While I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years’ time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to “normal” again. Do we then—prosperous once more—go round and re-open all these centers, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade? It’s hard to see how—it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye. Unless the government has developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and insisted councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to “normal” again, our Victorian and post-war and 1960s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.
And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids—poor kids—will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into “their” library and thinking, “I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome.” Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.
A trillion small doors closing.
Shall we do another righteous column? While I’ve got my serious face on? These are the ones I think of when people go, “Oh, I read your stuff! You’re not bad! I think my dad likes you!” and I’m all like “Yeah, I’m changing your life with my Marxist/feminist dialectic! Check out my rad moves!”
Then it turns out, further into the conversation, they were just thinking of the funny one where I try to get Pete to call me “Puffin,” instead.
UNLIKE MOST OF THE COALITION, I WAS RAISED ON BENEFITS
Unlike most of the people voting on the proposed £18b cuts to the benefits budget—as it shuttles between the Commons and the Lords—I was raised on benefits. Disability benefits—collected every Tuesday from the Post Office, in a shuffling queue of limpers, coughers, and people with their coat hoods pulled right up.
Perhaps if you drove past the queue, you would presume the ones hiding their faces were doing it because they were on the fiddle—“playing the books.” In reality, they were the scared kids with mental problems on Incapacity Benefit, who you’d see trying three times, and ultimately failing, to get on a bus. Good luck with getting them on a Re-Start scheme, you would think. Good luck with trying to funnel that terror into a cardboard hat in McDonald’s.
Public housing on benefits isn’t what you think—if you must imagine it, rather than remember, or just look out of the window. Popular imagination has it that it’s full of obese, track-suit–wearing peasants smoking Rothmans on the front doorstep, rehearsing for their spot on Jerry Springer while spending their fraudulent benefits on a plasma TV.
Benefits spent on plasma TVs is the totemic fury-provoker of the professionally angry social commentator—“They’re spending YOUR taxes on A FORTY-TWO INCH SONY!!! You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”— ignoring the fact that if you live somewhere with broken-glass parks and looming teen-clusters on each street corner, and gave up on the idea of having a car or a vacation long, long ago, then staying at home, safe, together as a family, and watching fifteen hours of TV a day is a peerlessly cost-effective, gentle and harmless way of trying to buy happiness.
Besides, they almost certainly won’t have spent “your” taxes on it. They’ll have incurred a massive overdraft, like everyone else in the Western World. They’ll have gotten your telly the way you got your telly. People on benefits are just people—on benefits. Some of them are dodgy, most of them are doing their best, and a few need more help than we could ever imagine. The mix is about the same as on your street. If you are having to imagine it—rather than remember it, or look out of the window.
What’s it like, being on benefits? Being on Disability Benefits—“I’ve had a hard day’s limping, to put that tea on the table!” my dad would say, as we sat down to eat something based around a lot of potatoes, and ketchup. Well, mainly, you’re scared. You’re scared that the benefits will be frozen, or cut, or done away with completely. I don’t remember an age where I wasn’t scared our benefits would be taken away. It was an anxiety that felt like a physical presence, in my chest—a small, black, eyeless insect that hung off my ribs. Every Tory budget that announced a freezing of benefits—new means-testing, new grading—made the insect drill its face into the bone. They froze benefits for four years in a row, as I recall: “freezing” being the news’s way of telling you that you—already poor—will be at the checkout, apologizing as you take jam and squash out of your bag, put them back on the shelves, and ask them to add it up again. Every week you fear that this is the week the pennies won’t stretch any further, and something will disappear: gas, food. Your home.
Eventually—and presumably to the endless gratification of Richard Littlejohn, a right-wing columnist whose love of assailing the disadvantaged in print runs through women, prostitutes, the poor, homosexuals, lesbians and immigrants, and will presumably, one day, continue on to mete out a thorough chiding to the ill, suicidal, and dead—they did take the telly away; halfway through Twin Peaks. All the kids cried and cried and cried. There wasn’t really anything left to do. I invented a game where you lay on the bed staring at the telegraph lines outside the house for so long, without blinking, that you would start crying. The house was very cold. Dad spent whole days in bed—huge white plastic jar of painkillers on the floor beside him, looking like a ghostly barrel.
All through history, those who can’t earn money have had to rely on mercy: fearful, changeable mercy that can dissolve overnight if circumstances change, or opinions alter. Parish handouts, workhouses, almshouses—ad hoc, make-shift solutions that make the helpless constantly re-audition in front of their benefactors, exhaustingly trying to reinvoke pity for a lifetime of bread and cheese.
That’s why the invention of the Welfare State is one of the most glorious events in history: the moral equivalency of the Moon Landings. Something not fearful or changeable, like mercy, but certain and constant—a right. Correct and efficient: disability benefit fraud is just 0.5 per cent. A system that allows dignity and certainty to lives otherwise chaotic with poverty and illness.
