We’ve had a few sunny days up here in Bonnie Scotland over
the last month or so. Not many. And it hasn’t exactly been anything Mediterranean . But better than usual. Normally a stretch of summer weather reduces the number of food parcel
customers we serve to a mere trickle. Not so this year. This year they have
kept on coming, one after the other, for day after day. The expressions are the
same. Only the clothes are different. Most are resigned, despondent, beaten.
But with the warmth of the weather have come new and different expressions. Hard
etched anger. Pale skin stretched tight over the bones.
For like night following day, cometh the warmth of
summertime, cometh the anger. And all of a sudden we are starting to hear the
‘R’ word.
It was a couple of weeks ago when the ‘R’ word made its 2013
debut at the counter in First Base. It passed through the lips of one of our
regulars. He’s a nice enough guy who has taken a fearsome kicking over the last
year or so. He’s certainly no young dafty. I guess he is just by fifty and he has
worked for most of his years. There is no point in pretending that he is any
kind of choirboy. Over years he has had his share of fights, most of which he
has won. When you look at him, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to discover
that he usually comes out on top in occasional dismal little late night street
battles. As a result he has a record. Not the longest record, but long enough
to make getting a job nigh on impossible in the new reality. So he’s on the dole
and he looks like staying there for a while. Not that he actually gets paid all
that often.
Some of those late night wars were fought out on the
pavements outside the town’s clubs in the days when my man was a doorman.
People don’t tend to forget such encounters. Grudges are borne and treasured
and lovingly preserved. So what? So it means that any man and his dog can pick
up the phone and report that an old foe is working on the black. So then what
happens? The person who is the subject of the report is immediately suspended
from all benefits until such a time as they can categorically prove that they
were NOT working illegally. It’s kind of hard to prove this particular negative
and my man has no ever managed to do so.
So he keeps getting sanctioned. Right now he is on his
third. Three months this time. In the winter he would come in from the dismal
grey rain and tell me how he had been walking the streets seeking out enough
dockers to roll a few fags. He could never get his head around how such a thing
could have ever happened. His sunken eyes spoke of nothing but resignation.
Defeat.
Not so a couple of weeks ago when the sun was the sole
occupant of a wall to wall blue shy.
In place of resignation was a slow burning anger which
promised to upgrade itself into white rage at the flick of a switch. And he
issued a very simple statement of fact, almost rehearsed.
“Tell you what Mark, if there is a riot this summer, I’m
joining in. Never thought I’d say that.”
The 'R' word.
And since then the ‘R’ word has been quietly spoken on a
further three occasions. Was it drunken bravado or the big talk of a handful of
blue Valium? No. Not even nearly. In each and every case it was delivered in a
calm and measured tone. The ‘R’ word had been thought through carefully. Weighed
and measured and tried on for size. And then used. Used in a matter of fact way.
Of the 300 food parcels we handed out in June, just over 120
went to people who have been sanctioned from all their benefits. As in rendered completely penniless. Many are on their second or third
sanction and they are starting to get a little frayed at the edges. Most of the
time the sanctions are for what we Lancastrians call summat and nowt. Like
being five minutes late. Other times the sanctions are more proactive. A guy
from last week told me that he had been given an appointment on 13th
June which he duly attended only to be told that the date had been moved to the
10th of June. Had they written to him with this information? No. had
they sent him a text? No. They had called him and left a voicemail message. Of
course most folk getting by on £60 a week never tend to have credit in their
phones and are therefore they are in no position to pick up voicemail messages.
This guy was in such a position. Gotcha. Sanctioned for a month.
He was another who quietly spoke the ‘R’ word.
The fact that Job Centre staff are being driven to sanction
at least three clients a week is now widely known. Most people are hyper aware
that 5 minutes late will mean no money for at least a month. This of course
means that it is getting harder and harder for the Job Centre people to meet
their targets which means that they are having to get more creative: to come up
with ever more clever ruses and tactics. Like changing an appointment and
leaving a voicemail.
And of course this kind of thing gets people ever more
angry. Will this anger send them out onto the streets?
