The cheapest of cheap market stalls

Elderly pensioner finding it difficult to afford food at even the cheapest of cheap market stalls. This is the state we are in. No sign here of "quantitative easing" - the huge inflationary boosts to the money supply are being siphoned off as asset prices are inflated (I am thinking particularly of the current behaviour of corporate bonds).

All that has happened is that a MASSIVE (capitals means I am shouting) increase in the money supply has led to inflation. We are seeing it first in assets and soon it must spread to prices. This has been entirely predictable.

When the inevitable inflation resulting from quantitative easing starts to affect retail prices the main burden will fall upon the poor and the pensioners.

This is a shameful state of affairs. It makes me feel very angry. And all the while at Westminster the politicians talk about how to shift attention from their expenses, and how to gerrymander the voting system, and how that rough Andrew Marr made Alistair Campbell cry.

Scaffolders

Above: scaffolders at work above a London street. Apologies for the poor image. Three reasons account for the blurred picture: it was a murky day; I didn’t want to distract the scaffolders and cause an incident; I didn’t want to be arrested by the police for using a camera in London.

Scaffolders are a sub-category of construction workers, and form a distinct classification of working class culture. The trade is of great antiquity, and manuscript drawings from the middle ages show scaffolders at work on cathedrals, castles and other public buildings (and probably Stonehenge itself was erected with the help of scaffolders). The skills employed have hardly changed – metal tubes (formerly wood) are put together in upright and horizontal formations, scaffolding boards laid down, layer after layer constructed until the desired height is achieved and the whole linked by ladders.

There are approximately twenty thousand working scaffolders in the United Kingdom. Salaries for scaffolders are between £12k and £24k – far too low for the heavy lifting and poor conditions (dirty, cold, often unsafe) they have to endure. I don’t wish to make a political point, but I cannot help thinking of Members of Parliament complaining ad nauseum about how hard they work, how hard their employed family members work (on the public payroll), how much they deserve to get in pay and expenses and golden goodbyes.

Scaffolders have to be physically very fit and have considerable stamina and powers of endurance (they have a Spartan disregard for extremes of temperature). Despite an ostensibly gruff “gertcha” indifference to others, they are very responsible in their work – a necessity since the safety of others depends upon their skill. Social culture revolves around a network of pubs located throughout greater London.

The natural classification of artisans or skilled labourers

Writing in 1849 Henry Mayhew said that: There are, then, three classes of workpeople - artisans, labourers, and servants. Of these the artisans are not only the most numerous, but the most varied in their occupations. The natural classification of artisans or skilled labourers appears to be according to the materials upon which they work, for this circumstance seems to constitute the peculiar quality of the art more than the tool used - indeed, it appears to be the principal cause of the modification of the implements in different handicrafts.



Above: these painters are certainly artisans. They look organised, and specialised, and even seem to have (unconsciously) formed themselves into a hierarchy (from the one stood on a ladder to the one on his knees). These are old-fashioned "working men", proud of their achievements (you could tell they were proud and self-confident from the way they worked and the way they talked to each other).



Above: park gardeners. They must be nearly as skilled as the painters - certainly they would need to know the difference between plants and weeds. But somehow they were less confident, seemed almost shambolic.



Above: window cleaner. Perhaps not so skilled, but needs to have an apititude for heights. The way this person worked was frantic, as if he was behind time and needed to catch up.

Earlier today Gordon Brown announced plans to (slightly) modify the lavish expenses and allowances claimed by Members of Parliament. As so many ministers in this government are fond of condemning "lazy" British workers who will not work for the minimum wage can I suggest that their own salaries and "perks" (second homes, free porn, 88p bathplugs) be set at the minimum wage for the remainder of this Parliament? Those MPs "too lazy" to accept this can clear off and we will bring in people who are prepared to be an Honourable Member for £5.73 an hour (maybe even importing Polish candidates).

Society needs a class of idlers and dreamers

Above: will there ever be enough “stimulating” and “fulfilling” jobs for everyone?

Work and Pensions Secretary (and former Culture Secretary) James Purnell has announced new measures to compel the long-term unemployed to take work when it is offered to them (and to be “preparing for work” when there are no jobs available).

These measures make me uneasy for three reasons.

First, they negate the contract of National Insurance. The “long-term unemployed” didn’t appear from nowhere. They come from families where people have paid considerable amounts of money in National Insurance over decades and never previously made a “claim” (and the long-term unemployed themselves may have paid National Insurance in the past under the impression that money would be available to them when it was needed).

