Why is anti-establishment sentiment thriving even after Brexit?

Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

There was quite a gloating article in the Guardian this week on Brexit and its consequences on the rest of Europe. In a nutshell, it said that Europe had been revolted by the self-harm the UK has inflicted on itself and the instability it has unleashed on the British economy, its politics and society in general. Despite its "I told you so" theme, it is not wrong. But the battle for the soul of Britain has been hijacked by two opposing factions: the rich on one side and the poor on the other, with paradoxically the poor unwittingly doing the bidding of those who would like to subjugate them. Anti-establishment fever tilted the vote towards Brexit, not a genuine desire to leave the EU.

Oh David Cameron, what have you unleashed? In fact, I could replace the former Prime Minister in that sentence with a number of people, like the present incumbent (whoever that is at the time you read this), or maybe a few media moguls. But this all goes back decades. It is a seething collection of pustules that has been awaiting its time to spew its fetid contents all over the skin of public life and drag the victim into a chronic downward spiral of health and well-being.

There is a correlation between the Brexit vote and the current malaise in society - let me explain...

Successive governments have run public services into the ground through cutting costs, economy drives and selling off tenders to the private sector. None of this needed to happen if it were not for ideology-driven politicians whether in national government or local councils, and their chums in the private sector from lobbyists to energy conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies to building contractors. Every one of them is partly to blame for the current situation. The situation is clear: for the last 40 years, cheap is best, and to hell with the consequences. Hospitals and health workers, infrastructure building, public hygiene, education facilities and staff, police, firefighters, the military, even libraries, have been affected by the scything down of their expenses all so that governments, councils and their contractors can say to their clients (that's you), that they have been saving money in your name.

Well I don't know about you, but as far as I am aware, it's the exact opposite of that method that leads to good running of public services. Money needs to be put into their systems, not removed. That means that instead of reducing our income tax bills, VAT payments and council charges, the powers that be should be raising them, or at least looking for ways to maximise returns. When some suited chinless wonder from the richer side of public life comes on TV and warns against voting for various politicians because "your bills will go up", people need to remember that this bozo from the landed gentry is actually worried about his own costs going up. He will be the first to see a reduction in his own income because he is earning more per year than most earn in ten or twenty years. Why is Jeremy Corbyn being picked out for special treatment? Precisely because of that. He wants public services to run properly and rich dudes fear that if they do, not only will they lose money, they'll lose the opportunity to buy into them when lobbyists have finished convincing politicians to sell.

Back in the 1980s, public services were run into the ground until the public clamour to sell those services off was so loud, that this was the most logical step. It was a tactic used time and again by the then government to make the case for its sale. This was true for water, energy, gas, telephony, public transport, even security services. What we saw, though, was a change in the accountability and rights of those public services, now they were private. Trains that were before late or didn't show up at all were blamed on strikes and militant worker-related action, whereas now the services are not much better and in some cases worse, despite being sold off. Outsourcing and selling off public services has led us nowhere, except that now those services need no longer be directly accountable to the government, and ultimately, the public. It also gives carte blanche to those companies to limit pay, reduce workers' rights and entitlements, all in the name of saving money. They have effectively written themselves out of any social responsibility.

It is this selfish ideology that has led to this moment in history (and yes, this is history - PhD theses will be written about this period in the not-too-distant future) where the gap between rich and poor has finally become too wide, and where injustice in society has become plain for all to see where once it was easier to sweep it aside with gimmicks and distractions, fobbing people off with standard soundbites and impersonal press releases.

And things are a lot more complicated than on the face of it. Far from being a country that's full to bursting, as landowners, right-wing politicians and lobbyists will tell you, there is plenty of room. Indeed, only a very small percentage of the land has been built on. The real issue is that it is a country whose infrastructure has not been invested in for a very long time, and citizens' roles in society are becoming less and less welcome, and it shows:

• the hospitals are maybe fully equipped, but many times there are staff shortages or there are not enough beds for patients, leading to dangerously long waiting times. If real investment were made to ensure there were enough fully-staffed hospitals for everyone, we would need to delve deep into our pockets 
• you should send your child to a local school no matter its ranking, meaning that pupils are liable to be turned down if their parents try to apply for a place in what might be a more suitable school outside their catchment area, even if it is just over a designated line. This means house prices in certain areas rise, and the rules prevent any logic from being used. The fallout from this is that people are being forced to do irrational things to get their children into the school of their choice
• the Royal Navy, once the envy of the world, is now a shadow of itself, as is the British Army and the Royal Air Force, all so the defence budget can be spent on a nuclear arsenal that nobody dare use
• there is a huge swathe of building land that is lying unused and empty because building companies refuse to build on it, meaning prices of houses go spiralling up, but more shockingly, their untouched land turns them a huge profit

There are many more examples of this, and people have become sick and tired of being treated like commodities. They know that successive governments have cut everything to the bone, they know the country is dangerously paired back to the very limits of manageability, they just haven't joined all the dots yet, but they are slowly becoming aware of it. 

