This is a story about intolerable pressure...

I have to start this piece with a lengthy preamble. To write about the difficulties faced by men in modern society could be misconstrued as sexist, chauvinistic, misogynistic and unsympathetic towards the suffering and struggles of women. To breathe a word about the struggles that men face, could be seen as a slap in the face to women who receive unequal pay, or suffer sexual discrimination, sexual harassment and far greater rates of rape, murder and assault perpetrated against them by men, than by women. In short: I am not writing in any way to perpetuate the inequality and suffering that women have to deal with every day. My piece is simply about the pressures that modern men are dealing with.

Further to my list of caveats, I write from the point of view of the experiences and knowledge I've been able to gather up to this point in my life. I accept that I will never know the agony of childbirth. I'll never know what it's like to be pregnant. I'll never know what it's like to be a woman. This isn't a piece about women. I'm not seeking to address ANY of the difficulties faced by women. I know nothing about being a woman, and I'm not going to write about it. I'm not depriving anybody - man or woman - of their opportunity to share THEIR story and have equal airtime and consideration. I'm not shouting anybody down. I'm not shutting anybody up. I'm not offering a viewpoint that says that what I think is more valid than what anybody else thinks. These are my thoughts and my thoughts alone, shaped by my experiences as a white, middle-class, hetero man, in no way intended to compete with the experiences of any non-white, poor, LGBTQ+ women, who are obviously going to have a remarkably different set of views from me.

I am sympathetic to the plight of women. I'm unlikely to be equally sympathetic, because I have an inbuilt bias towards being able to empathise with those who've had broadly similar experiences to me, because they're also white, middle-class hetero men. I don't choose to feel less gut-wrenching sympathy when I hear about - for example - unequal pay in the workplace... it's just not as emotive for me, because perhaps I haven't been affected by it. If I'm not part of the solution, I must be part of the problem, but my writing is not about how guilty I feel for the circumstances I was born into; my writing is about things I can directly relate to. I do not seek to discredit, devalue or otherwise detract from some very real issues faced by women. I mean only to comment in an area in which I feel qualified to do so.

So, 500 words of preamble. Now I can write with a little more precision on the topic that concerns me.

I decided that I wanted to write a bullet-pointed list of all the things that a guy - someone like me - faces during their life, presenting significant problems. I'm trying to add up all the little things that whirr away in a man's psyche, driving his behaviour and causing him distress. I'm just going to write these things down in the most succinct way, because I want to explore everything I can possibly think of.

Here we go:

• "Boys don't cry" / "man up"
• Inheriting the family name. Following in your father's footsteps
• Mummy's boy / suffocating
• "You're the man of the house" - expectation of maturity
• Boys develop more slowly than girls, both physically and academically
• Oldest & biggest boys in school year bully and physically dominate
• Societal obsession with sports and sporting achievement
• "Get married and start a family" is not a career choice
• Breadwinner
• Provide for the family
• Protector
• Boys can't hit girls, even in self defence / retaliation
• Encouragement of violence - bullying, boxing, fighting, sport
• Discouragement of sensitivity - "soft", "wimpy", "homosexual", "effeminate"
• Hypocrisy and contradiction - violence is both heroic (e.g. war) and vilified
• Hooligans / vandals / gangs - provide fraternity, but demonised
• Lack of sporting ability = social exclusion
• Interest in sport a necessity for social bonding
• "Make the first move" - guys do the chasing - "ask her out"
• Knock-backs / rejection / misread signals
• Assertiveness, persistence - important to "pull" a girl
• Sexual conquest is seen as adversarial - a game
• Impotence concerns - "can I get hard?" / "will I stay hard?"
• Premature ejaculation concerns - "can I last long enough?"
• Bedroom performance concerns - "can I make her cum?"
• "Treat 'em mean" - appearing aloof and unattainable
• Neediness and vulnerability - insecurity and need for security
• Peer approval - bragging and bravado
• Status symbols - the car, the house, the job
• Professional identity - coveted job titles, doctor/lawyer etc.
• Fear of failure - bankruptcy, homelessness, joblessness, redundancy
• Fear of rejection - loneliness
• Doing stupid things to show off / impressing others
• "All men are rapists"
• Suspicion / trial by media / allegations
• "Men are violent"
• "Men are dangerous"
• "Men are paedophiles"
• Get rich, or die trying
• Risk of homelessness
• Low-priority for help - considered not vulnerable
• Identity issues; body dysmorphia - use of steroids, huge muscles
• Need to look masculine, avoid gender ambiguity
• Weight of expectation. Assumption that advantages will lead to great success
• "It's a long way down" - falling from grace; loss of status
• Hide pain. Don't talk about problems
• Self reliance
• Isolation - man is an island
• Most idolised and revered men are athletes - worship of physique
• "Loser" - no job, no money, no career, no skills
• Thief / junkie / criminal / bankrupt / dosser / tramp - always a man
• "It's all your own fault" / personal responsibility; accountability
• Passivity = homosexuality
• House-husband = not an option
• Succeed or kill yourself

That's all I can think of for now. The list is all over the place, but I wanted to cover as many different things as I could think of in a short space of time. To see it written down like that is somewhat alarming, because it doesn't seem to convey the struggle that I believe men face, and that causes so many men to end their own lives. It's strange that I can write a single word like "provider" and that succinctly sums up a whole heap of pressures and responsibilities that a man shoulders, but it's just one word.

So, I'm going to leave it there. Half words of caveat and half words that are powerfully charged for me, as a man. I leave it to you, dear reader, to expand each bullet point and decide whether it's all a lot of fuss about nothing. I had to write this today, because of an event today that I can't write about. It's complicated.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about being medicated...

It would substantially benefit my bank balance if I was to swallow substances that would remove my brain from my skull and place it into a jar - a chemical straightjacket. My doctors are falling over themselves to give me pills that will put me into a warped kind of reality - an altered state - where my perceptions are chemically changed.

If you put your hand in a fire and it's hurting because your hand is getting burnt, you have two choices. Firstly, you could remove your hand from the fire. Secondly, you could take a drug so that you don't feel the pain or care about your hand getting burnt.

I remain absolutely convinced that I'm in a state of depressive realism that's allowing me to perceive the madness of our late-capitalist society. I see suffering and injustice everywhere I look. I see the ridiculous situation where powerful incompetent men are paid millions of pounds, despite screwing everything up, while the people who do the most essential jobs in society are paid a pittance. The poor give every penny they earn back to the wealthy men for the privilege of being alive. It's a bitter pill to swallow.

Why have we defined "functional" to mean doing jobs that we hate? Why have we defined "functional" to mean not rocking the boat; not challenging the status quo? Why are our most "functional" members of society the ones who are causing the most human misery?

To decide not to take medication is a political statement. To decline to have my body violated - simply to conform with a political system that I don't agree with - makes me into a kind of political prisoner. I'm a victim of "fit in or f**k off" culture.

It seems to me like most people depend on substances - alcohol, tea, coffee, energy drinks, cigarettes, nicotine e-liquids, antidepressants, anxiolytics, tranquillisers, sleeping pills, painkillers - and very few of us are able to live life substance-free. What is it about modern life that pushes us onto these addictive substances and keeps us dependent on them? Why should it be mandated to use psychoactive substances, just to live my life?

It seems deeply immoral to have constructed a society that's unbearable except with something to 'take the edge off'. It seems like a complete car crash of a situation that we have to reach for chemicals just to be able to function and fit in. It seems like bullying and coercion to me. I have deep ethical objections to a world that forces me to put substances into my body against my will.

I fought hard to free myself from my dependence on caffeine. Quitting coffee was challenging. Quitting tea was relentlessly difficult. Avoiding caffeinated beverages is tricky.

I had the good fortune of never becoming addicted to nicotine, except when addiction was forced upon me by my parents breathing their second-hand smoke all over me in a confined space, which was wicked and immoral.

