Since 2008 ordinary people throughout western Europe have lived through nearly 8 full years of austerity, the quality of the experience dependent upon class, country of origin, etc. Some have lost jobs, some property, some relationships, some human dignity. Eight years of make do and mend, food banks, economic desolation. Anyone waking from a coma to find their savings evaporated, their home repossessed, their grown children without work, in debt and still living at home would surely expect the consolation of hearing the culprits had been detected, apprehended, tried and placed in a high security wing with the child murderers and paedophiles. You’d think.
When they discover the worst Depression since 1929 has been the result of gambling and greed by a privileged elite of Gecko wannabes and risk-takers in £2,000 suits and high end sky tower luxury, who understand money (mortgages, investments, pension funds) only in terms of projections on casino luminous screens, who think in terms not of monthly income, but annual bonus and how much it might allow a division of their time between Mayfair and Mustique, who after a couple of lean years stalling on that second holiday home, can now ignore their bankrupt credibility and budget with that bonus in mind again, especially now a Conservative government has revived the spirit of the Blitz with the patriotic slogan ‘We’re all in this together’ and everything is quiet down in the streets where Bentley’s cruise past poor saps hurrying to work on zero hour contracts while their wives queue at food banks (the only banks they can trust) before shopping in the Pound store, our coma patient might be forgiven for wondering exactly how all this has happened.
They might also think a murder conviction has overtaken the tattoo as the latest fashion accessory. Apart from the usual parts of the world where life is so cheap another killing spree in another shopping mall will barely register as newsworthy, the past decade has seen an itinerary of tourist massacres from Bangkok to Boston, while 9/11 and 7/7 are now so embedded in cultural consciousness they trip off the tongue like Bingo calls: so embedded, we know as surely as the Jihadist knows his awaiting paradise, this wave of death and destruction, devastating though it might seem now, is only in its infancy. In the name of ignorance, gullibility and ‘Allah’, the innocent are relentlessly attacked and destroyed for going to school, traveling on the tube, running marathons or lying on a beach; yet what of those who are not so innocent, those who have actually done some harm? Bankers have caused greater global damage to the West then terrorism since the fall of the twin financial towers, which itself produced Guantanamo Bay and an American Jihad aimed at eradicating ‘all terrorists and those who harbour them’ throughout the Middle East. Yet where is the political retribution, the government inquiries, the war trials, the executions for the terrorists at home? Failing that, where is the revolution of the ordinary worker, the bloody reprisals of destitute pensioners and disenfranchised youth, the shootings in Knightsbridge, the bombings on Canary Wharf? Have we even seen a solitary stabbing in Mayfair? A knee-capping in Surrey? A contract taken out on any single banker, even a small one, a roughing up, say, a broken leg, arm, eye-gouge, knee in the groin, slap in the face. Nothing.
How can we explain this? The helplessness of governments in the pocket of Wall St, confined to a tutting head-shaking? The machinations of the mysterious ‘New World Order’? The calm protective veneer of hired muscle? Or the meek passivity of the masses, those who have simply been worn down by the daily grinder of 20th century life and who have entered the 21st devoid of optimism and hope; who just go on struggling to make a living through the cusp of what appears to be a long hard era in which the individual no longer expects any more in the face of remote global forces?
Even the bankers must be surprised. Perhaps they can’t believe their luck, staring down at spiky London from cloud capped glass offices or standing on the terrace of Thamesside homes like Gatsby gazing out at the world beyond their own; at the seemingly contented dog walkers and static cows on the empty green bank across the short stretch of river, wondering at the listlessness of the masses, wondering what all the fuss was about (Crisis, what crisis?), why they suffered that white knuckle frisson of shock in the first hour as other punter’s worlds collapsed; it wasn’t their money.
So, what holds us in check? How have we kept the blood lust cool? Indeed, is there any lust for blood? Are the innocent just too innocent? Why has no on killed a banker?
The answer could be both depressing and mundane, with its roots in the affluent 80s where Margaret Thatcher punctured the bloated, helpless unions and declared there was no longer any such thing as ‘society’ (although we still had to ‘care’ for the damaged and the deranged in what she was happy to call the ‘community’). This may not have been merely political justification for the policies she was about to apply. At both the upper and lower end, the class system appeared to disappear (the workers no longer produced anything, the landowners no longer owned enough wealth to own the land) and we all became a new class of individuals; we became consumers. ‘I buy, therefore I am’ and ‘You are what you buy’ were our philosophical catchphrases. There was no going back. We are all consumers now, we’ve all bought into the same lifestyle dream. We no longer despise those enjoying the high end lifestyle (at the expense of others), merely gaze with envy at the distance they’ve travelled on the same continuum upon which we somehow find ourselves. Our reaction to finding ourselves shortchanged is not to rebel or reject the system itself (‘Very 60s. Very Left wing. Very ‘Traveller’, dog on a string, dribbling snot and desperate for a handout) but to emulate those ahead of us by buying in the same street, only from the bargain bucket end (more Tottenham Court Road than Bond Street) and the black market: fake Rolex, fake handbags, fake whatever, as long as it sports a label. With no sense of belonging to any wider community, the old working class have generically morphed into the materialistic Chav, sleepwalking in the prozac daze of fake bling and loudly proclaiming fake convictions, fake characters, fake souls.
