Phil BC: “Scandals of a public procurement character inevitably raise the grinning ghoul of ‘taxpayers’ money’ to underline how out of order and egregious the wrongdoing is. After all, it’s our money Tory ministers, top civil servants, and their mates are filling their champagne baths with. … But it is a phrase the left shouldn’t just avoid, but purge from its own agitation and critique its use in everyday politics. … How is the taxpayer constructed within the political imaginary? It is a location, if not a subject position, that is purely atomised save the contributions it is compelled to make to the state. … It appears extractive. … Thatcher’s genius lay in reconstituting the permitted political units of her assault on British society along a series of linked but formally independent micro or partial subjectivities — the owner-occupier, the small shareholder, the consumer and, of course, the taxpayer and all, coincidentally, are defined by their relationship to money. … In the case of the taxpayer, Thatcher’s efforts were aimed at promoting the reduction of the tax bill as the defining criterion of public service… [T]he atomised taxpayer were pointed to their neighbours, the family down the road, the guys thrown out of work, the single mums, the travellers, a whole pantheon of the undeserving poor in other words and told they were paying for them, their fecklessness and failures, and their laziness and layabout lifestyles. … It’s not just the wrong way of looking at politics, it’s their way of looking at politics. Our class interests lie in multiplying points of contact and building solidarities along them: privileging the taxpayer, whether by right or (nominally) left wing politicians is a fundamental barrier to that.“
18 April 2021