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I have been saddened to learn of two events that will take place in the near future: The death of The Dandy, and the publication of Britannia Unchained.
The first needs little introduction to British readers; it’s the UK’s longest-running children’s humour comic, which will cease publication (in print form) towards the end of this year, on its 75th anniversary. The second appears to be an odious political tract scribbled by a cabal of ambitious right-wing Tory MPs, desperate to make a name for themselves by tarring British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”.
The connection? Even at the end of its life, there is better and more useful information in The Dandy than there will be in Britannia Unchained.
The book’s authors, Priti Patel, Elizabeth Truss, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, and Kwasi Kwarteng, all members of the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs, argue that British workers are “among the worst idlers in the world”, that the UK “rewards laziness” and “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”.
They say the UK needs to reward a culture of “graft, risk and effort” and “stop bailing out the reckless, avoiding all risk and rewarding laziness”.
Strong words – undermined completely by the authors’ own record of attendance at their place of work.
Chris Skidmore’s Parliamentary attendance record is just 88.1 per cent – and he’s the most diligent of the five. Kwasi Kwarteng weighs in at 87.6 per cent; Elizabeth Truss at 85.3 per cent; and Priti Patel at 81.8 per cent. Dominic Raab is the laziest of the lot, with Parliamentary attendance of just 79.1 per cent.
To put that in perspective, if I took more than a week’s sick leave per year from my last workplace, I would have been hauled up before the boss and serious questions asked about my future at the company. That’s a 97.9 per cent minimum requirement. Who are these slackers to tell me, or anyone else who does real work, that we are lazy?
Some have already suggested that these evil-minded hypocrites are just taking cheap shots at others, to make themselves look good for promotion in an autumn reshuffle. Maybe this is true, although David Cameron would be very unwise to do anything but distance himself from them and their dangerous ideas.
I think this is an attempt to deflect attention away from the way the Tory-led government has mismanaged the economy, and from its murderous treatment of the sick and disabled. As one commentator put it: “They get a token Asian, a token African, a token Jew, mix in the middle class/grammar school rubbish propaganda, and suddenly they are just ordinary people? No they are not; they are stooges for the ruling elite.”
Britain doesn’t reward laziness among its working class. What it rewards is failure by managers, directors of industry, financiers. These people continually increase their salaries and other remuneration while their share prices fall, their dividend payments are lacklustre and shareholder value is destroyed. What have they given shareholders over the past 10 years? How many industrial or commercial leaders have walked off with millions, leaving behind companies that were struggling, if not collapsing? Does the criticism in Britannia Unchained apply to senior executives and bankers?
Our MPs are as much to blame as big business. They vote themselves generous pay, pensions and extended vacations (five months per year). They never start work before 11am, never work weekends (or most Fridays, when they are supposed to be in their constituencies, if I recall correctly). They enjoy fringe benefits including subsidised bars, restaurants and gyms. They take part-time directorships in large companies which take up time they should be using to serve the public. Only a few years ago we discovered that large numbers of them were cheating on their expense claims. They take more than £32,000 in “Resettlement Grant” if we kick them out after one term – which, in my opinion, means all five authors of Britannia Unchained should be applying for it in 2015.
These are the people who most strongly represent the ‘something-for-nothing’ sense of entitlement the book decries.
Have any of them ever worked in a factory or carried out manual labour? I’ll answer that for you: With the exception of Elizabeth Truss, who did a few years as a management accountant at Shell/Cable and Wireless, none of them have ever done anything that could be called real work.
In fact, the people they accuse work very long hours – especially the self-employed. When I ran my own news website, I was busy for 12-14 hours a day (much to the distress of my girlfriend). Employees also work long hours, get less annual leave, earn less and pay more – in prices for consumer goods, taxes and hidden taxes – than most of Europe. Average monthly pay rates have now dropped so low that they are failing to cover workers’ costs, leading to borrowing and debt.
Are British workers really among the laziest in the world? Accurate information is hard to find but it seems likely we’re around 24th on the world league table. On a planet with more than 200 sovereign nations (204 attended the London Olympics), that’s not too shabby at all.
Interestingly, the European workers clocking on for the fewest hours are German. Those lazy Teutons! How dare they work so little and still have the powerhouse economy of the continent?
If so many are reluctant to get up in the morning, why are the morning commuter trains standing room only? Or have the Britannia Unchained crowd never used this form of travel?
It seems to me that Britannia Unchained is just another attempt by the Tory right to make us work harder for less pay. The Coalition is currently cutting the public sector and benefits to the bone, while failing to introduce policies that create useful employment, and trying to boost private sector jobs. The private sector has cut wages and pensions. The result is higher unemployment and benefits that cannot sustain living costs, creating a working-age population desperate for any kind of employment at all (even at the too-low wages already discussed).
