Britannia Really Unchained: The Burnout Cult of Work Conceals a Jealousy Against Pleasure

Graham Williamson looks at the historic rhetoric against ‘idlers’ and ‘slackers’ and how it suggests a deep sense of futility in the Conservative philosophy of relentless ambition

One of the underlying biases of modern Conservatism is a hostility towards non-work in all its forms. It’s there in familiar Tory stances like the opposition to those who stop working to strike, and the disdain for welfare. It can explain otherwise baffling policy decisions like Rishi Sunak’s obsession with increased maths education; STEM subjects are perceived as resulting in greater employment, and are therefore to be favoured over the humanities. 

It is there, infamously, in the Britannia Unchained manifesto, whose co-authors include Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, which described the British as “among the worst idlers in the world”. 

Question these attitudes and you’ll swiftly be told that these are hard times, and Britain needs to get back to work. You may remember that Britain needed to get back to work after lockdown restrictions were lifted, as well as after Brexit, during austerity, after the 2008 financial crash, and on, and on. And you might ask, at what point does all this hard work start paying off? How much work is enough?

Back in the 1930s Bertrand Russell had an answer for this: about four hours a day. This was the ideal working day proposed in his 1932 essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’. For all its intentionally provocative title and tongue-in-cheek introduction, Russell’s essay has a serious point to make: "immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous".

Russell was writing less than thirty years after Max Weber first proposed the idea that capitalism was underpinned by a “Protestant work ethic”, a view of history that was heavily challenged in Weber’s time but remains familiar and passively accepted today. As a result, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ contains much that still rings true. During World War I, Russell notes, large parts of the workforce were taken away for the war effort. Yet domestic industry and infrastructure kept running, suggesting that:

"If, at the end of the war, the scientific organisation which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munitions work had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why?"

The answer, in Russell's view, is because work is seen as virtuous. Not just necessary work, not just difficult work, but all work - and the more you work, the more virtuous you become. Weber’s belief in the religious underpinnings of capitalism had created a cult of work.

Two years before Russell published ‘In Praise of Idleness’, John Maynard Keynes wrote ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. Published in his collection Essays in Persuasion, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ imagines a future one hundred years hence where, as the book’s preface states, “the Economic Problem would take the back seat where it belongs” and people could devote themselves to more fulfilling pursuits. The only risk, he predicted, was that people “have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy”.

When, I wondered, did this idealism give way to the cult of work, and the demonisation of those who rejected it?

The idea that nobody actually likes work, and that we would, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, prefer not to do it, was commonplace during my adolescence in the 1990s. Back then, the young were dubbed ‘slackers’, a term popularised by Richard Linklater’s debut film. The slackers were the ‘quiet quitters’ of their day, adopting low-effort grunge fashion and spurning the previous decade's obsession with wealth and upward mobility.

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Pleasure and Defiance

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, the conversations about work became weirder. Entering the labour market in the 2000s, I was perplexed at how many job advertisements asked for someone who was ‘passionate’, with a ‘drive to succeed’. Are you devoted to the highest standards in sandwich making, or floor cleaning? No. Nobody is, but by this point the basic truth that people often do work they don't enjoy in order to earn money was becoming taboo.

The modern Conservative Party often harks back to World War II, and certainly there were those in the 1940s who looked upon leisure as sceptically as Sunak and Truss do today. The Spectator film critic Edgar Anstey was so appalled by a Humphrey Jennings-directed propaganda short showing people going out and enjoying themselves during the Blitz that he predicted "a disaster if this film is sent overseas". The Ministry of Information forced Jennings to add an introduction spoken by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation head Leonard Brockington to contextualise his film.

The problem, though, is that Anstey and Brockington were catastrophically out of touch with the ordinary Briton, and Jennings wasn’t. Upon its release in 1942, Jennings’s film Listen to Britain helped define the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’. Audiences recognised that the people shown going out to the pub or the music hall as the Luftwaffe’s bombs fell weren’t doing so because they were unpatriotic or unserious. It was a gesture of defiance.

For a while, aided by the introduction of a new, comprehensive welfare system after the war ended, this attitude remained in place. During the Cold War the availability of faster, cheaper, more luxurious products for workers was seen as proof of capitalism's moral superiority over communism. The work cult went into remission, and leisure was seen as a sign of a society's inherent decency. The microwave oven had defeated the salt mine. 

In August 2021 Iain Duncan Smith evoked the Blitz spirit in an attempt to lambast civil servants who chose to continue to work from home as Covid lockdown measures were eased. The change in context is telling: rather than win a war against a genocidal death cult, Britons were being encouraged to risk their lives for the sake of "our great city centres... restaurants, cafes, shops of all kinds". Rather than working to earn leisure, we were being asked to risk dying for business. 

