I moved away from England with various motives. Tokyo would offer an escape from various messes I had gotten myself into, allow me to tie off a very loose, frayed end, and offer some financial security. English teaching in a city where English is highly demanded and appaulingly taught would, I thought, be a guaranteed source of steady income. Not so of course, given the world deciding that very year to decline into recession. Predicted the worst since the Wall Street Crash of the late 1920’s, the reverberations were felt by societies and economic groups across the world – not merely in the West where proximity to neo-liberal US trade venturism hid the dangers of boom/bust economics behind a thick vail of security and deficit fear-mongering. Back I came.
It’s hard to keep up with the news when you are far away and transiently baseless. I had heard whilst I was away in November about the start of the student protests and occupations. The University of Kent’s student body, a regularly apathetic group, finally did themselves proud by gaining coverage in the national media about their Senate protest. I longed to join them. In fact, I longed to be back in the academic surroundings of the University I had just left. The ritual is comforting; get up; eat breakfast; go to Uni; see your friends; read about things you are interested in and write some more of that essay; post-writing-pint; and back to bed. Utilitarian values ignored and there’ll always be a little bit more money in the overdraft, right? Of course, in that ‘real’ world, the one that people inhabiting it seem to get so superior about, the realisation appears to sink in that not everyone lives like this. You have to go out and get a job. You have to make your own way in the world – because certainly no-one will do it for you! Rely on yourself and no-one else. “You are an atom,” the realisation says.
Except that realisation didn’t happen to me. It hasn’t to millions of UK citizens who haven’t decided to live like this. These statements, these ‘facts of life’ were determined and self-righteously announced by some people who decided that they are mantras that we all must live by, because they say so. The economy and clearing the deficit demands that we get jobs in science, economics and banking, it is said. Not the science that tries to understand what we’re living in – that quantum malarkey – but that productive stuff. Not that theoretical economics where armchair-dwellers postulate on rubbish like ‘fair distribution’, but that which makes us money. And money soon! for if we don’t have more soon, everything we know will become Chinese. It doesn’t matter where the money comes from, stupid. We’re not harming the environment because Africa will sell us their carbon credits! And it’s creating a carbon market so people can make money! What? Of course carbon traders still have the environment as their primary concern.
No, we haven’t chosen these facts. Some of us haven’t chosen to live life being told in contradiction that we are atoms, but function inside a web of economics which means that we all must make small sacrifices. No, I will not take it lying down that those who didn’t lose all the money must be the ones to pay it back. The disappearance or scaling back of the Arts Council, the Film Council, the EMA, tuition fees, tax credits, child allowance, housing benefit, job seekers allowance, Sure Start, forestries and woodlands, public sector jobs by the hundreds of thousands, 35% of under 25s being unemployed, 9% of the entire population being so – and rising – are ideological. They are changes implemented by a group of people who have had idealogical and economically supported values since they emerged screaming into the hospitals because they have never known anything different.
I’m sure, David, that it was a harsh atomistic life down in Eton (when Mum was giving you the pocket-money meaning you could concentrate on studying, rather than having to go out and support yourself.) I’m sure you were quite all alone, amongst the all of your friends going into junior consultancy jobs at the age of 21. Except you’ve missed the point, haven’t you? Those friends of yours, the ones that I have no doubt keep you up to date on the state of Britain’s business on a regular occasion in backrooms that the rest of us don’t have access to, they are the group of people who you developed from. A group. With you as a composite part of it and fulfilling your social role, like everyone else did in it too. Charles who was always the one with the ladies; George who always seemed a bit thick, but paid your tab that time when your credit card bounced; and Mike who drank a bit too much, but was an alright kind of guy. You would go out to the cinema to see that new B-movie that hadn’t had all that much press, so it was still cool. “It’s good”, you will have said, “that films like this get made. Not all Hollywood clones, but good independent films”. So the Film Council. Or when you went out for a walk in Burnham Beeches with your dog, enjoying the fact that you can still walk around beautiful and well-maintained forests for free. In Tokyo, you have to pay for parks, you may have heard. The Forestry Commission you had to thank for ensuring the lack of entrance fee.
These are just small examples. For you, with some money, you could choose to be an atom. But you weren’t really choosing that, merely your role in your group of friends. But now you’re choosing our roles too. The raising of the age difference between higher and lower job seeker’s allowance will stop under-30’s being able to move away from home and the raising of that of housing benefit will push them out of the cities. Away from their peer, work or education groups. Away from the things, the people and the institutions they care about. We don’t agree that no-one else will look after you. Friends are there to provide a web of knowledge, support and enjoyment that one cannot obtain from the workplace – however fulfilling that may or may not be. But you’re not merely structurally enforcing our places in the social sphere. With a shift to a private sector that isn’t being supported by a viscous and opaque banking sector, rising unemployment is dragging social mobility down to a pre-Blair level, despite nearly 40% of young people emerging into their 20s with undergraduate degrees – what should be a stimulus to their mobility. Furthermore, the lack of available jobs – 35% unemployment for people under 25 years of age – and employment that potential students face, coupled with a prospective £27,000 of student debt will single-handedly undo any good work that the previous government did with the goal of giving young people a choice. Universities will do fine whilst creaming the elite percentage of wealthy nations’ students to fill their books, but what of the people whose mandate you are acting on?
As it has been seen from the student demos, there are several increasingly large groups of people who no longer believe that individuals should be perceived as atomised units formed into a working framework and working merely in order to support it. The abstraction, it shall be realised more and more, is purely that. Not a tangible entity in itself, but a mechanism that initially started with the goal of acting as a tool for the participants, not the converse. It is when these groups start to form together – the TUC and NUS being prime examples of those beginning to do so – that those who have not been afforded the opportunity to choose for themselves their lives courses will be heard. At first, discourse will dominate. This is good, productive and socially acceptable. Protests have begun and, following in their footsteps, civil disobedience, police brutality and arrests. But this will not be the last resort and these groups will not merely go away. They will demand to be listened too – and I am looking forward to when they really start.
learning and polemic 