Tuesday 14 May 2013

Skint


I had a long chat to my mother yesterday. In 1972 she went back to work having got the last of four kids (I'm the eldest) safely into what was then called Junior School (We had real schools back then with only the earliest glimmer of the notion of holding everybody back on account of some misguided egalitarian nonsense) She took a job as a representative for the Empire Stores home shopping catalogue company and largely touted their wares to exactly the kind of working class family we were.

She was shocked to discover, lurking in the teeming council estates full of the genuine working class, a new kind of denizen; families who managed to survive entirely without regular work. No, not the lovable Barbaras and Toms of the self-sufficient Good Life model, but the prototypes for the ‘unwaged’ underclass now under the protective custody of the Labour Party and its apologists.

Narrowly avoiding the all-too regular occurrence of the limited-to-140-characters Twitter-spat last night, my interlocutors were demanding I furnish them with examples of the harm done by socialism. Actually they were mostly critical of my apparently wanting to lay the blame at the feet of Karl Marx, which I absolutely wasn’t doing. I was however, suggesting that the origins of the widespread take-up of socialism lay with Marx, Engels and other young Hegelians and the whole class-struggle, means-of-production malarkey.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to point at the many examples of murderous socialist regimes corralled under the various versions and nomenclatures of Communist or Socialist, collectivism, such as those of Soviet Russia, Nazism, North Korea, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and so on. All I had to do was suggest they watch Channel Four’s new documentary Skint, filmed on a Scunthorpe estate; the real life version of Shameless.

On a small scale there is absolutely no doubt that some form of social collectivism must exist in order to prevent us tearing each other limb from limb. We used to call that ‘the family’ – remember them? You know, where children were brought up in nurturing environments and taught the rules and given aspirations to better themselves while the government’s role was to provide educational and legislative structures to make that possible. But as the scale of government intervention grows, control is lost.

Socialism maybe doesn’t intend to impoverish people but it always does, as opportunistic and resourceful humans adapt to their environment and choose, if regular work is not available or pays too little, the kind of lifestyle seen on Skint. Black marketeering, petty theft, casual acceptance of dangerous drug use and gross, anti-social behaviour all become normalised and accepted modes of living. The answer to the doomed life cycles thus created by the good intentions of big government surely can’t just be more big government. I have a sense, at least, that the coalition knows this, just as Labour desperately tries to ignore it.

The true face of productive Britain

What’s the solution? Short of a brief and deep humane cull, I have no quick answers, but neither do those who seek to rule us. But at least Skint answered one question that has long puzzled Britain’s social philosophers. Much of the programme centred around the unschooled, uncontrolled, fifteen-year-old jailbird-in-waiting, Connor, as he made his mother’s life a misery. If you’re looking for a contender, then I propose Connor as the real c**t in Scunthorpe.

6 comments:

  1. Old Showground14 May 2013 at 08:40

    "The answer to the doomed life cycles thus created by the good intentions of big government surely can’t just be more big government."

    True, but government will always vote for itself, ultimately. The first priority of government is its own survival; the more of them there are, the more they can feed off each other and thus survive. So, government has to get bigger.

    Like a pyramid scheme, the people who run the state need more coming in below to feed up to the top. Government officials clamber to the top so the upward drift of sustenance won't bypass them, which happens lower down in the base levels.

    The 'aspirations' of all the Connors in Scunny is a form of survival too. To survive they need the benefits and lax justice system and non-critical assistance of the socialist dreamers, and they will get them in order to go on doing what they do.

    Oddly then, the government climbers need the Connors to justify their climbing. The likes of the Scunny lot aid and abet big government by giving them reason to have conferences and issue edicts and award themselves more assistants and larger pay packets.

    The Empire of Westminster needs loyal subjects, and maybe Skint provided an idea of who is, in the end, most loyal to the idea of big government.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris Roderick14 May 2013 at 12:22

    These people have always existed. Hogarth drew them, Wesley tried to convert them, General Booth to save them. 19th century reformers knew that the only way was to control them by legislation.

    Modern leftards think that by throwing money at them and trying to pull the rest of society down to their level, they will somehow improve. Velvet glove treatment has not worked, regrettably iron fist must

    ReplyDelete
  3. Being brought up on what the BBC entitled the 'Worst Council Estate in Britain', surely qualifies me to publish a response to this excellent blog entry ;0)

    It is interesting to see that the problems of 20 years ago, have got much worse. Two issues, we are short of jobs that's no lie (it also provides many lazy, workshy bastards with a catch-all excuse), but I'm pretty positive that there was a massive stigma attached to people that didn't work when I grew up, even on a rough Council estate. This seems to have been obliterated by Labour's disasterous tenure. We can all be respected now by doing fuck all apparently.