Therefore if unemployment benefit (or whatever the goons are calling it these days) is no longer an automatic right, what has happened to all the National Insurance money that has been collected in the past and is still being collected? It is either an insurance policy or it is not. And if an unemployed person paid National Insurance when he/she was in employment, do they now have a claim against the state under the principle of proprietary estoppel in that they were relying on payment of unemployment benefit under the terms of the original NI contract? (I am just asking this question, I’m not a lawyer).

Second, I don’t like the idea of the government pushing people around.

Third, the idea of full employment is not only unattainable, it is also undesirable. British society has always had a margin (usually about 5%) of idle people whose existence was paid for by a levy upon those who worked. In return they have produced astounding creative work that has contributed very significantly to the national culture.

In the nineteenth-century this margin of idlers was called the gentry, living upon sinecures, pensions from “Dublin castle” (a semi-mythical pot of gold), glebe rents etc. Doing no paid work was a defining lifestyle for them. In return they produced a vast amount of unpaid intellectual capital – natural history, anthropology, archaeology etc.

In the early 1900s (to take another era at random) an eclectic mix of writers, artists, theosophists, Hyde Park Corner orators, failed revolutionaries, creative drunken wastrels etc subsisted on hand-outs, unpaid debts and an extremely low cost of living. Thinking and talking was their preferred mode of life. The class is described by Arthur Ransome in his study Bohemia in London.

In the 1950s and 1960s the margin of idlers subsisted on unemployment benefits, full student maintenance grants, academic bursaries etc. Characterised on television by Cherie Blair’s father Tony Booth who appeared week after week in a black and white sit-com, voicing his many opinions from a prone position on someone else’s sofa. This class produced novelists, poets, pop groups, amateur inventors, “naked civil servants” and full-time organizers for the (old) Labour Party.

Anyway, my point is that society needs a class of idlers and dreamers to produce the creative ideas that only really come from leisurely unemployment – a decent rate of unemployment benefit should be seen as a relatively cheap way of subsidizing this creative impulse.

As for the depravity of inner city estates, this is much more complex than merely generations of unemployed households. Family breakdown is much more likely to be the cause of despair, low self-esteem, and substitute gang families. Pushing these people around will risk the sort of outburst we have seen in Athens (and how many times do politicians need to be told: the culture of the United Kingdom is not the culture of the United States and what works in Wisconsin will not automatically work in Willesden).

More on Bohemia in London: http://www.tartaruspress.com/bohemia.html

The long-term unemployed

Above: I showed this picture to Terry and he started reminiscing about "Charlie Drake" a 1960s comedy set in an Employment Exchange.

In the Crossroads pub I met one of the long-term unemployed. He was aged about fifty and hadn't worked for about five years (and hadn't really had proper jobs before that). At fifty he didn't think he would work again.

I asked him what being unemployed was like. He gets about £55 a week in unemployment benefit (it's not actually called that, but I can't remember what the benefit is called). The Jobcentre periodically sends him on courses where he makes applications for jobs that never really come to anything (not having a car is a big problem for him).

Recently he has been sent on a new kind of course. This course is to last thirteen weeks. He has to go to a training centre where he sits in a large room with other long-term unemployed people.

They do nothing all day (sometimes they talk to each other, one person reads although reading is not allowed). The boredom of this experience is debilitating. Rather than experience this boredom week after week many people on the course go back to the Jobcentre and sign themselves off ("they sign themselves off and after three months they sign themselves back on again - even the ones who don't get hardship payments will do this in the end").

I was shocked when I heard this. It seems a cruel and immoral way to drive people off the unemployment lists. I say it is immoral because "we" pay taxes to fund the department of employment (or whatever expensive rebranding exercise they are going through at the moment) to HELP PEOPLE INTO WORK not to carry out vindictive campaigns against the very people they should be helping.

In the Victorian period the unemployed were required to carry out mindless "work" such as digging trenches and then filling them in again. This practice was condemned by subsequent generations. Until now, when we seem to have gone back to the policies of the workhouse.

Most people just walked past

Above: In a shabby inner London suburb a homeless man is selling copies of The Big Issue in an effort to raise money and escape from destitution. In an example of the widow’s mite, one of the few people to stop and give him money is a young mother (who couldn’t have had all that much spare money herself). Most people just walked past without looking at him.

Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor, wrote extensively about the homeless in Victorian London. Although he studied them as a category, he also integrated them into his great anthropological study as an extension of the poor, rather than as a class apart. I think this graduation of poverty is an important concept.

Because the homeless live in inhuman conditions it does not follow that they are less human than the rest of us. Homelessness is the logical extension of poverty, and homeless people should be seen as individuals who have failed to cope with the stress of extreme poverty. Most people do not look at homeless people because they are afraid of seeing someone like themselves, in need of help (obviously once that need has been acknowledged there is a concomitant obligation to give all the help you are capable of).



