Pavlov's Dogs
Bashing the poor in broken Britain.
Suppose you come across someone drowning. What do you do?
The guidance suggests you stay rooted to solid ground. If possible, you throw the drowning person a life-ring. Campaigners on water safety say to 'throw but don't go.' Quietly, near the bottom of the literature, they reveal why. If you decide to play the hero and dive into the water, the drowning person's survival instinct often kicks into overdrive. Presented with a floating mass—Namely, you—the afflicted may push your head beneath the water to save themselves. You're not the saviour but the sacrifice. It's grim, I know. In the words of Avon Barksdale, it's just business.
That same instinct informs the Western hemisphere's most successful political party. For good reason, the Conservatives have governed Britain for two-thirds of the last century: They'll do anything to survive. As former leader William Hague put it, the Conservative Party wins because it's an 'autocracy tempered by regicide.'
Granted, that regicidal tendency has misfired of late. The Conservatives bounced Boris—the most popular Tory prime minister since Thatcher. They lumped Liz Truss—a grow-in-water toy Thatcher—only to install Rishi Sunak, a man with the social nous of a dive bar handjob.
Despite his formidable brain and his indomitable work ethic, Sunak's languishing some twenty-odd points behind an uninspiring Labour party. This year's general election promises an epoch-staining massacre of a party which just three-and-half years ago sacked Labour's heartlands.
The current fixation swirling around the Conservative Party mind is that of welfare reform.
Last week, Prime Minister Sunak outlined his 'moral mission' to stop 'fraudsters' exploiting 'the natural compassion and generosity of the British people.' Sunak will achieve this by exploiting the natural suspicion and bellicosity of the British people.
The problem is simple. Since the pandemic, the numbers claiming out-of-work sickness benefits have punched a hole in the ceiling. The solution is simple: Pretend they're not sick or fiddle the numbers.
Sunak said that 1.3 million people on the sick claimed they were anxious and depressed. And yet, one million of those people claimed such ailments as secondary causes, i.e. not the reason they're off work.
According to Sunak, benefit claimants are 'gaming the system' and milking the hardworking taxpayer. Or something. Sunak sounds like ChatGPT spent the evening drinking bathtub gin in a local park.
Addressing Britain's 'sick-note culture,' Sunak promised to strip sick notes from doctors' hands and unleash sick-note squads on the malingerers and mottled malcontents.
I'd imagine these squads, private firms incentivised to say 'no', will operate on the British default setting of 'Didn't do me any harm.' That is, they'll compare any and all ailments to the negative nostalgia of their scabrous childhood in which they envied the kids with Polio, and a good beating didn't do them any harm.
Sunak riffled the pub-bore playbook. And another thing! If you refuse to work after twelve months on the dole, you'll be cast out to fend for yourself.
According to our unelected prime minister, who got the job despite failing the interview twice, you get nothing in this life without hard work.
On those pregnant words swelled the collective membrum virile. Millions of Brits fizzled in an auto-erotic frenzy. In this curious breed, words like crackdown and clampdown and enough is enough can reliably induce a Viagrarian boner at fifty paces.
It's sub-Freudian. Peruse their in-house bibles, and you'll gawp the human mind shrinking from desperation toward its closest relation—cruelty.
One curious linguistic development is the revival of Victorian argot such as indolence, ignorance, idleness, and want. In the Daily Telegraph, repressed strangely sexual urges thread through poor-bashing columns. What smut! Such essays seethe with sadomasochistic undertones.
I pray daily for a salacious exposé on the front pages, outing poor-bashing writers and their illicit affairs with sex workers gussied up as benefit scroungers. It's enough to make a Roman senator blush.
The comment section is where the fun really starts. Lurking between fingertip and keyboard are violent, vivid solutions to all the world's ailments.
If only we fed prisoners mouldy bread, if only we birched children at random, if only we swaddled scroungers in orange jumpsuits and forced them to clean the litter deposited onto filthy streets, our country of hardworking taxpayers would be great again. If only British life were still nasty, brutish, and short.
You cannot read a newspaper or magazine here without drowsing through tiresome, factually impoverished agitprop.
I'm yet to read a piece which possesses the facts. According to commentators, over a million people simply sauntered before a doctor who then stuffed their wibbling mouths with the fruits of hardworking taxpayers. One is goaded to believe that a quick trip to the GP ensures a lifetime of feathering one's arse with state handouts.
It's instructive to watch in real-time the cuckoo clock burst forth from the Conservative Party mind. Last week, the secretary for work and pensions, Mel Stride, claimed personal independence payments (PIP) amounted to thousands of pounds per month. The maximum is just under £750.
Unburdened by the facts, Stride strode on. Many should lose their benefits, and instead get vouchers for 'meaningful support' such as therapy, he said. He did not say that over one million were already waiting for therapy. Gallingly, Stride called it a 'Beveridge reset'. Not quite. William Beveridge, a Liberal MP who brainstormed the modern welfare state, saw Maslow's pyramid before Maslow. Beveridge thought the freedom to climb the pyramid depended on solid foundations. Needy people are not free. Before 1980, conservatives believed such heresies. Â
The authors of such Pavlovian schlock often confuse a temporary sick-note from a GP (for which one is lucky to get sick pay, let alone enhanced benefit payments) with an official 'unfit to work' diagnosis.
Securing that diagnosis is not the work of a wink and a nod. Welfare claimants must pass stringent interviews with doctors.
And the life of Riley it is not. Even when unfit to work, one doesn't get enhanced payments for the first three months. Those enhanced payments fall short of what the French and Germans pay their unemployed.
