Chapter 5: The Inevitability of Modern Crapitalism: Fuck You, SleazyJet and Go Swivel, Milton
Wake up Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you
Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
The second alarm is the ideal one to haul your carcass out of bed to. What’s less than ideal is when the AI spy in your smart alarm clock informs you (thanks to its greedy siphoning of your emails) that your flight is cancelled. I was supposed to be leaving in the afternoon, post-barbering and pre-flight inebriation. My assignment to find the working-class dream was set to be stillborn thanks to the nasty mantra baked into modern capitalism that all is personal responsibility. I would have to fix Greasyjet’s failure to sort my flight. When all is bargain basement, nothing is actual service. SleazyJet is one rung of the shit encrusted ladder of modern flying above Ryanair, with its bright yellow hellscape interior and dive bomber landings at obscure airports. I recall a trip to Brussels, my first if memory serves, in which “Brussels South” was actually Charleroi, at the opposite end of the country. This was in the early days of printed boarding passes and recycled jets; O’Leary was still fucking with the variables in his emmiserating travel equation. The cocksucker took Milton Friedman’s contention not only to heart, but to bed. Stack ‘em high and keep ‘em cheap. Keep everything cheap. That meant pilots executing take-offs and landings like the Luftwaffe were bearing down on the airport, and the passengers were the last Jews to escape the coming ghetto. In this fourth Reich, the O’Learys of the world have shifted their punitive actions from race to wages, ensuring unions and any other tool of collective bargaining are nowhere near their high altitude concentration camps. On Ryanair, you’re trapped, subjected to the advertising equivalent of Cyclon B and the camp guards are miserable as they push overpriced snacks past your nose, which is barely an inch from the seat in front. The only saving grace is that the inmate in front can’t recline.
The reality of travel in this foul year of our lord, 2025, is that all is on you. Gone are the travel agents, customer services and any sort of intermediary that would rebook, reschedule or process a refund. Instead, the prices rise and the service falls, such is the capitalist seesaw. Good luck hoping an elected representative will do anything about it, especially when they rely more on the Monopoly Man’s shilling than your endorsement. Hayek’s bible is required reading if you want to understand just exactly how we, the consumer, are being fucked with no lube or passion. The gospel of All for Self and Fuck Everyone Else guided my fingers as they scrambled to rebook flights, inform the hotel I’d be late by a day and get Scuba, my non-attorney friend, updated on the progress. Prices rise, service falls, and all the while, Friedman’s mantra of shareholder value uber alles makes every cunt sick, tired, angry and poorer. Let them eat £9 pot noodles at forty thousand feet, so sayeth the corporate Marie Antoinette.
Eventually, I jumped ship to Jet2, Easyjet promising to refund me sometime before the Rapture. Why is it that the founders of these airlines have eminently punchable faces? Who could blame you if, say, on one idle Tuesday night, you were to be too late braking if you saw either Stelios or O’Leary crossing the road? Naturally, you’d want to reverse to see what you hit and if your suspension ripples over something, who could blame you for wheel spinning away?
I lay in my air-conditioned shelf, on the roughspun sheets, a billion floors up with a view of the concrete carnage of Benidorm’s architecture, thinking back those long few days to that hiccup, the loss of a day of my holiday. The entire process was as friction-free as skidding down a cactus-lined chute. More painful, too. The apotheosis of capitalism, its high-water mark, is the modern airport. All scams exist on this plane of consumer existence. Glasgow Airport charged my lift to the airport £6 to drop me off, a process that took less than two minutes. £3 per minute to have a car idling in a grim concrete mausoleum, built to commemorate the memory of joyous travel. What a joke, almost as perverse as John ‘Smeeto’ Smeaton thinking his banjoing of Al Qaeda’s least competent operative outside Glasgow Airport would spin off to a successful career in anything. The former luggage ruiner was king for a day, but baggage slinger for life. And that whole episode provides another window into the handwringing of disaster capitalism. Vultures in Monopoly top hats waiting to find more reasons to swoop down and tear cash from the carcass of your bank account. All in the name of security. Why charm the pennies out my purse when you can frighten pounds out instead? Inside the terminal, if you want something approaching humanity, better get that bank card back out, because the cunts aren’t done with you. Perhaps that’s what is enraging the poolside this horrendously hot Wednesday afternoon? Fuck, that’s another thing capitalism is dicking; how many hottest summers in a row do we need to have before folk will stop denying the slow-cooked future we’re melting into?
But, ach, fuck it. Beer O’Clock.
