As I sat in the Induction Meeting at A4E, which I had to attend because I have been unemployed for one year I felt as if I had stumbled into an audition for the "Jeremy Kyle Show". There were nine of us at the meeting; one person had just come out of prison and his probation officer was going to help him, one very young girl was extremely pregnant and her friend had come with her, both of them wore track suits and sat staring into space, another person admitted to alcoholism. The trainer discussed their problems as easily as if she were talking about the weather but I felt embarressed for these "customers" of A4E, these were personal issues which, if any of these had been a problem of mine, I wouldn't have wanted aired in public but no one seemed to mind. When the young man sitting next to me was introduced he asked about becoming self employed and setting up his own business, he had a business plan, determination and from listening to him he sounded focussed and just needed help to get going. The reaction of the trainer surprised me she said he shouldn't think he could become a manager or go for a "top job" because he felt like it and he needed a business plan ( obviously she hadn't listened to him because he had a plan). She had already talked about CVs and how to display any skills or qualifications you might have stressing punctuality, and being a good team player, but, she told us don't use any big words you can't understand. It was in this context of watching the creation of mediocrity and low expectations that I opened my big mouth because I can't stand to see people put down. "Oh yes, you can start a business" I heard myself say "I did it from scratch, with no money or help, in fact I've done it twice". The trainer gave me a long look and began to back track - of course a person could be self employed and have a company but it took a lot of hard work and passion and the careers advisor would help with his idea. As I left the meeting I stood in the sunshine outside the building and thought about how important education is and how everyone in that room, including the trainer had been failed by the education system.
As I wrote in my autobiography "Pulling Myself Towards Myself" I grew up in Australia and had a first class education at one of the top private schools in Melbourne. I left school and became a Librarian and when I went travelling around the world I took, what others might call "menial" jobs working in a shop, running a market stall and cleaning houses but I never felt "menial" or of a lower class but that was because of my background and how I viewed myself. If you don't have a good level of education it is hard to hold your own in a fast changing society which uses "big" words and concepts that are beyond you and it is hard to have any feelings of self worth and pride in yourself.
For hundreds of years education was prized and cherished beyond all else: slaves taught each other to read in secret, women taught each in little groups hidden from sight, working mens institutes held night schools and courses that workers could attend after their shift finished and they were right because if you can read, think, reason and express yourself you are free inside your mind and a world of opportunities opens up that you can be part of.
Today, we have free education for all children but the education offered is shrinking the life not expanding it and I don't know why. I talk to the children in my street, they are nice kids with good parents but what they want for themselves is so little and it breaks my heart. When I was nine I knew I would be a world traveller, a writer and my life would be magnificent! Now, most of them want to be famous, be in the newspapers or on tv, one or two want to be footballers, all of them want lots of money but they don't know how to read well although they are all impressed that I write books but when I say they could write too they laugh and think I am crazy. The summer holidays are here and I am going to see if I can set up a little readng circle amongst the kids in my street, just a couple of hours a week to help with their literacy, it will be free and maybe it will be the start of opening up some of the opportunities this new generation of "customers" are being denied.
The Customer Experience
I don't know about anyone else but to me a customer is someone who buys something: I go into a shop, select an item, pay for it, have it packed for me and I take it home. Or I go on line and as I did a few months ago buy a robot vacuum cleaner which is the most wonderful invention ever devised by humans and it is delivered to my home.
Last week I became a "customer" in a very different sense and it started me thinking. I have been unemployed for over one year and I have been placed on A4E's "JobFit" scheme to help me find work. The induction meeting was held by a trainer who guided the eight other "customers" and myself through a series of forms. This was the first time I have ever heard myself described as a "customer" in the context of a work scheme and it didn't make sense - I am an unemployed person looking for work and struggling to get by, I am not buying anything from A4E, in fact if I get a job they will make money off the back of my efforts. When I left the meeting I began to think part of the problems we face in this society is we have stopped calling things by their true names and therefore our judegement and understanding gets clouded when we try to define ourselves and our experiences.
In Buddhism clarity of thought and expression is extremely important but at the moment everytime you listen to any politicians, banker or other feral rich creature trying to protect their wealth and justify their position of power there are only illusions, half truths and buck passing coming out of their mouths.
Without going into every nook and cranny of the various scandals which are coming to light from phone hacking to drug money laundering I think we should start to re-evaluate our society and find new ways forward which will take our economy out of the Depression we are in, you notice I call this time a Depression just like the Depression which started on Wall Street in 1929 and continued into the thirties. I want to make suggestions about the economy because that is the driver for everything else - education, free health care, good affordable housing, sane happy people to name just a few.
Lets get rid of Income Tax and instead use VAT which would be charged on everything the entire population buys as the "New Income Tax" system. We know now that there are trillions of pounds hidden away in tax havens and offshore accounts that will never be recovered by the taxman, okay, leave the money where it is but think how all of us would benefit if every time one of the feral rich bought a bottle of Bollinger, a tub of caviar or a new luxury car they had to pay VAT, we would have that tax paid to the Treasury automatically (no more deals with top HMRC officials over long lunches). We, the ordinary people really would be "consumers" in the truest sense of the word able to use our full wages as we saw fit in our own communities.
