Status Anxiety

cjno

Good article. The smug Guardianistas really don't like people earning a living , do they? The assumption made by smug twits like James is that all we need to do is to sell our homes in Putney, invest the equity, move into to our second homes in Devon, take up basket weaving and thereafter live more moral, simple, 'authentic' lives free of the taint of trade (which after all is so very vulgar). As you say, not an option if you're a single mum who has just lost her job in Woolworths.

O.B.I

My thoughts exactly, Mr. Young!

I graduated from University last Summer and, with the exception of holding-down a pot-washing job for a week, have been unemployed since.

I'm fairly skilled, rather intelligent (if I do say so myself) and I have a little bit of work experience behind me. Still, in these times, my CV's the first in the furnace.

Why? Because for employers the job market is currently an all-you-can-eat ready-prepared buffet, whereas for folk like me it's like trying to grow a good crop in the middle of a seemingly endless drought.

I can't stand these bloody "professionals", safe and sound in their handsomely-salaried jobs, that come out with the sort of fatuous garbage that you've quoted in your article.

It's comforting to know that up there in the clouds someone still recognises the plight of the common man!

Pesha

Solution to the credit crunch is a low flat rate taxation to get people back to work, reduce benefit payments and increase nations moral.
See my song If I were Ruler of our Nation on Google video
pesha

aquifer

Some Guardinistas are the most privileged workers ever and anywhere. Secure well-paid jobs out of the cold, defended against in-job abuse by unions and HR policies. Pensions to die for, with death benefits for partners. Are they really left wing, or is attacking capitalists just a way of boasting about the protected niches they have found for themselves, while feigning some solidarity with the underclass who might some day find them out.

Malc

"The mistake the puritans make is to imagine that the victims of this disaster have brought about their own misfortune. As Michael Lewis made clear in an excellent article in the December issue of Portfolio, the architects of the global financial catastrophe are the mortgage companies who lent money to people with no hope of paying it back,"

Wrong.

Fatima

Excellent article. Thank you. I've recently graduated from an architecture course and of course no one's building, so no job to be found anywhere! I am thinking of re-training as an accountant!

David Short

OBI, you don't tell us what you're qualified to do, apart from 'pot-washing'.

The British have lived on the back of nothing for a very long time, and it's all catching up with them.

If/when Britain starts making things again, there might be more jobs for people, even graduates from 'University'.

alan

Somebody's got to pay.

alan

True, David. Getting fat and beery on other people's money for far too long now. Go out and work for a living boys. Get off our backs.

O.B.I

'Mr. Short':

I did not list what I am 'qualified' to do. I merely wanted to convey my dismay with the fact that, despite being advised (repeatedly) that completing a formal education was a sure path to a decent career, I've ended up having to accept work that I could've just as easily taken-up without having wasted three years of my life 'earning' a now seemingly meaningless qualification.

Judging by the 'tone of your comment', I assume you share my lack of faith in the intellectual credibility of the contemporary crop of University graduates.

May I clarify that I do not believe that having a degree entitles me to a better career than the next man. However, I do believe that I have the right to feel a little disappointed given that the advice imparted to my generation years ago looks to be rendered obsolete in light of the coming recession.

So, 'Mr. Short', if (I'm making no assumptions) you happen to be settled-in to a decently-paid, relatively stress-free and, most importantly, 'safe' career, please spare me your 'sarcasm', your lofty 'observations' and your half-baked industrial 'premonitions'.

David Short

No, OBI, I am not in the position you imagine. I came from a very tough background in the north east, two or three streets from Catherine Cookson's "Fifteen Streets". My father came from one of the Fifteen Streets, because he was Catholic.

O.B.I

Very well. As I stated in my previous post, I didn't wish to make any assumptions.

But seriously, the imminent economic crisis, as Toby states in the above article, is not a "much needed reality-check" or the comeuppance for our post-80s decadence, as you seem to suggest.

I personally don't mind engaging in a bit of hard graft; but now the manual work's also drying-up, and it seems that almost every sector is laying-off a large portion of its workforce.

And as for getting Britain making things again, you've got to consider the cost of re-booting our nation's industries. When it's cheaper to manufacture products abroad, a tenner saved is a tenner earned, especially in the midst of a recession.

I'm no expert on Britain's industrial history myself, but it sounds to me like you're struggling to cope with your own nostalgia, rather than positing a feasible "battle plan" to tackle unemployment during the Crunch.

I hope this was a more intelligent response than my previous post, which I understand may have come across as a little sharp.

Catherine Von Shtuffenbaorgenpotz

The disaster came from the wealthy and powerful, to the marginalized and barely scraping by. Those who caused the problem will not learn from it. The wealthy will barely be touched by their jack-assery, again... James has hideously conflated cause, effect, and retribution by not analyzing much of anything correctly.

Steve Meikle

Do these moralists actualy think that people will learn from a currrent event? the only lesson of history is that people never learn from history, and current events are only history as it happens

Russ Thayer

EXACTLY! -and the emperor's tailers are getting bailed out.

Arepo

A small point and a bit off topic, but
I would like to point out that neither Oliver Cromwell nor the Puritans spent any time in priest holes. That was where Catholic priests went to avoid the unpleasantness the Cromwells of the world wished to visit upon them, i.e. beheading, hanging, drawing and quartering. You know, stuff like that. An example, I suppose, of the inability of the clueless secular press to differentiate among the various "religious types" they consider to be so far below them in enlightenment.

Aidan Mathews

On Puritans and priest-holes - such hiding-places are associated only with recusant Roman Catholic clergy, many of them Jesuit, and not with their Genevan adversaries on the far left of the religious reforms in 16nth/17nth European Christianity. Ditto the hair-shirt scolds, a Catholic and Orthodox monopoly,not a Calvinist habit. Come on, Spectator!

Dachmani

I find the blind bias toward materialism apparent from start to finish in this article. The circular thinking of this recession as "bad luck" and therefore not symptomatic of other issues ignores the responsibility that we have to look at our greed (oh my, we will need to pull from somewhere to define that word!). Whereas Puritanism is not the formula for any Garden of Eden, this article give us any real thought about our excessive western consumerism that has exploited us and, as the writer has displayed so grandly, blinded us to our own sins.

Publius

Reminds me of when Sharon Stone smilingly referred to China's killer instinct over the summer as "something like karma."

Crazy witch danced her way into an awards show over the corpse of thousands of little kids in China.

Puritans come in all shapes.

Dan Steinhilber

Puritans? Is that what you call tax and spend liberals?

Richard Clark

You are missing the point I believe. Man does not change until he hurts enough. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. I speak not from theory but my own recently lived experiences. what you are proposing is a drug of Choice, a magic bullet. We need to experience pain, it's how we grow, suffering on the other hand is totally optional.

Henry Balfour

Hair-shirted? Priest-hole? You don't know much about the Puritans do you?

Ed

The whole piece smells like a back-handed defense of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-Liberalism. If pundit X says ostensible insensitive thing Y while criticizing Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-Liberalism, we can ignore the question of whether the present economic crisis is the fruit of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-Liberalism, and instead worry about the insensitivity of pundit X, who--unlike Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-Liberalism--probably had very little to do with the present economic crisis. But that's just my impression of the thing.