I deliberately spend lengthy periods without alcohol, to clear my mind of all substances. Alcohol is ubiquitous and hard to avoid. There's huge amounts of peer pressure to drink.

Finally, I find myself fending off prescription medications. Without prescribed pills, life is very hard. It's almost expected that modern life is going to induce anxiety and depression in most of us, and so it's us who must change rather than us changing the circumstances that produce the unbearable mental health problems - we consent to having mind-altering substances put into our bodies, because we have little choice in the matter.

If you want money - and I imagine that you probably need it - then you're going to have to slurp tea & coffee, suck on your e-cigarette, get drunk and pop pills. We've arrived at a state where life is so utterly depressing and shit that we need all these chemicals to pretend that it isn't.

In the face of so many obvious problems in the world, is the answer to take pills that allow us to be wilfully ignorant and carry on regardless? In the face of the whole shambolic mess threatening to crumble into dust at any moment, should we be so coerced and bullied into medicating ourselves?

We live with incredible insecurity. Our jobs are utter bullshit and we could lose them at any moment. Our wages barely cover our living expenses, and in many cases they don't. Payday lenders and other legal loan sharks put us into a constant state of debt-laden fear. Our livelihoods are under constant threat; our homes. Where's the security? Where's the comfort? Where's the contentment and relaxation and happiness going to come from, in this bullshit merry-go-round of horrible jobs and insufficient money to ever escape from the rat race?

Eventually, it's all too much and we capitulate. "Give me something to make me feel better, doc" we say. We swallow our antidepressants, anxiolytics, tranquillisers, sleeping pills and painkillers because we can't afford to take time off to get better. We can't afford to drop out of the rat race. We can't afford to show any weakness. We can't afford to catch our breath.

The capitalists have got us right where they want us - numb and dumb. We're so f**king doped up that we don't realise how awful we've let things get. We don't dare to imagine a better world. We just keep chasing that ever-elusive dream that one day we'll get to quit the rat race, but we never will because we're all doped up to the eyeballs with enough drugs to tranquillise an elephant.

That's why I don't take the damn pills. That's why I'm going through the shit I'm going through - I want to experience reality and I don't want to be yet another dull-eyed slave.

Tags: #capitalism #politics #depression #medication #alcohol #caffeine

This is a story about a lack of insight...

I didn't invent the English language. I didn't invent consciousness and feelings. I didn't invent thought. So, how can I ever have an original thought or idea? How can I ever write something original? Everything I ever think and write is going to have been thought about and written about somewhere else, by somebody else.

In fact, the idea of originality is a dumb one, borne out of pretentiousness. Anybody who thinks they're being original is horribly egotistical, and also wrong.

I cringe a little when I see aspects of myself reflected writing that's smugly taking the piss out of angst-filled teenagers. It's quite easy to mock and belittle. It's quite easy to hide behind a comforting wall of sneering cynicism and criticism. I cringe, but I'm glad that I write - I'm glad that I expose myself and my flaws. I'm glad that I set myself up as a somebody who can be easily attacked. I give you the ammunition, and you use it.

My intention of writing so much is to exhaust my enemies. I've written so much that nobody can ever catch up with me now. I've written so much that anybody who's determined to tarnish my name will never be able to do it with their words, because mine outnumber theirs by an order of magnitude. Bullies are quite lazy and cowardly, and they will pick on easy targets - they will bully the vulnerable.

In the process of making myself incredibly vulnerable - admitting to every vanity and flaw in my character; every freakish fetish and grotesque quirk - I'm actually protected from anybody who wants to prey on my weaknesses. It's impossible to shame and embarrass me. If there's anything compromising that you wanted to know about me, it's all here, documented in unflinching detail. If you wanted to try and blackmail me or otherwise coerce me, you wouldn't be able to because everything bad about me is written down and on public display.

Ok, not everything.

I'm going as fast as I can. I feel like my life is in imminent danger, so I must get as much of myself down on paper as possible. I have to write everything, because my writing will be all that's left when I'm dead. I don't fear death... I fear being misunderstood.

Of course, it's terribly teenage angsty to write such a thing, isn't it? Surely I should cringe and self-censor when I write those words: "I fear being misunderstood". Surely I know it's not cool to admit to such things. Surely I know that being a grown up is all about pretending to not be affected by fear, anxiety, insecurity and all the other ailments of the mind; the existential questions around identity and morality and mortality. Surely I should pretend to be more cool, and pretend to be more adult.

When my writing is discovered, I'm sure I will become very famous.

Can you see the dry humour? Can you detect the self-deprecation? Can you see that the irony is not lost on me? Can you see that I'm aware how pretentious I am? Can you see that I write things that are like little traps, designed to elicit an emotional response from you? Can you see that I'm deliberately provocative? Can you see that your first reaction is the one I intended you to have, but it doesn't mean that you immediately understand who I am and how I think?

I feel all the emotions that you do; the things that hold you back from writing with honesty and authenticity. I feel those things, but I write anyway. I don't care that I'm making a fool out of myself. In fact, I'm deliberately making a fool out of myself. Having been bullied and abused for most of my life, I'm punching myself in the face so that at least I'm the one who's in control. If I'm going to get punched in the face anyway, it might as well be me doing it, rather than my tormenters.

I insult myself and declare my flaws so that it's not interesting for you to attack me. If I've already done the thing that you wanted to do - to shame me; to abuse me - then there's no sport in it anymore.

I try to head off every criticism at the pass. I try to anticipate every potential way that I'm going to be attacked, and make sure that I'm first past the winning post. If you try to attack me, I'll simply refer you to something I already wrote. Eventually, you'll see that it's you who is unoriginal, not me.

"I've heard that one before" I often think, rolling my eyes. It's all here... the proof. I have documented proof that your idea is unoriginal. If you're going to come at me, make sure you've done your damn homework. Except you won't, because you're too lazy. Thus, I'm protected. Instead of getting upset when I'm attacked, I have the comfort of knowing that I already exhaustively addressed the topic. I'm almost immune from attempts to shame, embarrass and otherwise abuse me.

As I write, I don't excuse my actions, behaviours and thoughts that are not morally as I would wish them to be. I don't write to justify myself. I only write to be transparent; open and honest; candid. Through transparency, I remove the power that those who know my secrets have over me. I have no secrets. I'm an open book, and therefore it's not possible to shame me by sharing details of my most compromising material. I already shared it. It's already written down.

I'm flawed. I'm a flawed individual. I've done things that make me groan aloud and cup my face in my hands. There's a seemingly endless list of embarrassing things I've said and done. However, I'm making a bloody good attempt to write it all down, so it no longer has any power over me.

What do you see, at the end of the day? Do you see evil? Do you think I'm a bad person? The more you get to know me - and you can know as much as you like - the more you start to have doubts about my character... maybe I'm not such a nice guy after all. What should we do with me? Lock me up? Kill me?

Having been bullied and abused for so much of my life, I have pretty strong views on how we should treat vulnerable people. I think I'm able to quickly detect injustice. I think of myself as perceptive, when it comes to psychological abuse - I can see the subtleties in human interactions, and detect the power struggles and detestable misbehaviour.

Really, I should be coerced into silence. I should be shamed into a dark corner, never to be seen or heard from again. Why the hell am I so damn noisy?

I'm so damn easy to hate.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about winos...

If you've ever spent a night in a cheap sleeping bag, you'll know what it's like in the small hours of the morning, when the temperature plummets and you can't get warm - you're frozen to the bone and your body shakes to move your muscles, burning energy to heat your blood, which keeps you awake. All you can think about is how nice it would be to be snug and warm and cosy. A rough night will teach you to appreciate your duvet, blankets, heating boiler or furnace, roaring fire and other sources of warmth, like spooning with your sweetheart.