Certainty, that is, until you cut the budget so savagely, some benefits disappear all together. Then, you bring back all the fear of the alms house, and the parish dole. Then, you cut this country back to Victorian times.
I remember it, from my childhood. I can feel the dreary terror from here.
One more.
I KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE POOR. THEY TOOK AWAY THE TV, AND WE CRIED.
We’ve recently heard a lot about the gulf between the rich and the poor—the difference between those with money, and those without.
Well, I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich. When I was poor, I knew I was poor because we lived on benefits, slept on mattresses on the floor, and would share a Mars Bar between ten for dessert.
Now I’m rich, I know I’m rich because I’ve got underfloor heating, and could afford to eat out at Pizza Express up to three times a week, if I so chose. I’m basically living the life of a billionaire. I am loaded.
So, having been a rich person and a poor person, what I notice is how similar they both are, really. There’s not that much difference at all. Everyone cheerfully plays the system they find themselves in.
In Wolverhampton, when you needed dodgy inspection papers for the car, an uncle’s mate would be given a tenner “for a pint,” and an exhaust pipe would magically appear out of somewhere—to the ultimate financial detriment of the garage it had been lifted from, but hey-ho.
Now I’m in London, friends of friends recommend good accountants who will “sort out” your VAT problem for a pint-equivalent fee—to the ultimate economic detriment of the country,
but hey-ho.
We’re all just monkeys using sticks to get grubs out of logs, really. However. There is one, massive difference between being rich and being poor, and it is this: when you are poor, you feel heavy. Heavy like your limbs are filled with water. Perhaps it is rain water—there is a lot more rain in your life, when you are poor. Rain that can’t be escaped in a cab. Rain that has to be stood in, until the bus comes. Rain that gets into cheap shoes and coats, and through old windows—often followed by cold, and then mildew. A little bit damp, a little bit dirty, a little bit cold—you are never at your best, or ready to shine. You always need something to pep you up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.
But the heaviness is not really, of course, from the rain. The heaviness comes from the sclerosis of being broke. Because when you’re poor, nothing ever changes. Every idea you have for moving things on is quashed through there never being any money. You dream of a house with sky-blue walls; wearing a coat with red buttons; going out on Saturday and walking by a river. Instead, you see the same crack in the same wall, push-start the same car down the same hill, and nothing ever changes, except for the worse: the things you originally had are now slowly wearing out—breaking under your fingertips, and left unreplaced.
This has the effect of making your limbs feel heavy; like you’re perpetually slightly drowning. You’re dragging ten years of non-progress behind you like a wheel-less cart. Perhaps there’s something out there you would be superlatively good at—something that would give you so much joy, you feel like you are flying. But you’ll never find out: the world is a shop and it is closed to your empty pockets, and you are standing still, heavy, in the dead center of your life. You look around, and start to suspect you might not exist. After all, you appear not to be able to make an impression on the world—you can’t even change the color of your front door. Twenty-six years, now; forty-two, and you’ve never even been to your neighboring town—it’s too far away. And so you sit. You sit still. Because your limbs are so heavy. They are full of rain.
If you’ve never been poor, I don’t think you could imagine what it’s like—simply because of the timescale. You could envision a day, maybe, or a year—but not a lifetime. Not generations of it, passed down like drizzle, or a blindness. Not how, if kids from a poor background achieve something, it’s while dragging this weight behind them. How it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode.
My children can’t imagine it. They love to play at their Sylvanian Family rabbits being “poor”: they love the ingenuity of a sofa turning into a bed for five rabbits; of having only one thing wear.
“It’s all cosy,” they say. “It’s all—little.”
I can see how if you were—say—a Coalition government consisting of public school kids and millionaires, you could convince yourself that the poor are snug in their motor homes. That all they need to bridge the “gulf” between them and the rich is for things to be less cosy. That making their life harder—withdrawing benefits and council housing—incentivizes them in a way making life harder for the wealthy—imposing higher tax-rates—would apparently disincentivize them.
But the last thing—the very last thing—anyone poor needs is for things to be harder. These limbs are full to bursting.
There’s something to be said for the more misty aspects of human behavior. People operating on less coherent, yet still surging, instincts. People just . . . gathering.
The Occupy London movement set up camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in September 2011, and stayed until they were finally moved on in March 2012. Many commentators derided their well-meaning incoherence. I loved it.
I LOVE A PROTESTOR. YOU DON’T NEED ANSWERS—JUST QUESTIONS.
I love a protestor. We all protest, of course—getting out of bed with “My back!”, shouting at the television: “You ASS!”, reading the headlines with furious exclamations of “We did WHAT?”
But that’s just a sentence or two—a minute of remonstration, and then back to wiping down the counter, stacking papers and talking about the profound oddness of the people next door. We protest for the benefit of our own blood pressure, then forget again.
But a protestor—a proper protestor; someone out there, protesting—I find to be a beautiful thing. An objection made flesh, a whole body made over to do one thing—voice disapproval, simply by standing somewhere.