Lose your job in Britain and you'll get £382 per month. If you prove you're unable to work, you'll get around £750 per month—a middle-ranking carouser's wine and fags bill.
Of course, to point this out invites the familiar chorus of crickets.
Sunak and Stride know the facts. They know forty percent of benefit claimants are working. They know Great Britain pays the stingiest benefits in northern Europe. They know, too, their beloved Thatcher's amateur surgery costs us billions a year in handouts. They know the average Brit is much worse off than the average French or German. They know the vast majority of those claiming benefits have paid into the pot in which many wish they could not piss. They know all of this. They hope that millions of others do not know. And they're right. Â
They know, too, that Brits cannot abide any measure of unfairness, at least amongst the lower orders.
The Conservatives excel in deftly exploiting the Great British fear of someone somewhere taking the piss.
To 'take the piss' means to make fun of someone or to take more than one's fair share. Often, we bleach this colourful expression from the rhyming slang 'Mickey Bliss' into 'taking the Mickey.'
Back in the olden days, the destitute collected urine to sell to tanners and gunpowder manufacturers. Back then, 'taking the piss' meant depriving the already hard-up of meagre earnings. The very poorest 'didn't have a pot to piss in.'
Spend an afternoon or morning in a British boozer, and you'll soon learn (often from those with no evidence themselves of productive work) that Britain teems with battalions of feckless layabouts who are, to exhaust the proletarian idiom, taking the piss.
This fear animates much of British life. British people, especially amongst the precariat, loathe any notion of someone taking the Mick. Of course, this is not an irrational tendency. Growing up working-class, those who sailed through life without ever setting an alarm clock weren't too popular. Such injustice offends the British sense of fairness. But that injustice is more cartoon than documentary.
Ask the man in the pub about so-called benefit scroungers. He'll swear they get thousands a month on top of all their bills paid by the taxpayer. How many would lose their benefits after Sunak's twelve-month cut-off? Apparently, it's only a few thousand.
But facts don't compromise reality. Suspicion and mendacity rule. Facts do not matter. What matters is someone somewhere might be taking the piss. To this bovine paranoia, the rest of us are slaves.
I've always wondered what animates the social Darwinists. Such a predatory outlook must compensate for a gnawing shortcoming. It's the type who watches Glengarry Glen Ross and creams over the landshark Alec Baldwin. It's the type who thinks The Wolf of Wall Street is a self-help documentary and not a venal celebration of tiresome psychopaths. A rousing tribute to that wanker from school who works in Dubai now.
Strangely, the soi-disant Supermen who insist life is sink-or-swim believe forces beyond their control hold them back from greatness. When times are good, they claim those at the bottom are ineffectual and deserving of their lot. When times are bad, they claim those at the bottom are all-powerful corrupters of the nation’s very soul.
After fourteen years of abject failure, the Conservatives blame our many ills on some pandemic-riddled kid who can't leave the house lest a panic attack fold him in half.
Such thinking is visceral. Back in 2019, Boris Johnson won a truly national landslide. Buoyed by the trust of those who routinely substitute 'Tory' for a potent epithet rhyming with Jeremy Hunt, the Tories looked to govern not by the term but by the generation.
The realignment was not to be. Why? There's something in the Conservative Party that cannot abide such democratic notions. To properly function, it seems the Conservatives need at least half of people to loathe them. Offered a generation in power, they said no. They'd much rather sneak into office and commit wretched acts for the thrill of doing so on behalf of the few who cling to some poxy Latin inscription on their school tie. There's something in the Conservative Party brain which cannot leave monkey-minded high school hierarchies on the sodden playing fields of its memory.
Meanwhile, Sunak buckles beneath the weight of his mummified logic. If your successes are all your own, then your failures are yours, too. For the first time in his 43 years, Sunak is failing.
Sunak feigns belief in meritocracy. His problem is that most British people don't fall for American-style self-mythology.
Footage from his younger days reveals a callous, unyielding streak strangely potent amidst his twenty-one years.
In that video, young Rishi boasts of his rise from pharmacist's son to friend of aristocrats. The poster boy for meritocracy cannot contain his self-satisfaction. So much so, Sunak peddled that story for his failed leadership bid. He rose from nothing. And look at him now.
Sunak neglected to mention attending two of the most exclusive schools in the country, the fees of which exclude anyone outside the richest five percent, and the tickets from which guarantee a place amongst the social elite. If anything ails this hedge fund pretending to be a country, it's this genre of lurid fiction.
"I have friends who are aristocrats. I've have friends who are upper class," he says in the clip. His proud father looks on. "I have friends who are working class." Oh? He corrects himself. "Well, not working class..." The sneer could shatter his teeth.
Why would Sunak have working-class friends? He says this as if it's a natural law that someone as special as himself wouldn’t know anyone who merely drifts through life mending to the sick, transporting food, piping gas into homes, building houses and skyscrapers, policing the streets, or trading bullets in some faraway hellhole. He corrects himself as if he's admitted something disqualifying to normal human beings.
Why would he bump gums with those losers who keep things ticking over? Those derelicts without whom society crumbles overnight. If only they applied themselves. If only they just swam around the right testicles, and paid for the correct school tie, they could be winners, too.
George Orwell said England is a family with the wrong members in charge. After working my way through a tome of his most surgical essays, the more I see everything changes, and everything stays the same.
"...only to install Rishi Sunak, a man with the social nous of a dive bar handjob." That's the Gage I know and love!
And I thought I could be bleak! Powerful writing, Sir.