great certitude and conviction, out of his arsehole. He was in the middle of some long peroration about the bone-idle working class of today, how they don’t know how to work, or won’t work, or think work is beneath them, or can’t spell the word work, or don’t understand work in a semantic sense, or something – the usual fucking boring guff you hear from self-important well-off right-wingers, especially the heads of industry, but also sometimes from backbench Tory politicians when they’re too far from the Central Office twat-zapper to be effectively restrained and have begun to froth at the mouth and gibber and writhe like demonically possessed spastics in front of the TV cameras or their local constituency association. David went on to tell us what his old dad did when he was short of work. Do you know what he did, Mr Starkey Senior? He walked a hundred miles, or something, in order to find a job. Or it might have been five hundred miles, or a thousand, or fifty. I can’t remember. And actually, now I come to think of it, he may not have walked – he may have cycled, or pursued new employment a great distance from home via the conduit of a pogo-stick, or by swimming the entire length of every watercourse that hove into view, or by hopping, while beating himself about the body with a birch switch. The exact mode of self-propelled transportation detailed by David now eludes me entirely, for which many apologies; that’s bad research, really. Something very fucking arduous, anyway, all in order to find new work, all in order to maintain his pride and provide for his family, to be a man, to be a worker.
That’s what he did. He conformed to the Tebbit principle and, metaphorically or otherwise, got on his bike to seek out employment. And the point Mr Starkey Jr was trying to make, the same point made by Lord Tebbit a couple of decades previously, is that the feckless scumbag British worker just doesn’t do that any more. He expects work to come to him, he lolls around whining about a lack of work, but he won’t go out looking for it. What we need, Mr Starkey Jr implied, is an infinitely flexible workforce.
We already have one, of course. The British worker puts in more hours than any other in Europe, with the exception of the Irish. And look where that’s got the poor bastard. Indeed, the least flexible, most regulated and least hard-working people in Europe live in what we once knew as the Hanseatic League – Germany, Norway, the Netherlands; they are also the most affluent countries in the world. Perhaps the British worker should work less hard, then, and be a damn sight less flexible about his working arrangements. Perhaps we’d all be better off that way. But as soon as the unemployment rate creeps up because the government will not invest in anything, and the working classes start getting a bit restive, there’s always someone like the otherwise rather wonderful David Starkey to come along and tell them that the reason they can’t get a job is that they’re not flexible enough, they won’t put themselves out – and so that’s why the jobs go to the Poles and the Slovaks. Look how flexible and vigorous they are, these broad-faced Slavs! They’ve hopped all the way from Łódz and Košice, and now Brasov and Plovdiv – and here they are right now, doing the jobs you could have had, you mugs.
Flexible, then, as understood by Mr Starkey, is a synonym – a euphemism, if you like – for ‘fucking cheap’. The reason British businesses employ Eastern European labour is that they can pay them three fifths of fuck-all and get away with it; it is nothing to do with a reluctance on the part of the British worker to shift his indolent fat arse and travel a few miles for a job. The Poles and Slovaks have very low overheads here, and a much lower cost of living back home. They don’t have families to support in this country, by and large, so they work for less. Have you noticed how minicab fares haven’t risen much recently, or have sometimes gone down? You can probably work out why that is when you listen to the driver’s accent.
We’ll return to the immense joys occasioned to the poorest people of this country by large-scale immigration in a later chapter, and leave the subject for now, after I’ve told you about the two lads I met outside the Job Centre in Middlesbrough. Skilled labourers, they’d been on the dole for months, and were desperate for work. They took themselves off to the Olympic site down in London, where there was loads of construction going on, but they couldn’t get a job, turned away from every site. And, one of them told me, shaking his head, the signs outside the site offices were all in Polish. The Poles had nicked all the jobs.
Yes, yes, I know, you mithering authoritarian bien pensant, I can see those hackles rising along your spine, I can see your wet lips forming themselves into the ubiquitous ovine bleat of raaaacisttttttt. Of course I know that none of this is the fault of the Poles, I know they are blameless. It is not remotely the fault of the Poles, OK? But once you’ve said that, where does it leave the lads from Middlesbrough? Or doesn’t that matter? Just raise your glass and offer three cheers for the free movement of labour and capital, like any good socialist would. Anyway, we’ll come back to this interesting topic. I don’t know, incidentally, how those Boro boys got themselves the 260 miles down to London. Maybe they borrowed David Starkey’s dad’s pogo-stick. Or maybe they took the fucking coach.
Right now, I’m packing up for a move myself, got the removals people coming round in a week. We’re off, sixty or so miles from where we live at the moment, on the edge of London, to near Canterbury (and dangerously close to David Starkey, as it happens). I counted up, and the new house will be the nineteenth different place I’ve lived since leaving home in 1978, meaning that I’ve spent an average of one year and nine and a half months in each place. I’ve lived in the north-east, the south-west, South Wales, London and Kent. I pester my wife on an almost daily basis to move to the north-east of England, but she won’t do it because she thinks there are no Starbucks there and she won’t be able to buy tampons, batteries or shoes, so it doesn’t look like we’re going there any time soon.
I think my yearning for the north-east, where I always feel at home, comes from this berserk thirty-four years of rootlessness, a peripatetic existence, a sort of domicile equivalent of fast food. Only during the four years I spent in the small Wiltshire village of Heytesbury did I do that thing you’re meant to do – participate in the community – to any extent.
I am hardly alone in this wandering however: the amount of time people spend in any home has reduced enormously over the last thirty or so years; if you’re in the private rented sector (where I’ve been most of the time) the average stay is now little more than a year. Even for home-owners the average duration has fallen and fallen, until it is now just under ten years. We have become every bit as mobile as David Starkey would like us to be; we move hither and thither, packing and unpacking our accretions, for a multiplicity of reasons – not least that we are proud to be participants in a flexible workforce. Like Starkey, the government wishes us to be infinitely flexible workers, to move where the jobs are, to get on our bikes – but the jobs are increasingly short-term contracts with scant possibility of tenure, and so we move on again.
The government, however, also wants us to be participants in something the Prime Minister christened a ‘Big Society’, a nebulous and ill-defined concept which seems to mean, insofar as it’s possible to understand what seems to be a vague aspiration, helping out with stuff in your neighbourhood. But you don’t help out in your neighbourhood if you don’t know who your neighbours are – and these days one in eight of us do not even know the names of the people living next door. An average of a year spent in a place does not give you the chance to become involved in your neighbourhood; you’re basically squatting, looking nervously about you, locking the door tight and pulling back the bolts on the windows. Your involvement with those around you extends only to pushing past them at the bus stop on your way to work. With every year that passes we are leading a more atomised existence, in which the people we meet day to day are of value only for fleeting, instrumental reasons.
My parents, by contrast, moved home a total of three times in fifty-five years. And in each place they settled, they settled. There was attendance (and in my parents’ case, involvement) at the local church – a social centre as potent as the local pub. My mother also joined the local amateur dramatics groups in Bexleyheath and Middlesbrough, and was even for a while a member of a Black and White Minstrels troupe – as I have previously mentioned, she had always had a soft spot for African-Caribbean people, whom she thought of as ‘cheerful’, and I think joining the Black and White Minstrels was her way of paying an appropriate tribute to them. Foremost, though, she was the ‘Akela’ of a local cub pack, later rising to become a district commissioner,