I've slept on a glacier, and it's horrible how quickly the ice leeches away the heat from any body part that strays off your sleeping mat. Concrete is just the same - without some insulating barrier between you and the floor, the cold seems to rise up and enter you... your lips turn blue and your teeth chatter.

In this city of concrete, brick & cement, limestone and granite, there are far more homeless people than I'm ever used to seeing. I've been homeless and slept rough in London. The UK's capital city is a magnet for those seeking to improve their fortunes, through employment opportunities, begging from rich tourists or simply the high quality narcotics.

"Have you scored?" yells a man behind me, to a man at the other end of the road. It's 9:30am on a Wednesday, and these two beggars look familiar to me. My ten minute walk to the office takes me past almost 15 men, who all congregate along the route between the city's two main railway stations - each with their own 'patch'. Some sit quietly with a paper cup on the pavement in front of them; eyes downcast but intently watching the world go by in their peripheral vision. Some look me square in the eye from several hundred metres away - well aware that I am pretending to not notice them - before timing a polite and muted "spare some change please?" request to perfection... all I can say is "sorry mate". Some linger at an intersection, where they step into my path... "excuse me" they say, and my eyes flick up to meet theirs... they know immediately that the element of surprise has not worked - I saw them before they saw me - and I continue my walk undiverted.

How do I know that it's a man who slept rough in that doorway, and he was probably an alcoholic and/or a heroin addict? If one wishes to be pedantic, I don't.

Speaking frankly, a woman who sleeps rough is is at risk of becoming a rape victim at some point. Another unspeakable and unpalatable truth is that a woman in the grips of addiction is not going to spend her nights having her body illegally violently sexually violated against her will, when she could spend that time turning tricks - there are an insatiable number of punters for blowjobs and sex - to pay for just enough heroin and crack to numb the pain of another shitty day of human existence.

What I say is not sexism, prejudiced or anything other than the situation as it stands in the UK - sadly, there are enough rapists out there to make sleeping on the streets a dangerous thing for a woman to do, so our local government will ensure that they are not complicit in any acts of rape or sexual assault that get perpetrated on the streets, though their negligent inaction.

A single man with an alcohol and/or drug problem is not considered to be vulnerable enough to be housed by the local government. In fact, the alcoholics and addicts who line the busy thoroughfares of this bustling city, are viewed as a liability with regards to giving them money and a place to live. "They'll only spend it on drink and drugs" completely misses the point about cause and effect, but statistically it's proven to be mostly correct. Council houses (a.k.a. social housing) and apartments have been turned into absolute shitholes by so many men in the past, that the local authority treats their homeless adult single male population like a plague of modern-day lepers.

Thus, I can make an educated guess that this almost entirely unused fire exit doorway, was where a man laid his head to rest last night. He was probably a heroin addict, but this means nothing - whether it's a symptom or the cause of his destitution is a non sequitur, because homelessness and addiction are intractable. It is as if we ask "which came first? the eggshell or the egg yolk?" without considering the ridiculous notion of having one without the other, and completely ignoring the chicken.

The United Kingdom was flooded with cheap alcohol during the boom years of the 1980s, when the British pound sterling was strong versus the French franc, and enterprising men and women set off across the English Channel to bring back vast quantities of wine. France grew grapes and fermented them in a country that was predominantly rural and agricultural. England, by comparison with our nearest neighbour, has dense areas of population clustering around factories, coal mines, steel mills, dockyards and other organs that were necessitated for the functioning of an empire, as well as the defence of the realm.

Heroin's quality and availability once fluctuated wildly in the UK. The fields of opium-yielding poppies flourish in Afghanistan and Thailand, but the trade routes - the Silk Road - were at the mercy of incredible geopolitical forces. Now, thanks to the intervention of the USA and the UK in illegal foreign wars and 'regime' toppling, the supply of high-quality cheap narcotics has never been in more rude health.

If you think a homeless heroin addict single man is a fool and a failure, you are wrong; completely wrong. If you think in terms of 'bang for your buck' a £10 bag of heroin is going to get you a lot more fucked up than £10 of alcohol. If you think that injecting drugs is insane, you haven't considered the insanity of putting something you've paid your hard-earned money for, into your acidic stomach, where nearly 1/3rd of it will be destroyed. The rational thing to do is to put 100% of your intoxicant directly into your bloodstream.

If we followed the logic of the homeless man, we would all have a canula in one of our veins, and we would pay £1 for pure ethanol to be squirted into our bodies from a syringe, whereupon we would be immediately intoxicated to the point of near-blackout.

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Before we go any further, I should make it clear that I am not advocating injecting drugs - or drug abuse of any kind - nor have I ever injected any drugs, or had another person inject me with narcotics.

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If one wishes to consider the desperate plight of an addict or alcoholic, one only needs to think about the period when many homeless men would drink methylated spirits. Methanol differs from ethanol chemically, but methylated spirits - known colloquially as meths - has been deliberately poisoned by manufacturers, in an effort to discourage human consumption, without success. I can buy 5 litres of meths - roughly the same volume as 7 bottles of wine - for around £10, but to drink it would kill me. Out of desperation to avoid delirium tremens, which can cause seizures and death, alcoholics will drink small amounts of meths to self-medicate for their physical dependence on alcohol, despite the fact that it will cause them to go blind.

The war on drugs and the war on terror have now created a reliable supply chain, whereby the most powerful narcotics on the planet are available at unsurpassed purity and at rock-bottom prices, as never before witnessed in human history.

Competitive free-market economics has given rise to a swathe of pharmaceutical giants, vying to innovate with new medications that are 'better' than anything seen before, in a race for profits. Fentanyl and carfentanil were born into this world in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Carfentanil is so potent, that an aerosol mist of it could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Although the Russian government does not officially acknowledge it, carfentanil has been used in a terrorist hostage situation - pumped into a building as a gas - resulting in the deaths of 125 innocent civilians in a single incident, from opiate overdose.

The rise and rise of the zero-hours contract McJob and a hopeless future for unskilled labourers, in the face of global capitalism, has created insecurity and the total destruction of the prospect of happy and contented family life for a scandalous number of men. While pram-faced mothers, with gold hoop earrings and their hair held back tightly in a scrunchie, will be prioritised for social housing, our entire welfare system discourages work and parental bonds. Economically, a single mother is better off than one who stays with the father of her children. Dads have been made redundant by cheap Far-Eastern labour. People respond to incentives, and so we have created a generation of children from broken homes. We have created an unacknowledged mountainous scrap-heap of homeless single male drug addicts, in a society that has no better use for them, other than to let them rot.

We are all familiar with the concept of supply and demand, but there is also something intrinsic in our genetic programming that makes us seek out value for money. It seems obvious that given the choice of intoxicants, I would select 1 gram of carfentanil instead of 1 gram of morphine. An amount of carfentanil the same size as a grain of salt is enough to kill me by overdose - carfentanil is better value for money, being about 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

The opium smokers became morphine addicts, then diacetylmorphine (heroin) addicts, then fentanyl addicts and now carfentanil addicts. The subsection of the population who have abandoned hope are always driven to seek the strongest mind-altering substance that they can obtain, for the money which they beg (panhandle), borrow or steal in order to support their 'habit' each day.

1 kilogram of carfentanil could kill the entire population of the United Kingdom. Carfentanil is produced in bulk quantities in the Far-East, where - ironically - all the manufacturing and mining jobs have gone, leaving vast numbers of men economically redundant.

In this city where I now live, the capitalists drove the cloth-making industry into a race to the bottom, negatively affecting the prosperity of nations such as India, which has over a billion inhabitants. It seems apt that the 'payback' for this global suicide pact should be so publicly conspicuous. Homelessness and addiction are openly on display, as symptoms of a world that is sick with an illness that's called capitalism; vulgar greed and hoarding of wealth.

