Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Class

Class came up on someone else's Facebook page the other day, with an impassioned plea by the writer who sees himself as working class and objects to the way working class people are seen in this country.

This is the link - I'm not sure if it's still active: http://stv.tv/news/politics/1360057-class-is-the-scottish-problem-independence-will-not-solve/

I'm not sure about matters of class. I haven't been sure for a long time. On the one hand, I've got relatives living in nice (bought) houses and doing highly skilled, non-manual jobs, in which they earn quite a lot of money, telling me they are working class. And I've met graduate engineers, university lecturers and teachers from Syria and Afghanistan at the foodbank who till a couple of years back were part of a comfortable middle class at home but now find themselves in the UK unable to work and living on a fiver a day while they wait to hear if they can have permission to stay. They don't call themselves middle or working class. They say they are poor.

A couple of generations ago it was easy: you were born into a poor environment (the surroundings were poor, although your family maybe wasn't) so you were working class. On that basis, I was born into a working class background. We lived in a room and kitchen, all five of us. We could have afforded something better housing. It's just that nothing better was available. But that's not the full story. The view of my father's family was that he had married beneath himself, while my mother's family thought his family were 'middle class on their way down,' mainly due to some of the family drinking and gambling the family money away.

Either way, it doesn't matter too much: both versions of the story above just give us an idea of how precarious life has always been for people who have to work and have no savings, property or investments to fall back on.

Arguing over who is working class and who isn't is an irrelevance in an age that seems to be dead set on doing away with jobs (check the increasing number of self-serve checkouts in the supermarkets) and reducing the lives of those who still have jobs to a desperate attempt to cling to some sort of decent life on a minimum wage backed up by tax credits paid for by the 'government' - that is, the tax payers - you and me.

What is happening now reminds me of the scenario around a long-standing marriage that has started to break down: I've given you the best years of my life, I've worked my ass off and now you want a younger/better model and I am to be chucked to one side. This isn't how capitalism is meant to be: we're meant to work and employers are meant to pay us enough so we can live.

Those of us who work have kept our  side of the deal but the others?
                                                                                                                                                           



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