Pull the Other One

One could be forgiven, when watching the news of what inevitably became known as 'Hackgate' for wondering what the Hell is wrong with David Cameron. I mean, he can't run an economy, we know that much; he can't win elections without help from his valet, Nick Clegg; basic human decency is something so foreign to him that his initial response to any ethical question is to apologise politely and tell the questioner he doesn't speak Swahili _ but a scandal like this should, surely, be right up his alley? This whole thing is, when you get down to it, a matter of public relations - and that used to be Cameron's job, for goodness' sake.

It's at that point that I remember Dave never got one of the limited range of jobs he's done on merit. Every single career opportunity he's had has been presented to him on a plate, on the 'who you know' principle. Why study and graft, after all, when you can just get a mate from Buckingham Palace to put in a good word for you?

So I don't buy the lazy idea that David Cameron is a 'master of spin'. Blair - he could spin. Blair got landslides. Cameron's much-vaunted PR skillz only got him a deeply unfulfilling political cohabitation with the Lib Dems. And Blair knew how to get angry properly, too: how to project just the right sense of wounded feelings while still rhetorically defending himself. When Blair got angry - even when you were equally angry with him - you had to fight back a strong urge to nod, admire his spirit, and admit you had to see his point of view. When Cameron gets angry, he looks like a petulant child telling Nanny his Papa could have her killed. David Cameron, angry, is one of the most pathetic sights I have ever seen, and I have seen a man vomit into a self-service cinema popcorn machine.

Still, you can't hang around with the real media sharks without some of their tricks rubbing off on you, and I'm not just talking about being able to chop out three lines on the rim of a seatless toilet in Hoxton while keeping the lockless, barely-hinged door shut with your pinstriped buttocks. So, reading the Guardian this morning, I wasn't surprised to see that Cameron's Tory-led coalition have wheeled Vince Cable out to talk about crackers:

'The business secretary, Vince Cable, announced the first phase of the government's "Red Tape Challenge" and expressed hopes that lowering the age at which one can buy Christmas crackers, among other regulatory tweaks, would help restore high-street confidence.'

The inclusion of that Christmas crackers bit by Cable - or whoever wrote his speech for him - is a damn cute piece of PR. The reason it works is that it makes journalists' jobs so much easier. First of all, it gives them a ready-made hook on which to hang the story, and it plays into a well-established tabloid myth about 'health and safety gone mad'. But there's also something appealing about the word 'crackers', a faintly-comic, ludicrous, almost retro word for behaviour that is supposedly insane, but not in a serious way; a word you might find in Whizzer and Chips, or that Bart Simpson might say in the 'cockernee urchin' voice he does sometimes. And one of those words, like 'romp', which seems to find its most natural home in the pages of newspapers. It's irresistible.

Weirdly, the only paper I can find which has went the whole hog and put the word in their headline is the Belfast Telegraph, with 'Crackers: the silly trading laws about to be scrapped'. Maybe the sub-editors decided this was a little too cute, and rejected it in the way that you can find yourself turning down people you desperately want to get off with when they make their own intention to get off with you too obvious. But most papers picked up on the ludicrous crackers rules prominently in the body of their reports. And in that sense, the work was done, and the real agenda of the Tory-led government concealed, as usual, in the last paragraph of the article - or in a hanging sentence, as in the Guardian:

'Cable said the Red Tape Challenge would be extended to 25 more themes and sectors, including employment law, by next summer.'

The italics there are mine: because those three words, 'including employment law', are really what this is all about.

As Justine pointed out in our last post, the Tory idea of helping businesses is to make the labour market more 'flexible': code for a world in which you sell your time to corporations for peanuts and can be sacked at any time. Since before the election  they have carried out a propaganda campaign against two key pieces of legislation: the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equalities Act 2010. Christine Burns has taken note of how the Red Tape Challenge seems unusually preoccupied by the latter of these; many other bloggers have noted the deluge of anti-human rights propaganda in the right-wing press. With that in mind, there can be little doubt as to the true aim the Tories are wrapping up as a silly-season story: they want you to think they're making it easier for you to buy Christmas crackers; but what they actually doing is making it easier for your boss to give you the sack. And if that happens, it won't matter how old you are when you go to the shops for some yuletide cheer: you won't be able to afford it anyway.

Selling Cheap

(We've been quiet of late at You Didn't Win  due to me (AJ) being rather busy with poetry gigs, so apologies for not posting as often as we'd like. In our time away, we've been gratified to see how tough things are getting for the Tory-led Coalition, and we're particularly pleased to see that the moral bankruptcy of their backers in the Murdoch press has been publicised to such an extent that the Digger has been forced to sacrifice part of his media empire, the News of the World newspaper, like a chess player frantically throwing pawns away in suicidal moves to buy his Queen (Rebekah Brooks) another second's breathing space. We're less pleased about the fact that the grunt-level workers of the NOTW will now find themselves added to the unemployment statistics, but not to worry - You Didn't Win blogger Justine has been thinking on the words of Tory rent-a-gob Philip Davies a couple of weeks ago, and may have the perfect solution for them...)