I am full of sorrow that so many of my fellow citizens are left bewildered as to what happened to their once-great nation, and seek solace in all the wrong places. To help even one man (#frank) exhausted my economic reserves. All I have left is the power to spread word to more people than I could ever manage to speak to individually, using the power and freedom of the Internet. I preach to the converted, so often, but to stop and speak to the abandoned men - each in their 'patch' - is impossible in the face of a capitalists waving a fistfuls of dollars in front of a sea of hungry people.

All I can say to my readers who own computers, smartphones and Internet connections - you have a golden ticket that the man who slept on the cardboard in the doorway last night, does not have. He's viewed as trash, just the same as the remnants of his existence left behind when he awoke and moved elsewhere this morning.

Tags: #homeless #frank #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about human waste...

Here is a pictorial representation of my life in London.

Starting on the left, are socks that I purchased in a supermarket after being discharged from hospital. I was homeless and living in a hotel room paid for by the NHS, because I had only just recovered from a failed suicide attempt but the hospital needed their bed back.

Next is the spotty sock. This sock was bought when I had been homeless and nearly died a few more times, but then got myself back on my feet (sic.) - I was working again. I had just enough money left to be able to get a new suit, which was very understated and plain, so these socks were my act of rebelion - thumbing my nose at the grim reaper and saying "Ha! I cheated death and destitution".

Then comes the stripey sock. This sock was bought when I was living out of a hotel room again. I'd run away to Ireland when my life had fallen apart, and the loving family of a friend I'd met in a hostel, pieced me back together again and sent me home to the UK a new man. I had no money anymore, so I was living on business expenses, out of a suitcase and back in a hotel. This sock represents the insecurity of the time - I needed to keep my big mouth shut and not be so loud until I had money again. This sock represents a tiny bit of humility, but still some resistance to playing by the rules.

Finally comes the Burgundy sock. This sock was bought when I finally remembered how to fit in and conform; to take perverse pleasure in spending an entire week at work, blending in to my surroundings and being completely unnoticed. That's what big corporations want - they want you to fit in or fuck off. This sock represents complete capitulation. I needed the money: I had rent to pay, friends to pay back, pay bills and I had depleted my savings. My back was against the wall again, so this time I didn't push my luck. I was the corporate chameleon.

Each of these socks has lost its partner and will be discarded. I can't anticipate a time when I would be so desperate for some kind of foot covering, that I would be reduced to wearing odd socks, which would so blatantly not be a premeditated fashion decision. People would judge me as having 'problems' if I was seen wearing any combination of these lone socks.

Here is the entirety of my wardrobe, for at least 3 months; maybe even a year. Who knows? A pair of jeans will last for 3 or 4 years. I wear my clothes until they're just rags. I was feeling stressed and anxious about transporting everything I need in my life, across the country, but now I've seen a huge pile of clothes fit into this suitcase I feel tiny and insignificant. Isn't my life so small, that you could snuff it out and nobody would even notice? I could disappear and hardly leave a trace.

Of course, I've been aggressively selling, recycling, giving away or throwing away anything I never use or wear. Like Occam and his razor, I have been shaving away parts of my life, little by little, until all that's left is the very bare minimum. Minimum Viable Person (MVP) - that's me.

I feel guilty, of course, that my ecological footprint (sic.) is still so big, as I dispose of enormous amounts of mass-produced crap, and it will probably end up in landfill. Clothes, particularly, are manufactured so unbelievably cheaply, and imported so vastly that the per capita amount of clothing is enough to allow our entire nation to cease doing any washing and just buy new clothes when the old ones get dirty. We're living in the age of disposable fashion. I don't even know why I'm taking a huge suitcase of clothes on such a long journey, when I could buy a similar size bagful of Primark garments, for the same price as the luggage, which I bought to transport my much more expensive, higher quality wardrobe.

I'm absolutely on the ragged edge of how much stress I can stand, having never set foot in the city I'm about to travel hundreds of miles to, or the apartment where I am to spend at least the next few months. I've had nearly 2 years where, despite everything, I've had at least one stable constant: my apartment in the city I've known longer than any place on Earth. I can navigate to and from any two parts of this densely populated and hugely diverse metropolis, with pure instinct, which has developed over the years. Even though the river meanders and is an absolutely useless reference point, I still know which way is North, when bridges and tunnels go North-South, East-West and West-East, assuming you're North of the river... which you will be if you've got any class and style.

It should be a happy moment, to be so unencumbered by material possessions, family ties and the considerations of a life partner; every lone sock that I cast aside should lighten the weight of my soul, but I've not made my mark on the world yet. Who am I and why should you even care that I once lived?

Maybe I'm the odd sock. I don't fit in. I don't pair up. I don't play nice with the others, so I should fuck off because I don't fit in.

That's the way I feel right now.

Tags: #london

This is a story about not pleasing all the people all the time...

The gutter press and Tory rags have done a staggeringly good job of convincing ordinary people that their security is under threat from the invisible spectre of international terrorism. Despite the complete lack of evidence of any communication with ISIS - commanding and controlling "sleeper cells" and suchlike - the newspapers have managed to convince a worrying number of people that there's an Islamic plot to kill and maim the people of the UK, even somehow dovetailing with immigration, asylum and - by loose association - our membership of the European Union.

Our very worst off members of society live in the most fear. They fear the loss of their low-skilled jobs to migrant workers who are prepared to accept terrible working conditions. They also fear for their security, having been turned into Islamophobes by an unrelenting media narrative about terrorism, radicalisation and Muslim extremism. A disappointing number of our fellow Brits would vote in favour of policies that deported Muslims, closed our borders to immigration and asylum and expanded our police state; even arming every police officer with a gun. These working class people should be staunch Labour voters, but the 'security' (jobs and terrorism) issue swung them into the Conservatives' open arms.

Meanwhile, the surprise success of Jeremy Corbyn - to political pundits, journalists and even his own party members - is easily attributable to the number of liberal lefties who were politically 'homeless' until Corbyn re-ignited those forgotten dreams of a socialist utopia. Many who voted Labour might not have been pro-Corbyn, but what educated humanist could ignore the simplistically appealing ideology of taking from the rich to give to the poor? At last, a left wing party to vote for again! Many who had been politically dormant were re-activated by the chance to make a vote to oppose the right-wing, and their cruel cuts and austerity.

To some, it seems obvious that if Labour were to adopt a policy of blocking and derailing Brexit, they would surely have voters turning to them in their droves. Sadly, this is where Labour is caught in a terrible paradox.

By opposing Brexit, Labour would seem soft on immigration, and therefore soft on national security, which are the paramount issues in the minds of the working class, who are Labour's core voting bloc. Conversely, the Islington champagne-socialist who reads the Observer or the Guardian is appalled that Labour offer no strong opposition to leaving the EU. Even to the most rabid Corbyn supporter, they are somewhat baffled as to why he's sitting on the fence when it comes to Brexit. The reason is simple: Brexit is bound up with fears of international terrorism as well as job insecurity. To oppose Brexit would be spectacularly unpopular with the working class. To oppose Brexit would make the Labour party into a party for the wealthy educated London leftie liberals, who are a substantial proportion of the much-resented gentrifiers - seen as no different from any of the other metropolitan elites, who are out of touch with the reality of life's daily struggles in an austere Britain.

After years of politics where people and politicians believed in nothing; where policies were chosen based on focus groups and surveys; where political ideologies had been abandoned... Jeremy Corbyn represents the antidote to politics dominated by unprincipled men and women who only want to wield power. Every policy; every position on the Corbynite agenda, is driven by his conscience and his desire to do the best for ordinary people. This is a radical sea-change, from the rush to the centre and the boom of the populists. We had the era where Tory and New Labour were indistinguishable. We are in an era where a populist party can capitalise upon the pain and fears of a nation reeling from an invisible recession and security threats that have been exaggerated beyond all reasonable proportions. Corbyn represents a return to an ideological politics and strong opinions on what's best for the ordinary people of Britain, instead of the weak insipid crap shaped by polls and focus groups, which pointed to vote-winning policies.

