Eleven More Things

1.

It is 1980, maybe 1979, perhaps even 1981.  I am washing cars.  It’s my part-time job, the one I do because I like the things I can do with the money: music, drugs, beer, the usual.  I’ve been washing a few cars in the neighbourhood for a couple of years but recently I got a job down on the causeway at a second-hand car showroom.  I do three or four hours on a Saturday morning.

This morning the guy who looks after the cars during the week was there.  He does bigger cleaning than me – full valet on occasions – my job is sometimes not much more than wiping off the dust that’s fallen since Friday.

I can’t remember his name.

What I do remember is him asking me what I do when I’m not washing cars.  I tell him I’m at school.  He’s a bit older than me, perhaps 19 or 20 or 21.  He asks me what I study.  I tell him maths, physics and economics.  He looks at me for a few moments.

“What, like home economics?” he says.

I can’t remember what I said in reply.

A few minutes and thirty years later I’m standing in front of Her Majesty’s Planning Inspector at the Public Inquiry into the revised London Plan.  More or less every word of that sentence would be incomprehensible to my car-washing friend.  I would probably say something like: well, the Mayor of London has a duty to produce a plan for all the houses and buildings and transport in London, and he has to do this every few years, and whenever he or she produces a new one it goes through a great long process… (and I wonder if he’s still listening at this point)… and one of the main things that has to happen is that there’s a series of public meetings to go through the Plan to see if people agree with it or not, or whether the Mayor’s made any mistakes, that sort of thing.  It’s a bit like a court hearing, with a judge overseeing things, and witnesses and people asking questions.

And it’s called “a Public Inquiry” and the judge is “Her Majesty’s Planning Inspector” and that’s where I found myself back in 2008 or 2009 or 2010 arguing that the Mayor (who at that point was a chap called Boris Johnson) and his people (that is, the people who’d done all the work for him) had made a fundamental error.  I was arguing that the whole premise of their economic calculations – of continued and unending economic growth – was wrong.  I’d submitted a paper and I’d been summoned by Her Majesty’s Planning Inspector and I was trying to explain myself.  I was arguing that this game we’re in, this game of trying endlessly to grow this thing we call “an economy”, this game is doomed.

Yes, it’s a game in which some things get better – healthcare, the niceness of our holidays, the quality of our audio-visual equipment and so forth – but a lot of things get worse.  Basing a plan for the future of London on such a game was, I argued, the same as a decision that these things bad things were ok.  If you plan to make London’s economy ‘bigger’ I said, you were also saying:

·         more people will suffer stress and mental ill-health

·         there will be more poor people

·         we will fuck up the planet even more quickly

To his credit, the Planning Inspector did at least listen (though in his report, published a few months later, he declined to instruct the Mayor to have another think).  The Mayor’s henchfolk, by contrast, simply took the piss.

2.

What is “new economic thinking”?

What is “Build Back Better”?

What is “a new social contract”?

What is “a Green net-zero Covid-19 recovery package”?

3.

The goldfinch I can see from my back window has been pulling at a piece of string for four days now.  The piece of string is one I used to tie an unruly branch of grapevine to a wall as part of an over-elaborate bower I have built in my little back garden.

The goldfinch grabs the string in her beak and tugs and pulls and sometimes tries to fly off with it.  As soon as it become taut she is momentarily swung through the air like a swingball.

I want her to succeed, even though it will mean my grapevine bower comes crashing to the ground.  She will have her little bit of string.  I will build a new and better bower.

4.

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS

This is a political slogan.

This is not a political slogan.

5.

WE

It is not something that you should do, or I should do, or – most of all – that they should do.  It’s “we”.

And not some subset “we” – we the readers of this blog, we the members of this bubble, we the enlightened or the wise.  We the us.  All of us.

MUST

It’s non-negotiable.  It’s part of the deal.  It’s essential, necessary.  Without it, nothing else works, or happens.

LOOK AFTER

You know when you look after something?  Or someone?

Well, that.

OUR

Not theirs, not yours, not mine.  Our.  Belonging to all of us.  Needed by all of us.

KEY WORKERS

Not ‘vital’, not ‘emergency’, not ‘special’.

