The pound and the fury

Why anger and confusion reign in an economy paralysed by myth

Jack Mosse, Julie Froud

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526158802
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526158796
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Business generale

1
Anger, confusion and the pot of money myth

Anger

Tracy lights another cigarette, leans forward on her crinkled faux leather sofa, and with the satisfaction of someone succumbing to an irresistible swell of righteous anger, tells me:

Rich wealthy men decide what goes where, what we get, what we don't get, what gets spent, where it gets spent and how it gets spent. That's our economy really; it's not in the hands of the people that pay their taxes. It's always been like that: rich, white men.

Gesticulating through the haze of smoke, she continues:

You've got all these rich snobby idiots up in parliament that don't want to lose out on what they've got, so they punish us for it.

I prompt back: ‘So you think they know what they're doing?’

Oh they know exactly what they're doing. I'm not racist, my kids are mixed race. But they're opening the doors to all these foreign people, they're given houses, they're given furniture, they're given this that and the other. And then you've got someone that was born and bred here, I worked until I became ill, and now I have to basically beg for my little bit of money. They know exactly what they're doing! My mum's one of them pensioners that's looking at cuts. My mum is 77, she started working from the age of 10. I think she's entitled to her money, and I think if they took some of their own pay cuts they wouldn't have to tax us so much. Because, trust me, they could still live very comfortably on a quarter of what they earn, no more bonuses, no more taxis, no more hotels, you go and stay in a hotel you pay for it yourself, you pay your own bar bills. What did they do that's any different than an everyday person that works?!

Me, appealing to the logic of democracy: ‘But why is that? They get voted in, so someone must have faith in them?’

Oh we won't even go there! The day you show me a true ballot that's gone through and hasn't been fixed! I'm 46 years of age. I've been voting since I was 16, I've talked to people … It's fixed from start to finish. They put in who they choose to put in!

Tracy's diatribe was remarkable only in how common the sentiments she expresses are. I'd had hundreds of other conversations with people in Tracy's neighbourhood who, like Tracy, understand the economy as, essentially, a sham. Politics is a charade, the media are full of shit, and it's all orchestrated by rich, white men.

When speaking with Leo, as we were standing on a small patch of grass in his estate's central square I became distracted by his Rottweiler, who crouched beside us to uncurl an enormous stinking mess. But Leo didn't notice; talking about the economy was getting him worked up. In what was becoming a familiar scene, my interviewee began to lose himself in anger. He leant in towards me, as if he'd finally decided to tell me what he really thought, and, in relation to Jeremy Corbyn (leader of the opposition at the time), said:

Do you know what they'll do, they'll kill him. That's not a word of a lie. I honestly believe that, if he actually gets too close to becoming Prime Minister they will kill him. I do not put it past these people, because these are the same kind of people that killed fucking Kennedy … They will not let him in. Just like the way they fucking killed off Diana.

Des, an experienced youth worker, paused during his lunch break to chat with me on a bench. Between mouthfuls, he drew on a particularly strong version of the prison-industrial complex to explain economic policy. He told me:

They know what they're doing, and I think they're doing it so they can create more young criminals and put more young people in prisons and so-forth, because prisons pay for these societies. Prisons, for them, is big business, so if we get a lot of young boys in the penal system and give them all hardship then when they come out and there's nothing there for them, they're going to carry on the hardship, and get in more trouble. The government is criminalising young people on purpose. They're making them into criminals.

Blatant election riggers, murderers and orchestrators of a penal system based on the principles of slavery were typical representations of the ruling elite in the neighbourhood. Perhaps because I had been cocooned in my university world, where we like to think we're the only ones really sticking it to ‘the man’, I was surprised by the extent of vitriol towards the establishment.

The estate where Tracy and her neighbours lived is one of the biggest in the UK and was a two-minute walk from where I was living in North London. On days when I wasn't teaching or didn't need to be at university for some other reason, I would head to the estate and talk to people about the economy.

On one of these trips, I met Bryony as she waited on a wall outside a council administration office for a friend to finish work. She was in her late twenties and had just started working as a receptionist in a trendy table-tennis bar after a long period on the dole. After a few questions about how she saw the economy, I saw that familiar anger rise up:

They will quite happily change the law and the system to suit themselves, without telling us. Quite happily! And then they'll make a speech in parliament, and the average person isn't aware of how the system works, but these people have been bred to do this sort of thing so they know the system, they know how it works, how to cheat the system, how to change the system, and how to do it to suit themselves.

Stephanie was a mother of three whom I met queuing in the corner shop. I asked if she thought it was possible to affect economic policy. She frowned and told me:

Talking's talking, it doesn't actually change what the government does, does it? You can say all these things, but they're going to do what they want to do in the end. They don't listen to people.

Later, as we talked in her front room, I asked her how she would try to explain what the economy was to someone who had no idea, like a child. She responded:

The economy is good for rich people, but if you're working-class people then it's not good for you. They're just people that sit in the Houses of Parliament, that's about it really, isn't it? You vote for someone on polling day and that's about it. You could vote for anybody and the same person's going to get in no matter what you vote for! So it's just for people that stay drinking tea in the big Houses of Parliament!

Steve, a thoughtful caretaker whom I chatted to over coffee in a local café, shared that view:

It's for the rich people the economy really. It's about control; I think people at the top always want to control the people at the bottom, especially in this country, where we have an exaggerated class system.

These short quotes are chosen from hundreds of conversations about the economy I had with people on the estate. They are typical. Talking about the economy would inevitably lead into a discussion about how the ruling elite used their control of the system for their own benefit while screwing the rest of us over.

It was a small sample and, because of the nature of the area, I was talking mainly to people who had suffered most at the hands of the government's austerity policy. However, the rise in popularity of anti-establishment politics, most obviously evident in the UK by the Brexit vote, indicates that it wasn't just people on this estate who feel this way. Populism has become an accepted byword for the anger, resentment and rejection towards elites that has shaken established democracies in recent years. What my conversations showed was that a large part of this anger concerned how the economy was run, and who it was run for.

So, the first thing to note when trying to get a grip on contemporary public understandings of the economy and the myths that underpin them in the UK, is a widespread mistrust and hatred of the people who are seen to run it. This is important to the story I want to tell, as it undermines that idea that the masses are tricked by the myths of a shadowy elite. Economic myth does emanate from elite institutions, but it is not as simple as the gullible pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Anger, confusion and the pot of money myth
• 2: Churches of high finance: myth in the financial sector
• 3: Magic money tree: myth in the political sphere
• 4: Media myths
• 5: Demythologising the economy: not a pot of money
• Notes
• Index