Now that Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, has proven itself to be a credible opposition and stands every chance of being in government, the next move is extremely unpalatable. As a party that ideologically stands for the working class, Labour must address that group's primary concerns, even if they're unfounded. It would be impossible to undo the damage of the Brexit campaign, UKIP, BNP, EDL and a nonstop media narrative that tells us that Islamic fundamentalist terror threatens to kill or maim us and our families, anytime, anywhere. The ongoing invisible recession caused by the financial crisis of 2007/8 and Tory cuts - austerity - has been blamed on econonic migrants, but the broad brush has tarred all immigrants, including those seeking asylum. As a principled man Corbyn has been able to do little more than sit on the fence.

Tax avoidance by the rich and large corporations costs the UK vast sums of money, wheras economic migrants actually bring a net benefit to the economy. Suicides caused by job losses and welfare cuts far outnumber deaths caused by terrorism.

It is as if, having been stressed and depressed for a long time, we discovered that we could function perfectly well with just two fingers and a thumb, and so we have decided to cut off four of our digits in the mistaken belief that it will solve our malaise.

To try to reason with those who are hell-bent on Brexit, would only be to further antagonise and patronise them; similarly with those who believe we might need to nuke Iran or North Korea before they nuke us. Those who have decided that all Muslims are potential terrorists are not open to persuasion that their beliefs are complete bullshit. Unfortunately, many traditional Labour voters hold these abhorrant views, and have a warped set of priorities, when it comes to politics, citing immigration - and national security, implicitly - as their number one issue.

The Tory party ties itself in knots, being led by a woman whose opinions can do a U-turn in the blink of an eye; a woman who believes in nothing; a woman who is the toothless, powerless figurehead of a party hell bent on creating a huge insecure labour pool, to be exploited by ruthless capitalists for obscene profits.

The best we can hope for is an awakening of class consciousness: where people realise that the Tory government does not seek to protect its people, but seeks to exploit them; where people realise that the Labour party of today bears no resemblence to New Labour or the Labour party of the 1970s; where people wake up to the injustice of the fact that the burden of Tory cuts and austerity has fallen disproportionately on the least wealthy.

Labour and Corbyn are trapped between a rock and a hard place, and can only patiently continue to stand by their manifesto and the underlying ideology - that the richest and the largest corporations should pay their fair share in society - until the electorate is finally sick and tired of Tory lies and hypocrisy.

As a champagne-sipping North London socialist, I obviously want to scream with frustration at the working class man or woman who votes against their self-interest. They've been turned into Islamophobes who blame immigration for their daily struggles in life, rather than remembering that it was the bank bailouts that started this whole mess, and the Tories who made the ordinary people pay for it. However, all my efforts have done is to label me as part of the London elite, living in a bubble... despised by the working class.

At the moment, politics depresses me, but the ever-present chance of a vote of no confidence in the government and another general election this year, would re-invigorate my interest and my enthusiasm to spread the 'gospel' of comrade Corbyn and a better life for everyone, under a left-wing socialist Labour government.

Politics is such a turn-off for most people, but I think that the referendum on our EU membership, the shock result of Donald Trump's victory and the credibility of a Corbyn-led Labour party, has engaged people who were previously disinterested and/or disillusioned.

Perhaps I'd better get ready to announce my Loony candidacy, should another election be suddenly thrust upon us.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about home treatment...

This is what the Conservative government's 1990's Care in the Community policy looks like, in practice. An extremely low-paid NHS worker, who isn't trained as a mental health nurse, is dispatched on public transport to travel across the London borough of Tower Hamlets, to bring me a bag of medication. They're supposed to check that the old packets are empty, which 'proves' I've been taking my medication. They're supposed to escalate any problems to nurses and doctors, back at base. If they can't find me or get in contact, they're supposed to ring the police.

It's that final point that's the important one: the police got co-opted into this half-baked scheme. Of the people the police deal with - the front-line officers - most of them will have mental health issues. The police are picking up the pieces of the mental health epidemic. When somebody is truly having a mental health crisis, the police will be the ones who get that sick person to the place where they should have been in the first place: a psychiatric institution.

There are nurses, psychiatrists, social workers and the like, who are involved in assessing whether you need to be detained under the Mental Health Act - what's known colloquially as a 'section'. If you're seriously mentally ill and out in the community, it's down to the police to find you, catch you, detain you and get you to that assessment where you get 'sectioned'.

Also, the police are out there, picking up body parts off the train tracks and underground railway. The police are there when somebody has jumped off a bridge and landed in a river or on some mud flats, or maybe gone splat into something harder below - perhaps a road. The police are there when somebody looks like they're about to jump under a train or off a bridge - CCTV operators are trained to look out for agitated members of the public, who look like they're about to top themselves.

Around the time of Care in the Community, there was an explosion in prescribing of psychiatric medication by our ordinary general practitioners (GPs) - our regular family doctors - there were 9 million prescriptions for Prozac in the UK in 1991. This is the principle behind Care in the Community: put people in a chemical straightjacket, and they can be safely released back into the general population. Ten years later, there were 24 million prescriptions for Prozac and another ten or so years later again, and London alone gets through over 60 million prescriptions for Prozac. These are almost all issued by a GP, not a psychiatrist.

When it comes to "serious" mental illness - anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder (a.k.a. manic depression), schizophrenia, personality disorders - the NHS kicks you out of the bit where you get various therapy options (e.g. CBT) and instead you're referred to a psychiatrist, who will prescribe some fairly brutal medication. In the case of schizophrenia, you could have a risperidone implant, injected underneath your skin, which will keep you in a chemical straightjacket for up to 6 months.

The other people who got co-opted into this Care in the Community policy were the general public. An average member of the public is fairly fearful of a schizophrenic, believing them to have multiple personalities and a propensity for violence. Several murders that received significant media attention, focussed on the fact that they were committed by formerly institutionalised schizophrenics. Depression is now such a common feature of people's lives, that any stigma has gone, but most people would be fearful of living near, working with, or having their children around a schizophrenic, surveys have found. Lock your doors - there might be a madman lurking nearby.

If I was in hospital, I'd have somebody checking on me every 30 minutes to an hour - making sure I hadn't found some way to harm myself. With the Crisis Team (a.k.a. Home Treatment Team) who are tasked with keeping me safe at home, I see them every other day. I could take a fatal overdose 2 hours before they were due to arrive, and by the time an ambulance got to me, I would be well and truly dead as a dodo.

I had stockpiled 336 tramadol tablets (16.8 grams) which is enough for two people to commit suicide, easily. As part of their responsibility to help keep me safe, they asked me for the tramadol back. I gave them 112 tablets (one box) which was a tick in their box. In hospital, I would never be able to hide the remaining 224 tablets from the nurses. If I took an overdose, I'd be fed activated charcoal, have my stomach pumped, be put on a respirator and given various medications to counteract the deadly effects of a tramadol overdose, in plenty of time to save my life.

I can't tell you what the cause and effect is. I can't tell you whether Care in the Community is the reason for the mental health epidemic, or whether it's something else, such as the collapse in living standards and precarious lives we live now, with our income and housing under constant threat.

Most people don't like to lose their liberty. In fact, it's distressing to be locked up somewhere, and not allowed to leave. There are crisis houses, where you can come and go as you please during the day, but you have to be back by nightfall and sleep there or else the police will be sent out to find you. This seems like a compromise that would suit most people who are having a mental health crisis, who pose no danger to the general public.