The origins of this social change might be agued to have an earlier genesis. Before the 60s it was obvious who was Us and who was Them. In the decade of Pop, the children of the monied slummed it for a while in the hedonistic dressing-up box of the King’s Road, providing an illusion of merging classes in a psychedelic purple haze of frocks and rocks. In retrospect, what a smart fashion mag might have labeled The Hip Quaran (of Quant and Conran) provided the fashion dictates for a classless lifestyle and the party of sex and drugs and rock and roll, etc, etc rolled on, until the generation grew older and sober. Now we awake in another time to find the gulf between rich and poor wider than its been since the 19th century; the young, sold the dream of education and mobility, find no class to be mobile into and themselves overeducated, jobless and looking forward to spending middle age in their childhood bedrooms. Fashion, a fickle mistress, has taken sides and is very much high end.
The ancient House of Burberry illustrated this modern confusion over identity and snobbery only recently; brought to its knees a few years back when its tartan was adopted by the Chav clan, reaching a particularly low point when a minor soap star, dressed herself and her child from head to toe in the merchandise for a photoshoot. The long-term clientele shunned the store as it would leprosy and the brand name all but collapsed as the Chic had no intension of shopping alongside the Chav. Accessible luxury had become far too accessible. After several years of marketing revisionism, the House has now redeemed its exclusivity; and the distance it has travelled from the hoi polloi is maybe a measure of how far the old order has reasserted itself. Labels, however, remain seductive to the disenfranchised; there’s murder on the sales floor and scheduled tourist coach trips from London to Bicester not for any investigation of the town’s historic roots or the Oxfordshire countryside but the permanent 30% reductions in its designer outlets.
The technological revolution has been a catalyst in this process, intensifying the snobbery of accessible cultural identifiers. The poor are seduced in this 21st century revolution just as much as their counterparts were sold a dream during the 19th as an essential component for the success of the Industrial revolution. While Religion persuaded the masses to keep their place, turn themselves into machines for the sake of high production quotas with the promise of a rosy future after death, several generations down the line low end consumers are seduced not by a better life after death (with the exception of Muslim terrorists) but by design: the sleek, sexy products which appear to be democratically available whatever your station. The widescreen TV, the slimline G4 mobile. For as little as a £25 a month contract you too can share a little in the luxury of the iphone, for example; the arrival and opening ceremony of which can be viewed on Youtube where the world can see the pristine white, packaging lovingly dismantled; the box, a perfect fit, the layout, a sample of Tate Modern art, so perfect it seems wrong to disturb the arrangement by removing the contents.
When even those on benefit can own these products the seduction of the lifestyle is complete; the assertion of superiority and the sub-division of class is subtly defined by discrete margins of quality (the latest phone, the widest TV screen) made possible by credit and high interest loans. This is accessible snobbery. The snobbery of prison where the lowest will feel content in the knowledge that at least they’re not pedos or pimps; there is always someone lower. You don’t have to be a millionaire to feel superior.
Once again, Shakespeare is there before us:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
the instruments of darkness tell us truths;
win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
in deepest consequence.’
The old working class had always voted Conservative, as any psephologist will tell you; they are Disraeli’s ‘Angels in Marble’, a quirk of the English class system. However, in the past this was a deferential genuflection to a superior, educated, paternalistic elite, coated in the gloss of patriotism. The deference has faded (although most of the present cabinet were students in the two major public schools Disraeli would have recognised) but the legacy of 80s Thatcherism, besides the lack of choice other than a red or blue version of the same politics, is a sense of how individual aspiration has replaced community. There is much to be said for aspiration and a desire to ascend from ‘humble origins’ and the ability to free the individual from the pacifying ‘protection’ of the state; however, ascendancy is, apparently, best accomplished by individuals with the ruthless psychopathic nature of sharks and this nature has become not only acceptable but admired and emulated. With so much invested in the consequent accompanying imagery and lifestyle, it is hard for those lower down the foodchain to criticise others who have merely been more successful.
Through an unconscious propaganda, the lifestyle is constantly on display in magazines, on TV, in the same city, the same neighbourhood (at least before social cleansing is fully underway) and those on zero contracts in packing houses, call centres, supermarkets don’t feel it is not for them; far from turning with disgust at the shameless, ostentatious displays of wealth on offer, they feel they have a right to it themselves (look, they might say, at the celebrities who were nobodies and have done nothing, living the celebrity lifestyle...and what is a banker only a more secure, less famous celebrity?) making them feel only frustration and individual guilt in their individual failure, their powerlessness as individuals; a failure to act and a feeling that any act is futile. Yet every day, migrants from distant war zones are risking their lives in an attempt to smuggle themselves into the same country for the privilege of sleeping on the streets.
Is there a solution? Obviously killing a banker would be a symptom of impotence rather than empowerment. Perhaps we are awaiting a new vision, a new messiah, a new lifestyle which allows the masses to act again with conviction. Don’t hold your breath.
DG 2015
