A JOB IS A JOB IS A DEAD END

Jim Jarratt has been a student teacher and an actor/musician, he's appeared on TV and radio and published a book of songs and some popular guides.. but for most of the 1980's he was unemployed. A year ago he wrote an article for this page on joblessness. It changed his life, if not his point of view.

Jim Jarratt


I am sitting on as train with the Guardian. Not this morning's paper: I have plucked it from a briefcase where it has been in cold storage. I am reading an article about unemployment entitled Government Surplus, which was written by an unemployed man called Jim Jarratt a year ago; I am trying to see things from the viewpoint of its author. It is not easy. The problem is that I wrote the article, in what seems to be almost another time and another place.

It all began with jobschemes, unemployment, more jobschemes, more unemployment, and an ever mounting frustration, despair and anger. This despair led me to write my story and to express that anger. It was not written with a view to publication, simply because I wanted to exorcise a demon, to bring it out into the open and to give it a name. I was required to attend one of those compulsory Restart interviews a few days before the article broke. It was the usual iron hand in the velvet glove approach: 'If you haven't got a job by the time of your next six monthly interview you will have to go on a training scheme etc. etc.' My protests that it was now 1989 and I had been on three jobschemes since 1980 to no good effect made little impact. I expressed anger that I had twice been made redundant as a result of the governments continual practice of closing down perfectly good projects to replace them with new ones. The jobscheme stastistics shuffle. Surely, I argued, ET is but CP writ differently? Why has all the funding been taken away from these schemes? I was informed that MSC money had been provided to help the unemployed, not community action groups fighting unemployment. Confronted by this all knowledgeable smug man in white shirt and tie, I felt small, lower than the lowest, an illiterate, inarticulate dosser. No doubt this was the desired effect. I thought of the MSC headquarters in Sheffield: a brand new office complex with MSC in giant gold letters on one side of it, the golden temple of an empire built on the manipulation of the unemployed. I had encountered MSC officials down the years. They always seemed to have brand new luxury cars, wear pin striped shirts and ties with regimental crests. 'They never get made redundant' I thought.

So, on April 6th 1989 'Government Surplus' burst upon the nation... and my life was changed virtually overnight. The many, many letters which dropped my letterbox as a result came as a complete surprise. I was both inspired and moved by them, sometimes to tears. For the most part they were from other unemployed, middle aged people in much the same boat as myself. I received letters from pensioners threatening to send money, letters from students, an offer of a job at a centre against unemployment in the Midlands. The phone never stopped ringing. I had braced myself for the flak, but there was none.

Everywhere I found nothing but sympathy and support and I was profoundly moved at this revelation of the fundamental kindness of human nature. Within a week I had secured a job as a delivery driver and had received an offer of freelance editorial work from a publisher's consultant. I had just started work when a letter postmarked Jobcentre appeared on
my mat: another Restart interview, this time a personal letter from the manager expressing concern at the failure of the Governments 'initiatives' to provide me with 'suitable' employment. However, I was now in a position to politely decline the offer. It seemed a hollow victory, for by getting a job I had relieved the authorities of the by now highly publicised problem of 'what to do about Mr. Jarratt.' In winning a battle I had excluded myself from the war. I was later to discover that Government Surplus had raised a stir in circles far removed from the local Jobcentre.

A letter dropped upon my mat a few weeks later from the Junior Employment Minister, Mr. Patrick Nicholls, to local Labour MP Max Madden: Also enclosed was a compliment slip from the latter. The general tenor of the missive was that 'Mr. Jarratt's criticisms (of ET) are not borne out by the facts... the latest figures show that 184,000 people are on the programme.' He also mentioned he had attended an ET forum in Manchester, where 37 traineees had discussed how ET was 'working for them.'

My response was not so blandly worded. Had the remaining 183,963 trainees got to discuss with the Junior Minister how ET was working for them? Perhaps the enthusiastic takeup on ET might have had something to do with Restart and the 'go on to ET or else' syndrome. I sent the letter back to the MP and received a shorter ministerial reply via the same channel saying my letter had been read 'with interest'.