With the false security of Care in the Community, the number of beds available for those having a mental health crisis, has been slashed dramatically. You can attempt suicide and be hospitalised - in intensive care - and then discharged out onto the streets, simply because there isn't a free bed on a psych ward or in a crisis house, where you could more safely transition back to normal life. You can be suicidal, and the best the NHS can offer you is to come check that you're still alive once a day.

As a man, I'm many times more likely to commit suicide than a woman, but far less likely to seek help. This means that I have had the good fortune of being looked after once in a crisis house and once under a voluntary 'section' on a psych ward. Not many people receive lifesaving treatment like that - the resources just aren't there anymore.

So, what's the solution? Pharmaceutical companies tell us their medications are better than ever. More and more of us are taking powerful psychiatric medication. But, yet, the percentage of the population suffering from mental health issues is ever-growing; suicide rates keep climbing - there is, undoubtably, a mental health epidemic. My personal opinion is that it's not a medical problem: it's a problem created by insecurity: jobs and housing; it's a problem created by declining living standards and soaring levels of stress.

No amount of pills are going to fix the mental health epidemic, even if you bring them to my door.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #depression #bipolar

This is a story about climbing the social ladder...

When you're lying in the gutter, you're looking at the stars. When things are really and truly shit, you reach a point where you stop caring what the world is going to throw at you next, and you recognise that the simplest thing - a sunny day or a £10 note lying on the pavement - can transform your day; your life.

When you're top dog; a fat cat with a cellar stuffed full of vintage wine, a garage full of supercars, yachts and speedboats, a swimming pool, acres of manicured grounds, horses & stables, farmland, a profitable business empire, wealth squirrelled away offshore or in anonymous safe-deposit boxes... you're not going to fall very far. Even if you secured business loans against your UK house, you're still going to be able to live in some tax haven in a penthouse apartment, in relative luxury, for the rest of your days. The money that's held in trust for your children is untouchable; secure. Most of your own wealth is hidden. You can escape with your filthly lucre, flee overseas and stay safe from extradition... you can't really fall that far at all.

When you're in the middle, you're reading OFSTED reports on schools and trying to work out catchment areas and where you can afford to buy a house for you and all your spawn. You're trying to do the delicate balancing act of being two working parents, while also doing school runs and all the pickups and drop offs necessary for the after-school activities that will turn your offspring into well-rounded individuals, who hopefully will have plenty to talk about at their interview for Oxford or Cambridge. You've been giving your thick little shits extra maths tutoring in the hope that they'll pass the 11+ exam and you can force them to go to a grammar school that they don't want to go to, because all their equally unacademic friends are going to the local comprehensive. You spend at least half the night awake worrying about your teen daughter getting pregnant, and the other half worrying about your teen son getting addicted to drugs. You spend your holidays visiting sights of historical or cultural significance, or abroad where your little darlings get to say "où sont les toillettes, s'il vous plaît?" or "ich möchte wurst, bitte" or whatever language you're insisting they learn, to improve their university application. You spend your evenings with the rasping, scraping, screeching noise of a badly played violin and thunderous farting noises, amplified a thousand times through the brass torture implement that is a French horn. Every shitty note of every shitty practice session that the kids don't want to do, but you want them to maybe get a music scholarship, and Oxbridge looks kindly on musicians. Homework is a constant argument, as your children bare-face lie to you about having done it when they haven't, because they want to go and play with their friends. Those friends who you wish they wouldn't hang about with anyway, because they're the wrong sort of children. All the while, you're one redundancy or sacking away from the whole house of cards collapsing, because all your money is eaten up by the mortgage you over-stretched yourselves to get, the car loan, the loans for those musical instruments and the private lessons, all the petrol you burn driving your little darlings around and all those cultural, historical, educational outings. One fuck up and the whole thing comes tumbling down and you'll be back in your clogs.

When you're 'working-class' housing benefit covers most of the rent. Employment support, disability living, jobseekers allowance and income support allowance somehow provides not quite enough to do anything except shuffle miserably small sums of money around and scrimp and save, buying all the loss-leaders in the supermarkets and supplementing your income with a bit of cash-in-hand employment, dealing [mostly] harmless drugs and shoplifting. On the estate you live on, there are hundreds of families who are struggling just like you, and you all swap tips on how to make ends meet, as well as trading, borrowing and loaning... a thriving black market. Whatever happens, you at least feel solidarity with your neighbours. You're English and proud. You were born here, and you've got a right to live here. The government has a duty to support you and your children, and it's damn hard work keeping the little tearaways under control. You have ten children, all called Steve, which is not confusing because you use their father's surname when you want to get their attention. You're not even aware that you're a Jeremy Kyle cliché, because you have been stuck into a ghetto of equally impoverished people, with equally abysmal opportunities, and it's been the same for generations. You don't know any different. You're not trying to climb the social ladder, because the route is barred and nobody ever tried or knew how to try. You're not afraid of falling, because you're the bedrock foundation of British society: the very definition and product of the welfare state and the neglect of the poor; the result of social experiments with high-density housing in the 60's; the living embodiment of upper-class fears that the working-class would breed more, given half a chance.

Clearly, it's the middle-class who are sharp-elbowed, trying to fight the way to the front of the crowd, trying to get their little darlings a slight advantage, in the race for those few places at the best schools and at the best universities. It's the middle class who myopically can't see that marking exams to a grade curve, where a predefined percentage of children will achieve A* grades, means that education has become an arms race. It's the middle-class who believe in destroying their children's present in the interests of their future, despite the pure insanity of it. "The future of our children is at stake" is half-screamed out of a middle-class parent's mouth, which foams and froths. If you want to see the living embodiment of Hell on Earth, try being a fly on the wall during the period of secondary school selection, GCSE exams, A-level exams and university application. Middle class parents will tell you that they can't deal with their teenagers, without any comprehension that the filial obedience they enjoyed before has been exhausted: the children have finally figured out how to zone out and ignore that constant nagging and cajoling. Why this desperation? Why does it seem to be such a matter of life-and-death to these middle-class people, who live in the luxury of the wealthy West?

Most middle-class people, with their good jobs and their ample but dowdy houses, will tell you some kind of folklore tale about how hard they worked to achieve what they've got. Many middle-class people will claim to be working-class made good, telling you that their mother was a hamster and their father was a window cleaner, or whatever claptrap lies they've told so many times that they now believe. Fact of the matter is, if you're a middle-class homeowner with teenaged kids, you've enjoyed a house price bubble that's made you feel wealthy - on paper - even though you haven't worked very hard, except all that stress with the kids, right?

While you've been working very hard to make sure your kids don't fuck up their future, people who are richer and smarter than you have been funnelling vast quantities of money offshore, where it can't be touched. Your fucking ISA or other savings account that you hope will soften the blow of having to support your kids through university, is a piss in the ocean. In the event of an economic downturn, you're fucked, aren't you?

Our middle-classes trample each other; grasping for the next rung on the ladder; grasping for something to hang on to; grasping for safety; grasping for security. Living a life which can fall to pieces and thrust you into the Jeremy Kyle world of the working-class, that you've so desperately tried to insulate your children from - it's a fate worse than death, to you. If there's one thing you fear above all else, it's that your children should end up mixing with Britain's poorest and most disadvantaged; as if your children might 'catch' poverty. In fact, there may be no choice in the matter. Without those offshore trust funds, and a desirable property that's far bigger than you need, where's your safety net? It's the council house on the estate filled with denizens that you never wanted your children to ever meet or interact with, lest they be led astray into a life of teenaged pregnancy and drug abuse.

This is why the Tories win votes from people who you'd think were otherwise quite ordinary and decent: because they're afraid. They actually have achieved very little in life, and they're acutely aware how easily they could lose their place in the queue that they fought so hard to get [at the expense of everybody they trampled to get there]. There's a sense of entitlement, because there has been so much worry; so much insecurity. It feels like it's OK to be a bit selfish. It feels like, because of the myth of how you rose from the gutter, with terrible tragedy in your life and no opportunity, you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and you became successful through sheer hard work, grit and determination. It's utter bullshit, of course, but it's why you're going to vote Tory, isn't it?

