Half of the families in this country have less than a thousand pounds in savings. A quarter of them have less than £95 in savings. Average personal debt is nearly ten thousand pounds. And the next crash is coming.
During the last recession in 2009, the number of millionaires doubled, but ordinary people got fired from their jobs by the million and the aspiring bourgeoisie were also hit hard, with tens of thousands of small businesses destroyed by predatory banks. But in those times there was still some semblance of a social safety net. Now though?
Real wages in the United Kingdom have fallen almost as fast as they have in fucking Greece, and they had to deal with a financially bankrupt government; ours is merely morally bankrupt. Many of my friends are living horribly precarious lives, bouncing between shitty jobs with no savings whatsoever. Never stop moving, never sleep, drive for uber, cycle for deliveroo, keep thrashing around, make less than the minimum wage and far less than a living wage, barely keep the creditors of your back, grind your soul down into a fucking pencil nub, every waking moment with an entire media and political machine hammering it into you that if you go bankrupt though it’s because you didn’t strive hard enough.
And austerity continues apace – jobseeker’s allowance is pitiful and can be rescinded on a whim, child support is cut to the bone, there’s still – STILL – foodbanks everywhere, and homeless people everywhere. Cuts to local councils mean mass layoffs and rising council tax. Everything is getting more expensive. The NHS is going to start hoovering money out of people’s pockets soon.
Society, in other words, has been almost completely removed. Thatcher’s utopia is here. The idea that we’re part of a cohesive whole that gives something back if you sell your labour to it? That’s gone, it’s all been cut. We’re getting less and less back; instead we’re told over and over that we’re free agents and we get what we deserve. And the next crash is coming.
I don’t know what it’s going to be, or whether it’ll be even something that starts in this country. It could be the housing market here though, or it might be student loans or the bursting of the tech bubble. Or it could be food insecurity, ‘cos that’s right around the corner for us here on this crowded island sitting on a warming planet. Whatever. It’s coming.
There is so little resilience in our personal finances, and there is so little in the way of government programs to protect us from destitution, and our society is so weak that when the next crash happens there is going to be nothing for people to do except start breaking shit.
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The coming crisis is unavoidable. No-one you vote for will be able to prevent the bubble of fake cheap credit that we injected into the veins of the economy after the 2008 recession from bursting. The only consequential course of action for us is to build local institutions, based not on money but on trust and a spirit of communal aid, that can keep people safe and fed after the machinery of state and capital sieze up. In the aftermath, those humble kitchens and shelters will be the building blocks of something new.