After the super rich, it’s the professional middle classes who’ve done best from the Brown/ Blair years. This army of public sector managers, consultants, advisors, holders of quango posts and various other hangers on have bred like rats under New Labour. They even have a kind of ideology to unite them – an abhorrence of all -isms. These very very nice people have a hatred of anything sexist, racist or homophobic. Their ideology has even been codified in the form of political correctness through which they impose their (in)tolerance on the rest of us.
Take the smoking ban. It’s clear the lower orders don’t realise smoking is bad for them. The answer – make smokers social outcasts by banning them from public places until they learn the error of their ways. The same applies to those nasty racist, sexist hoodies who’re a blot on the landscape of liberal Britain. The answer – ban the horrors, without trial, from where they live and distribute photos so everyone can identify them.
The stronghold of the liberal middle class is the public sector. This army of middle managers spend their whole lives rushing round, clutching mobile phones and attending meetings. No one really knows what they actually do but when they occasionally stop to talk down to you, they always make it clear just how busy they are and how hard life is being a manager. Their mantra is that the public sector must deliver an ever improving service to the customer. Or is it service users? Then again, it might be client – it’s so hard keep up with the latest pronouncements. But keep up you must, because failure to use the latest correct form of words can lead to trouble.
The bane of the middle manager is the manual worker, a group of people who just don’t want to be team players. In team meetings they rarely say anything constructive and show no enthusiasm for the latest initiative aimed at delivering a better service. When given their brightly coloured uniforms, to encourage a sense of team working and to present a positive image to customer, they wear them reluctantly and only occasionally wash them. In fact, washing doesn’t seem a high priority for them in general.
It’s for these reasons, and the suspicion they all vote BNP, that the professional middle management have tried to ethnically cleanse manual workers from the state sector. Through privatisation and competitive tendering, directly employed manual workers are now increasingly a thing of the past. In their place it has been possible to recruit more and more professionals who now make up a whopping 29% of the public sector workforce, compared with the reactionary private sector where it is only 8%.
Of course it’s not been possible to completely get rid of the lower orders. But middle management have been able to draft in some of their professional friends who’ve set up little companies that run courses on such things as team motivation and health and safety. For a few thousand pounds a time these people are drafted in to train workers how best to go about their jobs safely with wonderful smiles permanently fixed on their faces.
However, professional middle class tolerance doesn’t extend to the home where, in order to dedicate themselves to their jobs, they employ a small army of domestic servants. Here they’re happy to employ working class people to do the cleaning, tidy the garden, do odd jobs and so on; here their commitment to equality is geared to ensuring their employees are paid the lowest rate possible. In this endeavour, single parents claiming dole, or illegal immigrants scared of being deported, have been found to make for the cheapest and most hard working employee.
But there’s a worry that’s spoiling this liberal utopia created under New Labour – a growing realisation that Labour may be kicked out at the next election. But then again, that nice Mr Cameron does seem to be one of us. His commitment to the equality agenda does seem real. And there’s the added bonus that he might cut taxes. After all, with the credit crunch, professional middle class parents are struggling to pay the kids’ school fees. Perhaps it’s time to send back the Labour membership card and see if the Tory commitment to keeping Britain as unequal as Labour is really true.