Having an ideology of saving money for the sake of it has proven recently to be a myth that has badly exposed the long-term dangers of such recklessness in playing with people's dignity and respect, and nowhere has that been more evident than in the case of Grenfell Tower in West London. What has struck me is how someone came up with the idea of saving a few thousand measly pounds by choosing an inferior cladding material in a refurbishment project to make the outside of a tower block more aesthetically pleasing while neglecting the inside, where residents - who are human beings, by the way - live.

The sentiment of grief turned to anger very quickly, leading to a general feeling of ill-will towards the Prime Minister, the government, Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, and various contracting firms. This is not surprising, but it is a microcosm of UK life in general. The protests we saw in Whitehall and at Kensington Town Hall are just a spit in the ocean of general British dissatisfaction with the way life is going at the moment, and this is manifesting itself in so many ways.

The Brexit referendum last year, in my opinion, was won by a three-way split between different sections of the public: 

• easily-led individuals who believe everything that the right-wing press tells them, as well as unadventurous, stay-at-home monolinguals who know nothing about the wider world except the two-week drunken jaunt they undertake every summer to some touristic Mediterranean concrete jungle
• people with vested interests in pulling out of the EU, such as some unscrupulous employers, financial investors and politicians, who have been heavily sponsored to say negative things about the EU, and finally
• genuinely disaffected, forgotten and ignored people all around the country who wanted to vote for a change and saw it as their way to stage a protest; effectively kicking the government where it hurts for their constant overlooking of their issues (it is these people I can forgive for voting the way they did - so would I, probably)

What the last group fails to realise, is that by voting the way they did, they have done exactly what the people who are profiting from making their lives a misery wanted them to do; that is to say, they are turkeys voting for Christmas, which makes this such a national tragedy. There is also a gap between the educated and the under-educated, leading to a startling decline in trust in true facts and expert opinions, and a worrying rise in people's willingness to tie their misery to any popular movement that will get them out of the terrible hole they are in, whether that be extremist religion, militant political organisations, support groups, pressure groups or general grumbling to mates at the pub. Brexit had very little to do with many people's actual wishes and more to do with a genuine national mood of dissatisfaction with their circumstances.

What the UK needs right now is a long healing process and a coming to terms with the fact that the people have been lied to for many years for profit and nothing more. The recent election on 9th June reflected people's mistrust of the current incumbents and their handling of social matters as well as Brexit negotiations, where even the Daily Mail has revealed that 69% of people favour a softer departure from the EU. People need to regain a modicum of trust in their politicians and their public services.

Anti-establishment sentiment is thriving in lots of little pockets like local issues, or even as a cause of adverse personal experiences with authority, but when the dots get joined up and everyone realises that it is a national issue, there will be a mass protest at the gates of the high and mighty. People just don't realise yet who is to blame, but this is slowly revealing itself now that people see that cuts in services and selling out to corporate greed have led to the situation we find ourselves in the early summer of 2017.

If you want nice roses, you do not cut at the bottom.

The hazards and misfortunes of being a language trainer

There are few things I find more frustrating, upsetting, enervating and infuriating than the English language training sector and the people involved. I shall elaborate, but this is really just a small part of the overall picture:

There is an awful paradox at the heart of it all that needs somehow to be killed off. If you look at people of other professions coming into contact with large groups of customers on a daily basis, like accountants, doctors, lawyers and the like, they keep themselves to themselves and don't reveal their secrets to the world so readily. They also provide a "need-to-have" service, rather than a  "nice-to-have" service, such as artists, restaurateurs and gardeners. For that reason they can charge a lot of money for their services. Artists, restaurateurs and gardeners too, but there are very few of the latter who actually can afford the kind of gated properties of the former. In fact, they are liable to be the clients of the latter. And far fewer in number, which is why most artists don't make a huge amount of sales.

