(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)As if it weren't bad enough that the economy's on its arse and we're flying headlong towards recession, it seems we also have to put up with a bunch of talentless hacks punching the air and cheering. Last year, the certifiable George Monbiot put crayon to paper in a piece titled
'Bring on the recession' in which he opined:
I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises
Monbiot - ecomentalist and communist that he is - can hardly wait for a return to mass unemployment, inflation and poverty because it will bring us a step closer to the subsistence existence that he and his soap-dodging mates crave.
Now, if it was just Moonbat talking this shit, you could dismiss it - quite correctly - as the ravings of a madman, but the recession fetish is spreading far and wide.
Recession porn follows a strict format. First comes the token gesture of sympathy to those who will suffer, swiftly followed by unrestrained glee that economic collapse will stop those ghastly commoners buying handbags/going on holiday/driving their cars etc. Here's India Knight in last week's
Sunday Times:
...endless headlines about falling house prices, recession, fuel costs and every single thing that you need becoming prohibitively expensive. Perversely I’m rather loving them, mostly because I am happy to observe that the decades of vulgar excess are finally over. I was speaking about this to a friend last week and we were both retrospectively astonished about how we lived eight or nine years ago - we were, we concluded, like mad people, or at least delusional ones: weekend pads in the country (paid for by overdraft), regular blowdries (ditto), dinners in expensive restaurants (tritto), thinking nothing about buying handbags that cost the upper end of three figures (quadritto).
Alright, so you and your mates are a bunch of stupid fucking shopaholics. Why am I not surprised?
I could go on
(and I have - I’ve written a book about the joys of the New Thrift, it’s out in November)
Priced at a less-than-thrifty £14.99. For 272 pages.
but you probably get the idea: what seems like a depressing time - rain, recession, getting a shock every time you fill up the car with petrol - can, with a little ingenuity and provided you weren’t on the breadline to start off with, have unpredictably cheering results on the home front.
How very jolly. You are, quite literally, the poor man's Mrs Beeton.
There’s no denying that some people are feeling the pinch in a way that causes them sleepless nights and I don’t mean to make light of their anxieties.
You've got a funny way of showing it. And I can feel a 'but' coming...
But, combined with the washout of a summer we’ve just had, there is a strong collective sense of us all coming back down to earth. It’s like a huge national reality check and, unwelcome as it may be, there is a possibility that it will result in us straightening out our priorities. The fact of the matter is that, although it may be a great bore to have to restrict our shopping to the window variety, most of us have enough stuff.
Most of us "have enough stuff"
at the moment but that'll soon change when we lose our jobs and get our homes repossessed. And won't that be a terrible "bore", you vacuous bint?
In her defence, India Knight is a third-rate columnist with a book to plug (it doesn't sound much like a defence, I know, but bear with me). Her piss-poor column generally consists of three themes: (a) having children, (b) having a job and (c) combining (a) and (b) . She is well out of her comfort zone when discussing economics so it's no wonder she comes across as a fucking idiot. But she's not the only one who gets misty-eyed at the thought of a return to the austerity of post-war Britain.
Take Tim Lott. This twat writes for The Independent so you could be forgiven - even applauded - for having never heard of him. His article is called - I kid you not -
'Bring on the pain of a recession and purge our coarsened souls':
Recessions are nasty, horrible and painful. Many people are already suffering, many more will suffer. The unemployed, the elderly, the poor – all the usual victims will get it in the neck. It would be in the poorest taste imaginable to celebrate an economic slump and thus insult the many losers such a slump would produce.
Having got that out of his system, Mr Lott goes on to celebrate an economic slump and insult the many losers. In the poorest taste imaginable.
I would like to modestly suggest that recessions are both inevitable and (this is the controversial part) a bit – just a little bit – desirable.
Strap yourself in.
Christopher Ruhm, the American economist, for instance, has published a study suggesting that a 1 per cent rise in unemployment reduced the death rate in the US by 0.5 per cent. Higher unemployment, he argues, can mean fewer cars on the road and thus fewer accidents. This also means less air pollution and a drop in pulmonary diseases and heart attacks. Also he suggests that during a slump it is the heaviest smokers, drinkers and the most obese who are likely to change their behaviour.
I've never heard of Christopher Ruhm but the man sounds like an arse. A reduction in traffic accidents as a result of a negligible reduction in car travel is pie in the sky and "the heaviest smokers, drinkers and the most obese" are always the least likely to change their behaviour: that's why they're the heaviest smokers/drinkers/most obese. People will sell their own grandmother for a tab and a pint when times are tough. It's everything else that gets neglected (which is why, incidentally, sin taxes on fags and booze are ineffective and - because they make poverty worse - counterproductive).
