Every heard of Jonathan Harmsworth, the 4th Viscount Rothermere? He’s a billionaire, having inherited his wealth from his billionaire parents, he lives in France, he has never done a day’s work in his life, he owns the Daily Mail and the Daily Mail hates you. And, as his squalid little rag reminds us today, He wants us to work until we drop. Yet the Mail’s average reader is elderly and overwhelmingly female and it appears these are the groups it hates most. So, let’s look at the Mail’s hateful ‘story’, in which it claims that 9.4 million people are workshy.
The 9.4 million. figure includes early retirees (I was one of those), stay at home mums and dads who are overwhelmingly better off and don’t need to work, disabled people, carers and students in full and part-time education. Let’s drill down even deeper.
25% are students, many of whom, especially working class students, also work in order to pay for luxuries like food and accommodation. Both my boys did. 13% are early retirees, 17% are carers. 1.5 million claim unemployment benefits but they can only claim for a short time. These people are not workshy. Even those who retired early from work, like me, put in 40 years of full-time graft and in my case I worked part-time in my later working life. Now I volunteer, which is to say I work for nothing, for the greater good. Don’t you dare, Harmsworth, living the life of a billionaire in France, call me workshy. Anyway, I blame the Mail.
Before Brexit, we had a steady supply of European labour to carry out the hundreds of thousands of low paid, minimum wage jobs we didn’t want to do, as well as working in vital public services like the NHS. Those days are over now and even though migration has grown dramatically since we left the EU, the people who have more than replaced them in numbers, from places like India, Nigeria and Pakistan, have not benefited the jobs market.
Many of us do not want to work forever. I was lucky enough to retire from full-time work when I was 57 and despite the financial hit, I never once regretted it. I was able to largely maintain my lifestyle by taking on part-time work. My feeling was that I would rather spend my life doing what I wanted to do rather than what someone else wanted me to do. I don’t think I am alone in that. With the retirement age growing – my partner now has to work until she is 67, having had seven years state pension stolen from her by the then Conservative chancellor George Osborne – there is no guarantee your life will be longer as a result. We are all a stroke, a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis away from catastrophe. No one here gets out alive. Other clichés are available. The point is mainly this, though: unless you live to work, why would you want to spend the best years in later life in work?
It’s not just Brexit, though, obviously it played a part. Many people cannot work and/or require carers, often unpaid carers, because over seven million people are on NHS waiting lists, a direct result of 14 years of the Conservative government Harmsworth and his newspaper told us repeatedly to vote for. The very politics being played here by the Mail are a major cause of alleged staff shortages.
My loyal reader will doubtless be over-familiar with my view that those who spend years looking forward to retiring at the state pension age often find they are then too old to do the things they planned to do. Towing the caravan to Italy, for example, may be a lifelong ambition. But when you’re 67, who is to say you will still be in the same physical shape you are now? You think you will be able to rage against the dying of the light, but will you, really? Maybe you will, but the ravages of old age come in different ways, sometimes dramatically, other times glacially slowly.
The government is rightly concerned about the falling labour market, but what to do? How about by slashing NHS waiting lists? How about making the employment market more pleasant, giving workers better rights, better conditions and a higher wage? How about fixing the care system?
The Mail sees us as nothing more than units of production. Identical units of production at that, certainly not regarded as human beings who have, despite enormous odds, been lucky enough to have been born at all. I have long looked beyond success as being determined by wealth, the biggest house you can get, material possessions and all of the rest of it. As I always say, who wants to be the richest man in the graveyard?
No one has told Keir Starmer to “get a grip of workshy Britain”, other than the Daily Mail sub-editor. I hope its middle aged and elderly but not quite retired readers realise the Mail means them when it refers to the workshy. I won’t hold my breath.
My view is that most of us do work hard and very few take advantage of a system which, in any event, is hard to take advantage of. There is no generous benefit system for the so-called shirkers to exploit, other than the out and out fraudsters. Indeed, the most generous benefit of them all – and, yes, it is a state benefit – is the Retirement Pension, even though it is a pathetic amount compared to our European friends.
If you don’t buy the Mail, then good on you. It is an unpleasant source of hate, division, gaslighting and frankly untruth. if you do buy the Mail, then just remember what I said earlier: it hates you. Live your life how you want to live it because, as I say again and again and again, this is real life, not a trial run. And don’t take lessons on what constitutes being workshy from a hate-filled billionaire who creates next to nothing to a country he can’t even be bothered to live in.
