cold and musty Victorian buildings, often with corrugated-iron roofs, the smell of mildew and distantly brewed tea and polish from the altar and the pervasive leak of gas from the boiler, to sing stuff at Christmas like my mother’s favourite carol:
Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie,
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
In 2010 a Church of England vicar decided to ban that particular hymn, incidentally. Why? Because he’d been taken on some sort of exchange visit to the West Bank and the Israeli-occupied territories, and had decided that the words were all wrong. Bethlehem isn’t lying still, is it? It bloody well isn’t still at all! It’s under the jackboot of Israeli oppression! Ban the hymn!
So, to be sure, there are benefits from the decline of religious belief, such as not having to concern ourselves with self-aggrandising narcissistic idiots like the vicar who banned ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ (and the one who tried to ban ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, for that matter). It’s just that there have also been unintended consequences which have been bad for all of us. Some specific, such as the abnegation of deferred gratification and its concomitant, self-sacrifice. And others that are more difficult to define, more ectoplasmic, if you like. But of all of them, the end of deferred gratification is the most important.
3
It’s no go, my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever.
But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.
Louis MacNeice
Sometimes, although rarely, the speeches Prime Ministers make are interesting and revelatory. More revelatory and fun altogether are the speeches they planned to make but, for one reason or another, didn’t. Take the speech that David Cameron planned to deliver on 5 October 2011, his little shiny red face set in a very grim, self-flagellating these-are-hard-times-but-we’re-all-in-it-together austerity mode, with the economy mired in recession and a vast public debt that was not reducing at quite the speed he, or anyone else, might have liked. Some well-meaning aide had presumably mentioned to him something like, ‘Hey, Dave, never mind the public debt – have you seen the household debt for the UK? Staggering, mate. Gobsmacking. You ought to have a word with the public. Shocking state of affairs, get something done about it.’ At the time, Britain’s total household debt was a fruity £1.6 trillion, representing 160 per cent of household income, nobody saving anything, the whole thing predicted to rise and continue rising, the entire population living on the never-never like the fat, idle, feckless and spendthrift layabouts they are. Suitably appalled, Cameron planned to say the following stuff, which was duly leaked to the press by his office:
The only way out of a debt crisis is to pay your debts. Households – all of us – paying off the credit card and the store card bills.
This brief injunction did not immediately reach the ears of the public, however – presumably because someone showed it to the Chancellor, George Osborne. I would imagine that, upon reading it, Osborne will have remarked something along the following lines: ‘Christ on a fucking bike! What is this mad bastard thinking of? Get him on the fucking phone right now before he destroys the entire Western economy.’ The speech was subsequently rewritten to remove any reference to people being enjoined to pay off their store cards and credit cards. Indeed, if the British public had listened, suitably rapt, to the Prime Minister making the speech he had originally intended, and had thought to themselves, ‘Yes, Mr Cameron, you’re quite right – I shall pay off the Barclaycard this very moment,’ then the country would have been bankrupted by tea-time.
The entire economy is built upon debt. Further, in order to climb out of recession, the government requires us to spend more on stuff – probably useless stuff, but stuff all the same – which means that far from urging us to pay off our bills, the Chancellor would have wished the Prime Minister instead to herd us all down to Argos to buy loads more white ephemeral electronic cockshit, just to get the economy moving. And thus increase our collective household debt, exactly as the oxymoronic Office for Budgetary Responsibility has predicted it will. Hell, read your Keynes, Cameron: you spend out of recession. Or at least, forgetting Keynes, you enjoin the public to spend out of recession, and then charge the gullible bastards a crippling rate of interest to pay it all back, which of course they cannot possibly do. Such as Barclaycard, charging, for example, an advertised initial APR of nearly 30 per cent. And when the mugs have defaulted on that – and, what’s that glib little modernist phrase, ‘maxed out’ their various extortionate store cards – they can ‘consolidate’ their debts with all manner of Doug and Dinsdale Piranha Loan Shark companies, and lose their houses, or their cars, or their legs. As John Lydon once put it: ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Credit for the working classes has never come cheap, and their despairing efforts to pay off their debts keep the country afloat. Debt sits on the shoulders of the poorest, and makes their lives a misery. And Britain’s gross household debt is now the fourth biggest in the world. In little more than a year after I got the idea in my head to write this book, incidentally, back in early 2011, the amount of unsecured loans and debts owed by the average family in Great Britain increased by a scarcely believable 48 per cent. It now stands at an average of £7,944 per family, or 32 per cent of net annual average income. Tacitly, the government does not wish this state of affairs to end, even if in his more enlightened moments the Prime Minister betrays touching misgivings about the rather beastly workings of modern unrestrained capitalism; it wishes, indeed fervently hopes, that the never-never balloon will keep on rising, that the poorest will keep taking out loans to buy shit things and then bugger themselves senseless trying to pay for them.
The availability of credit – first hire purchase, then credit cards such as ‘Access: Your Flexible Friend’ (I once had a girlfriend who rejoiced in that nickname) – was heralded as a step forward for the working classes, a sort of democratic capitalistic spirit which would enable them to buy all the useless shit they ever wanted but had previously been unable to afford. The shit they’d gazed at wide-eyed in the shop window. And so, to a limited extent, in the early days it was; as wage rates for the working class rose quite sharply in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small wedge could be carved off each week for the HP or the savings club in order to acquire a small bunch of hitherto unexpected luxury – a TV or a holiday, say. But, no such thing as a free lunch, etc. etc.; credit, as it exists in its ubiquity today, is a con trick perpetrated upon the poorest and the most vulnerable in society. It doles out an illusory wealth which has, over the decades, disguised the extent to which the incomes of the richest and the incomes of the poorest have become ever more polarised, the trickledown that never really happened and was never really expected to happen, if we’re being honest. The poor get their shit stuff, for a while, until it is repossessed along with their oldest daughter, and maybe they forget that they’re earning only one two-hundredth of the salary – excluding bonuses – of their chief executive, whereas forty years ago they’d be on about one twentieth as much as the boss.
What follows is certainly not an attempt to condemn the mass of ordinary working Britons for the crisis in personal debt: it is, palpably, not their fault. So relentlessly have they been told to borrow, assured that borrowing’s perfectly fine and dandy – the banks do it, the country does it, so why not you? – and so ubiquitous is the availability of credit (as ubiquitous as its crippling rates of interest) that the blame cannot reasonably be laid at their doors.
Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that credit is an officially sanctioned instrument for ensuring quiescence among the plebs, the worker bees, the lumpen-proles, for making them get on with their arduous work and shut the fuck up because Argos or Currys is only around the corner and you’ve got that nice loan sorted out from that Russian company, haven’t you? Credit has taken over from religion as the opium of the people. Which I suppose is the point. The aim of this chapter is to attempt to explain how and why