We would also have to rethink what we wanted to spend the VAT on everyone wants free health care, education, council services and affordable housing but we have to ask questions and debate honestly for example, why do we still have costly, in every sense of the word, nuclear weapons and want to spend billions updating them when, we are continually told it is the terrorist who is our greatest enemy. You can't nuke a single ragged fighter with a rocket launcher - these are the sorts of debates we have got to start having and soon if our economy isn't going to continue to stagnate for decades to come and I will be an old woman writing a follow up book to "Days of Thrift" entitled "100 Years of Thrift".
Last week I became a "customer" in a very different sense and it started me thinking. I have been unemployed for over one year and I have been placed on A4E's "JobFit" scheme to help me find work. The induction meeting was held by a trainer who guided the eight other "customers" and myself through a series of forms. This was the first time I have ever heard myself described as a "customer" in the context of a work scheme and it didn't make sense - I am an unemployed person looking for work and struggling to get by, I am not buying anything from A4E, in fact if I get a job they will make money off the back of my efforts. When I left the meeting I began to think part of the problems we face in this society is we have stopped calling things by their true names and therefore our judegement and understanding gets clouded when we try to define ourselves and our experiences.
In Buddhism clarity of thought and expression is extremely important but at the moment everytime you listen to any politicians, banker or other feral rich creature trying to protect their wealth and justify their position of power there are only illusions, half truths and buck passing coming out of their mouths.
Without going into every nook and cranny of the various scandals which are coming to light from phone hacking to drug money laundering I think we should start to re-evaluate our society and find new ways forward which will take our economy out of the Depression we are in, you notice I call this time a Depression just like the Depression which started on Wall Street in 1929 and continued into the thirties. I want to make suggestions about the economy because that is the driver for everything else - education, free health care, good affordable housing, sane happy people to name just a few.
Lets get rid of Income Tax and instead use VAT which would be charged on everything the entire population buys as the "New Income Tax" system. We know now that there are trillions of pounds hidden away in tax havens and offshore accounts that will never be recovered by the taxman, okay, leave the money where it is but think how all of us would benefit if every time one of the feral rich bought a bottle of Bollinger, a tub of caviar or a new luxury car they had to pay VAT, we would have that tax paid to the Treasury automatically (no more deals with top HMRC officials over long lunches). We, the ordinary people really would be "consumers" in the truest sense of the word able to use our full wages as we saw fit in our own communities.
We would also have to rethink what we wanted to spend the VAT on everyone wants free health care, education, council services and affordable housing but we have to ask questions and debate honestly for example, why do we still have costly, in every sense of the word, nuclear weapons and want to spend billions updating them when, we are continually told it is the terrorist who is our greatest enemy. You can't nuke a single ragged fighter with a rocket launcher - these are the sorts of debates we have got to start having and soon if our economy isn't going to continue to stagnate for decades to come and I will be an old woman writing a follow up book to "Days of Thrift" entitled "100 Years of Thrift".
Dedicated Follower of Fashion
When I knew him he was in his late fifties - corpulent with a florid complexion and a nose which was becoming swollen from too much alcohol. He wore the most expensive Saville Row suits I had ever seen with a small touch of colour on the dark cloth in the form of his matching socks and top pocket handkerchief, this was his only flambouyant gesture. He was extremely well connected and respected in the City of London and dined at all the best gentleman's clubs, attended the annual Royal garden party, Henley, Ascot and the various banquets which bored him greatly. I don't know why he took a liking to me perhaps because we were so different, I was 30 years old, left wing and a feminist but perhaps aside from the entertainment value he thought I was as ruthless as he was. I was ruthless but only about myself, I hated what I called my laziness and ignorance and how slow I was to learn, I wasn't ruthless in the way I treated other people and slowly I realised that was the difference between us. He took it upon himself to "teach" me about the City, I think it amused him to tell outrageous stories and laugh when I would refuse to believe that power and money were the only things that mattered in life. "Star gazy pie" was his phrase for people like me, why couldn't I understand that "they are sheep and we shall shear them" was the only true philosophy to live by? There would always be wealthy families like his although he was too lazy to really chase the big bucks that you could make in banking, hedge funds and investments; his father and uncle had set up the offshore companies and accounts to protect their wealth but he made sure he always had a number of seats on the boards of various companies and a few directorships and consultancies to keep his coffers full but don't ask him what those companies did or how their businesses worked.
Looking back I realise he was lazy, insular and totally indifferent to everything except those things which affected his comfort. These aspects of his nature were well hidden behind an erudite, charming exterior with huge amounts of bonhomie and wit but it was all skin deep but even though he knew it was all an act he felt proud of his effect on others, rather like an actor producing an Oscar winning performance. Despite having so many friends and so much wealth and influence he was afraid it wasn't enough, whatever his definition of enough was and what he did have was leaking away, drained away by the things he hated most - modern life and all its gadgets (he refused to use a mobile phone), unions, having to pay too much tax to support the state, a state he despised because it had banned foxhunting and all the while he was struggling to find new businesses to mentor and "consult" because the young entrepreneurs coming onto the scene with their dot com enterprises didn't need his entree into society to succeed and that made him furious.
