Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Looking back, you can boil down the story of the financial crash to a sentence: the bankers ran off with the profits, we got stuck with their losses. Short and snappy, and also true. Summing up what happened next, though, has so far proved trickier. But at the halfway point in Britain’s angry lost decade, enough evidence is now in to say this: after socialising the bankers’ debts, we privatised despair.
The past five years have not been about the big public calamities that usually make up economic crisis. No industries have gone bust nor, thankfully, have millions been slung on the dole. Instead, it is becoming clear that the teens of this century will be marked by tens of millions of instances of private financial misery, all borne behind closed doors.
This will be the decade of workers on wages so low they are priced out of the lifestyle they once thought was safely theirs; of tenants struggling with soaring rents and crappy landlords; of severely disabled people kept awake by the prospect of their benefits being cut, while others on jobseeker’s allowance jump though hoop after hoop to avoid being sanctioned.
None of this everyday wretchedness fits what we have come to think of as a slump; yet this is the shape of the one we are grinding our way through. Defying the spectacular predictions that were made after 2008, this crisis is private, unequal and internalised.
I have been tracking these issues for years – but what they look like added together came into painful clarity a couple of weeks ago in Liverpool. Norris Green falls among the most deprived places in England but, with greenery, wide roads and new houses going up, it doesn’t look bad at all. Gazing out of his windscreen, Barry Kushner, a local councillor, set me straight: around half these households were now in temporary work, he reckoned; the launch of the bedroom tax had caused mayhem for residents; there was a two-month wait for appointments at the local Citizens Advice bureau. Along this neat terraced street was a row of front rooms where parents were fretting over how to pay off the Christmas they’d just given their kids.
Norris Green doesn’t fit the traditional narrative arc of economic crisis. As in much of Britain, there’s no rerun of the Great Depression; it’s more a whole string of mini-depressions. You see it in the growth of foodbanks, or in last autumn’s warning from Citizens Advice of a surge of people in trouble over their rented homes – a 15% rise in reports of harassment by landlords, a 20% spike in evictions. More prosaically, you see it when the poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack report in their book Breadline Britain that over one in four households can’t afford to repair or replace broken electrical goods – a proportion that has more than doubled since 1999.
Apart from the odd high-street name such as Woolies or Comet, there have been no great business bankruptcies – partly because Britain has so few big industrial employers left after the Thatcher and Major recessions. Another reason is the hundreds of billions the state has pumped into the financial system, keeping afloat households and businesses that would otherwise sink.
This explains the lack of public spectacle. But our privatised despair is shaped by three main factors: huge inequality that leaves the poorest stranded; the mushrooming of precarious jobs; and George Osborne’s habit of picking off sections of the population to pay the biggest bills for the bankers’ losses.
The first factor is most thoroughly itemised by my Guardian colleague Tom Clark. In his book Hard Times, he catalogues how this meltdown has slapped the poorest in ways that don’t make it into public discussion. Clark turns up YouGov polls showing how Britons hit by the recession are more than twice as likely as their slump-proof compatriots to report that they row more. Citizenship surveys indicate that the sharpest fall in volunteering in 2010 took place in precisely those worst-off areas that most desperately needed them. David Cameron’s “big society” was always a luxury item for those with money, time and assertiveness to spare.
If privatised despair reaches into your home, it does not let up at the workplace. While employment has hit records under the coalition, the new work is more insecure and lonelier than we usually imagine. The characteristic jobs of this slump are the Uber driver, or the outsourced care worker going from door to door for 15 minutes a time. The new work is in perma-temping, shuttling from workplace to workplace, or in enforced freelance or fake self-employment. Forget about collective organisation or trade unions: these are often low-paid areas of work where regular contact with a roster of people who know your name cannot be guaranteed.
Inequality and insecure jobs aren’t new; they have simply been heightened since Cameron and Osborne moved into Downing Street. The chancellor who promised we were all in it together has specialised in fiscal divide and rule; the Conservative who hates picking winners in industrial strategy has been expert at picking losers in his budgetary strategy. So it is that the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that “lower-income groups will fare considerably worse over the post-recession period”. Or that Simon Duffy at the Centre for Welfare Reform calculates that people with disabilities have been hit nine times harder than the rest of the population by austerity; those with severe disabilities 19 times harder.
Add these three factors together, and add in: the almost complete erosion of social institutions; the growing redundancy of the church in a secular country; the toothlessness of trade unions; and the way in which social security has gone from being a helping hand at times of need to being an instrument of surveillance and punishment. What you end up with is working poor turning on those without jobs; and those right at the bottom cut adrift entirely. I call it privatised despair, but writing about interwar Europe, Hannah Arendt talked of “radical isolation”, in which men and women were turned against each other.
And sometimes turned against themselves. In his book, Clark writes about a couple in Luton: the wife is severely disabled, the husband is extremely ill. “Stephanie” lives in fear of her disability living allowance being stopped and thus losing the car in which she ferries “Martin” to his oncologist. They mention how they dread the postman delivering a “brown letter” containing bad news from the Department for Work and Pensions. I can think of no better metaphor for privatised despair: living in fear of the daily post. Then Stephanie says something no blameless person in a civilised society should ever say: “I feel that I am scum, really.”
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