The Tory MP for Shipley, one Philip Davies, caused something of a stir while discussing the Private Members' Bill that would 'allow' employees to opt out of the minimum wage. As one might expect, the response to his comments has been pretty much one of anger and dismay. With a bit of eye-rolling; he's a Tory - would we really expect anything less?

His defence has been the standard attack on left-wing strawpersons and to claim that he was just saying what people with learning disabilities had said to him. Because that makes it all OK, apparently. (Looking at his other twitter interactions with those who don't agree with him, he doesn't come over as a particularly nice person. You remember that thing when we were kids, repeating something back to someone in a singsong voice? I'm reminded of that. And this is an elected representative of the people.)

Never mind that it was probably a small group of people that he spoke to, or that some of those with developmental disabilities have sometimes got issues of vulnerability that mean they can be easily taken advantage of. Given that so many in society believe that people with disabilities and impairments are less productive members of society and need to be SPOKEN. TO. AS. IF. THEY. ARE. DEAF. as well as patronised, is it any wonder that some of them may internalise that and really believe that it's them that need to accept lower wages to be accepted by the rest of us? I have misgivings about a society that places ones' worth so entirely on paid employment; this serves to erode my already-shaky belief in it further. That we would seriously discuss paying the most vulnerable members of society even less than those who are just managing to hang on on £5.93 per hour?

Because if this came into effect, it wouldn't just be those with developmental disabilities who would be affected.

The current Parliament are wanting to overhaul the welfare system, as we are all already aware. One of the things they would like to do is to 'get the long-term sick' back to work. Those claimants fortunate enough to get through the ATOS assessments will only be able to claim Incapacity Benefit (or whatever they'll rename it under the new system) for a year. After 365 days (of if you're in 'luck' and it's a leap year, 366 days) that stops. Perhaps you'll be able to start a new claim. If you need to, there's a chance you'll be more ill than you were a year before. Hopefully you'll be at least about the same. You'll have to be assessed again. It's unlikely that the DWP will leave you alone for that year after your successful claim, too. They will probably want you to maintain your claim over the year, just in case you get better after 6 months or so, and can stop the claim and get to work. Having been chronically ill and claiming for ESA in the past, I have an inkling of how stressful that can be. Stress is generally not conducive to good health or recovery.

So, a year has passed and your claim is over, or you failed the ATOS assessment because, by proving you can jump the flaming hoops they ask you to jump through to pass, you were set up to fail. The Government really don't want to give you any money. The last of your benefits will run out in a couple of weeks, and after that your council tax and housing benefits will run out too. You need a job. But you have this long-term condition that means it's very hard to find an employer who will take you on; your illness may make you 'unreliable'. This Private Members' Bill suggests that you might want to work for less than an employer is legally required to pay you. The Tories suggesting this are at pains to point out that it's the employees who opt out; the employer cannot. Remember when they also said that universities could charge up to £9000 a year for fees? That was suggested to be optional, with only the very best institutions charging the top rate? Well, every university likes to think it's better than average, I suppose. The average for 2012 is about £8,400.

When it comes to maximising income and minimising expenditure, in a capitalist society, of course the fess are going to go up. Of course employers will pay as little as possible for labour. So there won't be outright statements of 'you've got the job if you'll work for less', but there will be a huge pressure on people to offer to work for less. In all my working life, I don't think I've ever gone for a job where there hasn't been a lot of interest. Or, at least, so I've been told at some point in the application stages. Whether it's a bland statement of fact, or a tacit method of pointing out just how replaceable I (and pretty much everyone else) am, I couldn't say. I guess it doesn't hurt to try to make new employees as compliant as you can from the outset.

Put someone who is desperate for an income in the interview chair. Or someone with a disability (not that the two are mutually exclusive; with the planned cuts they will morph into one and the same more and more). Everyone in the room knows that they could increase their chances of 'success' by saying they'll work for less... The job market may end up like a silent auction, but in reverse. The person who 'wins' is the person with the lowest bid.

As part of the defence of Mr. Davis' comments, a number of people have mentioned people working for free, to get experience. There are a number of comments on this Daily Mail article but I'm loath to link to it properly, so that's to the istyosty page of the same, but without comments. Internships are presumably what the commenters refer to. Internships of a fixed period of time (six weeks in the comment I refer to, the time period is more often than not up to a year) of unpaid work. They hinge on a certain amount of privilege; someone has to pay the living costs for that period of time. Lots of people volunteer for charities, but they also have to pay for their costs too, either by also having a job or being on JSA or pensions. To compare internships and voluntary work to working for less than the legal minimum wage is to compare apples to elephants.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: do we want to live in a society that devalues people, based solely on the job they can find? That agrees that those who have disabilities are worth less than those of us who currently don't?

(Note from AJ: this isn't the first time Philip Davies has popped up on my radar. Like Nadine Dorries he seems to be one of those annoying new Tory MPs who see it as their duty to ape the worst excesses of the Tea Party movement - the main difference between Davies and Dorries being that he chooses to do a cack-handed imitation of Glenn Beck rather than Sarah Palin. This piece, on the Telegraph's reporting of a European LGBT conference, contains a short digression on Davies which gives, I think, the measure of the man.)