It is a year now and still I have not become a multi-millionaire. Something is clearly serious amiss here. Yes, it was a mere twelve months ago (19 November 1995, to be precise) that share options in mass gullibility were first floated on the open market and, with the descent to earth of the god of Mammon made flesh, we were all informed, in tones designed to elicit guilt from the average Catholic, that IT COULD BE YOU. A finger out of the sky pointed at us from beyond the TV screen: a sort of divine signal that the purchase of a lottery ticket was our pre-ordained path to prosperity if not righteousness.
Out we trotted, fools that we all were (and some still are), to hand over our puny little pound in exchange for the multi-million-pound public fantasy. Yes, I went. The queue was long in that final hour between W.H. Smith closing its doors to us luckless suckers and the balls being juggled before the nation’s wide-eyed mass regression to Christmas Morning aged Two. In front of me stood a grubby man wearing plimsolls with holes in them and a folded-up copy of the betting page from a newspaper with no news in it. There he stood, his life in poverty and his mind on the brink of unbounded affluence. But he was a thoughtful old twit, declaring half to himself and then to anyone who would listen that when he won he was damned if he was going to pay the top rate of income tax. Why should he waste his millions subsidising workshy layabouts with nothing to do all day but sit in the belting shop and complain about the price of pork scratchings? No, he would be moving his new-won riches to tax-free Guernsey, he explained, and let the impoverished wretches of this bomb-site called Britain fend for themselves.
Standing in the queue were others who were fending for themselves by entertaining the hopes of the most easily manipulated as they made their charitable donations to Eton school for parasites, the restoration of Royal palaces and other “worthy causes”. A statistic was later to appear suggesting that if a resident of London were to throw a pound down the toilet and flush it into the expansive urban sewage system they would stand more chance of it accidentally coming back to them through the water supply than being repaid as part of any lottery prize money.
Not for Ken Southwell of York all of this faithless cynicism, for as the Northern Echo newspaper reported this January, he won £840,000 on the lottery and still intends to continue working. Contradicting every half-baked heckler at a socialist meeting since 1904, Southwell informed the newspaper that “The reality is you have to do something. You can’t just sit back and do nothing for the rest of your life.” The newspaper reports a Dr Peter Warr of the Institute of Work Psychology at Sheffield University who explains that people like working—it’s natural, for humans to want to expend energy. End of human nature myth, though we fear we might hear it again between now and the coming of a sane social order.
Speaking of which, a question presents itself. How often have we heard the cynics to slavery tell us that socialism is all well and good but it will never come in their lifetimes? Why waste energy on demanding the impossible? Might we have spotted one or two of these hard-headed realists standing in line at the lottery counter, hard-earned fiver clutched in sweaty palm, waiting for their chance to achieve the almost impossible? Given a choice between a massive old fraud of an avaricious fantasy and a serious bid for the people of the earth to take it themselves into their own hands which would you bet on?
Steve Coleman
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