ANOTHER VOICE
Why the idle rich are no longer with us
MATTHEW PARRIS
Is this the first age when the rich work harder than the poor? My question is Prompted by two observations. The first is that most people in Third World countries sit around all day with nothing to do, and now the poor in the rich countries are join- ing them. Indolence — enforced or chosen — is the established order in Britain's 'sink' council estates. The labouring poor are a diminishing class. As they dwindle, a long-established minority is mushrooming in size: the work- ing rich. That is my second observation reinforced by an arresting article in these Pages last week (`Hived off hyphens', 16 May). The double-barrelled surname, sus- pects Damien McCrystal, is heading for extinction. Mr McCrystal was too polite to spell out the main reason for this, but sin- .gle-barrelled readers will be bright enough to read between the lines: for the first time In Britain we are beginning to bracket sta- tus with competence, and double-barrelled Individuals are presumed to lack the latter. To get rich or stay rich takes application these days. First to Eritrea. For Eritrea you may read Bolivia, Kenya, Tanzania and Cuba, all of which I have visited in recent years. When I was a child an expression was cur- rent to describe hard, sweated labour: working like a black' suggested vigorous and protracted effort. Doubtless the phrase dates from the days of slavery and might be thought insulting today. It is inaccurate now anyway. Blacks in black countries, like People of every colour in most poor coun- tries, do not work hard at all. Most of them have little to do. The Third World does not go out in the midday sun. The remark must immediately be ampli- fied if it is not to give offence. I am not sug- gesting that people in poor countries are in.'''y.. — Evidence is to the contrary: when work is offered for reward the poor every- where seize it with enthusiasm. Nor am I suggesting (as Britons abroad like to drawl) that life is easy in the Third World where the natives sit around under mango trees waiting for the ripe fruit to drop, whereas Englishmen 'detest a siesta', etc. That may be the appearance but it is an illusion. Indolence is not the choice of most of the World's indolent. Many in most poor coun- tries lead dispiritingly bleak lives, lack much, sicken often, die young, and never try to break out of it because most humans don't anywhere. But it is just not true that being a peasant farmer (which is what most of the world's poor are) is hard work. The occupation does involve short periods of back-breaking labour and living conditions which are gen- erally crude and often uncomfortable. Life may be brutish. For women in particular (women do most of what we call `man's work' in the world) life is tough. But every- one sleeps all night, and many, especially men, sleep for much of the day, too. People talk a great deal, fight a bit, make love with depressing frequency, chew a large quantity of betel nuts, and drink much coffee and tea (and in Africa, beer) very slowly. They do everything very slowly. I do not idealise such a state, nor for a moment do I envy those who must endure it, but neither by hand nor by brain are these — in anything but a Marxist's fantasy — the workers of the world.
The workers of the world live in Dagen- ham, Swansea and Surrey; they toil by hand and brain in Bremen and Frankfurt; they swarm from the Tube at Mansion House; they commute from Connecticut; pack the railway carriages from Southend; pore over briefing packs in the back of limos on the M4 at dawn; clock on and off in their mil- lions in Yokohama, Hong Kong or Seoul, and phone home with the news that they're working late, again, in Lyon or Atlanta. The workers of the world fly business-class to and from New York until they're too tired and time-lagged to know what day it is.
The workers of the world are saving for a rather pricy bolt-on conservatory they've seen advertised in the Sunday Express; hop- ing to buy a top-of-the-range Mondeo; wondering whether, if the wife goes out to work too, they could put their daughter through private school; or contemplating the cost in time (money being no object) of a week's ski-ing in Colorado this Whitsun- tide.
The remark cannot be more than anec- dotal, but I am sure people in Britain work harder now than they did when I first joined the world of work 25 years ago. We got in at ten, left at six, rarely worked late and never at weekends, and went for long lunches at the pub — lunches which on Fri- days were even longer and involved many pints of bitter. I knew a fair number of rich people then, many of them in industry or the City, many of them with double- barrelled surnames, and most of them (it seemed to me) rather dim. Their lives offered few challenges beyond inserting a cuff-link with the left hand.
These people did not work hard. One had no sense of a bare-knuckled fight for commercial advantage or survival. There was a distinct sense of hierarchy based on cachet and connections: were you, as the Spanish say, enchufado, 'plugged in'? This, we now realise, was a doomed breed. They used to be everywhere; today you spot their top handkerchiefs and over-tailored suits only among Buckingham Palace officials checking out the House of Lords in prepa- ration for the Queen's Speech.
Needless to repeat the newspaper arti- cles, doubtless exaggerated, about people working in the City now until they burn out at 35; but no doubt, either, that the ethos has altered. Life is sharper on the shop floor, too; and for small business it is red in tooth and claw. Even white shop- keepers now stay open after 5.30 and restaurateurs after 9 — because of compe- tition and because customers work late, shop late and have no time to cook, and their spouses work too. Those not working at weekends because their customers call at weekends are customers themselves, who have to call at weekends because there isn't an hour spare during the week and the wife's at work too. At every level of the hive, from drone to queen, you can- not get away with slacking these days.
A whole class of rentiers, for whom money used to make money while they slept, are now slaves to their pagers or spreadsheets. And, as I tried to demon- strate here the other week, a growing field of consumer economics concerns itself with the marketing of pure cachet to consumers who don't have the spare time to consume anything more, and seek instead to attach knobs to the things they consume already. The poor, meanwhile, have all the time in the world.
It's the same the whole world over, It's the rich what takes the strain, It's the poor what gets the leisure, Ain't it all a bleedin' shame?
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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