Above: the Big Issue is a weekly magazine published on behalf of, and sold by, homeless people throughout the United Kingdom. It is a way of overcoming the embarrassment most people experience when giving money to homeless people (it also has a cover price, so the “donation” is fixed in advance at £1.80). Unfortunately it is not a very good magazine, and so I usually give the money without taking the magazine.



Above: Arlington House in Camden. Once a famous hostel for the homeless. This institution (one that worked) has been closed and is being “redeveloped”.



Above: Jack London continued the work of Henry Mayhew. People of the Abyss is very well-written and deserves to be better known. For instance: “…how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s streets? Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver til you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live.”



Above: I also plan to read this biography of Jack London.

Lured into a racket

Above: advertisement for "hostesses" in the (obscured) window of a "topless" restaurant in Farringdon Road.

"Topless" restaurants and lap-dancing clubs are in every town now, following changes to the law in 2003.

Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor demonstrated that the poor pay of female theatrical performers drove them into prostitution:

“Ballet Girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved. To begin with their remuneration - it is very poor. They get from nine to eighteen shillings. Columbine in the pantomime gets five pounds a week, but then hers is a prominent position. Out of these nine to eighteen shillings they have to find shoes and petticoats, silk stockings, etc., etc., so that the pay is hardly adequate to their expenditure, and quite insufficient to fit them out and find them in food and lodging. Can it be wondered at, that while this state of things exists, ballet-girls should be compelled to seek a livelihood by resorting to prostitution?”

This is not to condemn all modern lap-dancers and topless waitresses as prostitutes. I am sure there are some who are confident career women fully in command of their own destiny. But I guess most are pretty girls from eastern Europe, lured into a racket they cannot get out of.

There were a few lap-dancing clubs ten years ago, but the explosion in numbers has been a result of New Labour policy (along with Super Casinos and 24-hour drinking).

More: http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/04/lap-dancing-clubs-local

London Labour and the London Poor (1)

One of books that changed my life is Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. It is a fascinating ethnographic examination of the working class and underclass in Victorian London. It makes me think about “the working poor” in London today.

I hope this photo essay will be the first in a series.

Obviously these are candid photographs, taken from “real life”, so if anyone objects let me know and I will take the image down.



Above: construction workers have uncertain job security. Employment is often on a casual basis. Henry Mayhew wrote “The first contractor, who does the least of all, gets the most of all; while the poor wretch of a working man, who positively executes the job, is obliged to slave away every hour…”



Above: street cleaners. Usually today they will be employed directly by borough councils and receive proper payment, including pensions. In Henry Mayhew’s day things were more casual and he write of the classes of street cleaners as being “scavengers, nightmen, flushermen, chimney-sweeps, dustmen, crossing-sweepers, “street-orderlies,” labourers to sweeping-machines and to watering-carts”.



Above: drainage workers. There is nothing glamorous about this job, but it is absolutely essential. Henry Mayhew helped expose the scandal of poor housing in Bermondsey without adequate drainage “any one who has ventured a visit to the last-named of these places in particular, will not wonder at the ravages of the pestilence in this malarious quarter, for it is bounded on the north and east by filth and fever, and on the south and west by want, squalor, rags and pestilence.”



Above: lighting engineer (Mayhew writes of the gas lamp lighters of Victorian London).



Above: Mayhew writes extensively about “barrow boys” and their unique culture.



Above: kitchen workers. Again a precarious occupation, now as in Mayhew’s time (the shouting and bullying of Gordon Ramsay would shock Henry Mayhew). Mayhew recorded the experience of kitchen and domestic servants into unemployment, destitution and thus into far worse means of existence.



Above: I am sure this is actually a highly-paid surveyor, but there was something about the way he went along the pavement daubing paint on cracks and potholes that seemed Dickensian.



Above: casual labourer eating a makeshift lunch (probably brought from home) while laying on the grass of a London square. These labourers have no rights and can be dismissed on a whim. In one of the richest cities in the world they subsist on a pittance.



Above: sandwich-board men. It must be humiliating to wear this advertising paraphernalia. Mayhew records “the Street-Advertisers viz. billstickers, bill-deliverers, boardmen, men to advertising vans, and wall and pavement sticklers”.



Above: the “shirking classes”. Whenever the sun becomes hot you suddenly see people in the middle of the working day, in urban areas, dressed as if they were on holiday. I don’t mean to judge these people, nor do I think they should be “forced” into working if they don’t want to - if they can get by on benefits good luck to them (but young idlers were around in Mayhew’s time and he writes: “without judicious treatment, the restraint may be entirely thrown off by the youth, and the labour be discarded by him, before any steadiness of application has been produced by constancy of practice”).

More on Henry Mayhew: http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/25