Plumbing

From Dream Theatre

I had a dream last night (no, wait, this one is actually quite interesting). Or, more accurately, it was early this morning, in that halfway state between sleep and wakefulness when "lucid dreams" tend to occur. In the dream, I was seated at a table with various people, when one of them turned to me and asked, "How do you become a plumber?"

My immediate response was, Is this one of those jokes? Like "how do you make a Maltese cross?". A flash of merriment that, gratifyingly, set the table on a roar (sorry, but my dreams do sometimes take a Shakespeherian turn). But, no, this man – I think he was an artist – really did want to know. I supposed that he saw me as a sort of representative former prole, still trailing some tattered remnants of a working-class authenticity.

So I started in on a long monologue about social class, differing views of education and aspiration, pride in skilled labour, apprenticeships, family businesses, and so on, each statement immediately re-qualified by stepping back a further explanatory stage, until I seemed to be expounding an alternative theory of English history as seen through the prism of plumbing and reaching back through the centuries, in the vein of Raymond Williams or Christopher Hill. It was bloody good stuff, even though I say so myself. But then I had to wake up properly and finally go for a pee.

I think it's fairly obvious what stimulated this dream.

We've had our rotten garden fence replaced. In preparation, I donned my overalls and some tough leather gloves, and set about dismantling our equally rotten garden shed, and clearing a matted tangle of bramble, honeysuckle, and bindweed, which was pretty much all that was holding the fence up. It took a couple of weeks, and it was actually good fun to get so hands-on and physical for a change. It reminded me of my carefree days as Roy the Art Technician, a path never likely to have been taken by me, but one which lives on as a happy memory.

Then for two swelteringly hot days this week a young guy from a local fencing firm came and put up our new fence, single-handed. It was impressive to watch him work, so efficiently, tirelessly, and purposefully, despite the oppressive heat and humidity. He did a fine job, and clearly took real pride in getting it right. I was struck by the way modern tools have removed a lot of the tedious physical labour from such a task: electric screwdrivers are wonderful things. And as for the compressed-air nail gun... Bam, bam, bam! Done! Next board! Bam, bam, bam! Although all of the careful preliminary levelling and lining up was done with nothing more sophisticated than a ball of string and a spirit level.

I was further reminded of a summer job I had in 1974, putting up the security fence for the first Knebworth Festival, which involved bashing six holes through sheets of corrugated iron and then manually fitting them with nuts, U-bolts, and a spanner onto a scaffolding. Now that was hard labour, but not exactly skilled work, and it is skilled, mainly manual occupations such as (sticking with my dream) plumbing that young people – the ones who are not particularly interested in school or suited to office work – need.

To become a plumber is very far from a failure in life, neither is it easy to achieve. It takes aptitude, application, and understanding, not to mention certification. Plumbers, contrary to popular opinion, are not necessarily well paid: certainly, the young lad that turns out to fix your dripping tap is probably earning less than the national average wage. But he's gaining experience, and with experience comes advancement, and ultimately even the prospect of owning his own small business. Everyone from every stratum of society is likely to need a plumber at some point in their life. It's a good choice of career.

When it comes to the "who" and the "how", class is obviously a factor: there are very few Etonian plumbers, although I'm sure there must be some. But all social classes have their complexities. The guy who empties your dustbin may well have grown up next door to the guy whose plumbing firm is installing your new shower, across the road from the woman now teaching your daughter geography at university, and around the corner from some unemployable lost soul who spends his days in medicated vacancy; and even just down the road from where a future world champion Formula 1 driver will one day grow up. This is to take as an example the actual single street – Peartree Way in Stevenage – on which I myself happened to grow up.

It always puzzled me at university that so many of the privately-educated Marxists I met there seemed to believe that "the working class" was a monolithic mass of like-minded folk, just waiting to be led to an historically-inevitable revolution. But the more able of my contemporaries who had left school at the earliest opportunity – the future plumbers, builders, and electricians – would almost inevitably become lifelong working-class Tories; supporters of tax breaks for small businesses, opponents of immigration, and instinctively suspicious of state benefits and trade unions as inimical to hard work and a self-help ethic.

These are all decent, law-abiding folk on the whole, if simply wrong wrong wrong politically, and not the sort of ultra-rightist thugs stirring up trouble on our streets at the moment. The sad fact is that not all working-class people are thirsting for socialism. Neither do all working-class people feel solidarity with other working-class people. Certainly, working-class people are not confined to heaving dustbins or servicing assembly lines, and never have been. Why, one or two have even ended up as Prime Ministers. But, as I say, everyone from every stratum of society is likely to need a plumber at some point in their life. It's a good choice of career.

But there's a problem: the pipelines to becoming decent, law-abiding folk with rewarding working lives are being blocked off. The relentless move towards de-skilling and outsourcing is taking something vitally important away from so many ordinary lives, and that, ultimately, will spell trouble. In fact, we may already be there: I'd ask you to read my post Trouble from 2009. It's one thing to put a labour-saving tool like a nail gun into the hands of skilled workers, but quite another to turn them into mere factory button-pressers, or (ultimately and ideally, it seems) replace them altogether with a clever machine. But even before AI makes us all redundant there's a limit to the amount of skilled workers we can import in order to make up for our failure to invest in our own workforce – from the legendary "Polish plumber" to Filipino nurses –  without causing damage to the social fabric. This is obvious, isn't it? Never mind rocket science, it's not even basic plumbing.

Machine-smashers like Captain Swing and the Luddites were not, um, "luddites" in the watered-down modern sense but were making a desperate intervention, one that needs to be made again and again and again, it seems: that people, not profits, are the point of it all, and people without meaningful work are angry, frustrated people. And angry, frustrated people are the dangerous tool of choice of manipulative demagogues everywhere: they're easily persuaded that a complex problem has an easy, often violent and scapegoated solution. Just watch the news, and if there's a bit of a racket outside maybe check your car is not on fire.

So, anyway, sorry, I was forgetting: did you still want to know how you become a plumber? I think we need to go back to when the Romans invaded Britain to steal our lead piping... Or perhaps to times of old, when knights were bold, and toilets weren't invented. But, huh, for some reason I have just remembered that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a dog called Flush...

Listen, it's been fun, but I think I really do need to wake up now and go to the bathroom.

Nice job!