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Workshy Scroungers

In their paper The Rhetoric of Recessions, Daniel McArthur and Aaron Reeves analyse centrist-to-right-wing British newspapers between 1896 and 2000 to see how descriptions of the poor and unemployed changed over the 20th century. They discovered that negative terms are deployed more frequently during times of economic crisis and mass unemployment. 

There are some significant cosmetic changes. Snobbish or strictly economic terms like ‘riff-raff’ or ‘pauper’ were incredibly popular during the early 20th century, before falling from use in favour of words like ‘feckless,’ ‘skiver’ or ‘workshy’. Rather than attack the poor for being poor, the modern terms spotlight the underclass’s perceived reluctance to work, which is positioned as their worst crime.

McArthur and Reeves find examples of negative coverage of the unemployed in most eras. “When the Great Depression hit”, they note, “parts of the press blamed ‘dole’ abusers for the country’s economic difficulties rather than speculators or financiers… in August 1931, The Daily Telegraph called on the government to ‘not be moved by the threatening invective of those who… [cry] “Hands off our dole”’. The government cut unemployment benefit by 10%.” (Note the commonality with modern right-wing rhetoric about students, environmental protesters, etc: the government is ‘threatened’ by the powerless)

Yet once the immediate crisis was over, this rhetoric became less common – up to a point. The really striking part of McArthur and Reeves's analysis comes in the 1990s, when unemployment levels were falling, and yet negative press stories about ‘workshy scroungers’ kept rising and rising, untethered to any short-term political goal. McArthur and Reeves describe this rhetoric in the 1970s as disrupting the post-WWII consensus on the welfare state. By the 2000s, it had become part of the press’s regular repertoire. 

In other words, my observations about my youth were correct: some time around the turn of the millennium, we really did start talking very strangely about work and not working. Twenty years on and it’s only got stranger. The phenomenon of people wanting actual time off from work has resulted in labels like ‘Great Resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ (the latter of which, as far as I can tell, refers to people who do the hours of work they’re contracted to). 

Like any argument, the case for work has not been strengthened by a lack of challenge. Indeed, the normal justifications for hard work collapse against even the gentlest touch of reality. The old bromides – that hard work pays off, that it earns you a living and that your job is who you are – are increasingly not the case. The richest people either do no work or no useful work, and levels of in-work poverty are soaring. 

As for tying your identity to your job, what is a twenty-something hopping from zero hours contract to zero hours contract supposed to make of that? In the face of the modern labour market, this quasi-mystical view of work as your soul's purpose looks like a recipe for mental health crises: if my job is pointless, does that mean my life is too? 

But somewhere in the tabloid rhetoric McArthur and Reeves studied, there’s a revealing admission, one that undermines the whole cult of work. Readers are exhorted to hate the unemployed not because they're missing out on self-actualisation, but because they're supposedly having a better time than you. 

The intended response from the reader is something like ‘Why should they sit on their behinds when I have to go out to work?’ This un-acknowledgeable contradiction – that work is all we live for, and also we envy those who avoid it – is pushing rhetoric about work into total incoherence. It is harming the mental and physical health of workers, who are being asked to push themselves harder and harder without any of the safety valves of socially acceptable complaint that previous generations employ. 

It’s even bad for businesses. In Russell’s essay, published just over ninety years ago, he accused the rich of hypocrisy for not wanting their idleness to be stigmatised in the same way that everyone else’s was. Today, the rich are apparently busier than ever. As Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout, observes, “Billionaire tech-industry titans brag about their hundred-hour work weeks, even though their labour isn’t what boosts their company’s stock prices”.

Rather than benefitting the company, their work is a turbo-charged, rise-and-grind respray of the “bullshit jobs” that the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber identified as a key driver of alienation. This relentless schedule only makes sense once you remember work is seen as an inherent good. They are, to use a phrase borrowed from the right, virtue signalling.

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Musk in Overdrive

The ultimate virtue signaller in this regard is, inevitably, Elon Musk, who boasts of working sixteen-hour days and having six hours sleep, leaving only two hours for recreation – an implausible claim, looking at the amount of time he spends posting drivel on Twitter, but one that is central to his myth. 

Shortly after Musk's acquisition of Twitter, he exhorted his remaining employees to work "long hours at high intensity" to save the site. And what did the site need saving from? From Musk, who had made a series of reckless business decisions and fired masses of staff. To the surprise of Musk and his acolytes, few employees decided it was worth their while working harder for no extra pay to spare the blushes of a boss who publicly disparaged them.

Thirty years of escalating rhetoric about the glory of work, the monstrosity of leisure, and the effective censorship of any criticism of work, has led us here –a place where the richest man in the world has absolutely no idea why his employees work, or what could motivate them to work harder. Born rich, there is no background he could draw on, no memories of his own steady climb up the ladder, to help him understand them. 

Sunak, who graduated from Oxford and went straight into a job at Goldman Sachs, may soon face the same problem on a much bigger scale.