Scoop-kick Nick 30 Ans out of London

By the Marquis

I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. That I have managed to drag myself out of bed, let alone put pen to paper, that I have managed to lift my head above the black cloud that has hung over this illbegotten week, is no small miracle.

James Price, the oldest ever president of the Oxford Union, and Net Contributor to the ‘Mythoyookay’ page, has left London. Elvis has left the building. His open letter broke my heart in two places. One, for his poor Cocker Spaniel, Tennyson, who, “despite his floppy fringe and persistent happy trot,” has been spat on and scoop-kicked high over the Gaumont State Theatre by roaming bands of faredodgers. And two, because he spends the bulk of it besmirching the reputation of my beloved home, Kilburn. For those unfamiliar, Kilburn represents the western frontier of what I would consider North London-proper; the long, low corridors of yellowish brick, between which my whole life has unfolded, begin here and roll on until they meet the Grand Union Canal again at De Beauvoir Town. With the arcade that starts at Kilburn, facing south, the Arabs sketch a long, unbending stroke, slipping under the curve of the Westway and coming to its end at Speakers Corner, where the Edgware Road opens like a crown of fronds bursting from the straight line of a palm tree.

Among the James Prices of this world, this neck of the woods is a frequent subject of ire, being one of the parts of London most visibly changed by the ‘Boriswave.’ Its inhabitants are largely recent arrivals like Syrians and Afghans who, unlike Pakistanis and Caribbeans, are not well-established stock characters in the narrative of British Multiculturalism, so can be picked on without jeopardizing one’s job prospects with the Adam Smith Institute. It is not, let it be said, a bad place for a young person to live. My rent is no higher than what I know friends of mine further out pay for the same amount of space. It is one of few places in London where, thanks to the Dar Al-Islam, I can decide I cannot sleep at 2 o’clock in the morning and will find no shortage of cafes still keeping the lights on - in which, by virtue of my being a foreigner, I am afforded a degree of privacy that the Irish pubs do not.

The other upside of this is that, because the highstreet is still busy much later into the night than most of the city, the muggings and phonesnatchings that I notice are more frequent in the nearby Westbourne Park area do not seem so common; a couple of the shopkeepers have told me that ‘making the neighbourhood safer’ (I have not repeated the explicitly racist terms this was phrased in) is the private reason they stay open as late as they do. Since they do not sell alcohol, I cannot imagine whatever money they make between 11pm and 3am would otherwise justify those hours. With some notable exceptions, crime generally takes the same form it does among Turks and Albanians; a dignified, relatively self-contained affair that the general populace most often encounters in the form of untaxed tobacco and discounted drinks at restaurants that, because they are fronts for money laundering, do not need to turn a profit (Kilburn can boast what, to my knowledge, is London’s only Campari spritz under £4.) At the risk of this piece becoming some rambling Mamdani-esque list of all the various ethnic food vendors I regularly ‘dap up,’ I will close this section here, and turn my attention to the matter at hand.

Price’s letter, a long whinge detailing the various horrors he found himself affronted by streets away from my front door - the Hamas Hate Marches, drug addicts at the Tube station, the homeless under the rail bridge - forms only one more installment in a now annoyingly long-lived canard on the British Right: that of the long-suffering “young” (late 30s) professional: the backbone of the British economy, that kicked-and-spat-on house pet, ‘Nicholas 30 ans.’ (As a side note, there is one particularly galling moment in the letter, in which Price expresses his genuine surprise that Ben Judah, cited as the author of a book on the conditions of London’s working poor, written living undercover in hostels among Eastern European labourers, is in fact a man of the Left and not ‘one of ours’ - why a writer obviously very sensitive to the plight of the downtrodden has not come around to the side of men like Price, who film homeless encampments on their phones to send to the police, is no great mystery.) The ‘Nicholas 30 ans’ thesis - that professionals pay a high rate of tax, which, by way of state pensions and social housing, funds the lifestyles of demographics who represent a net drain on public finances - is, strangely, an unknowing attempt at a Marxist position, in so far as it frames political disputes around the competing material interests of classes defined by their relation to property. But sadly the authors of this thesis, who seem to have had their political formation in the Peep Show Quotes Facebook group, did not share in the fine, Trotskyite upbringing of men such as myself and Peter Hitchens - theirs’ is a half-baked vulgar analysis, and a self-serving lie. Nicholas 30 ans is not a ‘net contributor.’

The total market value of the British software development sector in 2023 stood at £43.35 billion - the public sector spend on software contracts for the same year was £26 billion. Public sector procurement accounts for up to 25% of the consultancy industry’s UK revenues, and higher for the ‘Big Four.’ Capita, the largest professional services provider in the country, reported 47% of its income came from government contracts in 2016. Per the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts’ report, the percentage of larger procurement contracts that are given on a framework model - that is, where pre-approved suppliers are awarded contracts without open competition - sat at 68% in 2021.

