In his 2013 budget speech on March the 20th,
George Osborne said “It's a historic achievement for this government and for
hard working families across the country.” He was speaking of the government’s
proud pledge to raise the personal allowance to £10,000, but his singling out
of ‘hard working families’ was odd in that the allowance is, and has always
been bestowed on any worker, irrespective of whether they are part of a family,
and independently of how hard they work.
In an article written exclusively for the Daily Mail at
the start of September in 2012 titled 'Hard work, moral good and no more
dumbing down... It is time to stop the dithering that's holding Britain back', David
Cameron was even more explicit in his endorsement of that most Protestant and
Victorian of sensibilities, writing:
“... and all of this means a nation where we talk about
the values that matter: that families are vital; that we each have
responsibilities to fulfil; that doing an honest day’s work is a moral good
that should be rewarded.”
These are of course fine examples of a political rhetoric
that has been vigorously adopted by the Conservative party in recent years, but
it is a monumental cipher and a distraction that is expertly designed to appeal
to the Tory’s ageing and financially comfortable voter base. The essential evil
of this tack – and I won’t shy away from that assessment – is that it aims to
shift the moral responsibility of the economic downturn from those in
government, to the populace. The implication is that if you disagree with the
government’s economic stewardship, or if you find yourself worse-off
financially as a consequence, you only have yourself to blame for not being
industrious enough.
This is iniquitous nonsense.
Firstly,
working harder will make little or no difference to the earnings of most of the
population; salaries are simply not calculated that way. People are employed on
the basis of the kind of skill that the employer requires, and in nearly all
cases, a salary is decided before an employee has lifted a finger. Once
employed, there may be a degree of opportunity for promotion with a concomitant
increase in earnings, but in the majority of cases this involves taking on
different responsibilities, rather than simply increasing how intensely a
person works.
Secondly,
ministers imply in a fabulously patronising way that socioeconomic status is
directly and exclusively related to how hard you have worked in your life. Poor
are you? Then you’ve been lazy. This is a perverse, reverse meritocracy, where
wealth has become an automatic totem of a person’s moral and industrial
excellence, rather than the former following from the latter. You don’t need to
have much familiarity with sociological ideas to understand that some
occupations are enormously demanding in a physical sense – mining, manual
factory work etc. – but are paid poorly, while essentially all of the best paid
jobs require no manual effort beyond pushing buttons and pulling levers.
Lawyers and A&E doctors may work similar hours, but they do not command the
same earnings, and it is extremely facile to find many more examples where there
is a discontinuity between financial security and effort.
Finally,
there are in reality only a fantastically small number of workers whose intensity
of labour is directly connected to shaping the health of the economy, and these
are in the main government officials and public servants – those who work at the
Treasury for example, and those who work at the Bank of England. For the rest
of us, we are hopelessly at the mercy of the inflation and taxation that ratchets
up the prices we pay for goods and services. You can never leave your place of
work if you like, but petrol prices will rocket just the same, and your salary
will probably be unmoved.
This
hard-work theme is another divisive PR campaign from a bulging Tory catalogue that
is designed to unburden the state from the responsibility of caring for the
most needy and underprivileged. If you can blame the plight of the poor on
their own failings, then you can argue that they don’t deserve any help. The
working classes may wither and die, Messrs. Cameron and Osborne, but the fault
will be entirely yours.
