Ian McMillan: Railing against the jam working people are in

Blackcurrant on your face: it’s not a good look, not a good look at all. 
All that might seem irrelevant and irreverent but I assure you it’s neither. The older I get and the more I write, 
the more I realise that nothing’s irrelevant, that everything is grist to 
the mill.

What I intended to write about this week was a couple I saw on the train the other day, rattling into Barnsley from Sheffield. They looked, in the soft light through the mucky carriage window, careworn. They’d been to Meadowhall and they were clutching bags from shops that sold bargain clothes and food that you’d hope would be wholesome and from a jolly and local butcher in a jolly and stripy apron, but of course you’d be wrong.

The couple were probably in their mid-thirties. They had a couple of kids with them, each clutching their own bags. One was falling asleep and kept doing that “I’m-not-asleep” shuffle that my dad used to do on the settee when his chin crashed downwards and his eyelids drooped, and the other child was clutching a soft toy, if clutching is a strong enough word for the grip she 
had on the helpless pony. Perhaps she didn’t want it to get stolen and put in a pasty.

The man was looking out of the window and he suddenly jabbed his wife in the ribs and pointed to a field. “That’s wheer that theer high speed train’s going,” he said. She couldn’t have been less impressed. “Don’t talk to me about the high-speed train,” she said, sounding like a character from an Alan Bennett play. “I’ve enough on with horsemeat and the price of stuff.”

Those two people were, if they only knew it, The Squeezed Middle, the Strivers that politicians are so in love with. I knew they were Strivers and not Shirkers because the man had said earlier that he was glad the train was 
on time because he’d have time for a cuppa before he had to go to work.

They looked buffeted, and why shouldn’t they? Things are very bad for Mr and Mrs Squeezed Middle right now. They thought they were doing their best for their family but it turns out they’ve been feeding them horsemeat swept up from a yard at the far edge of Europe.

They never thought they’d end up queuing up at a food bank, either. They thought they could manage on a wage that, although it wasn’t called a living wage, was called, in that awful reductive phrase, a Minimum Wage.

They queue up at the foodbank with other Squeezed Minimum Wage Strivers and they wonder how it ever came to this. They are from that huge group of people called The Working Poor and, because of the way a lot of the media portray them, they think that The Idle Poor are stealing from them. They’ve been told that they’re the lucky ones and that, if the Idle Poor would just get out of bed and down to the Jobcentre they’d get a job that would make a Shirker into an instant Striver and it wouldn’t mean that the Striver’s job would be less secure, because there are plenty of jobs to go round if only people would go and look for them. And if only people were prepared to accept low wages. And if only people were prepared to define themselves as self-employed. And if only people were prepared to work part-time when they wanted full-time. At least, following the recent ruling, they won’t be asked to work for nothing because it would “prepare them for the world of work”. At least that won’t happen again. Not for a while, anyway.

I keep thinking about this blackcurrant on my face. It makes me look daft. Daft and angry, which is what I suppose I am. Angry at the way things are and daft for thinking that anger alone will solve anything.

So I don’t blame the woman for being underwhelmed by the not-so-imminent arrival of the high-speed train. Maybe her kids will be able to zoom to Minimum Wage jobs in London in less than an hour. Sorry, that’s just the blackcurrant jam on my face making me daft and angry. I’ll go and wipe it off.