The knock-on effect this has is obvious; if my firm makes a quarter of its income from government contracts, and similar statistics apply to the business clients that pay the remaining three quarters of my invoices, the real measure of my dependance is far greater than 25%. The professional class in this country would not survive without the billions and billions in taxpayer money which is spent on them every year; on management consultants who produce ‘Action Plans’ for the Civil Service, and on data engineers who produce various bespoke Portals and Progress Trackers in which Zoom meetings are duly Logged: these make up the wages of Nicholas 30 ans. By my fag packet maths, around six tenths of the British software industry’s income in 2023 came from government procurement contracts - if you work in that sector and paid any less than that proportion in tax that year, chances are your account is firmly in the red.

You are not a ‘Net Contributor.’ You are on Benefits Street. You are on the Dole. The red arrow, pointing away from Nick toward HMRC, while large, is not quite so large as the green arrow heading back in his direction, returning from HMRC by way of KPMG. His position in the economy is not unlike that of the Somali family in Zone 1 social housing that these greedy interlopers on the British Right feel themselves so shortchanged by; Nick and ‘Karim’ both live off of the profligacy of the British government, and would both be made much, much worse off by the same rationalisation of state and economy that would leave the rest of the country richer and happier. When Mr. Price recounts the story of when, at my very own Kilburn Station, he was shrugged off by a TfL employee after demanding some poor homeless man be arrested for jumping the barrier, I can only reflect that the RMT Union still make ‘em like they used to. This hardworking man had obviously been well schooled enough in the Immortal Science to, upon making some reasonable assumptions as to the class James belonged to, see this episode for what it was; a squabble between two scrounger lumpenproles, which it would be no more fruitful to intervene in than it would be to insert oneself into a screaming match between two crack addicts fighting over a cup of change.

The continued existence of Work from Home (I will keep my comments on this brief, having been beaten to the punch already in these papers) long after the end of the lockdown is in no small part a product of this same system of procurement. The cost to the government of the average private sector consultant is three times that of the civil servant he works alongside - the inflated profit margins on those contracts allow a firm to overlook the fact that its ‘hybrid’ workers are being compensated for an eight-hour day they spent most of pottering about the house between Zoom meetings; in effect, Work from Home is the redistribution of profits to one’s employees in the form of free time.

I am not, as the hideous men oinking in the replies under J’accuse’s last piece on this topic might fear, demanding they be made to come into the office and do their jobs. The benefit of Work from Home to the employee is obvious - out of sight of your employer, there is no need to ‘look busy,’ no need to achieve any more in a day than one would be reprimanded for having left undone; that this arrangement is possible is proof enough to me that these jobs, at least as full time positions, are superfluous. On this basis, I see no reason why legions of Work from Home warriors should be frogmarched into their cubicles to sit around not knowing what to do with their hands, so freshly unknotted from their genitals. Labour is a national resource, like natural gas or rare earth minerals, and it cannot be squandered paying people to do nothing. I here briefly outline an alternative approach by which the state might guarantee this - I petition that this be added to J’accuse’s running list of demands.

Under the NSDAP’s Four Year Plan, German firms were prevented from paying out dividends to their shareholders exceeding 6% of their book capital; any excess profit had to be spent either on government bonds, or reinvested in a manner that expanded the firm’s productive capacity. I am not invoking the Nazi party for the sake of scandal, but because, in its broad strokes, Mr Hitler’s economic program already resembles that of the British state since 1997: the privatization of state assets, coupled with a high degree of government investment and intervention in the private sector - the key difference being that, while Germany was able to wield this to facilitate rearmament and economic renewal, we have seen no such returns. Regarding the dividend cap, an equivalent can be done in Britain today, treating ‘excess labour’ in the same manner, with sanctions enforced via a system not dissimilar to the ESG rating assessments currently in place (See also, ‘Financialising Remigration.’) A company that does not meet certain basic standards for productivity, like not paying people to masturbate, will not be eligible for government contracts, and will face punitively high borrowing rates. It will cost you more to keep around your Work from Home Upper-Junior Project Leader and his big shiny 2:1 in Sports Management than it will to send him on his merry way, off on his “persistent happy trot.” Nobody who works for a company that expects any work from the government whatsoever, on the payroll of the British people, will leave the office before 8pm on a Friday; where a team of 20 people is accomplishing what could feasibly be done by four people working harder, 16 people will be fired.

This is an interim measure to restore the ability of the state to enact its policy goals, prior to the fulfillment of more costly, longer-term, more ambitious civil service reforms, by insisting the money it already spends is used for the public good. It may also, I hope, massively shrink the size of the professional class and land Nicholas 30 ans at the Job Centre. The intent is not to punish him, but to abolish the possibility of his existence by good stewardship of the economy - he is a little fatty growth that has built up around the sides of the arteries of Capital, and we shall excise him with a scalpel’s precision.