Gissa job! I can do that. Go on, gissa job.’ Yosser Hughes, played brilliantly by the late Bernard Hill in Alan Bleasdale’s landmark BBC series Boys From The Blackstuff, came to epitomise the desperation of the unemployed in the early 1980s.
Yosser is the manic father-of-three who will go to any lengths to find work so he can feed his family. In episode one, he claims to be a bricklayer, even though he’d have more success laying eggs.
When he’s fired by the construction gangmaster, after building the world’s worst wall, he headbutts him. ‘You can’t sack me, I’m on the dole.’
Bleasdale’s superb screenplay has now been turned into a stage play. Patrick Marmion’s five-star review in the Mail inspired me to rewatch the original TV series, currently showing again on iPlayer.
It’s set on Merseyside in 1982, when UK unemployment hit three million, and follows the fortunes of a group of redundant men seeking gainful employment, not just to earn money but to regain their dignity and sense of purpose.
Yosser Hughes, played brilliantly by the late Bernard Hill in Alan Bleasdale’s landmark BBC series Boys From The Blackstuff, came to epitomise the desperation of the unemployed in the early 1980s
They all want legitimate full-time jobs but out of necessity are claiming the dole as well as being paid cash-in-hand for their casual labour, while being pursued by the Department of Employment’s in-house fraud squad — the so-called ‘sniffers’.
As a former labour and industrial correspondent who chronicled the rise in unemployment caused by the collapse of traditional heavy industry in the early Thatcher years — and covered the subsequent Militant Tendency terror in Liverpool — I can attest to the show’s authenticity. Not least the sharp Scouse gallows humour in adversity.
One glorious example: During confession, Yosser tells a priest: ‘I’m desperate, Father.’ The priest says: ‘Call me Dan.’
Yosser: ‘I’m desperate, Dan.’
I defy you not to laugh, even though there’s nothing remotely funny in Yosser’s plight.
But what’s most striking about the main characters is that while they’re all happy to claim the old rock ‘n’ roll, they’d much rather be working. Dignity of labour still counted for something back then.
Not so much today, with 9.2 million people in Britain classified as ‘economically inactive’, either not working or not looking for work.
The problem is most acute among the three million 16 to 64-year-olds who are content to stay at home living on an assortment of enhanced ‘disability’ or ‘stress-related’ benefits. Half of them are said to be suffering from ‘mental health issues’.
While many are undoubtedly afflicted with serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, the rest have been signed off with varying levels of ‘anxiety’, which can range from being a bit fed up to a congenital aversion to getting out of bed in the morning.
The medicalisation of every single reason, real or imagined, behind some people’s reluctance to go out and earn a living is a national scandal.
Politicians would rather pay people to do nothing than be accused of heartlessness. Labour’s solution is to hire more counsellors and therapists.
If anyone ever suffered from genuine Mental Elf issues, it was Yosser Hughes, a full-on, ocean-going, ‘you’ll-never-take-me-alive, copper’ headbanger. But he wasn’t prepared to be a permanent benefits supplicant, sitting at home all day feeling sorry for himself and stuffing his face with Hobnobs in front of Bargain Hunt — or the test card on BBC2, as it would have been back then.
Yet on Yosser’s Merseyside, and in other major cities such as Newcastle, around a quarter of the working age population is now classed as economically inactive.
Idleness has become institutionalised in Britain, especially since Covid, with the explosion — if that’s the right word — of ‘Working From Home’. Explosion implies something dynamic. WFH is more of a damp squib.
Only yesterday, it was reported that WFH has led to an increase in traffic jams, which would be surprising given that few bother going into the office more than two or three days a week. But it might explain why I can never find a parking space outside the barber’s because of the number of people in the suburbs ‘working from Starbucks’ over a skinny cinnamon latte.
WFH is one thing, but economic inactivity is the more pressing problem, which politicians of all stripes seem reluctant to address in the run-up to the General Election, even though it goes to the heart of our immigration crisis.
Yes, we need foreign workers to support essential services such as the care sector. But only because migrants are prepared to take jobs which British citizens are unable or unwilling to accept.
when the Blackstuff was first aired, you’d find local men who had recently lost their jobs hanging around on street corners at the crack of dawn, waiting to be picked up by gangmasters offering casual shifts on construction sites.
Today, those jobs are all being filled by migrants while the locals lie in bed, courtesy of the DHSS.
The ‘sniffers’ are too busy chasing Bulgarian fraudsters to bother with redundant brickies being paid cash-in-hand while also receiving welfare cheques.
In the 1980s, Labour and the unions were big on the right to work. So were the hard-Left, such as the Workers Revolutionary Party, before they discovered anti-Semitism. (Back then, the Blackstuff’s Chrissie, played by the great Michael Angelis, thought the WRP were World War II air raid wardens in tin helmets.)
There were several attempts in the 1980s to revive the famous 1936 Jarrow March for jobs during the Great Depression. Today the Left seems more keen on the right not to go to work.
These days the Jarrow Marchers would be Marching From Home.
Yet there’s no shortage of honest work available, with around a million vacancies going begging, especially in the struggling hospitality industry.
Yosser Hughes wouldn’t have turned up his nose at a job in catering, even though he’d have to be restrained from nutting the maitre’d after being fired for tipping soup in yet another customer’s lap.
Sadly, though, about the last thing you’ll hear in Sicknote Britain today is: ‘Gissa job!’
Diane Abbott will contest Hackney as a Labour candidate, although I doubt it has anything to do with this column’s support for her. One thing I did notice, however, was that she had the Labour whip restored after completing a two-hour, online anti-Semitism course.
Two hours, online? Hardly enough time to compress millennia of the oldest hatred. In fact, it’s half the time you need to finish a speeding awareness course, which gives you some idea of how seriously Labour takes anti-Semitism. You have two hours starting from now. Failure will result in three points on your driving licence. Enough, already.
Traditional nursery rhymes are on the way out
Traditional nursery rhymes are on the way out, according to a new report, as young children reject Ba Ba Black Sheep and Three Blind Mice in favour of hip-hop and hard-core rap.
How long before the BBC, in an attempt to get down wiv da kidz, launches Listen With Mother****er?
The offending poster
The Tories must be getting desperate. Iain Duncan Smith is to chair a debate at Woodford Rugby Club in Essex on June 26. It’s billed as a ‘Menopause Awareness Event’.
So that’s what they mean by a ‘change’ election.