert which it appeared to ape—with the line “. . . and all wrapped up in a sesame seed buuuuuuuun,” but, alas, did not.
Labour’s new line seems to be that the Tories are not a coldhearted bunch of peasant punchers—but an intellectually busted flush, instead. That they’re stupid. That’s their problem.
However, I’m not sure the best attack is claiming stupidity. There are quite a lot of clever people in this government. I think the Tories’ real weakest spot is their . . . blitheness, instead.
Blitheness is an odd thing. Blitheness is different from optimism—which is basically a graceful digging-in, a silent vow never to give up. Optimism is a fit soul, committed to outrunning the darkness, however long it takes. Optimism has looked at the alternative—cynicism, resignation, despair—close up, in the eye, and, horrified, stiffened its resolve, and kept up a steady trot, towards the uplands.
Blitheness, on the other hand, is not hard-won. Blitheness is what you are born with—like lanugo. And, like lanugo, blitheness starts to wear off as soon as you rub up against anything abrasive.
Adults, then, who are still blithe have not rubbed up against anything abrasive. Blitheness does not have calluses on its hands; it does not stay awake at night, worrying what the next day’s post will bring. Blitheness only ever gets birthday cards in the post; and postcards; and catalogues for candles, cashmere, and pinafores. Blitheness is cushioned in the velvet surround of there being enough money to sort nearly every eventuality out.
To people who have often dreamed, in panic, of sealing up their letterbox so that bad news can never be delivered, David Cameron’s speech, a week after Miliband’s, came from deep within this swaddling.
Explaining how £10 billion of cuts to the welfare bill would be introduced, Cameron mooted the end of housing benefit to single people under twenty-five.
“If hardworking young people have to live at home while they work and save, why should it be any different for those who don’t?” Cameron asked, to wild, blithe applause.
It takes a blithe man to ask this question. Someone for whom “at home” is Mum and Dad—careworn, but still loving—wryly opening up a bottle of wine when their postgraduate children camp out in the spare room, saving for the deposit for a house.
Sure, there will be arguments outside the bathroom when the hot water runs out, and the awkwardness of having massive adult bodies in the room that once held a toddler never quite goes away. But in a world where the money has disappeared, families must stick together and help each other out. Austerity measures mean feeling cramped, not having much privacy. Canceling a holiday. Delaying your life plans for a decade.
If you are blithe, it would never occur to you that there are homes that are not a refuge at all. Rather, that “home” is actually darkness, or a trap, and Mum and Dad are not welcoming—but dangerous. It’s a blithe man who does not know how much damage can occur before the age of twenty-five behind the family doors. You can be blithe if you’ve never been in a flat so tiny the place feels like a pan coming to the boil, filled with grease, smoke, and sour anxiety. If you’d never been somewhere so small that there is nowhere to work, and save.
Optimism is saying, firmly, “Things will get better.”
Blitheness is saying, easily, “Things never get that bad in the first place.”
Churchill was, despite his depression, an optimist. Bertie Wooster, in his spats, blithe. Blitheness is telling everyone to tighten their belts—and it never occurring that some people just don’t have a belt.
But, of course, who does not love Wooster? For this is the deep irony of the appeal of the Tories—that this Boris-y, Cameron, public school blitheness is one of their biggest appeals.
In times of depression, frustration, and despair, who doesn’t find their spirits lifted by someone with the sunny, seductive belief that the solution to poverty isn’t to spend money—but to save it? Who doesn’t find their anxiety relieved by these girl-faced, almost nonchalant boys who exude an air of things being fixable simply by a stiffening of character, and everyone pulling together? These aren’t stupid beliefs. They have often been the saving of our country. But believing that these are the solutions to everyone’s problems? That’s . . . blithe.
How to Handle Other People’s 5:2 Diets
Of course, there are lighter, more enjoyable aspects of living in London: Regent’s Park rose garden, tiny dogs, spotting celebrities getting keys cut in Timpson’s. And the 5:2 diet. For a brief spell in 2013, everyone was on the 5:2 diet, and I found it very, very amusing.
At this point in the summer of 2013 there is nothing most urban Westerners need more than advice on how to cope with a friend, colleague, loved one, or fellow lift user who is on the 5:2 diet.
For those who don’t know what the 5:2 is, it is a diet wherein the dieter eats perfectly normally for five days of the week—then spends the remaining two days on a very restricted diet, of no more than 500 calories for women and 600 for men. The 5:2 is also referred to as “intermittent fasting,” which gives it a pleasingly religious/medieval air—the subconscious suggestion being that the dieter will end up not only more slender, but also wiser, calmer, and closer to God.
Current proponents of the diet are bogglingly varied, and are said to include Benedict Cumberbatch (“It’s the only way to slim down into Sherlock”), Sir Mervyn King, Beyoncé, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and the book The Fast Diet has now sold over 250,000 copies in the UK. So, yes—the 5:2 is all around you. There is no escape.
Indeed, you are almost certainly going to spend some time today with someone who is following it. Here is my advice for you, when that interaction should happen.
Establish, as soon as possible—as if it were an emergency—if they are on a “Fast Day” or not. This is key information you will need to know right up front, before you say or do anything. I cannot stress how vital it is that you discover this. Thankfully, it’s very easy to find out if someone is on a Fast Day, because anyone on a Fast Day will tend to say “I’m on a Fast Day” in a small, tense voice within thirty seconds of meeting you. They will then look at you as if expecting you to respond with something that expresses great sympathy—“Oh no! A Fast Day! You must be very, very hungry!”—but also admiration—“But, then, eating only 500 calories for a whole day is an amazing thing for you to be doing, Sue! Go you!” Bear in mind that even if you do give this perfect greeting—rather than the far more likely nonplussed “Oh”—it’s important for you to realize that, ultimately, nothing can go well between you and this Fasting person today. This is someone functioning on 40 percent of their brain capacity, at best—disabled as they are by extreme hunger and constant thoughts of how much they would like some delicious, frangible buttery toast. They hate you because you are a person who can have some toast. And if you go so far as to eat some toast in front of them, they will turn away in a poorly suppressed murderous rage, probably to go and stab a picture of you eating some toast, which they are about to draw, in the aching hours of free time unfilled, today, with lovely breakfasts, dinners, lunches, and snacks. Although any point in the day with someone Fasting is basically going to be a tense and unpleasant pain in the arse for you, there is a particularly dangerous time:
Between two and five p.m. on a Fast Day is usually the peak of the hunger—and, therefore, the peak of the danger for you. During this spike in hunger, brain capacity appears to drop as low as 9 percent, and Fasters become actively evil. Like demons. Personally, were I prime minister, I would make it so people you were talking to on the phone had to say, at the start of the conversation, “It’s four thirty p.m. and I’m on a Fast Day,” and then you could just simply put the phone down before they inexplicably refuse to process your claim, send out an engineer to mend your boiler, or authorize an emergency crew to come and cut you, bleeding, out of the wreckage of your car. NB: In all likelihood, the person who just crashed into your car was someone else on a Fast Day, who’d just driven past a Burger King, and was blind with tears of hunger.