One of the progressive talks we are going to have to have whether Jeremy Corbyn becomes the Labour leader or not is about the nature of work and jobs and the distribution of wealth. Cameron and IDS talk about hard working people, full employment, making work pay, and a whole lot of other regressive bullshit. The world has changed and a labourist mentality is not working and cannot work any more (if it ever did other than for those who gathered the fruits of the labour of others for themselves). We’ve been locked into the means of survival through work, it’s an orthodoxy so rigid it has all the hall marks of religious dogma that is questioned at our peril, questioning brings out the regressives in rabid, unbridled, fury.
I grew up in a world in which the orthodoxy was that men worked and women stayed at home. What women did wasn’t considered to be work. Raising kids, shopping, cleaning, washing, cooking, looking after the children when they were sick, often caring for aging parents and neighbours, taking kids to the doctor and dentist, keeping a mental list and itinerary of all that running a home required, 24 hours on the job, wasn’t work. Men were the providers, women and all they provided were invisible, taken for granted, unregarded, patronised, slogging away like mere background noise. Even today in vast numbers of homes, there are two Christmases, the one enjoyed by men and children, and the Christmas of women who make it happen, the invisible labour of women often preparing months in advance. Even the Christmas card list and sending the cards was the traditional domain of women, yet usually signed, ‘Jim, Mary and the kids’ or some such.
Today the demand is that everyone must work in a world of wealth and work doesn’t pay enough to keep even one person going for millions of people. Is this progress? They call Corbyn regressive when what we’ve got under Cameron, supported by the Tory lites, is positively Victorian, if not feudally medieval.
In Tory Britain, today, apparently even disabled people can be made well by work and people are incentivised to work by being starved to death.
Corbyn, the so called regressive, has sparked terror in the heart of the Labour party who are suddenly confronted with democracy and are doing everything in their power to stop it.
We need to have a long, long conversation about work and a whole lot of other stuff and it’s long overdue.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
