There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics. Numbers, data and evidence are essential to the evaluation of policies, but they are easily manipulated. Someone with skill at cherrypicking can use figures which are “true” in one narrow sense of the word to give an entirely incorrect impression of reality.
While the government boasts about the lowest unemployment in a decade or some other isolated figure, closer analysis reveals deep systemic problems. What counts as employment has fundamentally changed. Gone are the days of wages that would enable a single earner to support a family. Behind the headline unemployment figures there are deeply troubling trends in underemployment and the growth of the “precariat” – a class of people whose relationship to work is one of insecurity and stress, shuffling between part-time and temporary contracts and unable to plan for the future.
I have never been counted as “unemployed”. This, however, did not mean that I was always paid and secure. In the times when work was scarce, I would have frequent periods of literally having no money for food. More than once I went for weeks on a single bag of budget rice, as I tightened my belt through the dry spells. I frequently relied on the flexibility of landlords who’d take rent in intermittent chunks when invoices got paid. I was “poor” in those periods, but I wasn’t “unemployed”. I was precarious, living from scrabbled job to scrabbled job, and I wasn’t alone in this. My peers with actual “job” jobs are far outnumbered by those who’ve been living the “gig economy” for a decade or more. I didn’t get a “proper job” until my mid-30s, and the hangover means my credit rating still reads: “NOPE.”
It’s this kind of experience which leads to people shouting: “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” People are not stupid: you can’t piss on their heads and tell them it’s raining. They know how increasingly difficult life has become since 2007. People whose “careers” are a treadmill of stints at call centres and warehouses watched the people who crashed the economy into the side of a cliff in 2007 get rewarded with golden parachutes. The impression is that the government is in it to protect this oligarchical class of parasites while feeding the rest of us flannel.
In 2016 the bubble of complacency burst. We now have a panic as professional politicians whose careers were built on patronising or ignoring the working class flail around looking for reasons people in low-paid, insecure jobs might not think they have their best interests at heart.Tristram Hunt’s resignation as MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central is the perfect example of this. Parachuted into a previously safe seat, a route to frontbench government starts to look difficult so he’s decided that it’s all just too much like hard work to do right by his constituents.
The shambolic Ukip isn’t offering any real solutions, but the party is picking up votes because people don’t trust Labour or the Tories after years of disappointment. As they have throughout history, authoritarians are claiming disaffection with the status quo is support for a radical agenda. In the past, Labour MPs in northern constituencies have coasted through, interpreting their easy “you’re not the Tories” wins as a mandate for their weak tea policies. If Ukip sneaks a surprise victory out of “you’re not Labour” this will be lauded as a mandate for its incoherent and self-contradictory nationalism. The results will be viewed through the distorted lenses of people in London, to whom Stoke and Copeland might as well be Mars; every political event only matters inasmuch as it fuels speculation as to whose stars are rising and waning in the incestuous Westminster soap opera.
The issues that matter are wages, jobs, security, the capacity to have a decent life, the feeling that going to work actually matters, that there’s a point trying. These desires for a life that is more than just an endless cycle of poverty and insecurity are not simply ignored but actively resisted. Tory MPs spent four hours in parliament discussing their favourite radio stations in order to run down the clock and avoid discussing a bill that would have held Theresa May to account on preserving workers’ rights after Brexit. In previous centuries, such levels of disdain for struggling workers have had people reaching for the pitchforks and storming the palace. The government is lucky we live in more enlightened times.
This situation took decades to create, and it won’t be undone overnight. The absolute shower that we’ve ended up with in government couldn’t find their own backsides with both hands and an atlas, let alone come up with a policy that gives a population of disenfranchised and underemployed young people a reason not to throw in with the bargain bin Oswald Mosleys of Ukip. We need politicians with the revolutionary belief that we don’t have to settle for a race to the bottom, not pandering to hucksters, to give the swollen precariat a chance to stop drowning in part-time work and payday loans. To pretend anything else is good enough is to condemn us to economic decline and nationalist violence.