Not NHS workers (but they’re included).  Not care home workers (but they’re included).  Not the emergency services (but they’re included).

Bus drivers, train drivers, delivery drivers.  Cleaners, warehouse operatives, people who grow food.

And – people at home looking after their children, people preparing food for their families, people making sure their grandfather is ok.

In short, everyone whose daily work keeps the show on the road.  These are the key workers (whether they get paid or not).

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS

No-one needs a degree to understand this sentence.  No one needs to have paid attention to Twitter, TikTok or Facebook.  No one needs to have read a newspaper, a report from a think tank or an academic article.  It doesn’t even matter if someone watches BBC, Sky, Fox or nothing at all.

6.

Today is my 20,202^nd day on earth.

7.

Net effects.

Fewer people dying in road traffic accidents, fewer people developing health conditions associated with poor air quality, more people destined for longer healthier lives because they’re now walking or cycling to work.

More people dying from strokes and heart attacks because they’re frightened of going to hospital; more people enduring domestic violence because it’s even harder for them to escape; more people experiencing stress and anxiety because they’re terrified of a pandemic outside their front door and their entire lives have been turned upside down.

I don’t know.

What if, in all this self-isolation, we are now avoiding the ordinary everyday bugs that used to keep our immune systems in regular fighting fettle?  Maybe this time next year there’ll be an actual influenza outbreak and the deaths will be higher because fewer of us have robust immune systems.

I don’t know.

Apparently, the net effect of Hurricane Katrina was positive for people’s health: so many poor people were evacuated to nicer places that they ended up living longer. See here - https://www.nber.org/papers/w24822

And in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 so many more people in the US decided to drive rather than fly that an extra 1,500 Americans died on the road in the twelve months following the attack.  See here - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-road-deaths

I don’t know.

8.

Slippage.

The poor bloody infantry.  Let’s send them back to the front.  We shall put them on the buses.  We shall put them on the trains.  We shall put them in the slaughterhouses.

The people who are most at risk from this disease are the poor, the old, the male, the black, the overweight.

The UK government has already removed the funding for street sleepers: they shall be evicted soon from their places of safety.  The unwinding will continue: soon they shall re-open the car showrooms and the clothes shops.  We shall be told it is our duty to go out and spend for Britain!

Something will begin to recede into memory.  What will that be?

9.

Bookshelf.  Random numbers: 22, 13, 31: ‘Side Effects’ by Adam Phillips.

“For Freud, childhood is the forbidden, and memory is always at best a guilty pleasure.  There is nothing more transgressive than talking about one’s childhood.  Except, that is, like a budding Oedipus, to re-create it in adult life.  It isn’t, in other words, that Freud destroyed the innocence of childhood; it is that Freud showed us that the idea of innocence was invented to destroy the truth of childhood.  Our childhood, he wants us to believe, is most akin to a Greek tragedy.  We call Oedipus a tragic hero because he is the most ordinary man in the world.

Oedipus, of course, had never seen the play.  Just like ourselves as children, he is going through it all for the first time.  By the time we get to see or read the play, it is far too late.  We are already confounded by our fate.  Psychoanalysis – and this is another paradox at the heart of Freud’s work – is always after the event.  It doesn’t cure them so much as show them what it is about themselves that is incurable.”

My emphasis.

10.

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS

I think that this is the phrase we should start from.  Find an ordinary person.  Ask them:

“Do you agree that we must look after our key workers?”

We do not have to say anything about new economic thinking or reform of the tax and benefit system.  We do not have to say anything about universal basic income or the minimum wage.  There is no need to speak of capitalism or socialism, bosses or trade unions, north or south, immigration or Europe.

We must look after our key workers.

“Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart?  When all those people died and the only people who kept going were all those key workers?”

We must look after our key workers.

“Can you imagine if something like that happens again?  We’re going to need all those key workers again.”

We must look after our key workers.

We need them all the time.

Here are two reasons why this works:

First, there is a well-developed theoretical and policy backdrop.

We can call it ‘the proletariat’ or ‘the foundational economy’ or the ‘shadow economy’, it doesn’t matter too much.  The thing that matters is need.  When Covid-19 prompted governments around the world to ‘shut down’ their economies, they didn’t entirely shut down.  Some things simply had to keep going.