Recession can lead to many other benefits – a boom in public works for instance. With residential construction virtually stopped it's likely to get a lot cheaper to build things. One of the enduring legacies of America's Great Depression, for example, was the infrastructure: roads, bridges, dams, city halls, museums and parks. During recessions, governments get far more for their money, so embark on public works projects, which can also cut unemployment.
You really haven't got a fucking clue, have you? During recessions, governments get far
less money because fewer people are paying tax. Fuck me, this is such basic stuff. Even if the state could afford to pay the unemployed to construct monuments, it would not create any wealth. As has been appreciated for
quite some time, a country cannot spend its way out of a recession. If "building things" was the answer to unemployment we could pay the jobless to construct pyramids in the Yorkshire Dales. As Frederick Bastiat noted over 150 years ago, in the
parable of the broken window, that would be a fucking insane way to run an economy:
The ultimate absurdity revealed by the broken window fallacy is that if it were true, then governments could easily create and fructify wealth: they need only (and repeatedly) erect pyramids and monuments, dynamite them and immediately rebuild them. Better yet, if "job creation" were desired, then labour-intensive shovels should replace capital-intensive earthmoving equipment; and if even more "job creation" were sought, substitute the shovels with spoons.
Exactly. I'll say it again: this is really basic stuff.
Then we get the Monbiot argument:
...my feeling is that the environment may also benefit from a recession. People will want to cut their energy costs, therefore non-essential power consumption will drop by far more than any amount of liberal nagging would achieve... there will be less eating out (therefore less driving) and less meat eating (since it is more expensive). Holidays and therefore air travel will slump, curbing pollution.
Now we're getting down to it. Let's get the proles off the roads, off the aeroplanes and back indoors eating vegetables.
The mall culture that has destroyed many of Britain's high streets is likely to erode in the face of the financial burden of a car journey that can offset many of the economic benefits of out-of-town superstores. High streets – especially as rents begin to fall as businesses fail – can start to regenerate with smaller, more individual shops.
Oh, don't be so pathetic. The supermarkets will ride out any recession. It will be the small shops and independent traders that will go under.
During the Eighties, for instance, it could be argued that the huge amount of youth unemployment led to a burgeoning of creativity. The inevitability – and relative acceptability – of being on the dole meant creative layabouts spent a lot of time doing reasonably creative things, and it helped fill the art schools and led to, among other things, the New Wave in music and, arguably, Brit Art. Perhaps a rise in youth unemployment again will lead to another creative upsurge.
We are scraping the fucking barrel now aren't we, Tim? Don't get me wrong, I like
'Ghost Town' as much as the next man but surely there has to be a better way to improve the state of the pop charts. Couldn't we just send some promising musicians to Zimbabwe for a bit and let them soak up the inspiring atmosphere of economic decay?
Fuck me, even the government isn't trying to put any spin on this one.
This is what they expect these "creative layabouts" to be doing:
Ministers are bracing themselves for a rise in violent crime and burglaries and a shift to far-right extremism as the effects of the economic downturn take their toll, a leaked Home Office report to the Prime Minister says.
In a series of warnings, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, says that Britain also faces a “significant increase” in alcohol and tobacco smuggling, hostility towards migrants and even a potential rise in the number of people joining terrorist groups.
That sounds a bit more realistic, so what the fuck are these pundits talking about? Can't they remember what it was like living in a recession? How they used to weep and wail whenever some factory or coal-mine closed down. Weren't we told that every social problem was caused by employment, inflation and recession?
But all of this is just preamble to Tim Lott's main point, which combines the snobbery of India Knight with the misanthropy of Moonbat, and is at the heart of the bizarre fetishisation of recession:
But the main benefit for me of a recession is not any of the above, but the inevitable change in values that is likely to occur. After all there is no doubt that the past 10 years has seen a exponential increase in vulgarity, greed and stupidity. And, of course, shopping, which encompasses all three.
In a world where Kelly Osbourne can announce proudly that she owns 750 pairs of shoes and WAGs talk of putting their names down for a handbag that costs £12,000, haven't the boom years led to a collective coarsening of our souls? When Lakshmi Mittal can own three houses in one London street – one for him and one for each of his children – at a combined cost of more than £100m, we are well on the way to moral rot.
These people are hardly typical, are they? Lakshmi Mittal is the fourth richest man in the world, for Christ's sake. I doubt he's going to have to take in a lodger.
