Of course Britain will pay its respects to the Queen, but why must poor people pay the price?
Grief is the price we pay for love, the late Queen wisely said; but for many of her subjects, their actual income is the price to pay for grief. Aspects of normal life have been suspended, but no one has yet found a way to cancel or pause the cost of living crisis, a peril without recent precedent. What happens when an abrupt national event collides with an economy defined by insecurity and declining wages: well, more misery and hardship? But amid the mourning for the Queen, few people want to talk about that.
“Now is not the time,” decree the self-appointed grief police. Perhaps someone should inform one casualty, let’s call her Helena, that now is not the time to complain about her partner being ignominiously tossed from a Royal residence on to the scrapheap. “My partner was let go from work at Windsor Castle last Friday with no notice just because of mourning,” she tells me. As a contracted out construction worker, he was given no advance warning, simply ordered to make the site secure and then leave. Helena understands that many wish to mourn: “But for a young family this has put us in dire straits, and I feel resentment as this is nothing to do with us: I have respect for the death of an old lady but that’s about it, we still need to eat.”
Enforced mourning and a precarious workforce make poor bedfellows. Take Bunty, who works on the minimum wage for a Devon baking company. She has been given a choice: either she loses a day’s pay, or she takes it out of her annual leave allowance. She can manage financially, “but it’s the principle that’s at stake, in my opinion,” and she’s right. This mourning period illuminates the deep cracks in our labour market, and the damage that’s been done to the bedrock by decades of
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