WE ALL PAY YOUR BENEFITS - NEGATIVE SOLIDARITY

 Well, this is quite sickening. Here's the blurb from the BBC website:

"Four claimants and four taxpayers come face to face to explore each other’s lives, examine their values and speak their minds. Will the taxpayers feel that benefits are too high or not enough? And will the claimants decide that hard work is good for them or will the sacrifice be too much?"

When most "hard work" boils down to slaving your guts out for someone else's profit, why on earth is anyone going to decide that it's good for them? And I do like that term "sacrifice" with its (I think deliberately) sacral overtones. So working is a sacrifice, is it? Taking that seriously. we would have to ask to whom, and for whom? But the point seems to be fostering of negative solidarity, which translates as: "we have it shit, so you should have it shit, too". Like Ian Duncan Smith's constant mantra of "making work pay": you might think that that would mean making sure pay and conditions for most jobs improved; no, it means making sure that benefits are harder to get, worth less, and are easier to lose. The working population are expected to be grateful that someone is getting shafted more brutally than they are. More, they are told that it is claimants that are somehow making them work longer and harder for less money, and obscurely, that the precarity of work (zero hours contracts and the rest) is somehow down to the doleys. But if work is a sacrifice, it's not one that is made to claimants, claimants are not the ones who have kept wages stagnating for years.

"[...]in this second episode the experiment is reversed as the claimants spend time with the taxpayers. Getting up early, working alongside them through long shifts and seeing the effects on family life[...]"

So working "long shifts" (we're talking about most work that is done, the savagely underpaid variety) has effects on family life...But because it's a sacrifice (unclear to, or for, whom) it's worth it? The lack of affordable child care is somehow just a fact of life, like those long shifts.

"[...]the claimants experience the sort of work it takes to pay for their benefits and get a taste of the reality of working life. They must decide if they think that work is worth it. With the battle lines drawn between claimants and taxpayers, this series brings the two sides together to discover if any of them can agree."

At what point will we get to see the salt-of-the-earth-taxpayers get to have a face off with Lord Freud, for example, the charmer who recently said that the increase in food banks was due to the fact that they were giving away free stuff, and not because people might not have the wherewithal to buy food. Maybe he could be put in the position of explaining to them why he has so much and they have so relatively little. But no- that's not the way negative solidarity works. The working population are slaving so hard because of the unemployed, apparently, not because of their bosses.

THIS IS ENGLAND

I liked Shane Meadow's film largely for its performances - the kid was especially good - but was less convinced by the "period detail" (music, dad killed in Falklands) that quite a lot of the critics enthused about. I'm also more than a little ambivalent about skinheads, anyway; I know there were anti-racist skins around, but there weren't any where I grew up. What seemed to get a lot of people excited when the film came out was its apparently shocking premise that the working class were not all knuckle dragging xenophobes.

Anyway, to the series - which follows the characters from the film a few years on. I haven't yet watched the second part, so maybe what I'm going to say will be proved redundant. Brendan O'Neill in Spiked has already pointed out what is probably the most telling sequence of part one:

"One of the most striking things about the first episode is how people-free the settings were. This was most clear in the scenes in the hospital...Utterly bereft of other patients, doctors and nurses, the hospital becomes a playground for the good skins to muck about in...having a wheelchair race...or to resolve their personal differences in..."

There are no other people. The whole point about youth subcultures is that they were oppositional, you defined yourself by your tribe and your tribe was defined against not just other tribes but society in general. Meadow's skins exist in a bubble, they are not in opposition to anything. In this, it is absolutely unfaithful to the 1980's in particular and to the meaning of youth cults in general. However, in this it is faithful to the 21st century.

O'Neill makes the comparison to "Friends", which I think is pretty accurate. That enormously successful sitcom was a quintissential product of the "Happy '90's", its protagonists occupied a de-politicised (one assumed that they were vaguely liberal/left)and largely depopulated void. Their semi-incestuous inter-relationships were posited not just as a defense against the world, they were the world.