How to be poor

will. All the ills of history are
always blamed on poor old God, who is unable to defend himself.
    Trade Unions, defending their power,
do not speak of God although they should. They perform a divine mission. If
people accept my thesis — and they seem to be doing so in increasing numbers — that
poverty is good and ennobling while riches are degrading, and bad for the soul,
then we should support Trade Unions through thick and thin. No single power
group does so much to make us poor and miserable as they do. Others try, of
course; but none of them can compete.
    Quite a few mistaken souls think that
Trade Unions have grown too big for their boots and should go the way kings,
the nobility, the church and the capitalists have gone. In other words, they
should survive but they should not be dominant in our lives. These people are
victims of a fallacy. Trade Unions fulfil a divine mission, in fact two divine
missions.
    1) They see to it that we, as a
nation, will become poor much more quickly than we could if we relied only on
the recession and bad government.
    2) They have also invented a much
more original idea: the exploitation of the rich by the poor.
    This is the first thesis of Mikesism.
The second is the abolition of class differences. This occurred, admittedly, to
my illustrious predecessor, Karl, too. But all his attempts have failed. In
capitalism class differences have survived; in communist societies they have
grown much wider. The only way to abolish class differences is for all of us to
become middle-class.
    We have heard a great deal about
“levelling up” and “levelling down”. The public school system is surely a
source of inequality. Our school system was bad and Shirley Williams made it
worse. Her theory, in essence, is that if everybody cannot be properly
educated, nobody should be. This is logical and perhaps even fair. This is the
way to equality. And it is also the way to ruin. If we follow it, soon we will
not have enough people who can handle our computers, run our electronic
industry, our courts and our government. We shall become a nation of Bums.
Equal Bums. We shall not be equal to other nations but equal among ourselves.
    This is surely the wrong road. The
road of Mikesism is different: it wishes to turn everybody middle-class. Mine
is the only movement to state this aim in so many words, although the truth is
that it is secretly shared by every other movement of our age. People want to
own their homes, drive their motor cars, use their own free time in their own
way.
    To make middle-class morality prevail
needs a certain amount of courage. You must be brave enough not to be uncouth among
the uncouth; you must be brave enough not to be proud of being uneducated; you
must be brave enough to wear decent and clean clothes, perhaps even — dare I
say it? — a tie; you must go so far as not to use foul language; you must be
brave enough to be courteous and you must face the derisive laughter of the
crowd, should you offer your seat in a bus to a crippled and blind lady of
ninety-two. You must be brave enough not to push, not to jump queues, not to
elbow people aside, not to smoke cannabis even if everybody around you does,
not to get drunk when all your friends do, not to admire drunken driving as an
act of heroism; you must be brave enough to pay your bills, to treat all people
— whether they are dukes or paupers — with courtesy and as your equals (never
mind their rank or your own) ; you must be brave enough — and this is the most
difficult of all — to face the howling hordes of your own people, whether they
call you a blackleg, a union-basher, a nigger-lover, a traitor to your class
(whichever class it may be), and follow the dictates of your own conscience.
The overwhelming majority of those seemingly indomitable people who march under
banners and shout slogans are pitiable cowards; the man who dares walk alone is
the brave man.
    By the time all this is achieved, we
shall have become middle-class. Then rush to open a bank account. One of the
great divides between classes is the bank account. The working class — perhaps
rightly — do not believe in banks, they do not write out cheques and do not accept
them. Those who aspire to a truly classless society must open bank accounts.
Those who do have bank accounts — i.e. the established middle classes —should
march proudly on. The future is not theirs but they will have their fair share
in it. They can serve as flag-bearers