When credit cards went boom, consumer identity turned xenaphobic:
New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown adopted the neoliberal vision of social reality by tweaking Thatcher’s brand of game theory to include the possibility that social inequalities might just be mere products of a socio economic vacuum. There third way policies of public private partnerships pushed the debt of infrastructure projects such as hospitals into a people of the future problem. Eager to fulfil the ever emergent horizon of individual freedom and move forward beyond a collective vision of societal emancipation, the financial system was further deregulated so that new money could be created in debt to the now. The illusion wealth created by neoliberal new Labour enabled several years of economic boom whereby people no longer needed to worry if there work didn’t pay them too much as they could live as credit card tart, the term used to describe people who flipped cheap credit from one credit card to another, many, many times. New laptop, new camera new credit card, new car, new kitchen, new credit card, no worries about tomorrow, it was a shared illusion.
Debt is the source of contemporary currency, and the key to being wealthy is being on the team that passes these debts on before systemic collapse. During these years that most damage was done to possibly of a greater social solidarity was lost to the material world of stuff and materialist illusions
Through the 2000s personal loans were flogged daily on TV. The then market leading consolidation loan provider Firstplus, employed the face, brains and body of Carol Vordeman to seduce new customers and get into debt with them. Famous for her materially economic, curve hugging dresses, mathematical genius and saucy tea time banter with Channel 4 teatime quiz, Countdown host Richard Whitely. Every weekday this popular game show entertained the great British public with word skills, maths and double entendre. Her tea time celebrity status endorsement of First Plus loans, encouraged the public to lump together all their credit card debts into one handy £50,000 loan secured by their home ownership.
During day time and prime time commercial television viewing Vordeman calmly endorsed the everyday normality of debt for a decade, up until the stock market crash of 2008, when easy going debt came crashing down like house prices. During these days there was a sense that there was only today and tomorrow was a long way off in a future that was blinded from the many by the shiny new things personal finance had allowed them to do. Anyway, you could trust Carol, because she was good at maths and consumer identity was the big societal delusion well before Brexit was a concept on the lexicon of a Countdown word score.
These were the days when class based identity was seduced by individualised consumer branding, that is before it was punched out by the killer blow of austerity blamed for the loss of purchasing power on the “foreigners” who had come here to work for real money, whist everybody else had been bamboozled by no-sweat credit card debt.
The violence of personal debt might not be that obvious to note at first, except for the silent anxiety of its victims, forced into the servitude of debt, modern day slavery dressed up as new car takes away some of the pain. Of course this moment in time when the reality of money was a credit card statement crunched up and thrown in the sock draw was soon to be awoken by the global financial crash when bankers had run out of ways of magicking up new money with debt.
The following assault of austerity metered out by the next so-called coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, was a new form of economic viol metered out by neoliberalism whose advovateds promoted the perception that the apparent willingness of the masses to buy things on the never never of cheap credit we’re at fault, like the smoker who buys cheap cigarettes. bubbles of financially engineered cheap credit was withdrawn from “the masses” as an act of further social engineering, where ways of life were brought back into line with the true reality of a country where we don’t really make anything. This brutal attack on millions of the poorest members of the population who had propped up the economy with their kitchen extensions, new car and personal debts to buy the latest, now outdated, TV.
Neoliberalism’s never-ever- land logic of credit card living excommunicated community spirit, banishing it with the globalisation of production and the out of town relocation of retail parks. , was replaced with the cult of consumerism. Then Brexit and Boris Johnson the end-times result of mindless free market capitulation, devoid of any solution to systemic crisis, loss of community and its replacement, purchasing power. Blaming the European Union for Anglo American economic policy and the lies of a elitist narcissist, conning the poor to think that their true identity could be magically rescued from episodes of Dad’s Army and the pornography of an sexed up view of British history with the scenes of slave trading and drug pushing deleted.
This mutation of British exceptionalism that had thus far been kept under wraps by political correctness and the wishful thinking of the ruling class. Now given the light of day these anti-European ideas grew exponentially infecting the most economically deprived en masse. Where once the poor and disaffected had been left hungry and voiceless by the press, they now felt emboldened to express themselves with a deliberately misdirected hate.
Meanwhile financial institution quantitatively eased hope away, by syphoning off free government money given to save the economic system from collapse, into offshore accounts and liquid lunches on tropical beaches. Brexit financiers stirred up xenophobic hatred of the foreign thief, steeling our way of life, speaking other languages, and working too hard. In this very real sense, the poor became co-creators of a post EU future, free of regulation, human rights deregulation, and the end of continent wide free movement. In this act of further decline the supernatural possession of a brutal past will sadly come to haunt those who wished for the exhumation of colonial Britain most.
Put simply, the breadcrumbs of the Brexit idea, led a tasty trail for isolated individuals to follow, away from their desolation. Up until this point, many of these people had been perceived by the lens of public opinion, as self-flagellating morons, whose individual choices had culminated in them joining the queue for titbits at the foodbank. This framing of the millions was orchestrated by poverty pornographers, who choreographed a seemingly united media narrative that patronised how the poor idiots live, knuckle dragging northerners swigging super strong larger on scummy northern streets. Tabloid journalists gagged for more, as they dined out on the misery of others and fornicated in their columns at the downfall of society and self-promoted the possibility of them getting into key government positions.
When Jeremy Corbyn rose up against all the odds to take a stand against this dire situation, all hell loose broke at the top. The ruling elite feared their privileged position from birth might be challenged by the meritocracy of hope.
Breadcrumb Brexit gave somebody else to blame for the hardship a pain and offered many of those who stood in solitary despair a future horizon a glimmer of hope. In place of own desperate situation their appeared on the mirage of a reimagined past, where the dream of a British Empire in renaissance the loss of consciousness from hopelessness. Meanwhile, out of sight of the northern centres of urban decay, millionaires got on their gin palaces and both literally and metaphorically sailed towards offshored money banks and tax breaks, far away from the fracturing civility of UK life and growing financial crisis and then covid-19 hit.