“The thing is, see, Maggie had the right idea,” said English Steve to some massively rotund Londoner. “Yeah, I mean, darn sarf (down south), we get it. You know, you’re one of the first norvennurs (Northerners) that gets it,” said Pavarotti’s stunt double. By now, I had drunk eight beers and slid into bloody mary mode. Tabasco, pepper and Worcester Sauce. And fuckin hunners a’ vodka.
“How’s the tap water down your way, then, mate?” I stressed the mate, infused it with as much unfriendliness as I could. Perhaps it was the cholesterol in his veins, numbing his neurons, or maybe it was just that stock ignorance of all things north of Watford these wankers hold in reserve for us Barbarians, but Jabba the Pundit was oblivious.
“What abaaat (about) the wowta (water)?”
“How are the bills? Have the rising prices got the shite out the rivers yet?” I asked, no reasonability whatsoever.
“What you trying to say?”
I looked back at him, over my shades. “Maggie had the right idea. Aye, if ye like yer water full of shite and costing treble what it should, then aye, mate, she was fuckin spot on.”
Finally, he sensed I wasn’t trying to be his friend. I mean, why would I? The cunt looked like he ate everything in arm’s reach.
“Thatcher was the best thing to happen to this country!” He said.
Margaret Thatcher
“For (£)3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan personally.”
“What Country? Aye, tell that to your kids, as they can’t afford to buy a house cos you cunts keep property prices jacked up, whilst cancer creeps in to become the number one source of bankruptcy in the UK since you adore the free market so much that there’s no NHS. I would say jog on, but the only exercise you get is flexing your jaw, so fuck off and enjoy yer shitey tap water!”
For a split second, I thought he was going to go for me. His jellied eyes were illuminated with rage. I sat relaxed, comfortable in my drinking slippers, zero fucks given, just staring back. I could run away if he got physical, I mean, the only thing this fat fuck has ever caught was a cold. I gazed at him, and he turned on his chunky heel, just saying a parting, “fuck you, pal”.
I blew him a wee kiss and said, “Enjoy swimming with the turds when ye get home!” and got back to the bloody marys. I had three lined up. I could feel English Steve staring at me, that stroke victim mouth of his getting ready to issue a riposte. But nothing came. Snipes returned from the bar with more drinks, a massive grin on his chops, “How to win friends and influence people, eh?” he said, putting the drinks down, “and Thatcher was a cunt,” he said to Steve. This seemed to activate English Steve’s screensaver mode. As you find with a great deal of people of dogmatic conviction, there’s seldom much behind it beyond their own atavistic, emotional needs. For the love of god, give me someone of a sound and solid Conservative mind to talk to, someone who knows who Edmund Burke or Roger Scruton was. Fuck give me some cunt who actually knows that they peddle Milton Friedman’s insanely stupid ideas while shuffling through the wreckage those ideas wrought. But no. No dice. The great white conservative whale who was just loitering, condescending to English Steve on their shared appreciation of one Mrs. M. Milksnatcher (Finchley), before being harpooned with something approaching sense, well, what did he really know? I have written extensively about Thatcher (see here), and at every turn when confronted by a fan boi, it’s the same feels over reals schtick they trot out, invariably resting upon, ‘yeah, but my parents could own their own council house’. The idea that we could all become landowners means that we all start seeking rents and exploiting an asset that is no longer available to the next generation. Rebirthing Feudalism as micro-Feudalism, calling it progress and ‘amazing’, then not bothering your arse about the fact your kids and grandkids are digital serfs, owning nothing and able to access little, is about the least ethically sound and morally ambominable thing I’ve come across, short of what Saville or Ian Watkins got up to with kids. And with the kids there is, horribly to say, the argument that it wasn’t a whole country these monsters were fucking.
Snipes dipped in and out of the pool, throwing chat towards anything with a cervix, whilst I got increasingly spangled by the pool bar. The last bloody mary count was in the high twenties, and I was feeling the sluggish tug of sleep. It was early afternoon, and I opted to skip lunch and nap. Scuba was out doing whatever it is that Belgians do when they’re alone. I thought of him now, this mad bastard from Flanders. He had conducted his entire holiday in English, not skipping a beat and speaking in that zero fucks given manner of his. But so far, he had been the ballast on this trip, keeping things on an even keel. I had been the social hand grenade, even when he was totally bollocksed and I was not too bad. What was this, day four? Or five? I’d lost count and partially control of things. I dozed for an hour, then sprang to life and began to punch words into my Chromebook; this thing you’re reading now. This holiday/assignment was fucking draining me. I was here to journey to the heart of the working-class dream and to discover things. Instead, all I was finding was the excesses of a lack of thought at every turn. A kind of concentrated nihilism leaking from the mouths of every intergenerational, YOLO-inspired punter by the pool. Time to do a root-cause analysis. This would need bevvy and a sounding board.
