You could be forgiven for thinking there was in fact no
recession in this country at all. Despite what limp wristed rags like the Daily
Mail might tell you, there are no bread lines or mass poverty, nor deep rooted
social unrest or raging class warfare. When you think of apocalyptic
nuts-in-a-vice financial meltdown, you cast your mind back to 1931 and the
Great Depression. Wall Street crashed harder than Billy Joel in a people mover.
Poor old Ramsay MacDonald was tearing his beard hair out trying to keep the
country in the black, whilst irate Northern workmen marched the Jarrow Crusade
to Westminster, only to be turned around again (probably after depositing a
hurtful note) and sent home. The North got it right in the face whereas large
areas of the South West did a good job of dodging the debt. There was desperate
poverty, widespread frustration and general despondency and misery. It was times
of some boom, a lot of bust; Orwell’s The
Road To Wigan Pier up against Henry Ford’s Model A. Grim, grim, grim.
And, as of late 2007, we find ourselves in a global economic crisis of humongous magnitude. And yet if you take a gander down any high street or waltz through any university campus in the country you won’t see children in rags playing with mud clods or toothless old women gnawing on crusts of bread. No no. Instead you will see bars and nightclubs crammed to capacity, intellectual types tapping pretentiously at twinkling computer screens in coffee shops, housewives relaxing at home with 17,000 episodes of Cash In The Attic recorded on their Sky Plus box. No, this recession is kinda funny. It seems most people are willing to concede the small things to keep the luxuries. Video Games are actually booming, outselling Hollywood and the private press; in a recession. People will live off of bent tins of beans as long as they can maintain a slew of consumer electronics, and year on year sees yet more techy crap coming out, usually with an Apple logo on it, reaching a sort of peak in idiocy with the glowing tea tray that is the Ipad. It doesn’t look like a recession. But, if you look really closely, beneath the veneer of luxury over necessity, there are the tell tale signs. In fact they are everywhere. Turn on the TV and you have to endure endless adverts pleading with you to claim your mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance, or PPI, attempting to tempt the proletariat by using big words like ‘legislation’(even if any ‘compensation culture’ has levelled off since the late 1990s; thanks Advanced Legal Research and Law Reform). Similarly Price Comparison sites come in droves, offering a chance to shave a few quid off the bills. Slots for Cash 4 Gold or Gold 4 Us or Give Us Your Broken Necklaces You Sonsofbitches fill every ad break going.
The same thing is going on in the
high street. In nearly every city centre you can find them, explosions of pawn
shops or exchange joints; dingy sweat holes jammed full of anything you can
imagine, from Nintendo to cameras, chess boards and golf drivers. And while it
is sort of amusing to poke among all that jumble, it is nonetheless the result
of a squeezed lower class coughing up their earthly goods to try and make ends
meet. And sometimes it’s painful how much these items probably meant. Just poke
through and you will find movie memorabilia, watches engraved for loved ones ,
hard back books with the spines lovingly cracked. It is sort of horrible, if
you think about it. Then again places like CEX
or Cash Converters are just offering
a service, and the money generated may even be vital to some. But there will
always be something unsightly, sort of upsetting about those places. And then there are the personal finance
joints; both in the city centre and on the internet. Cheery adverts for Wonga.com mask the insurmountable APR
rates, tied up in the small print scroll at the bottom of the screen. The
desperation is there, it’s just hidden behind a set of vaguely off-putting adverts
featuring geriatric puppets with perpetual sex drives. I’m sure that’s just how it was in the
thirties.
And if you want to be reminded further of the stormy
financial outlook(why?), just try and
get a job. Yeah, like me. I tried to get
a job for something like 3 months, applying for pretty much everything across two
cities. I received a rejection email from Tesco telling me that my application
to work at the chicken counter was not successful, due to a lacking on my part
of the “particular skills required”.
I am hardly Donald Trump, but I thought that an LLB Law Degree might sufficiently
enable me to ram a spit up a chickens arse.
Still, I am disadvantaged having to stay at home in the North East,
where a whopping 1 in 5 young people are unemployed. The North-South divide has
never seemed to actually mean anything beyond the cultural, until now. And it
is sad, to see rates of pay and employment possibilities at such odds in the
North to the South. It makes you feel you were treated a little unfairly.
Can it get worse? It probably won’t get much better any time
soon. After the Double Dip, which I will not pretend to know anything about
(Think it was one of the less successful Mr Whippy variants, or maybe a
progressive grunge band), things seemed to have levelled off somewhat. Note
that ‘levelled off’ is a phrase that seldom provokes unbridled elation. We are firmly in the 21st century’s
retelling of the Great Depression, except with poncey gadgets in the place of
mining families crowded grimly around a single boiling kettle. What can you do
to keep ahead? The worst thing about a global depression is that the answer is
well beyond the whim of the individual. You are left feeling powerless, and
wronged. You find yourself letching off your parents out of necessity over compulsion,
doubt your own abilities and prospects, and worry for the future and your own
happiness. But it is not all bad. There
is an end, just dimly in sight. And who knows, maybe this pressure will go on
to make you far more effective and adaptable than those softies who flew the
nest in the boom years of the early noughties. And Mum and Dad don’t mind,
really. Just don’t stay out after bed time.
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