Jack Thurston

Why we must resist New Labour’s cult of work

First published in The Idler, June 2005 (Issue 35: War on Work).

The Labour Party will seek to win a third tem of office with a claim to be on the side of Britain’s “hard-working families”. The expression “hard-working families” is by now a familiar feature of the political landscape. It peppered Labour’s 2001 election manifesto and was spelt out in giant letters on the stage backdrop at the party’s conference last autumn, dwarfing the delegates standing to address the party faithful. You will find it in speeches and articles by Cabinet ministers, backbench MPs and youthful political wannabes. It even bridges Britain’s great political divide between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor. A Google search of the world wide web reveals 1,409 occurrences of the phrase in conjunction with Tony Blair. Gordon Brown is only marginally behind with 1,110 hits. Lacking any decent catchphrases of their own, the Tories have lately adopted the expression, rather unimaginatively arguing “no, no, no, don’t listen to them, it’s the Conservative Party, not Labour, that’s the real friend of Britain’s hard-working families”.

Once a phrase becomes so entrenched in the political lexicon as to be happily used by every side, it is usually safe to dismiss it as hollowed out, meaningless and lacking any real policy content. But the idea of the “hard-working family”, I regret to report, is no empty pleasantry. Rather, it forms the dark heart of New Labour’s work-driven ideology and is well on the way to infecting the entire political establishment.

Writing in January’s Guardian, Alan Milburn, the man who resigned from the Cabinet to spend more time with his family only to become bored after less than eighteen months, completed a remarkable about-turn. Now back in the Cabinet, Milburn is in charge of running the election campaign and writing the manifesto. Unsurprisingly, “hard-working families” loom large in his rhetoric. But he offers some revealing elaboration when he tells us that Labour’s appeal to voters will be based on the idea that “if you play by the rules, you get a chance to progress”.

Milburn’s own career path offers something by way of explanation and is a journey he shares with many in the current generation of Labour politicians. In the 1980s he flirted with the radical left and was involved in running a bookshop on Tyneside called Days of Hope (known to many at the time by an deliciously irresistible spoonerism Haze of Dope). Those freewheeling days were marked by electoral failure, political marginalisation and a sense of permanent defeat. Only in the 1990s, once he had discovered the joys of hard work, traded the caftan for the sharp suit and nailed his flag to the mast of “new” Labour, did his political fortunes change. The message: dreamers are wasters; idleness is for losers.

New Labour”s uncompromising message is rooted in the joyless Methodist preaching of the nineteenth century. In New Labour’s secular version, a devotion to God becomes a devotion to “personal prosperity” and it too relies upon the promise of future rewards in exchange for enduring today’s privations. The party’s theme tune spells it out in the clearest of terms: Things Can Only Get Better (but just not yet). As a political message it is devoid of the imagination for social transformation that we should expect from the Left. The obsession with “playing by the rules” reveals an intolerance for diversity, not the conventional notions of diversity in terms of who we are, but rather how we choose to live our lives. Of course, the Government is only too willing to set up commissions and task-forces and establish targets and quotas for diversity in gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, but it does not accept that in any healthy society there must be room for people to break the rules or make up their own rules, challenge the system and refuse conformity.

British people work the longest hours in the European Union. More and more, our identities are defined by what we do at work. Yet we lag behind in terms of productivity. Treasury spin-doctors present the image of Chancellor Gordon Brown up at the crack of dawn, banging on the doors of the Treasury with armfuls of ideas on how to the productivity gap with other nations. It must torment his Presbyterian soul that France is higher up the productivity league than the UK even though the French still enjoy two hour lunches and eight weeks of holiday a year. In short, they fit there work around their lives. New Labour thinks we should fit our lives around our work.

If the Chancellor were to take just a moment to understand how it is that productivity is calculated (I would recommend a hammock as an excellent venue for such contemplation), then he would stop fretting. Productivity simply a measure of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) divided by the number of hours its people work. If you accept the basic economic principle of diminishing marginal returns (that we tend to get more done at the start of day than at the end when we are tired and fed up), by working fewer hours, a nation will increase its productivity.

The industrial era is defined by the continual invention of new labour-saving devices, from the spinning jenny to the iMac. Dazzling technological progress gave us the idea that one day it would be possible for us all to relax while an army of willing robots did all the work, freeing us to enjoy all the new-found leisure time denied our forebears, slaves to the forces of economic necessity. That day looks as far off now as it ever was. Instead, we have been sold a future in which technology simply expands the amount of work we can do and drives a consumer culture that equates consumption with happiness and personal fulfilment.

Another reason people feel they have be hard-working is that the work culture has caused the housing market to go completely insane. Escalating house prices mean we have to work like dogs to earn more to pay the rent or the mortgage. Higher earnings drive up house prices. A vicious circle that benefits nobody but estate agents. Now if we all worked a little less, earned a little less, house prices would return to a sensible level, and we’d all actually have the time on our hands to enjoy spending some time at home, taking it easy.

So how did we get into this mess? And what can be done about it? Of course it is unfair to blame Tony Blair and his ministers for the entire edifice of advanced industrial capitalism. But politicians do bear responsibility for a peddling a work ethic that reveres paid employment and denigrates anything else (with the exception of shopping, keep-fit and DIY, each of which so-called leisure activities bears a frightening resemblance to work). The problem is that New Labour cannot resist the desire to build a world in its own image. And if you take a close look at the kind of people who make up the New Labour project, this should be a major cause for concern for anyone who wants a life where there is enough time to smell a flower, eat a long slow meal or gaze at the sky. Even the most well-motivated politicians are unusual people driven by a rare desire for a the adrenalin, drama and excitement of a life in the public eye. To succeed in politics you have to work damned hard at it. And here is the problem in a nutshell. The people running the country are different from the rest of us. In fact, their overblown appetite for work is the very reason they are running the country and not us.

If you take a look at the lad culture of New Labour apparatchiks, you will find that the only passion that may challenge their love of politics is their devotion to football. For many of these types, the ‘weekend’ means the couple of hours it takes ‘to go down the Arsenal’ on a Saturday afternoon. I wonder if we would have a more humane politics if our politicians were instead advised by a corps of spin-doctors and policy wonks devoted to more relaxed pastimes. Crown Green Bowls, perhaps. Or leisurely cycle touring, in the Edwardian manner. And if they did, what kind of policies could we expect them to dream up? How about a statutory right to a four day week, in exchange for less pay? Or giving tax breaks to job-sharers as a way of increasing employment? If we switched taxation from earnings to consumption, we could all work less yet earn the same amount, freeing up the time we need to do fun things that do not cost money. Unfortunately policies like these are an abomination to a political class that works hard, plays hard and expects us to do the same. It is time to resist the totalitarian vision of the hard-working family. A manifesto for idleness is ready and waiting, the trouble is that its proponents are too idle to stand for election.