The Underclass: A quiet uprising: An Existentialist Memoir (about a life in 1980s Britain, capitalism, Nietzche, Ãœbermensch, Mohr, Byrne, working class, sub culture, Scottish, Glasgow)

Lately, we’ve had MPs coming away with how they could easily live on £12.80 a week for their food shopping. That’s true. You could. But would you want to, day in, day out, year after year, with just the basics to eat? Even that would be doable, especially if you lived in a really poor country where everyone else was scraping by on the same amount, but imagine you lived in a rich country, where you were bombarded constantly with images of things you don’t have. Then it’s two years down the line and you still have no job; you badly need a haircut; your children need shoes; Christmas is coming up; they need new coats; your washing machine has broken down and one of your kids has been invited to a friend’s birthday party…the list goes on and on. Those MPs and the other opinionated inhumanitarians like Dalrymple don’t know what it’s like to have been born into a deprived town, where generation after generation of your friends and relatives have nothing, even though they work out in all weathers on freezing concrete under cars, in fish factories, or cleaning out toilets (if they are the lucky ones with jobs). They don’t know what it’s like to stand in a queue in the corner shop, where everyone in front of them is buying fags and bottles of tonic wine or vodka because they’ve bought into the myth that this is the only way to make life more bearable – a way that they are blamed for and which will ultimately cost them their lives. Or to live in a street controlled by a CCTV camera that never seems to capture the fights, or the stones being thrown at your windows, or the teenagers stealing plastic wheelie bins, or those kids setting the bins on fire to inhale the toxic fumes because they’ve been told it gets you high. All of a sudden, the English middle classes aren’t so smug because their inheritance is also being taken away – on nursing fees for their elderly parents, and more recently, because of the fact that they now can’t afford to finance their children through university. But what can we actually do about it? Nothing. When you realise that, you're f***ed.