“I’m increasingly seeing so many people now twigging that everything they’ve been told is a lie.
“Work hard, get yer head down and get rewarded?
“Aye?
“There’s people doing two fucking jobs that are barely keeping their heads above water. People on £50-60K a year are unable to buy a house and also paying a higher marginal tax rate than billionaires – of course some of these are easily led as to thinking this problem is caused by those below them on the social ladder but quite a few are now twigging.
“Yet instead of the complete systemic overhaul of the economic system that we need, our bent and increasingly unfit for purpose political system offers us up only more of the same shite.
“That is until they can’t keep kidding us about shite like ‘growth’ anymore and then they’ll need to clamp down further by offering up their demagogues, step up the likes of Farage and Badenough.
“Sadly, the cenotaph guarding, dinghy bothering clowns will usher them in at the next election and if you think we’re fucked now …”
***
Gee, I hope you didn’t think we were the only country where the chief leisure activity for the rich is forcibly sodomizing the non-rich and telling them to smile because it’s good for them to bleed a little.
Besides, toilet tissue is cheap.
The italicized text above was written by someone I like and trust who lives in the UK. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I consider England my Motherland and have traced my lineage back to the middle of the 14th century. My birth surname was Whitcomb, and the village of Whitcombe (population 20) is almost as far south as you can go in England without crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight.
My friend Steve who wrote the text lives much farther north in the southern part of Scotland. He calls himself a Socialist, which is a much less pejorative term in the UK than it is here.
Of course in Britain, most people are much more realistic about their own status. I have written about this before, but a few years back, people in both the US and the UK were asked to describe their economic status. Ninety percent of Americans called themselves middle class, while two-thirds of Brits said they were working class.
The Pew Research Center says middle class in the US is between $43,350 and $130,000, but the last two Republican nominees before Donald Trump — both wealthy men — said they considered the top end much higher.
In 2008, John McCain said he thought $250,000 was middle class, and in 2012, Mitt Romney said he thought $400,000 was middle class.
Of course, both of those men and family wealth measured by nine figures to the left of the decimal point. Romney was so clueless about the way working class people live that he said if young people were having trouble finding jobs, they should borrow money from. their parents and start their own businesses.
He also said when he and his wife Ann were starting out, sometimes things were so tight for them that they had to sell shares of stock to pay bills.
Indeed.
Let them eat cake.
When my friend was writing about incomes in the UK, the figures he cited for pound sterling would compare to about $63-76k. Of course, they have higher taxes than we do, but they have their National Health Service for medical needs. Still, if you’re not a pop star or a footballer, getting ahead and even being well-off is about as difficult there as it is here.
As for going to school, working hard and playing by the rules …
Half a lifetime ago, when I was working as a sports columnist in Colorado, I wrote a piece that was probably the closest I ever came to stepping over the line.
The wrestling coach at one of the local high schools had enjoyed a winning season with no complaints but was told his contract would not be renewed. The former coach, who had been promoted to assistant principal, decided he didn’t like his job and wanted to go back to coaching.
What he did was legal and within his rights, but it wasn’t right. I wrote a column addressing the subject that started something like this:
“Hey, kids. You know they say if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll get ahead?
“Well, forget it.
“You can do everything right and if your boss wants your job, you’re screwed.”
The administration at the school was furious. They pointed out to me that the deposed coach was not a teacher at the school (he was at the junior high) and had received a waiver because they had been desperate for a coach. I said I knew that, but the waiver could have been extended and besides, the coach was first in line for a teaching vacancy at the high school.
We agreed to disagree and I agreed to dial it back a little.
I was still glad I had said it.