Language training falls in a middle category. For some it is a "nice-to-have", for others a "need-to-have", where half are learning languages to better carry out their job, and the other half so they can hold conversations with strangers on hotel terraces; and herein lies the problem. The managers and owners of language schools are able to get the best of both worlds by charging clients in the "need-to-have" category a lot of money for the services of their trainers/teachers, yet pay their personnel the same kind of fees from the "nice-to-have" category. It is a trick of the trade, and a very prevalent one. Furthermore, a sizeable minority of the teachers are gap-year students, or freshly diploma'd twenty-somethings who can barely recognise the difference between a preposition and their elbow. The rest, who are trying to make a career out of it are terrorised by their employer by making competitors out of your colleagues (ever wondered why many are reluctant to share?) and making every day in the school seem like it's your last one. But the most despicable part of their little ruse is how many hoops they make you jump through for such a paltry salary. Take a look at some of the jobs on offer on the TEFL websites. Here's one I found today:

[Name removed] is a leader in the provision of educational travel programmes. Accredited by the British Council, we've been teaching English to international students for 20 years. Our aim is to provide students with a fun, friendly and safe environment in which to develop their communication skills in English.

We are looking for talented and committed EFL teachers to work on a non-residential basis at our centre based at [name removed].

This is a 1 week post, teaching up to 20 hours.


So far, so good.

Then:

Essential:
- CELTA, Trinity TESOL, PGCE in English or an MFL, or equivalent
-Bachelor Degree

Desirable:
- Experience of teaching students of university age
-An undergraduate degree

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A NON RESIDENTIAL POSITION AND WE ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE ACCOMMODATION.

So, you're thinking it's going to reward you for the fact you have a degree and you need to pay for your own accommodation? Wait for it...

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I say, what?

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I did read that right?

Yep, you definitely did.

That's virtually nothing. I got more per hour for mowing lawns, and that was back in the mid-nineties.

So, let's say you're doing the maximum 20 hours for the week. That works out at £250 for the week. Then let's add in your accommodation. You're in a well-to-do provincial city in the late summer. Kids are back at school but it's still warm. You're looking at £25-£40 per night, for a youth hostel or a cheap hotel. So that's between £170 and £280 for the week. In the youth hostel category, you come out with £80 profit, leaving you with just over £10 per day for food. In the cheap hotel category, you're £30 out of pocket even before you've bought a muesli bar for your evening meal. And you still have to factor in that you need to travel there. Oh yes, and UK tax. And that's not for preparing lessons, correcting and marking work and doing the admin. It says "From £12.50 per teaching hour".

This repeats itself over and over again in varying forms of ruthless cheapskatery and devious mind-trickery as to leave most people with the idea that you should be grateful for actually having something to bloody well do, and you're actually such an ungrateful little weasel for demanding a higher salary. You are supposed to understand that you are doing a humanitarian act, and asking for more money will lead to demands from the others, which in the end if all the teachers did it would lead the school to bankruptcy.

Utter rubbish.

Imagine you've got a class of 8 students. Their parents have paid a package of £500 to £900 for the week, including all meals and basic accommodation in the residence halls of the campus. That's about £4000 to £7200 per class. That means the people on the course are from families that are not poor. Indeed, they're likely to be the lawyers and doctors of the future. The school has overheads, so let's take away 60%. That still leaves £1600 to £2880 per group. And they can't pay proper salaries to their teachers?

There are many standard replies to that question, including the old cliché about profit margins and the like. But what I find most baffling is that these schools really do find the personnel for their courses. There really are people who wish to fill the gaps. And these are the pedagogical versions of interns, that new breed of modern crypto-slave that will do anything for the promise of a job in the future. Except in this business, there is no guarantee of success or riches beyond the current hourly rate afforded by language schools across the world.

I think it is really high time serious language trainers got together and separated themselves from the amateurish schools willing to employ bookish recent graduates looking for a jobby (job + hobby) from the more serious ones who look after their staff and treat them more like the career-minded human beings they are trying to become.

Career-wise, I live in a bubble of contentedness, and I am thankfully not in this predicament that the vast majority of my fellow language trainers find themselves in. But when I look through the job ads just to see what else I could be doing, I despair for the predicament of those wanting to join me in this noble yet poorly-rewarded of professions. It is a very well-oiled ladder, and that's how the schools like it.

