Saturday 18 January 2020

Brits are tired of feeble excuses and liberal finger wagging

I dropped out of sixth form. I'd been in the same stultifying environment for seven years surrounded by the same people, a bit of a misfit and utterly bored to tears. I remember the year head trying to motivate me by suggesting I'd peaked academically at GCSE level. He knew that would get under my skin. But still, I wanted out of there. I hated it. I needed different surroundings and new inputs. I'm easily bored and had no burning desire to go to university.

Luckily for me I pretty much fell into a junior administration role at the local chemical plant. I'm probably the last generation to ever have that opportunity. In another universe I probably still work there having decided to get the basic qualification in chemical engineering. But I didn't. My job gravitated more toward computer programming and after a basic introduction course paid for by the company I was able to teach myself more advanced coding and database development. I built on those skills and now whatever else happens to me, I at least have a trade to fall back on if I can find someone to employ me.

I remember this time particularly well as it formed the basis of my political outlook. I was living in a shared house taking home about £120 a week after tax and thinking it was a mug's game when all my housemates were making more or less the same money as me by signing on the dole and playing computer games all day. But I was at least developing a skill. Now I'm over forty I can pull in a decent wage if I find the right sort of company. That's not always easy since I'm still a misfit and tend to get fired within a month or so of any new job. I struggle to conform to even basic social conventions.

What I notice though, is that those who spent those vital years playing computer games are now still scratching minimum wage jobs in the arse end of Bradford. It's not difficult to see why they can't compete with highly motivated young eastern Europeans, many of whom have had a better education and thanks to the currency differential, there's an actual point to working hard. You can do your stint working in the UK and then buy a house back home. Not so much for Brits where even dual income households earning way above the national average have no hope of buying unless someone in wealthy in the family can give them a head start. The average age of first time buyers is creeping ever upward with house prices having more than doubled since 2004. About the time when freedom of movement properly kicked in. (no connection there, no siree.)

We are told that EU immigrants aren't taking our jobs. They're either doing the jobs we won't do or jobs where we have a shortage of skills. Certainly British youngsters are not rushing to pack sausages on a production line for bugger all, but then they can't afford to having overheads that gang labours don't - and they're not living ten to a room in beds in sheds. And why the fuck should they? But nevermind that our cheap food and services are propped up by exploitation. We'll just gloss over that.

But what of those jobs Brits simply don't have the skills to do? That's a problem. Not so long back I worked in a consultancy firm supply engineers to the Hinkley Point nuclear programme. We'd recruited a lot of young French people (probably from EDF). Good jobs on decent pay. These are the sorts of jobs that could have gone to British kids had they the skills and the right attitude. But there's a problem there.

Gaining access to training is difficult and even more difficult to finance once you reach a certain age. Chances are if you haven't picked up a trade by the age of 22 you never will. I could very easily have been one of them. I think in my mid twenties I decided I was bored to tears with programming and have tried to change careers many times since, but when businesses can take their pick from a host of qualified new arrivals, you're pretty much stuck where you are. Once you get pigeon-holed, you're done for. Business doesn't have to invest in training. There's no incentive. Thanks to freedom of movement, workers are a ready commodity.

The other problem is the mentality of Brits. Under Blair the welfare took hold and where we should have had young men doing engineering courses they were signing on, smoking pot and pricking around with Cubase Audio. Insofar as universities were expanded they were more a means of keeping young people off the unemployment statistics than actually teaching them anything of commercial value, hence the bewildering array of soft courses. This toxic development essentially means that Brits are not only priced out, but also outclassed in their own country.

Of course we are told freedom of movement works both ways. I recall at the engineering firm I worked at we did send engineers abroad all expenses paid. Lydia "gap yah" Vaughan-Smythe types who'd have no problems working abroad with or without freedom of movement. With UK language skills being what they are (pitiful for all manner of reasons) the option to up sticks and work abroad just isn't there - not forgetting the asymmetric nature of opportunities which don't tend to favour working class people.

When you add to this the disruption on the local level and the ramifications for local services and community cohesion you can easily arrive at the conclusion that freedom of movement just isn't fair. It's good for businesses who don't want to invest in people or treat them with any dignity, it's good for our gap yah Lydia, and it's good for lazy politicians who use it to prop up GDP growth irrespective of the social decline it perpetuates. But it's not good for people who just want an ordinary life with fairly pedestrian expectations such as secure employment and a roof over their heads.

Here we have the likes of Lisa Nandy telling us that "legitimate concerns should be taken into account" again uttering the throat clearing exercise of calling for "investment in skills". But for as long as there is no particular incentive we know that simply isn't going to happen and though the government could do more to provide training, we know it will be substandard and largely valueless. It's just another excuse to ignore voters.

The consequences of this are easy to see. Walk into any dentist or day clinic and you'll find all the medial professionals are foreigners while the administrators and secretarial staff tend to be white working class people who could have had those jobs had the opportunities for training and development been there. Working class Brits are condemned to be the administrative class of an economy that no longer serves them. Some "white privilege".

Of course a lot of us are victims of our own choices. I know I certainly am. I don't blame foreigners for that and utterly resent the implication that leave voters are in any way xenophobic. Working class people are more likely than most to forge relationships with EU workers. Nobody wants to see mass deportations and the anger is not directed at foreigners. Rather it is directed at a governing class that simply doesn't listen and does nothing. Instead of acting they simply wag the finger.

And that is essentially the point of yesterday's post. Pakistani rape gangs have nothing at all to do with Brexit or even the EU to any real extent, but the same dynamic applies. Our political class and now our civic institutions would rather paper over the cracks and stifle debate than take meaningful action. Eventually the public runs out of patience and is not willing to be fobbed of with equivocation, excuses and denial. We've seen this in the freedom of movement debate with flat denials that vast movements of people have any impact on jobs, housing and services.

What they mean by that is that freedom of movement has no impact on their jobs, housing and services. And so long as it has no real world consequences for our ruling class, they will continue to ignore, belittle and patronise voters. You can't get away with that forever.

Still, though, Brexit brings no resolution to this. We are doubly insulted. We still have the same old tropes fired at us from luvvie remainers and the same old lies while the Tories may actually be worse thinking that a reversion to a blue passport and Brexit bongs on the stroke of midnight signifies a government getting back in touch with the common man. They seem to think subsidising a steel plant in the north east and bailing out a regional airline represents any kind of departure from the usual base assumptions. It's going to take more than that.

If there's one thing now clear it is that EU membership was propping up a governing class who otherwise couldn't even manage the basics. And as we now see from Sajid Javid claiming there is no requirement to follow EU rules to export goods to the EU, and with a talent drought in the Labour leadership contest, it seems we don't have the makings of a functioning government. It seems that packing sausages and designing nuclear reactors aren't the only areas where we made ourselves useless. We let the EU run our trade, fishing, agriculture and energy policy and now it's our job we find the cupboard is bare. Only now they're out of excuses. That, I suppose, is a start.

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