i have oft quoted an old Billy Connolly line, taken from the days when his stand-up routines used to feature details, which we now know were heavily expurgated, of his tenement childhood in Glasgow.
Describing a parent giving him a clip round the ear as a result of some unknown or unsuspected misdemeanour, he repeated the accompanying phrase: “That’s what ye get fur nuthin’; see whit ye get for somethin’!”
I can hardly think of a better way to describe a huge area of current political thinking, which seems to be all about castigating certain people who allegedly “want something for nothing” and punishing them for not being in full control of their own destinies, when those destinies are being tossed hither and yon by the national and global events that we are perpetually being told are arbiters of contemporary life that we just have to suck up.
Coming as I do from what previous and deeply politically incorrect social commentators used to call “the respectable working class” (ie. you lived in a council house, you had a wee square telly, no car and you didn’t know what a state benefit looked like), I suspect that these days we would be classed, if I can use such a word, as one of those frequently mentioned “hard-working families” and smiled upon with a certain level of well-meaning if deeply patronising charm by those making the rules by which we would be struggling to live and make a living. Lucky us.
Of course, in these straitened times, governments should stamp out fraud and chicanery wherever they appear. Much is being made of a clamp-down on tax avoidance etc although as with the treatment of the banks, the financial sector and the supposed reining-in of the major utility companies, this appears to be proceeding in the slo-mo footsteps of the opening credits of Chariots of Fire.
There is also much talk, in the election run-up (yes, we having a General Election. Hadn’t you noticed?) of zero-hours contracts and their justification or lack of it.
And there right in the middle of it all is the dear old Queen, faced with industrial action round Windsor Castle way because some of the staff are being expected to take on extra duties unpaid. Not that they are that well paid in the first place if a swift scan of the royal jobs adverts is anything to go by.
What was that about something for nothing? Or does that not apply above stairs?
One mantra of the moment is that people like “well-off pensioners” who can afford to pay for things – like care homes, health care, telly licences and their heating bills – should do so gladly and willingly.
Would it be lese majeste to stretch a point and suggest that the Queen, as an entity rather than an individual, might just qualify as a well-off pensioner? Presumably part of the money she gets from the state is supposed to go towards paying the salaries of those she employs.
Like the frequently mooted idea of an extra penny on income tax to support the NHS, I for one would certainly not grudge my hard-earned tax revenue going, if it has to go into royal hands at all, to pay another “hard-working family’s” wages. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to work for nothing or near equivalent.
If zero-hours contracts are here to stay, can zero-salary contracts be far behind? Too late, mate – like Stephen Sondheim’s famous clowns, don’t bother, they’re here
I blame Downton Abbey. At least the original Upstairs, Downstairs implicitly acknowledged that there was a huge difference, not to say deference, in the best-ordered societies and that hierarchies, literally, ruled.
Downton, on the other hand (and foot, no doubt) seems to imply that there is a cosy complicity between master and servant and that they’re really all in it together, being nice and fair and lovely to each other. And we all know where that gets you…
Now that theatre and television companies are being told to avoid overt political expression during the election campaign, it’s worth looking to the allegedly elitist world of opera for a good, old-fashioned bit of domestic revolution.
Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, on which Mozart’s musical masterpiece was based, was originally banned, partly because it was pretty damned sexy for its day but also because it was regarded as subversive. In all respects, the servants came out on top.
If it was good enough for Wolfgang Amadeus, it’s good enough for any politician with an ounce of self awareness.
And I bet that barber Figaro wasn’t on a zero-hours contract, either.