It had been years since I had thought about this City grandee and now my memory was jogged as I watched the news and saw an interview with Marcus Agius, the Group Chairman of Barclays, he was apologising for Barclays but the fury beneath the apology was red hot, that he should have to account for his actions was intensely humiliating, you could hear it in his voice - how dare the "Great Unwashed" who are not known to him challenge his behaviour.
So, the scandal goes forward and all the old guard of elitist, entrenched, powerful, wealthy entitled people who share my old grandee and Mr Agius beliefs of entitlement and they are fighting a rearguard action for their very lives: they did nothing wrong, they brought prosperity to Britain and have given their staff jobs how can this be wrong? When this argument is challenged they fall back on how expensive it will be to have a judge led inquiry and what a long time it will take to present its findings, let Parliament, the same Parliament they fund and manipulate, do its job and have a committee look at this instead.
Just as I did you have to step away from their influence and take a very hard clear look at what they have done with their feral banking practices; how many years has this been going on? I think it is for longer than 14 months and it has affected a great deal more in our society than just the rigging of an unimportant, obscure, if you believe the bankers, inter banking rate. LIBOR affects mortgages, credit cards, pensions and business loans. How many people and businesses have gone bankrupt and lost everything they own? How many pensioners have lost assets and seen their nest eggs shrink? No one will ever know.
But what I do know is there are several things we as ordinary citizens can do. Move our bank accounts to ethical banks and Building Societies that don't award bonuses, use credit unions which I have written about in an earlier blog entitled "ABC" and petition our MPs demanding an impartial judge led inquiry.
I gradually moved away from the grandee's circle because I grew up and didn't like what I saw and heard as I sat at dinner in the various country houses and Belgravia flats, none of these powerful people ever questioned themselves about their behaviour, they are unthinking, dedicated followers of fashion. A fashion that is regressive, anti democratic and ultra right wing red in tooth and claw capitalist. I learnt about real politicks and saw how the world worked but I wanted a different world; one that is fairer, more honest and honourable and I still do.
Looking back I realise he was lazy, insular and totally indifferent to everything except those things which affected his comfort. These aspects of his nature were well hidden behind an erudite, charming exterior with huge amounts of bonhomie and wit but it was all skin deep but even though he knew it was all an act he felt proud of his effect on others, rather like an actor producing an Oscar winning performance. Despite having so many friends and so much wealth and influence he was afraid it wasn't enough, whatever his definition of enough was and what he did have was leaking away, drained away by the things he hated most - modern life and all its gadgets (he refused to use a mobile phone), unions, having to pay too much tax to support the state, a state he despised because it had banned foxhunting and all the while he was struggling to find new businesses to mentor and "consult" because the young entrepreneurs coming onto the scene with their dot com enterprises didn't need his entree into society to succeed and that made him furious.
It had been years since I had thought about this City grandee and now my memory was jogged as I watched the news and saw an interview with Marcus Agius, the Group Chairman of Barclays, he was apologising for Barclays but the fury beneath the apology was red hot, that he should have to account for his actions was intensely humiliating, you could hear it in his voice - how dare the "Great Unwashed" who are not known to him challenge his behaviour.
So, the scandal goes forward and all the old guard of elitist, entrenched, powerful, wealthy entitled people who share my old grandee and Mr Agius beliefs of entitlement and they are fighting a rearguard action for their very lives: they did nothing wrong, they brought prosperity to Britain and have given their staff jobs how can this be wrong? When this argument is challenged they fall back on how expensive it will be to have a judge led inquiry and what a long time it will take to present its findings, let Parliament, the same Parliament they fund and manipulate, do its job and have a committee look at this instead.
Just as I did you have to step away from their influence and take a very hard clear look at what they have done with their feral banking practices; how many years has this been going on? I think it is for longer than 14 months and it has affected a great deal more in our society than just the rigging of an unimportant, obscure, if you believe the bankers, inter banking rate. LIBOR affects mortgages, credit cards, pensions and business loans. How many people and businesses have gone bankrupt and lost everything they own? How many pensioners have lost assets and seen their nest eggs shrink? No one will ever know.
But what I do know is there are several things we as ordinary citizens can do. Move our bank accounts to ethical banks and Building Societies that don't award bonuses, use credit unions which I have written about in an earlier blog entitled "ABC" and petition our MPs demanding an impartial judge led inquiry.
I gradually moved away from the grandee's circle because I grew up and didn't like what I saw and heard as I sat at dinner in the various country houses and Belgravia flats, none of these powerful people ever questioned themselves about their behaviour, they are unthinking, dedicated followers of fashion. A fashion that is regressive, anti democratic and ultra right wing red in tooth and claw capitalist. I learnt about real politicks and saw how the world worked but I wanted a different world; one that is fairer, more honest and honourable and I still do.