Like Cairo Istanbul Rio ?
Maybe.
Probably.
Cold logic suggests that it can only be a matter of time.
Maybe this particular logic lies behind all the stories we
are now hearing about the monumental surveillance that is being mounted on
millions of us little people. Of course they blame in on Terrorism. But they
always blame everything on Terrorism.
It is hard not to get the sense of hatches being battened
down ready for the coming storm.
We seem to have an awful lot of extremely well kept secrets
at the moment. For five years now we have been subjected to a barrage of media
explaining how hard the times are and how we need to stand together to get
through it. And slowly but surely the blame for what has happened has been
shifted more and more onto the poor. The fact that a few bankers sent the world
economy off the edge of a cliff seems to be in the process of being air brushed
from history. Instead it is the idle, scrounging poor who are to blame. The
media tells us we are infested by a swarm of idle, feckless individuals who
binge drink, eat themselves to obesity, breed kids for cash and, horror of
horrors, watch Sky on 40 inch plus TV’s.
Slowly but surely all politicians are falling into a line
and they now vie with each other in the great new game of poor bashing. If
Nigel Farage were to suggest putting anyone unemployed for over a year into
meat pies, then Ed Milliband will blag a spot on the ‘World at One’ to say that
Cornish Pasties would do even better.
It is a hell of a smoke screen and the new reality seems to
be that anyone who wants to get elected has to prove that they can hate the
poor with the best of them. And does it ever work. Every hammer blow delivered
by the Department of Work and Pensions is followed by a jump in the polls for
Cameron and his merry men. No wonder they like it so much.
Will they manage to keep the big secret forever out of view?
Maybe. Eighty million Germans kept on believing that all bad things were down
to the wicked, scheming, money grubbing Jews for year after year until the Red
Army finally arrived at the gates of Berlin. And all the while, a very few jumped up
gangsters quietly filled their Swiss bank accounts until they were in danger of
bursting.
Times are hard. Hard for everyone. It says so everywhere. It
is an absolute truth.
However a mere thousand citizens of this beleaguered nation of ours saw
their collective wealth go up by £35 billion last year.
As in £350 million each.
They managed to get a million quid richer every single day
of 2012. So what happened to the recession?
To try and put that figure into some kind of context, it is
worth noting that £35 billion is about the same as we spend on Education and
Defence. It is a hundred times more that the promised savings to the public
purse resulting from the hated Bedroom Tax.
It’s a bloody fortune.
Walmart is owned by the Walton family. Right now there are
six members of the Walton family who own the whole thing. Between them these
six people have more cash than 42% of Americans combined.
6 people have more than 120 million people.
Two years ago they had more cash than 90 million.
Where will things stand in two years time? Will it be 150
million? 200 million?
It is of course complete and utter madness when so very few
people are able to drain off the wealth of so many. Since the Crash, we have all
got 2% poorer every year. And my word we are all beginning to feel it. What we
are still failing to realise is just where all of that lost standard of life
has gone.
It has gone into the off shore accounts of those 1000
individuals who managed to get themselves £35 billion richer last year.
And who do we blame?
The poor.
But history teaches us that you can only keep on kicking the
poor for so long. There always comes time when they collectively decide to kick
back. Like Paris St Petersburg Cairo
And when that day eventually comes, those 1000 gilded
individuals will melt away to their islands in the sun.
So will they go the same way as Tsar Nicholas and Marie
Antoinette and President Mubarak? Maybe. Or maybe by monitoring our Facebook
and Twitter accounts, the powers that be will manager to kill any revolt before
it has a chance to get started.
So roll up, roll up for the hottest ticket in town. It’s the
showdown we’ve all been waiting for.
In the blue corner we have Technology.
In the red corner we have History.
And let us never forget that there are in fact two ‘R’
words.
‘R’ for Riot
And then there is that other ‘R’ made famous by the likes of
Robespierre and Trotsky and Che.
But I think it prudent now to mention that particular ‘R’
word as you never know who is listening in.
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