In the UK, the Government actually produced a list.  I’ll let my dear friend Professor Ian Gough explain:

“This was brought home to me by a mundane list published by the UK government on March 19th, 2020: Guidance for schools, childcare providers, colleges and local authorities in England on maintaining educational provision. It listed those groups of essential workers whose children would be entitled to continuing educational provision after the shutdown of schools, preschools and colleges. In so doing it set out the sectors of the economy ‘critical to the COVID-19 response’… the sectors extend way beyond health and care or emergency services. They include farmers, supermarket staff, workers in water, electricity, gas and oil, teachers, telecommunication workers, transport staff, workers in law and justice, religious staff, social security staff and retail banking staff.”

These are the key workers.  These are the people without whom none of the rest of it happens.  The government says so.

Ian happens to be the author (together with Len Doyal) of ‘A Theory of Human Need’ (1984).  This work argues that human beings have universal and objective needs; and – lo! – when Ian lined up the 2020 UK Government’s list of key workers, there was a perfect fit with his 80s identification of needs.

Other equivalent exercises are, I’m sure, possible.  (I even tried it myself, once, when I was grappling with what an ‘economy of enough’ might really look like…)  Whatever.  The point is: there is a congruence.  There are ways of identifying the things that really need doing; and these things that really need doing need to be done by people who we can call key workers.  If we don’t look after them, we are in deep shit: there’ll be no food, or no power, or no money, or no houses, or no healthcare, or no families, and there certainly won’t be any of the comforts and luxuries we’ve come to expect.

Ergo:

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS.

It’s not a political slogan, it’s a statement of fact.

Second (I did say there were two reasons why this works) is that you can get from WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS to everything else.  It is a key leverage point.  (There’s some supplementary theoretical support here from systems and complexity theory in case we need it.)

Because the question that obviously follows WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS is: How?

And that’s where it gets interesting.  Perhaps we should do it via a universal basic income?  Or the provision of universal basic services?  Or radical reform of the tax system? Or a new legally binding framework protecting key workers? Or a genuine strategy for prioritising investment in care rather than consumption?

Maybe.  I don’t know.

How can we be looking after our key workers if our housing system is fucked?  How can we be looking after our key workers if the school system is inadequate?  How can we be looking after our key workers if we pay them a pittance, or oblige them to work zero-hour contracts, or condemn them to a diet of high-fat high-salt high-sugar ultra-processed foods?

I don’t know.

“Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart?  When all those people died and the only people who kept going were all those key workers? We must look after our key workers.”

Oh yes.  I agree with that.

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS

It is a political slogan.  And it is a slogan – I contend – that has the power to capture the feelings of the past few months; can sustain the attention and energies of a large proportion of the population over the next two or three years; and leads to a series of deeply progressive policy options without having to rely on a whole load of jargon or bullshit.

11.

My sister was angry last night. 

“What have the last seven weeks been for?” she said.  She swore.  She never swears.

I rang my mum.  “I saw Uncle Jack on the TV at the weekend,” I told her.

“Really?”

“Yes, amazing, they were showing a re-run of the 1970 Eurovision.”  My only claim-to-fame: my uncle Jack wrote the song “All Kinds of Everything” and he became briefly rich and famous in Ireland.

“So that’s…”

“Yup, 50 years ago.”

Silence.

“Fifty years?” she wondered.  “I can’t believe it. It goes so fast.”

Her grandson James doesn’t believe in that sort of thing, he says that time goes at the speed that it goes, no quicker no slower.  The feeling of fifty years passing is “the feeling of fifty years passing”, no more no less.

“Maureen and I used to walk into town every Thursday,” my mother announced suddenly, the reminisce burning brightly in her head, “with the babies in our prams and we’d pass these two old women – well, we thought they were old women – they wore green hats – they were probably only in their fifties!”  She laughs, hard.  “And we said, back then – ‘Gosh, look at them, we’ll be old like that one day’”.  A short pause.  “If I saw someone that age now I’d think ‘Look at that youngster!’!”