The middle-classes live in fear, and the more afraid they are, the more they vote Tory, for fear of losing what little they have; for fear of having to mix with the undesirable working-class folk who they've tried so hard to keep their children away from.

That's why you vote Tory, isn't it?

Tags: #politics

This is a story about being a groupie...

On the steps of the podium stand the winners of the 2007 Poole Animal Windfest. There is a girl and a boy for 3rd and 2nd place. If you look closely, where is the boy who won 1st place?

In 2007 I was involved in building part of the software system that processed over a quadrillion dollars worth of toxic bullshit for JPMorgan, in a single year. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad job and they didn't treat me badly. In fact they kept a private driver waiting down by the seashore; engine running; waiting for the kitesurfing competition to finish. Then I jumped in the Mercedes with smoked glass windows and we sped off to Heathrow for me to catch a flight. I didn't even have time to wash the salt off my skin or sand out of my hair... or collect my prize for winning the competition.

There used to be a time when JPMorgan's main office in Bournemouth had squash courts and a gym onsite. There was a bar. There were enough car parking spaces for everybody, so everybody drove to work. Then, they grew; and they grew; and they grew. Investment banks were - and still are - ludicrously profitable. The IT budget that paid for my little team of 30-odd people was circa $10m per annum. You're never quite sure what the real numbers are though, when you work for an organisation with 130,000 direct employees.

Slowly, prefabricated office buildings sprang up on parts of the car park. The bar, gym and squash courts were turned into office space. That was OK. We still had several tennis courts and a sports centre nearby with badminton courts and 5-a-side football pitches. You could park nearby in an overflow car park. It was still a great place to work, and nobody had a fucking clue what they were doing or what impact it would have on the world, unless they really stopped and thought about it.

I've always been one of those pain-in-the-ass employees who does stop and think about the ramifications of everything that's being done. When it turned out that senior management had decided to support outsourcing a lot of our software development, I was very vocal about my displeasure and concerns. I was a thorn in the side of everybody more senior than me, in the hope of JPMorgan seeing sense: cheaper employees do not equate to cost savings. You get what you pay for.

So, I got landed with a stinker of a project. To train up about 20 brand new offshore employees, in Mumbai, and also to build a piece of software that was not only late, but was a critical component in a global initiative to get all the toxic bullshit warehoused in one place - a depository - so it could be figured out who the fuck owed who what, and how much? Who was holding the toxic debt? Who was bankrupt?

How big is a million dollars?

$1,000,000

It's hard to say, but it's probably a few times bigger than the value of your house, or twenty times bigger than your salary. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000

Now what you're looking at is a billion dollars. 1% of a billion dollars is $10 million. You'd be pretty happy with $10 million, wouldn't you? That'd set you up for life. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000,000

This is quite obviously a trillion dollars. 5 trillion dollars is the value of all the world's 'money' - the cash in your pocket, the coins in your purse, your bank balance etc. etc. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000,000,000

We've reached a quadrillion dollars. 1% of a quadrillion dollars is $10 trillion, which is twice as much as all the 'money' in existence. So, how the fuck does JPMorgan process over a quadrillion dollars in a single year? Two answers for you: 1) Derivatives 2) Financial crisis of 2007/8

A derivative is a financial instrument that derives its 'value' from an underlying security. By security, I mean something tangible: a fucking house or a metal coin that has its value stamped on it. Derivatives are just pieces of paper that say "in the event X, I will pay Y"... for example "if the stock market goes up, the value of this derivative goes up ten times as much". Derivatives contracts have been created that have become more valuable than all the 'money' in the world. As much as a thousand times more valuable. This is just worthless paper, and nobody has the money to pay up: insufficient collateral.

I know, right? Don't stop and think about this stuff too much. Nobody else did. There was too much money to be made.

So I get landed this stinker of a project, drive off from the beach at Sandbanks to Heathrow airport in a luxury car, in order to train 20 or so Indians on how to build a piece of software that's going to be instrumental in the Financial Crisis of 2007/8. I'm an engineer. I solve problems. I stopped thinking about the madness of outsourcing to India when JPMorgan was already plenty profitable. I stopped thinking about the madness of there being quadrillions of dollars worth of derivatives contracts, when there was only $5 trillion of money in existence. I started thinking about software designs and who I had in my new team to build this software system.

At some point, I was seduced. I was seduced by limo travel, private drivers, 7-star hotels, business class flights, everything paid for on expenses, company credit cards. I was seduced by everybody telling me what an important project it was, and what an honour it was to be in charge - the manager - when I was only 27 years old; so young & ambitious. Giddy with this seduction, I started to see the world in different colours. Things were rose tinted. I was sucked in. It was like I was dreaming.

A year later, I'd woken up from a nightmare where I'd played a significant role in helping the Investment Banks to hold the world to ransom. "Pay up, or we'll crash the global economy and plunge the world into a depression that will make the 1930's look like nothing" they said. And the ransom was paid. Every government; every central bank coughed up hundreds of billions, so the bullshit could continue and none of the bullshitters had to lose a cent. In fact, the only people I knew who lost their jobs were the ones who were replaced by Indians I trained.

I started thinking again. Big mistake.

I took to the bottle. I drank every lunchtime and every evening. I was drunk most of the time. How could JPMorgan sack me or even reprimand me? What they'd paid me to do; what they'd asked me to do... they could never make that right. They just let me do whatever I wanted, which was mostly to go to the pub and get drunk. Nobody ever questioned it.

As Bear Stearns was being taken over by JPMorgan - asset stripped under the auspices of being 'rescued' - I'd had enough. Building software for banks made me sick. I was sick at what they did to their own people. I was sick of what the industry was doing to the world. I was sick of producing nothing of value; helping nobody except the lucky few who knew how the con-job worked.

Don't get me wrong, I should have looked the other way; kept taking the fat bonus cheques and big salary; kept those golden handcuffs on - loose enough that they never chafe - but I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. The whole thing left me feeling like I had blood on my hands. Every company that went bankrupt; every person who lost their job; every home repossessed; every suicide due to financial worries... I was one of the co-conspirators who fleeced them out of their money and assets.

Some colleagues stayed, but most of the cynical ones - like me - drifted away. Some died or at least nearly did, as they beat themselves up with alcohol for their sins. JPMorgan paid for a lot of people to go to The Priory to dry out. Those who couldn't face working again were pensioned off early. You only had to work for a year, and then you were covered by a generous insurance policy so you never had to work again. Occupational health were busy, getting rid of an entire generation of engineers who had built the bedrock foundations of the global financial services empire, now shakily propped up using public money. Masses of public money.

Ten years on, I watch in horror as those hastily made repairs to a fundamentally broken system start to crumble.

Record high national debt and record low tax receipts. Our economy is 80% financial services - an industry that's booming if you haven't noticed. You probably haven't noticed unless you work in the Square Mile or Canary Wharf. You've probably seen stagnant wages, a lack of jobs and insecure employment, such as zero-hours contracts. There's always a McJob, if your self esteem is finally fully eroded by the capitalists.

Brexit had a frontman - Nigel Farage - who was a trader from the City. Brexit had billionaire donors, like the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves, who literally said "insecurity is fantastic" - referring to his desire to see workers abused by their employers, in the interest of profits.

I don't wish to segue into commentary on current affairs, but you have to be aware who you're dealing with. Who's putting words in your mouth? Who's planting ideas in your head, through the newspapers and TV channels they own?

You have to wake up out of your nightmare.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism

This is a story about the precariat...

Here I am, in psychiatric hospital with underpants on my head and pencils up my nose. I think you will agree that this makes me perfectly qualified to run the country.