And let’s remember that Conservatives want to remove employment laws to make it easier to dismiss employees. In other words, they want a workforce that will toil for a pittance, under threat of swift dismissal and the loss of what little they have.
Why do they think this will improve the UK’s performance?
We already work longer hours and have less protective legislation than in Europe (such as the European Time Directive). But we are less productive in terms of GDP than their French and German counterparts, who work fewer hours and are protected by the likes of the ETD.
France is more unionised than we are, yet its production per employee is higher.
The problem is poor management and bad leadership. Poor productivity is almost always due to poor investment and poor training. Workers are abused when they should be treated as an investment. They lose motivation and when managers get their decisions wrong, they blame the workers.
Working class people are sick of grafting for low pay and in poor working conditions, to be exploited by the types of people represented by the authors of Britannia Unchained.
Is it any wonder we feel de-motivated?
I started this article by linking The Dandy to Britannia Unchained, noting that one was coming to the end of its life in print while the other was about to be published for the first time. I’ll end by pointing out a quality they have in common.
The Dandy is closing because it represents ideas that are now tired and out-of-date. Britannia Unchained should never see publication – for the same reason.
Mike Sivier's blog 
Tokens? I think not: the emboldened offspring of the colonist class working in alliance with their sponsors.
I’d enjoy their strenuous, dynamic death throes as I garrotted them.
I can’t condone the use of deadly force against the authors of this book, grotesque though they may be!
My own preference would be a continuous, sustained, reasonable dialogue with these gentlemen and ladies, to show them the error of their ways, punctuated at some point (preferably in the near future) by an election and their ejection from the House of Commons. That Might be tricky because they are in fairly safe Tory seats, by all accounts. However – hope springs eternal.
Mike – I too would prefer a civilised,restrained process (certainly such sadism should only meted out by, and on behalf of, individuals such as utterly-furious me) to be conducted by that which constitutes authority. But given that the lobe of said authority, from which these five’s pronouncements hail, has done and said nowt to distance itself from them, let alone shame them,I must needs cut to the chase.
I still can’t say I approve, but I do understand the sentiment behind your words.
How would other readers deal with the Infamous Five authors of Britannia Unchained, if you met them? Would you try to make them see the error of their ways by reasoned discussion, or do you think they’re too far gone for that, necessitating what Reimer calls a “cut to the chase”?
Mike,
Thank you for the comment left over on my blog. I can’t disagree with anything you’ve said. I’ve come at it from one angle – you’ve come from another.
The problem the Right has is that as they flounder around trying to sort out the economic mess which they had a hand in creating and causing (though Labour did much to exacerbate), they look at other places and argue “if only we were like..”
Back in the 1980s, the Thatcherites used to admire Japan for their work ethic though Japan was about as corporatist a society as you could imagine. Now, the “places of envy” are Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. They think that we should sacrifice our hard-won social and political freedoms for the notion of unending economic growthm which, let’s be fair, mostly goes to the elites rather than the ordinary people.
As I commented over on politicalbetting.com, all authoritarian societies, whether absolutist, autarchic, nazi, fascist or communist where promises of unending prosperity are made in exchange for order and conformity, come unstuck.
“If only we were like…” seems about right to me. It begs the question: Why can’t we be like the UK? What’s wrong with having a British way of doing things, that actually works? If you think about it, nobody in this country is going to conform to a foreign-based model anyway, because we ARE British; we do things in a British way, whether our political or commercial masters like it or not.
Perhaps we’ve become so indoctrinated into this idea of being like other countries that we’ve forgotten what a British way would be.
What IS the British way?
If I actually met one of the five…I suspect it’d be an encounter between a political peasant and a noble, with either florid gladhanding and talking past the point,or curt freezing-out. These creatures would regard a nobody like me,being of little or no immediate use in their self-aggrandisement, as not much more than a talking high-maintenance farm-animal with an inconvenient facility for just possibly reporting the details of their performance to others in my herd.
I wonder if they themselves actually believe this stuff, or if they are just flying a kite to test how much resistance would meet an attempt to further transform the country (in accordance with the imperatives of those they front for). I certainly haven’t heard Cameron or anyone high up rebuke them for insulting almost everyone in the country.
They’re definitely kite-flying, in anticipation of the conference season. The fact that David Cameron hasn’t already distanced himself from them is extremely significant, in my opinion.
This could be a serious misjudgement on their part, though. Support for the Tories is already well in decline and an attack on the workforce could push it past the point of no return.
Bring it on, I say.