Even now Government Surplus is not a dead duck. It has been taken up as the centrepiece of the Open University's foundation course in social sciences, and looks likely to be affecting the views of students in that area throughout the 1990s. Maybe one day some of these people will find themselves in a position to be able to do something about this massive waste of human resources and self respect. And what of me? Ironically, I now have two jobs, neither of which I can thank Mrs Thatcher for. This is entirely due to the goodwill and kindness of ordinary people, who care about the plight of their fellow human beings. Having a job has been a revelation. On a scheme you are never far from the realities of the dole queue, but enter the world of the securely employed and you realise that the people you work with have no idea of the problems associated with being on the dole. The unemployed are 'ignorant and idle'. If they don't have jobs, its their own fault, it's because they don't want to work. The traditional work ethic that 'if your work is not hard, boring and unpleasant, then it’s not work' reigns supreme. This polarising of different sections of the working class ensures the constant re election of Conservative Governments, who cynically use the social and material aspirations of ordinary people to divide and rule.

In the forward looking sixties and early seventies we were seeing the beginning of the erosion of the work ethic, the idea that quality of life was more important than dead end jobs. Thatcher has reversed this and returned us to the mentality that 'any job is better than no job.' This attitude is conditioned by fear, by the threat of poverty, social
ostracism and that total loss of self respect which the system goes to such great lengths to foster.. Training is part of this work ethic. 'Skills' and 'jobs' are the words bandied about. Education, especially education for its own sake, is untrendy in Thatcher's Britain. We aim for a society where poets, philosophers, visionaries, artists, and thinking , socially concerned human beings are surplus to the requirements of profiteering, materialism and the interplay of market forces. In Thatcher's Britain, God is a chartered accountant and the holy spirit is the floating pound. Ordinary people are reduced to numbers on computers.

I now have a job. I have regained my self respect. My life is on an even keel again. But I am not content, and I fear for the future. On the dole I felt wasted. As a delivery driver I still feel wasted. My job holds a degree of security, but no prospects: It is just a different form of dead end. I have 'employment', a fair boss and a decent wage, but the 'suitable' part is still missing. The freelance editorial work I do in my spare time is a potential way forward, but I will need more work opportunities than I have now to become my own boss. Still, it's better than no prospects at all. Since I wrote Government Surplus, unemployment as a social and political issue has been cunningly marginalised by the present regime and the mass media. They have laundered statistics and created the illusion that ET is working, job opportunities are on the up and things are getting better all the time. Thatcher's actual achievement is that she has increased job prospects at the expense of shorter hours, longer holidays and decent wages. As for youth, the 80's have seen the total wastage of a working class generation, a generation that has known nothing but the dole, government schemes, dead end jobs, black economy, and a standard of education that has often deprived them of even the most basic life and social skills. We have, however, given them a materialistic expectation, hence the soaring crime statistics. These people are the so called 'underclass'. Some of them are the rioters who smashed up central London on the pretext of being against the poll tax. The Government like to call them 'Militant Tendency' or rentamob. Perhaps they are right, perhaps not. The truth is that their political affiliations are irrelevant. All they want is a good excuse to go on the rampage. Left or right, anarchist or imperialist, these louts were not sent here by the Kremlin but were 'made in Britain'. They are a product of our system, the end result of a decade of Thatcherism. They take a rat's eye view of life, and come from the same deprivation, squalor and double standardising which in the 18th century created the London Mob which devastated the capital in the name of Old Prices and No Popery. Mrs Thatcher says they are anti democracy, but what does that mean? Anti authority, certainly, but anti democracy? Democracy is all things to all people. Mrs Thatcher's mode of government is not democratic by any standard I believe in. She is not accountable to Parliament nor even to her own cabinet, so what chance has the common man? Parliament is just a talking shop and the Cabinet a rubber stamp. In Europe people are taking to the streets and, for better
or worse, attempting to bring about reform and change by the sheer force of their conviction. In our country we sit on our arses and talk about mortgage rates, income tax concessions and the price of videos, while our government seeks to re insert that verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful which will restore the British Imperial class system to its High Victorian splendour. It is my hope that rising mortgage rates and the poll tax will kick those selfish, materialistic, petty bourgeois Tory voters in what appears to be the only sensitive part of their anatomy ... their pockets... and induce them to rid us of Thatcherism once and for all.

It is spring 1990. I am now 40, the trees are starting to come into blossom, I still have a job, family and some prospects. The secret police haven’t knocked me up yet, and my books are still selling. It might (almost) be a happy ending.

JIM JARRATT

Guardian 27th April 1990


Copyright Jim Jarratt. 2006 First published in THE GUARDIAN 1989
Photographs by Dennis Thorpe