Having a manifesto is something that we associate with nutters who commit mass murder. The end justifies the means, in the minds of people consumed by their political ideologies.

Admitting to having political ambitions is laughable for an ordinary British citizen. The route into politics is through namedropping, brown-nosing and suffering the bullying & infighting of the dominant political parties, as you rise through the ranks. Going into politics is not about campaigning on a manifesto which comprises your deeply held political beliefs. Going into politics is not about a commoner being elected to the House of Commons. There's no room for the riff raff in politics and you're going to need wealthy donors to back you. You'd have to be stark raving mad to think you could get into politics as a representative of the constituents in your local area.

Politics is a career; it's not about improving the lives of your fellow citizens. There's no room for anybody who hasn't made politics their specialism. An interest in government is a fetish for three-line whips.

Political office is granted in recognition of a complete lack of empathy for the proles that a prospective MP has spent their whole life exploiting. Our ministers should be selected from a pool of wealthy elites, who have no concept of life without a trust fund and the advantages of nepotism. The benches of parliament should reflect the people who helped win those seats: the wealthy donors.

Pretending that political parties are given an equal campaigning platform, and that we don't have a two party system, is a hilarious prank that's being played on the electorate. Who could possibly compete with the big two parties, who hoover up so much political donation money? If you're looking to buy yourself a peerage, are you going to waste your hard-earned cash on a party that stands no chance of winning a majority? What a joke!

The top three manifesto promises of the Tories are: plutocracy, plutocracy and plutocracy. Crush the proles. Smash their unions. Keep them insecure and divided. Oh, what a glorious thing, to see the landed gentry literally lording it over the riff raff.

Posh little girls and posh little boys grow up dreaming about the day when they'll get to destroy the welfare state and lower the living standards of ordinary people. "On yer bike!" the jumped up little twits shouted when they were youngsters, and now they're ushering in the Britain they always wanted: where the only fucking job you can get is being a Deliveroo takeaway food bicycle delivery rider.

We don't want anybody getting into politics, who has any idea what life's like for the vast majority of British citizens. We need people who live and breathe the Westminster bubble, to think about real issues, like where they're going skiing this year with their barrister chums.

- ALTERNATIVELY -

I know what it's like to claim benefits, be homeless, suffer mental illness and have to navigate an under-funded National Health Service. I know how digital transformation will affect every aspect of the world around us, and I've worked in education, retail, defence, financial services, security, transport, housing & construction and a host of other sectors too. 

I've studied the dismal science - economics - as well as starting several profitable businesses. I have in-depth knowledge of almost every tax we have: from income tax to capital gains tax; from Value-Added Tax (VAT) to corporation tax; from import duties to stamp duty. I understand trade deficits, fractional reserve banking, financial instruments and the national debt.

With a background in science and technology, I have a big-picture view that broadly encompasses every aspect of modern life. This is not stuff I've read about and only understand theoretically: I'm a practitioner and I have real-world hands-on experience. I have a worldview that starts in the subatomic realm of particle physics and finishes in the intergalactic universe of cosmology, with a geopolitical overview of terrestrial matters somewhere in-between those two extremes.

I'm not a specialist. I have no desire to study the minutiae of anything, like a stamp collector or a train spotter would, but instead I've gathered knowledge of how all the different component parts fit together. It's no co-incidence that I've been able to write game of life type software simulations: computer models.

Anybody involved in politics would benefit from being a generalist not a specialist. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's impossible to reconcile the competing views of thousands of specialists, because they all have a very narrow worldview. It's all very well being an expert in your field, but where's the balance?

If I was going to pick a bunch of people to run the country, they would be the fiction writers and the computer game designers. Without an enticing vision of the future, reactionary forces will drag us back into the dark ages. Without a working virtual world, how are you ever going to test your ideas, without your mistakes inflicting untold misery on real people?

As a prerequisite for becoming a minister, you should be able to build a thriving happy metropolis in Sim City and complete a game of Civilization through cultural influence, not war. If you're a failure in those virtual worlds how can you think you're even remotely qualified to wreak havoc on the lives of the electorate? We wouldn't turn you loose on the roads without a driving license.

All minsters and their children should attend state school and be treated by the National Health Service: you've gotta eat your own dog food. There should be a means test, that excludes wealthy families, trust fund babies and any nepotism: only a single generation of any family may enter into politics.

In fact, some of those who govern should be selected randomly, like jury service. Wanting to exercise any kind of power over your peers should be an automatic disqualification. The House of Commons should be balanced out with ordinary people, who have no interest in politics per se: it's the civic duty of every British citizen to muzzle the dangerous megalomaniacs.

Housing, transport, education, healthcare and a host of other essential services, are public services and as such, they should never be profitable. The state should have a monopoly on the things our citizens need. To allow a private firm to profit from our population's needs is a crime. The private sector is welcome to compete in the world of wants, but not needs. Simple economic theory will tell you that prices have upwardly inflationary pressure on things that you have to have: are you going to skip getting cured of that deadly disease, because it's too expensive?

Do you want to live in a world of zero-hours contract McJobs, insane house prices, stress, long hours, insecurity and indentured servitude, for the benefit of big business? That's what you're getting when you allow the country to be run by commercial interests.

We need to smash the plutocracy. We need to have dignity in labour. We need to be united, not divided by those who tell us that we're easily replaced and make us crawl over broken glass for a few mouldy crumbs. Inequality and the arrogance of the elites has reached unsustainable levels. We can't afford the rich any more.

If you think these are just the immature words of a bleeding-heart liberal who never grew up, and I don't understand the complexities of the world, I think you're being a mouthpiece of the elites when you say that it's not as simple as just dividing the wealth. It's easy to be an intellectual snob, because you believe you're destined for greatness. Just because it's not you, going with your cap in your hand to the mill owner to ask for a bowl of gruel, you could easily fall from grace at any moment. Just because you can't imagine what it's like to be poor and struggling, doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to the likes of you. Your fancy education and your expertise won't save you, when the working classes rise in anger and strike down the bourgeois rentier parasite class.

The irony of me writing this, while sipping champagne and looking out over the River Thames and the London skyline, from the balcony of my luxurious home, is not lost on me. The working-class heroes and self-made millionaires can be some of the most awful people. There's absolutely nothing humbling about rising up through the ranks and being successful; quite the opposite in fact.

I write as somebody who's been incredibly fortunate - getting propelled into a life of privilege and wealth - only to lose it all and have to rebuild from scratch. I write as somebody who knows that there's a fast track, as well as how hard it is to overcome prejudice and adversity. I write as somebody who can have delusions of grandeur as much as a sense of worthlessness. I know I'm flawed and I know I can fail, as much as I know how to succeed.

Worshipping power and status has led to layers of sycophantic courtiers, each one existing only to polish the egos of old men. Do you really want your whole country run, just so some exploitative megalomaniacs can be called Sir or Lord? Do you really think anybody deserves your respect, when they preside over the destruction of living standards in an epidemic of mental health issues, caused by the stressful modern life they created?

A central tenet of my desire for political influence, is my first-hand experience of depression, misery, exhaustion, stress and anxiety, which is an intolerable situation, created unnecessarily by unrestricted free-market capitalism. Are these the pillars that you want our working world built on? Should British citizens suffer as much as they do, just to have a crust of bread, a roof over their head and the hope of one day being able to pass on the suffering to the next generation? My answer is: no.

I don't necessarily believe that the state should own the means of production, but the workers should benefit most from the fruits of their labour. Wealth needs to be distributed, not concentrated in a few idle hands. Trickle down economics is a terrible lie.

I think that without social reform, eventually people will put down their tools and violently protest at their exploitation.

Obviously, I'm just a maniac up on my soapbox, shouting absolute nonsense, but who do you believe more: the wealthy elitist who tells you that everything's fine, or the person who's suffering at the hands of those elites?

Tags: #politics