Divide and Conquer

Ben Wildsmith 

Isn’t it interesting how the sociopathic ghouls who traditionally govern us frame the harm they do in language that dehumanises their victims?

It is simple to turn the citizens of a deeply unhappy nation against each other. After all, someone must be to blame for our perpetual bad mood, mustn’t they?

It’s been all sorts over the years: juvenile delinquents, single mothers, asylum-seekers, teachers, lawyers, trade unionists, the woke…

Maggie Thatcher infamously dubbed striking miners ‘the enemy within’ as she set about destroying their industry and leaving communities with no adequate employment alternatives.

I’ve become hypersensitive to politicians describing people in groups. The key to stripping people of their worth in society lies in erasing their individuality.

If you picture a single person with a backstory, a personality, a dependent family, ambitions, loves, and beliefs then you are in danger of empathising with them.

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Easy target

Amorphous blobs of undesirable human material, clumped together into an easy target is what the press and politicians conspire to present to us as our enemy.

Once people have been packaged up in this way there is no need to consider their needs or feelings at all.

This week, our Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has set her sights on the Civil Service. 10 000 of them are going to be losing their jobs in the service of her fiscal rules and the usual loaded language was wheeled out to sell the idea.

These people are, we are told, are in ‘back-office jobs’. The Civil Service, along with local authorities, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of rhetoric.

As the public sector has shrunk and been subsumed by private companies doing the same work at a profit, it has created the impression that any expenditure outside of doctors and nurses is a confidence trick played by lazy bureaucrats.

The Chancellor said she was ‘confident’ that these 10 000 jobs could be axed. Her implication is that the loss of all that employment is an unalloyed virtue.

The upheaval it will cause to the people involved isn’t even a factor in the decision-making.

They aren’t real people; they are the Civil Service. Ugh. G4S and Serco doubtless stand ready to fill the breach, quite possibly with the same people employed in less advantageous contracts.

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'Working people'

Labour’s rhetorical obsession with ‘working people’ only seems to run as far as demonising those who don’t work for some reason.

Last week we saw Wes Streeting attempt to shear mental health conditions away from our understanding of disability. Citing no evidence, he claimed that they were ‘over-diagnosed’.

There is a grim double act in play between Streeting at Health, and Liz Kendall at Work and Pensions.

Streeting delegitimises medical conditions so that Kendall can cancel benefits for them. Nice work if you can get it.

It's less clear who is supposed to be employing these miraculously cured mental health patients.

Are corporations crying out for people doctors say are unfit, but whom Wes Streeting reckons should pull their socks up?

There was once a time when the UK government funded companies to employ disabled people.

A friend of mine who had cerebral palsy had one of these jobs and was pictured during a workplace visit from Margaret Thatcher shortly before she axed the scheme. He never worked again.

The ‘dignity of toil’ claptrap we all have to listen to from people whose idea of work is appearing on Question Time rings a bit hollow when you are salivating at firing 10 000 of your own employees.

Disabled people must work at all costs, but the Civil Service is fat to be trimmed, its employees without value.

Confusion

There is a philosophical confusion in this government that should trouble us all.

Its solutions for short-term problems seem to be made without reference to any long-term vision, and devoid of guiding principles. It wants people in work, it wants people out of work.

So far, pensioners, farmers, the disabled, and the Civil Service have found themselves on the sharp end of this government’s tendency to isolate groups from the wider community.

The ‘working people’ they profess to serve aren’t defined by their labour, but their membership of an imaginary, bovine herd to which the party pitches its messaging. Flag, Work, Flag, Flag, Decency, Work, Flag, Vote, Labour.

With austerity baked into its economics, this government is going to need a lot of people to blame for the visible decline in our communities. Might be you, next week.