    On our Estate back then (it isn't that long ago, 15-22 years), unless there was a damn good health reason, families that had nobody working in them were thought of as scum. To accompany this, they were usually robbing scum. To further complement this, due to the amount of time on their hands, they were also druggie scum. How our family danced with joy when the family of robbers house across the road burnt down and she lost all her possessions (what goes around, comes around, and we didn't dance until we knew everybody was safely outside! Then we partied for everybody they had robbed from, it was AWESOME)

    If my friends/family were out of work, they weren't out of work for long, they'd do anything to get work, because if they were part of our group, everyone else would bloody tell them to stop being a lazy bastard and to sort their life out. Packing, YTS scheme, cleaning, baking, window cleaning, painting houses, decorating... fucking anything, just fucking do something, or go away and lose your friends, we didn't want to know people that didn't work.

    What would make for a far more entertaining programme would be to line them all up and subsequently Taser each of the fat, disrespectful, dirty, lazy, scruffy, stinking no-marks, so we can hear them scream and watch the agony on their faces. The following day they would be tasked to get a job or they would all be Tasered again, and it all be televised for normal folk's enjoyment. Miraculously, I bet they could all find gainful employment in less than a week.

    Harsh? No, I've lived it, been there, seen it and done it... and, interestingly enough, made quite a lot of myself, as have my friends. This Country provided us with all the tools for us to earn a living, thank you very much Britain. So let's start with more tax breaks for those like us that do give a shit, and completely cutting off the money to idiots like those displayed in this Godforsaken programme last night.

    I grew up with these types of people. Take away politics, take away left and right. I fucking know. Taser the bastards into shape.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So, come on Chris,don't hold back. You can speak your mind here! :o)

      Delete
  4. Let me just leave you with one little story from my life, that ended up shaping it for the better. I'm going to put this on my blog, so I'll keep it short.

    When I left School, I decided that I wasn't going to College (I would have messed around too much, I wasn't mature enough), and two weeks into my six weeks holidays at about 11am, my Dad came into my bedroom. The conversation went like this:

    Dad - 'What are you doing?'
    Me - 'In bed Dad, what's the matter?'
    Dad - 'Are you going to College, or are you going to get a job?'
    Me - 'It's six weeks holiday Dad, not now'
    Dad - 'No, you've left School now, there is no six weeks holiday'
    Me - 'Well, I'm not going to College, they are all doing media studies, it's shit'
    Dad - 'well you need to get a job'
    Me - 'but it's six...'
    Dad - 'Right lad, it's a simple as this, you need to pay your way in life and you do that by working, otherwise, you don't live under this roof, I'll kick you out on the street'

    Suddenly, things started to click into place, really quite fast, and in a moment of fluster and panic, I said...

    'but I.. what job... where... how will I?'

    He then came out with something really quite brilliant. He said this, and I remember it word for word, and I can see him standing over my bed and saying it now. By this time, he had my full attention.

    'I don't care what you do and what it takes, but I will drive you to the job centre and careers office, I will drive you anywhere you need to go and give you all the help you need, but you will get out of bed and come looking for a job with me now, you don't get into finding what you want to do by not working, neither can you pay your way. Get dressed smartly, get downstairs, we're going out in half an hour'

    Within a week I had a job on a YTS scheme as a trainee Photocopier Engineer. I explained to my Dad, how will I afford to get by on £30 a week. He said, 'you owe me nothing, you don't have to pay board, you don't have to pay me anything, I want you to go and work hard, and get into a schedule, you can pay me back some day'.

    Whilst my friends went to College and subsequently University, one did brilliantly in high-level Computer Sciences (he programs real-time DSPs for major recording studies and equipment), some did other courses with massive intakes, and little work at the end of it.

    When they'd all finished University, I'd had about three different jobs, an excellent track record and references, and I was already wearing a suit into work. I was working for the No.1 Security and Communications company in the UK, milking them for the enormous amount of skills they eventually gave me. I now have my own, successful business, and am surrounded by good people and can give the opportunities to people that want to work, just like me.

    That was the importantance of my Dad's little talk that morning, and I will never, ever stop repaying him for it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Even before I clicked the link, I *knew* what your topic was, when you used the word 'snipers' !

    ReplyDelete