Pete Sinclair
Who ate all the Nuts?
By Pete Sinclair
Of all the ridiculous sayings that are out there (“Least said, soonest mended”; “Children should be seen and not heard”; “The referee's waiting for a VAR check”) the one that annoys me most is “Society doesn't owe you a living”. Because the fact is, with the way the world is currently organised, society absolutely does owe you a living.
Think about it. Squirrels wake up in the morning, find some nuts, eat them and get on with their lives. Yet somehow, for all our supposedly superior intelligence, we've ended up in a situation where humans are unable to do the same. Society has taken the nuts and given them to a few select people, meaning the rest of us have to work our fingers to the bone, begging, stealing and borrowing in order to be allowed to buy back some of the nuts!
Of course, it wasn't always this way. Back in the days before common land was 'appropriated' (a posh word for stolen) people had the right to graze their livestock on it and cultivate it for crops. It was perfectly possible to live off the land. But the enclosures changed all that. Traditional rights were eroded over the centuries, culminating in the Enclosure Acts that were passed in the 1700s and 1800s. Land ceased to be for the use of commoners, and its ownership was placed firmly in the hands of the privileged few. As a popular poem of the time put it:
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
It's indisputable. Society has robbed us of our ability to feed and look after ourselves – so it bloody well owes us something in return. That's why there's such a strong moral argument for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income, not to mention all the practical arguments such as cutting the costs of bureaucracy and the savings that would be made on healthcare thanks to the reduction in people's stress and their increased well-being.
Some people object to the idea of a Universal Basic Income for the same reason that they object to the existence of welfare benefits. They see it as a handout. But strangely, these people are often the same people who are most in favour of the handouts that we give to the Royal Family – and most opposed to the idea of inheritance tax.
If you think that a free handout encourages you to do nothing, then surely you should support a 100% inheritance tax. Why should the children of the rich be entitled to all that wealth without lifting a finger? What sort of incentive is that to go out and do a hard day's work? In fact, why should anyone's life circumstances be down to the lottery of birth?
Of course the biggest example of this is the Royal Family. Being royal has nothing to do with talent or merit. A mere accident of birth entitles you to a lifetime of privilege and luxury, whether you're a hardworking ship-launcher and ribbon-cutter, or the freeloading friend of a paedophile. For example.
Yet somehow, the people who have stolen all the nuts continue to get away with it. When the Levellers first demanded universal suffrage (although of course even they didn't think that women should be allowed to vote) their enemies scoffed. “You can't possibly have one man one vote. If you did that, it's obvious what would happen – all the poor people would immediately vote to take away the rich man's castle and give it to themselves.”
The genius of our society, from the point of view of the rich, is that we do now have one man (and one woman) one vote – and yet somehow the rich have still held on to their castles. Time and time again, the less well-off are successfully persuaded that voting to give themselves a share of the rich man's castle would be against their interests. I'd love to know what the thought process is. “Well, if we let him keep his castle, then eventually, thanks to the trickle-down effect, we might end up with a drawbridge and a falcon.”
It's the same old story. The rich persuade the poor to blame the even poorer for their poverty. And the current scapegoats are of course immigrants. It's not the super rich who are taking your money; it's not the Amazons and the Googles paying 37p tax on their £5billion profits; oh no – it's those Latvian fruit pickers on two quid an hour; those Filipino cleaners who mop up our pure British blood from hospital floors for a pittance. They're the ones to blame.
The most tragic aspect of all this is that blaming immigrants for causing poverty stops people from seeing that those who are really to blame for their problems are the people with power and money. It lets the rich off the hook. So the irony is, that quite apart from anything else, the likes of Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson are (to put it in their own terms) traitors to the white working class.
The situation will only change when people at the bottom of the heap finally wake up to the fact that their enemy is not the immigrant on poverty wages, but the people who are paying them those wages and helping themselves to ever more obscene profits as a result.
The simple truth is that most people's interests are not the same as the people who own the nuts. So next time you're hungry and don't have enough money to buy food, just go into Tesco, help yourself to a bag of walnuts and if anyone challenges you, tell them: “In a decent society, I should be allowed to forage these...” *
(*Disclaimer: If you did that, you'd probably get arrested, so maybe train a squirrel to go in and do it instead.)
