Being poor is, and I know this might surprise you- shit. Money is essentially the capital to do what you want, whether it’s go on holiday, have nice food, live in a nice place… the less you have, the less you can do and the more limited your options. Money is brilliant! When you have it… And when you don’t you’re taught not to ask for it or about it, that the system we live in is brilliant, unchangeable and to question it is somehow unpatriotic, as though the UK exists only to prop up the Pound’s value against the Euro or the Dollar. But as the Cost of Living Crisis deepens, a weird phenomenon is occurring.. Right now, newspapers across the entire spectrum of the UK are decrying the status quo, talking about how we’re all struggling- and the lens through which they’re focusing is the workers' strikes: RMT, doctors and everyone else who’s lining up to take industrial action. Funny how those newspapers don’t talk about their owners, the Rothermeres, the Murdochs, the living monopoly men of our ages - no, blame the strikers! Funny story: for 11 years I worked in medical recruitment, specialising mainly in doctors. Doctors pay seems good doesn’t it? Bet you’d love a Consultant’s first year salary of, I think it’s £73k now? Have a quick look at how much it costs them a year just for their GMC registration, for exams, for indemnity, how much their student loan repayments are, the parking at the hospital, money for trips, admission to conferences to stay up to date on developments in their area; Then ask yourself how generous that salary really is. If I was shelling out £389 a month just for the stuff I’m legally obliged to, to have to do the job, I’d probably be asking for a pay rise as well, but what am I? Just another Woke, Lefty Remoaner eh! Why should we be paid fairly, after all I was dragged kicking and screaming into existence, I shouldn’t be comfortable here, we want to continue on that feeling of being dragged reluctantly from womb to school to work to retirement, then finally death can be a nice, long rest… Is this really how people think? It rather seems that way. Mad, eh? The problem we’re up against is not just the people with money positively spilling out of every available orifice (incidentally did you know the tip of the penis isn’t technically an orifice, it’s a meatus - and also that that word makes me feel nauseous). Of course they’re campaigning for rich people to be rich, of course they’re spending vast sums of money to help them get more money back - once you’re rich you’ve got to be a bit stupid to lose it because just having money makes money. Those people don’t concern me from the angle of agenda-pushing, the - what is it now, 173 billionaires in the UK? They’ll always pay into the collective agenda push, because they want the money they have and more besides. Rather than standing up for themselves and other people, they’d rather we were just all poor and unhappy - anything for a quiet life, eh? Even if that quiet life is filled with misery and the gnawing feeling that your son’s meat would provide a solid 3 - 4 weeks of nightly roasts, or you cant afford next month’s electricity because you had to have a fan on for 4 hours because the earth is literally fucking burning. But misplaced rage is a common trope amongst our vast group, the 99% (approximately 70% of which are dense as concrete). As companies like Centrica (who own British Gas) rake in literally billions just in attenuated profit based on last year’s figures some British families are figuring out how they’ll scrape through winter... but where is our ire aimed? British fucking Gas. When the actual energy extractors do what they do, i don’t know… forklift electricity out of the ground, hoover up oil into tins? This is where the problem starts: these energy extractors, the companies who pull the raw material like gas and electric, when they slurp up what we need to make sure the lights stay on, they’re immediately bumping up prices to extortionate rates. They then “sell” this energy to companies like the ones we pay, and those companies pass on the price raise to us because it’s costing them more to supply it… but we’re angry at them, not the wholesaler. Companies like Unilever are taking stupendous profits and immediately paying their CEO’s bonuses which are more in a year than I’ll earn in a lifetime, whilst workers at the bottom - you know, the ones who make the company run, who do the day-to-day, the ones you speak to - haven’t had an increase in pay not only against inflation but against anything - in 7, 8, 9 years… and then they get irate phone calls from us, raging less against the system than the sister, or brother. If we had any sense we would be angry at the CEO’s - and so would they. The fact is, people like Mick Lynch et-al have been all over the media delivering pragmatic truth into the faces of a media and political elite who have been allowing this disjointed system to progress to the point of absurdity: and that’s why it resonates with so many of us. When Lynch explains how our money goes straight into the banks of these firms, the vast bulk of it is scooped up, delivered to the elites at the top of the company and the remainder filters down into just making sure the services still run, the people are paid the same salaries, you cant help but stop, look and think “well… that’s bollocks, isn’t it”. Whether a service is public or not, when you pay them for the service it’s important that those that do the work (along with the service itself) are continually improved. I couldn’t give a toss if Gingrich McMoneybags can afford a new Bugatti and neither should you. Let me tell you a story about my own experience in this vein - the person I’m talking about certainly isn’t an “elite” but this experience still rankled me deeply, and this story is a small insight into the huge disconnect between those who work-to-live and those who work-to-reap-profit. Through the pandemic, I worked mostly in the office, alone, but once or twice a week at the height, I’d see my boss who came in and worked on the other side of the room. During this time I was dealing with doctors who would occasionally ring me in tears to talk about how horrible their experience at work was - death in the corridor, families saying tearful goodbyes on crackling WiFi. A horrible job for brave people. Nothing quite like a dose of “problems of the well-off” after listening to a doctor sobbing behind her car because she didn’t want to watch another person choke to death. When it comes to working class solidarity, our experiences extend even to those on what can seem like decent salaries - some can be under massive fiduciary pressure. Don’t think that because someone is on what seems like a good salary, they don't understand what it’s like to live in relative poorness. It’s not the people on £60k, £80k, £90k we should be mad at. But people on £500,000 salaries, who get £200,000 a year bonuses. People who earn salaries in the millions because they started a company, delegated all the work to people on a fraction of their vast income and occasionally show up to a meeting to steeple their fingers and complain that perhaps the people they employ on 1/500th of their salary just aren’t working hard enough: what work can you possibly do alone to justify that, especially when the workers who initiate, continue, complete the process, cant afford to pay their electricity? And what kind of slackjaw would be angry at workers on £60k for striking when their company brings in 1.6 billion of profits through that worker’s duties that goes straight to the pockets of someone who jumps on a zoom call from their 3rd house in the south of France to authorise mass redundancy? Stand with strikers: they’re just braver than you for asking to be paid what they’re worth. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the 5 people at the top of the company clutching profits like a xenophobic dragon, not the people trying to make sure they can afford their mortgage payments. This disconnect only continues as long as we propagate the system, so unplug from the depressing matrix of workaday drudgery and ask yourself how much better the economy would be if you could afford the luxuries yourself, ask for it, demand it. And for those who tell you you’re not worth it, remember that if they dont think flipping burgers at McDonalds is worth £15 an hour, they probably think sitting in a boardroom deciding to make those burgers 10% less meaty is worth £395,000… You’re not in the wrong: they are.
