Truss’ Attitude to Workers is a Medieval Mindset With a Modern Day Makeover

Truss’ Attitude to Workers is a Medieval Mindset With a Modern Day Makeover

AV Deggar argues that the Conservative Party’s beliefs about a work-shy population echo a bygone age

“There’s a fundamental issue of working culture,” said the UK’s future Prime Minister, Liz Truss, some time between 2017 and 2019. “Essentially, if we are going to be a richer country and a more prosperous country, that needs to change. But I don’t think people are keen to change that.”

In the same exchange, when serving as chief secretary to the Treasury, she said: “I once wrote a book about this which got mischaracterised.” That book is ‘Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity’, which Truss co-authored in 2012 with fellow MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore.

She would disavow this manifesto a decade later, when journalists remembered that a whole book’s worth of inflammatory citations existed outside of its most famous quote: “the British are among the worst idlers in the world”.

Add to this marquee statement that Britons “prefer a lie-in to hard work” and that “celebrity culture, reality TV, and binge drinking” were contributory factors to a “diminished work ethic and a culture of excuses”, and you understand the general thrust of Britannia Unchained’s view of British society.

Beneath all of its sociological misanalysis lies a fundamental Thatcherite incantation, articulated by Truss and her allies in a single sentence: “The state has made Britons idle”.

Underpinning that simple assertion, much of the narrative of Britannia Unchained, and the wider ethos of the contemporary Conservative Party itself, is an attitude as old as Bronze Age oligarchs condescending to the ochlos; patricians versus plebians; tenants lording over villeins.

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Shirkers, Not Workers

There have been a number of recent high-profile examples of Conservative politicians in the current administration, who have pointed – obliquely and overtly – to the British people’s lack of will and determination when it comes to work.

In May 2022, safeguarding minister, Rachel MacLean, said that those in financial hardship should fend off the highest inflation rate in four decades, the highest tax burden in seven decades, and the highest rise in energy prices ever, “by taking on more hours or moving to a better-paid job.”

The current Attorney General and bookies’ favourite to become the next Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, recently stated that there were “too many people in this country… who are of working age, of good health and who are choosing not to work full time and they are taking benefits.”

On the Tory leadership hustings roadshow, both of the final contenders have pointed to the British preferring an easy ride to hard graft, Sunak affirming that he would be “much tougher on our welfare system to get people off benefits and into work” and Truss pointing out that there were “a large number of people now across the United Kingdom who are economically inactive.”

In the real world, the UK’s poverty rate among working households hit a record high last year of 17.4%, with 42% of families with three or more children living in economic privation.

More than two million people – 40% of all Universal Credit claimants in the UK – are currently in work.

The Conservative invective around the British work ethic extends further than the dole queue, with senior voices from the Johnson regime taking exception to the work-from-home culture that emerged in the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the designated minister for ‘government efficiency’, who has so far failed to rein in his own serially AWOL prime minister, has called home working a “rotten culture”, famously leaving passive-aggressive missives on civil servants’ desks stating: “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”

Former Culture Secretary and Conservative Party chairman, Oliver Dowden, performing a Norman Tebbit routine for the Netflix age, exhorted civil servants to “get off their Pelotons and back to their desks.”

Chair of the Northern Research Group, and MP for Rossendale and Darwen, Jake Berry, urged the end of “the civil service ‘woke-ing’ from home”, in a bid to fully weaponise hybrid working as a new wedge issue in the culture war.

A decade earlier, in 2012, it was Boris Johnson who branded working from home “an excuse for general malingering”. Johnson said that working from home basically involved “wondering whether to go down to the fridge to hack off that bit of cheese before checking your emails again.” Perhaps he was speaking from personal experience.

Some have pointed to pressure from donors as the impetus for the Conservative Party’s war on teleworking. While it is true that one-quarter of the party’s funding has come from property tycoons since 2019, whose commercial portfolios would have suffered due to COVID-19, this is part of, not the definitive reason for, the dogma.

Presenteeism, where physical presence is equated with diligence, and absence with indolence, is feudally anchored. The serf is only valuable in the field, and his fecklessness can primarily be expunged by the landowner’s guidance and invigilation, which is both a duty and a right.

The contemporary lord of the manor attitude of the Conservative Party is a fundamentally medieval mindset with a modern-day makeover.

Truss’s comments on graft, and Britannia Unchained as a whole, represent expressions of an older – merged with a colder – view of people and society.

A citizen’s worth is what he gives to the market. The state only exists to make the economy function. Within that construct, there is no space for the common welfare, no forbearance, no compassion, no structures for aid or self-development. There is only a dark mythology about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and the triumph of the wilfully sovereign individual.

In Truss’s unchained Britannia, a happy few will always be destined for rule, safe in the knowledge the system is engineered to produce those fated to serve.