And a recession will not only see a massive growth of realistic thinking but in justified resentment. Suddenly all those City bosses who have been making millions for shifting figures around on a screen and avoiding paying taxes on the profits will not seem merely annoying but obscene. All those footballers who have been paid laughable amounts of money to kick a ball around will not seem glamorous but venal.
And what good will this outpouring of collective envy do? Robinho isn't going to get hit by the recession. Frank Lampard isn't going to lose any Ferraris. We all know these cunts get paid too much. So what? Having more people getting paid nothing isn't going to change that, you bitter socialist prick. The people on the dole can have as much "justified resentment" as they like, the poor sods, but they can't do anything about it. Still, at least you'll be happy knowing there's a bit more resentment in the world, eh?
In short, we will undergo a massive and well overdue reality check.
And I hope that everyone who got laid off by XL last week hunts you down and gives you a massive and well overdue kicking, you callous fucking wanker. I hope the fucking Independent goes under by Christmas and that you, personally, are told to clear your desk tomorrow. The Independent is the most tedious, self-righteous piece of shit publication on the shelves and you are the most egregious little turd on its books.
All the same, call me a cock-eyed optimist but I think the whole thing could be as refreshing as a slap in the face with a P45 and as chastening as one of the hair shirts Gordon Brown undoubtedly wears under his regulation two-piece suit.
So there you have it. The recession is going to be "refreshing" and "chastening". We're going to have to tighten our belts, stop driving, stop eating meat, stop going out and stop drinking because our unelected, autistic, thieving, incompetent traitor of a prime minister has spunked our money away in the good times. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, I wouldn't mind tightening my belt so much if I could tighten it around Gordon Brown's scrawny fucking neck. And the same goes for Tim Lott and all the other left-wing purveyors of "justified resentment".
Seriously, what is going on here? I know these people are economic illiterates but in what sort of diseased mind is a
recession a good thing?
The fact that not one, not two, but
three broadsheet newspapers have published the views of people who are in favour of economic misery shows how intellectually retarded this country has become. The targets of their venom - rich footballers, expensive handbags, proletarian consumerism - are the petty obsessions of privileged hacks. None of them are serious issues outside of their dinner party conversations and yet, in a grossly disproportionate response, they wish for nothing less than economic catastrophe to rain down on us all, safe in the knowledge that their own jobs will be safe; their own holidays are booked and paid for; their own children's education is secure. It will be a "reality check", they say. It will knock us down a peg or two. It will teach us a lesson.
Not only is it deeply misanthropic of these cunts to wish poverty on those lower down the social ladder, but their whole reason for doing so - that it will make us less vulgar and more eco-conscious - is completely misplaced. Environmentalism will be the first casualty of the recession because so-called "ethical" choices are invariably more expensive and more dispensable than the alternatives.
In the good times, we can find the money to buy organic food, free-range eggs and fair trade coffee even though we know that the cheaper alternatives are virtually identical. A booming economy allows us the luxury of pampering our consciences with ecological fads and ethical extravagances. But they're the first things to go when times get harder.
Similarly, we have grudgingly tolerated a slew of green taxes because we have, in the main, been able to afford them. But the penny is starting to drop that there has not been any global warming for a decade and we are becoming increasingly suspicious that the whole issue is, at best, an excuse for higher taxes and, at worst, a complete fucking scam. What were tolerable irritations in the good times will become intolerable impositions in the lean years and the public won't stand for it.
Look how quickly the government dropped its road tax plans and its 2p petrol hike after it got its arse kicked in a couple of by-elections. Where were Brown's green credentials when he went scurrying off to the middle East to beg the arabs to bring down oil prices? The Tories are backing away from their green commitments with as much dignity as they can muster and I doubt whether any serious politician will propose any new green tax until after the next election.
In Monbiot's demented mind, we should all quit our jobs, buy a plot of land and grow carrots (he, of course, will continue driving
his car because George, you see, is an important man with important things to do). Back in the real world, a recession will mean more shopping at Primark, not less; more crime; more misery; lower pay; more exploitation; more pollution; more suicide; worse health. Is this so hard to understand? Apparently so, because only
The Daily Telegraph - alone amongst the broadsheets - seems to have not yet lost its fucking mind:
Many of us will be the losers, bleeding money and equity till the bailiffs turn up. Thousands will lose their livelihoods or declared bankrupt. Many homes will be shattered and families made destitute. What happened in Georgia recently was a walk in the park by comparison. This is tragedy on a global scale. Nothing to celebrate there.
Recession is only good if you are the kind of person that takes pleasure in the pain and ruin of others.
How true that is. What a set of bastards.