Finally, a short note about the people who do my job. They are extraordinarily proud people, preferring to let someone else organise the lessons, set up the course locations, find the clients, level-test them, propose times and hours for their course, and ask them for post-course feedback. The teacher is only willing to involve him/herself in the bare minimum of extra activity, and you have to ask why. That is because it is not their job. They are paid to teach and give advice, mark work and guide students to their target. Correcting tests, preparing lessons and writing course records go largely unpaid. Many would say that out of every hour spent in the classroom, about 25 to 40 minutes is spent doing the accompanying admin. And in the class, the energy spent giving the lesson in comparison to the monetary rewards has a real effect on morale, psyche and sense of self-worth.

So next time you question the commitment and satisfaction of language teachers, remember there may be a hundred reasons behind it. Either the language schools need to stop their ludicrous race to the bottom with their course fees (a recent article in Swedish on public procurement of language services, this time translation and interpretation, found that low pricing had an adverse effect on overall quality and client satisfaction) or trainers need to refuse jobs that don't properly reward them for their efforts. I know already what is going to happen: all the time there are people willing to work simply for the work experience, who were legally minors less than 5 years before they do their dodgy TEFL qualifications, the rest will be exploited. And this particular formula is repeating itself in many other professional sectors.

Do they think I'm rich?

This last quarter, I have been inundated with bills. Not any old bills for gas, electricity and the like - I can manage them. But bills whose legitimacy I wonder about. One is called a "schuldzaldoverzekering". Yes, blind me with science if you want, but what in the name of Wolfowitz is that? Apparently, I have to pay it to the bank as an insurance against the house I sold in December. It amounts to about 500 euro.

Along with that, I have been sent a bill to insure my house against fire and another against robbery. OK, I'll pay them even though I don't own the house where I live. I decided to sell and rent for a while until the right house came along, because the last one definitely wasn't. I had so many costs, mainly for renovation, that along with the bills it just got out of hand.

On top of those, which amount to about 170 euro, there is the social security, which I need to pay myself as a freelancer. This comes to approximately 600 euro, payable every quarter. So let's say 200 a month. However, as a freelancer, it means I can't claim unemployment benefit and my state pension is lower than others because according to the government I'm stinking rich and able to afford it.

Like my plumber. I had a blocked kitchen sink and after pouring every conceivable liquid into it, putting balls on string in there until there was a noise, all types of efforts, nothing surfaced, only the dirty water, which drained away almost glacially down the hole. He came, poured some of his own product (imported from Italy, priceless stuff apparently) into the pipe and sent me his bill of 145 euro for 15 minutes' chat and 3 minutes' work. Yes, this type of pricing is surely why the government thinks I can afford to contribute so heavily to the economy as well as sacrifice my pension to fill a hole in society so some workshy couch potato can put an extra bet on the horses and buy bottled Stella instead of canned.

So far, the amount has reached 1270 euro. Now we turn to the little matter of the insurance claim by the bus company, who thinks I owe them 245 euro worth of paint for an accident where a stick of about 50cm long and made of MDF was catapulted out of the container I was throwing stuff onto, hitting the... wait for it... WINDOW of the bus. If they had sent me a bill for broken glass, I would have paid immediately, but as it was for paint I've replied rather unrepentantly on a few occasions to their threatening literature. In a few days' time, apparently, I'm going to receive a court summons.

My household bills add up to about 1300 euro (rent, cable TV, Visa, energy), so that brings the total up to 2815 euro. And I'm supposed to pay to travel to work each day, buy lunch there, invest in clothes; oh yes, and buy food for the rest of the daily meals. So we're looking at a further 330 euro approximately. We've hit the three-thousand mark and gone above it and landed at 3145 euro.

Fortunately, I'm not tempted by the consumer ads which try to persuade me to buy any number of things which I might need one day, like electric blankets, garden gnomes, clocks which tell you the date, temperature and current weather conditions (look outside your window, stoopid!), Xboxes, MP3 players (burn them!) and sunglasses whose shades automatically darken when you turn into the sun. Because if I were, I'd be making plans to auction off this computer to subsidise my retail obsession.

By the way, I received a tax bill of 5300 euro, because apparently I can afford it. So if any of you reading this who know me wonder why I haven't seen you for a while, it's because it's expensive when you're presumed to be rich...