On my way down to find Scuba, using the 90’s method of looking rather than texting like some anxiety-riddled control freak, I encountered one actual point of humanity in the trip. Pirate P, a fellow Scotsman from the west coast (best coast) of Escocia. He was with his wife, Mrs P, started their journey here in Australia. The origin of his name shall become clear, but for now, it wasn’t his sobriquet that interested me; it was that, between him and his good lady wife, there was a real narrative of working-class progress and aspiration that wasn’t rooted in a where’s ma next tattoo comin fae kinda way. I was surprisingly sharp for someone who had skelped more than a litre of vodka only hours earlier. As I stood at the inside bar, luxuriating under the AC, he tapped my shoulder, “fuckin hell, big man, yer alive!”
The sun was still terrorising the concrete outside, and Pirate P was in for some of that sweet AC too. Plus, the queue at the pool bar had gotten ridiculous. I looked out at it through the glass wall and saw the bulk of the Poolside Maggie Fan Club, waiting in line, this barely mobile postcode of a man. Pirate P followed my gaze, “Yer no subtle, are ye, pal?”
I shook my head, “Do you reckon he’s travel insurance? His premium must look like a Euromillions win. 8/1 odds the all-inclusive finishes the cunt off.”
“Ooft, harsh,” said Pirate P.
We sat and talked all things life, of how he and his wife decamped to Australia in search of something different, uprooting kids and an established life, chasing a higher quality of living and a more secure future for their progeny and of how now they had reached a crossroads.
“I wouldnae mind coming back here, I mean we’ve looked at hooses, but herself isnae so keen,” he confided. Crossroads indeed. They had been teenage sweethearts, together all this time, successful in their endeavours and experienced in both old and new worlds, with a healthy take on things. After the Reform Party Conference I had suffered through in my time here, this was refreshing just to talk to a normal fucking human being with relatable experiences and thoughts. He had a collection of Dostoevsky’s short stories under his arm, and I turned our chat to, “How come every cunt in his books has about twenty names?”
Could I have the same conversation with the calorie blackhole at the pool bar? Or even Snipes? Would English Steve countenance this chat? Scuba was more than able for this type of conversation, but what of the hood-eyed coke fiends out there, talking about fornurz not integrating, whilst only knowing how to order booze in their own language? My father often told me stories of how, when he served his time as an apprentice, it was normal for apprentices to be made to read classic books aloud to others as they worked—the 60s equivalent of an audiobook. I was wary of rose-tinted specs views of the past, of a yesteryear were kids respected their elders and politicians weren’t corrupt. No such past existed. But back in the day, there were good things—boating ponds in parks, tidier streets, open libraries and way fewer potholes. The traditions my father referred to were of big companies with massive workforces spawning their own communities. Throughout these places, knowledge, mobility and solidarity were emphasised way more. Learning wasn’t as scorned as it is now. How many people back then went shopping as a leisure pursuit? How many of these dead-eyed, beer-soaked suvvenurz (southerners) by the pool had even read a book in the last year? Some polls put the number between 40-50% of Brits haven’t read a book in the previous year.
“Education is a thing that isn’t always pushed, especially if the teachers think ye aren’t likely to listen,” said Pirate P, “for me, it’s something I done myself, but I do wish there had been teachers out there able to get through to younger me, you know what I mean?”
I nodded, inwardly happy I had lucked out in this regard. “The growth of private education, free market everything, that’s just part of this push to make everything bargain basement, to make a stratified society of rigid class,” I said, sipping my new bloody mary, coughing at the excess pepper, then musing, “education as a paid-for service, how fucking perverse. Folk need to see these things, healthcare included, as an investment, not an expense.”
We cheersed to that. Later, Scuba came down from whatever Belgian hidey-hole he was in.
“I think we should eat outside of the hotel tonight. I’m getting too bloated eating at the buffet upstairs. We still need to go check out the old town,” he said. I shrugged, hammered my cocktail, offering him my empty glass, “Your round.”
“But it’s all inclusive,” he said.
“Exactly, now make yourself useful, mate”
I could tell in his eyes he was bracing himself for what was coming next. It was going to be another long night for my long-suffering Belgian pal.
Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5