Work-shy Britain is in the throes of an existential crisis

The minicab firm on which I have relied for years – one of the largest in north London – is now unable to provide me with rides home from evening events. Because I know them well, I asked them frankly what the problem was.

The controller explained that they now had only four or five drivers who were prepared to work after 5.30pm, and even those, he said, were “very picky” about the jobs they would take. This is not, I gather, an unusual problem and the scarcity is not confined to drivers.

A good many shops and hospitality venues are now desperately seeking staff. Teenage school pupils have never found it so easy to get weekend work in places that would once have hired adults full-time. But there are apparently fewer and fewer adults who want full-time employment.

Job vacancies are at record levels: there are more of them than there are unemployed people. Of course, there may be reasons why many of the unemployed might not be suitable for the jobs that are available. But it is odd that those who are already working as, say, minicab drivers, should be unwilling to take on the hours that they would once have regarded as normal.

In spite of the fact that everybody is supposed to be terrified by “apocalyptic” price increases in the necessities of life, hardly anybody appears to think that earning more – even when those extra earnings are on open offer – might be a good idea.

Has that bizarre hiatus in which economic reality was suspended – when people were paid not to work, and staying at home became a virtue – reconfigured public consciousness in an irreversible way?

Is this the new moral consensus: do people actually believe that they have a right to work only as much as they like, and that the Government will find the means to make that idyll sustainable for ever?

There is something very big at stake here. It is to do with the role that work plays in individual lives and in the wider society.

There was a time when what you did for a living was about something more than simply the money you earned. It was one of the things that gave a sense of personal identity, purpose and context to your life. Children were asked what they “wanted to be” when they grew up because that was thought to be one of the key sources of a sense of self.

You may be thinking that this was just a middle-class indulgence: that only those from affluent, educated families had the luxury of choosing an occupation. But working-class life also conferred a strong sense of shared identity through work: the brotherhood of coal miners and the shipbuilders of the Clyde made that very clear when their industries were being shut down.

The desolation that followed in their communities was beyond recovery. Note: to any adolescent Leftist who thinks that this glorification of the work ethic was just a capitalist conspiracy to keep down an exploited workforce, I would point out that Marxism venerated workers and saw their labour as the moral foundation of social life.

This new thing is sold as a great rebalancing – a progressive settlement in which the value of home and family become more important than the job you do. It is gain, not loss. Personal relationships must take precedence over what should now be regarded as simply a way to pay for domestic needs.

But what is it that is being downgraded here? Family life in a modern society is rightly private, closed off in its intimacy and emotional intensity from the wider society.

“Going out to work” isn’t just an entry into grown-up responsibility and financial independence: it is the normal way for all those self-contained households to encounter one another in real face-to-face contact. Working from home is an attenuated version of this: a way of avoiding spontaneous, live connections, which you cannot control or anticipate, with people you do not necessarily know or understand.

For the life of me, I cannot see this attitude – which lays such stress on “wellbeing” – as healthy and liberating. It looks to me more like a fearful retreat from the great world of possibilities that lie beyond your own door: a world full of challenging unknowns and fresh perspectives, which might shake the comfortable assumptions that you can maintain so easily at home.

If this is true then the next question must be: what is making everybody so frightened that they are retreating into their caves and shunning the sorts of contact that were once a welcome enlargement of everyday life? Did the Great Covid Plague, which the public authorities imbued with diabolical powers, plunge us into a neurotic anxiety which cannot now be overcome?

Perhaps. But I suspect that the pandemic played into a greater historical fragility – one of those moments when a peculiar string of events contrive to produce a wave of existential terror.

The first seminal trauma of this century occurred at its very beginning. The attack on the New York World Trade Centre was a shock heard around the world.

The evil audacity of it, caught live on television, was almost literally unbelievable and it shook the confidence of the democratic West like nothing in living memory. For a good while it looked as if Islamic fundamentalism might undermine liberal values. But it didn’t.

Then there was the financial crash of 2008 from which a good many reasonable authorities thought the free market economies might never recover. But they did. Then there was Covid, which looked for a while as if it could mutate for ever into endless unbeatable forms. But it hasn’t. Now there is a horrendous war in Europe, which seems as if it will never end. But it will.

The greatest danger does not come from any of these particular events but from the insidious endemic fear that makes people so insecure and helpless that they retreat from life and all its unexpected adventures.

Obsessed by ‘wellbeing’ and home working, society is retreating from an age-old belief that what you did for a living was a mark of identity

There is something very big at stake here. It is to do with the role that work plays in individual lives and society