Godless in Eden. Fay Weldon

I belong to the robbed generation. I started work at the Foreign Office in 1953 – earning £6 a week as a temporary assistant clerk; I worked for some fifteen years, here or there, before I became self-employed, on PAYE, paying out a vast proportion of my weekly pay packet, or so it seemed to me at the time, for my Social Security stamp. Now I get the old age pension they promised me and it’s 44p a week. Robbed! And what about all those who having no savings, no longer able to earn, endure the indignity of having to ask for income support? Their mistake, having been told they were providing well enough for their futures, was to believe what they were told. Successive governments simply did a Maxwell with the pension funds, and didn’t even have the grace to acknowledge it, let alone jump overboard.

      

      The State is increasingly cavalier with its dependants. I know of a man with two artificial legs who because he can walk across a room – just – doesn’t get incapacity benefit any more. It was withdrawn in the last so-called fraud purge, a few months back, when everyone on incapacity benefit was called to a fifteen minute interview with a non-specialist doctor and the lists cut across the board by some ten percent. Just like that. Sure you can appeal but if you do you lose a whole set of other benefits while you wait, and then how do you eat? Is so much misery worth so small a saving to the State?

      

      The matter of the burden to the tax-payer of the benefit bill preoccupies government to an absurd degree. States with any spare money tend to go to war, and then we pay for that. Look at the books. Total government receipts, 1998, £309 thousand million. Total government expenditure £320 thousand million. We borrowed £11 thousand million from ourselves to balance the books. (You can get all these figures from the back of your Economist Desk Diary. Take off a few noughts from the sums and it’s no different from adding up your own cheque stubs.) Out of that £320 thousand million, Social Security costs us a mere £79 thousand million. I suspect one way or another we’d go on paying the same taxes even if we stopped spending on our poor relations altogether, and allowed the unemployed, the undertrained, the sick, the weak and the inadequate, the helpless in our highly complex society, to starve to death on the streets. And what kind of family would we be if we did this? How would we live with ourselves?

      One of the phenomena of the late twentieth century has been the growth of political correctness, of self-censorship, a quite false belief that we have reached the pinnacle of proper understanding, and a fear of saying what we think in case we offend our friends. It becomes important that we all think the same: and indeed, the rise of emotional correctness requires that we all feel the same. We allow ourselves as little freedom of thought as if we were Marxist-Leninists, even though there’s no-one around to put us in prison. Sexism, it is held, contrary to the evidence of the eyes and the ears, can flow only one way, from man to woman, just as racism can flow only from white to black. That both are now two-way streets we find difficult to accept.

      Sometimes it seems to me that with the fall of the Berlin wall freedom fled East and control fled West. Jung’s enantiodromia at it again. Turn, and run the other way down the tramlines. In Russia now see the worst excesses of venture capitalism and personal freedom, wealth which breaks all sumptuary laws brushing up against extreme poverty, an abundance of crime, coercion and murder, and the flight of altruism. While here in the West we have the creeping Sovietisation of our culture: the advent of a dirigiste government: we are controlled, surveyed, looked after, nannied, bureaucratised. We live amongst secrets: our news is manipulated. We all know it, but don’t much care. We have direction of labour. What else is Welfare to Work? If you can’t get your own job, take the one we give you. On which I notice the government spent £200 million last year, and did get a few actually back to work, but for the most part only temporarily. And for every person who got a job there must be another one put out of work – how can it be otherwise, when we still have a seven and a half percent unemployment rate. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just go on paying out benefits and saved everyone a lot of aggravation, humiliation, cold calling and letter writing? Or better still created work for people to do? But that would interfere with the Bank of England’s belief that there is a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment – defined by them as the lowest rate compatible with stable inflation. They like it pretty much as is – not too high to cause rioting in the streets. High enough to keep workers in a state of anxiety and doing what they’re told. In the light of such official or semi-official policy, Welfare to Work projects look oddly like window dressing. Or, less cynically, the thinking goes like this. True, we need a calculable pool of people standing around doing nothing, to cool an overheating economy – but it’s just so irritating when they stand around. Let them at least be seen to be working at not-working, which is what the new Jobseekers’ Allowance amounts to.

      

      Since the unemployed appear to be burnt offerings to the stability of our economy, martyrs in the cause of the low inflation and the high interest rates which keep the City happy, I think they should be treated with vast respect and allowed to live in peace, dignity and the utmost comfort.

      

      As for the employed, the conviction seems to be that if only everyone works longer and harder, women alongside men, we’ll all be better off. But better off how? Where’s our Five-Year Plan? What exactly is all this effort for? And has no-one noticed that in spite of having the longest working hours in Europe we have the lowest productivity? Of course we do. We’re exhausted.

      And we’re certainly no longer working for the children: they poor things are Kibbutzised, taken away from their parents and returned to them only at nights, so the parents are free to work to make the desert bloom. Which is all very well, but there’s no desert outside the window when the children look, and no drastic emergency, just a whole lot of new cars and new roads and new buildings and shoe shops and the Millennium dome.

      

      We live now under Ergonarchy. By Ergonarchy I mean rule by the work ethic. Forget Patriarchy, rule by the father, it’s Ergonarchy which is woman’s current enemy, now that she’s joined the workforce. While she was doing battle with Patriarchy, Ergonarchy sneaked in under cover of darkness and ambushed her. Ergonarchy insists women work but goes on paying them less. This isn’t because Ergonarchy is male – Ergonarchy’s an automated accountant, neuter and blind and unable to tell one gender from another – but simply because women, if they have children, can’t give their bosses the time and attention they require, and so end up contributing less and getting paid less. Ergonarchy’s best friend being Market Forces.

      

      And thus it will continue until society gets Ergonarchy under control, by the drastic measure of accepting that men are fathers too, and inviting them on board as equal parents. On the day when the problem of the working father is talked about as often as is the problem of the working mother, we will be getting somewhere. All children have two parents, though you’d never think it.

      

      I am not suggesting, you must understand, that mothers should stay home and look after the children. I don’t want them forced back into the kitchen, heaven forfend, for this is just another kind of loneliness, albeit temporary. I want my Ministry for Human Happiness to ensure mothers are out there doing half as many hours for twice as much money.

      

      Evidence of continuing male prejudice against women comes from the fact that the female wage is persistently lower than the male wage: though in Britain the gap is smaller than in the rest of Europe. But it is not on the whole the villainy and prejudice of men that leads to this undoubted inequity: it is the fact that the majority of women end up with children, and choose to give them more attention than they do their jobs. Even when partnered, many back off when the time comes for promotion, deciding that time for a personal and emotional life is more valuable than earning more money. The part-time nurse does not take the job as full-time ward sister, the TV researcher turns down the job as producer, because if they move up the ladder, when would they ever get to see the kids. The piece-worker in the home stitches shoes at 50p a pair because she has an ill child and is open to exploitation – not because she is a woman but because she is human being with a baby, and has no other options open to her. The earning capacity of the lone father (a fast growing group), falls as drastically