In a world where a minute’s remote dabbing at your computer can transfer thousands of pounds, order a car to your door or petition against a death sentence, there’s something so simple, elegant and forceful about putting your shoes on, walking out of the front door, and going somewhere where you body is a vote, instead.
There’s a group of Chinese Falun Gong protestors who’ve taken it in turns to man a small table, covered in leaflets, outside the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, since 2003. Every time I walk past them I think of how there are no elections in China at all: this is the only vote they have; standing in the rain, trying to protect the bright yellow tablecloth with a spoke-spined umbrella, for eight years. Just standing.
If I’d had two gins and felt a bit whirly, I’d claim occupation-protesting lay on the borderline between politics and art—that by placing yourself, say, outside a cathedral, you mean, and become, something wholly different to when you are placed in a supermarket, buying vegetables. You put yourself somewhere you shouldn’t be. You are the odd thing out. A misplaced item in the bagging area. And this is how you want to change the world: just by being a misplaced particle. Difficult to tidy away.
And, so, to the protestors outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, objecting to the global banking crisis. Their presence has caused so much commentary—and from so many different viewpoints—that it is clear they have stopped being merely a news item—a fact to be told—and have crossed over into being an infinitely malleable metaphor for whatever the commentator wishes to project on them, instead. Toby Young in The Telegraph saw them as “preening narcissists,” only protesting because they “want to be on the news—that’s all they care about.” Richard Littlejohn, meanwhile, saw them as “a gormless rent-a-mob . . . layabouts from Mickey Mouse universities.” I could spend hours suggesting why it might be that those particular people chose those particular epithets. Actually, I couldn’t—it would take less than a minute and consist of shouting “POT! POT! POT!” over and over again, until my Kettle Black Timer went off.
Anyway. Nearly all those who protested against the protestors commented on two things: how unwashed and scruffy they are, and how the protestors have merely “vague slogans,” and have failed to say what their solution to the banking crisis would be.
To the first comment, one can only reply, “But dudes—they are in tents. It would be alarming and disconcerting if people sleeping on roll-mats in Central London emerged from their bivvies at breakfast, box-fresh, and sporting a crease down each leg of their slacks. Your insistence that the revolution be ‘smart-casual’ suggests a lack of any pictorial reference points to previous revolutions. They tend to be fairly ‘festival chic.’ ”
With the second caveat, I would be a little more disappointed that it had ever been voiced in the first place. Is this now the entry qualification for voter-protest—that we must have all the answers, before we are allowed to speak? That when it comes to a global banking crisis so severe and complex that the combined powers of the European Union cannot come up with a solution—other than going “Text China! They’re LOADED!”—voters can’t comment on it unless we’ve got a massive folder full of equations with “SOLVED! The Banking Crisis” written on the front?
If we insist protestors must shut up unless they have answers, we are confusing them with columnists, academics, advisors, politicians. And, at root, protestors exist for a wholly different reason to these people. It misses the point of why people put on their shoes, leave their houses, and stand in the wrong place for a long, long time. Prot
estors don’t have the answers. They would never pretend that they are. What they are is a question mark. St. Paul’s currently stands over a square full of question marks—each tent a black punctuation mark in the middle of the City. A huge black question mark we now see every night on the news, and in the papers.
And the question being asked, over and over again, “What are you going to do about this?”
They don’t need to be anything more than that. Asking questions is beautiful. Asking questions is enough.
I found it one of the more incongruous coincidences that the slow dismissal of the underclass came at the same time as ITV1’s massive them-and-us, upstairs/downstairs, master-and-servant blockbuster, Downton Abbey. I have a complex relationship with Downton. Well, not really. I think it’s stupid—like a big dog in a dress, galloping around—and I delight in boggling at its every, demented, over-blown, eye-rolling move it makes.
I’d been writing about how enjoyably dumb Downton is for a year before I started to be quite good friends with Dan Stevens, who plays the show’s Matthew Crawley—or “Handsome Cousin Matthew,” as I always like to refer to him in print, because I know it makes him a bit awkward, even though he cannot deny he is handsome. Incredibly handsome. Honestly, sometimes it’s like sitting in a bar with the sun.
Dan—and I know he won’t mind me saying this, mainly because he’s too busy to read this, and so will never know—is a skilled party maximizer. A dedicated and joyous boozer with some manner of supernatural, endlessly forgiving liver. I once saw him accidentally fire a champagne cork at a tramp in Soho—but he subsquently apologized so profusely and literally handsomely that, in the end, I think the tramp felt flattered to have been assaulted by someone so facially perfect. That was the night that ended with him and Michelle Dockery—who plays Lady Mary in Downton, also a bit of a dude—crunking to Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” in a nightclub at 2 am. As I watched them, my mind made them wear corsets and World War One military garb. Given the amazing plotlines of Downton, it may well be something that actually happens in a subsequent season.
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