Worst Opinion of the Week: Events Workers Should Just Get 'Better Jobs'

Story: The entire UK events industry is at risk of collapse due to lack of financial support.
Reasonable take: The government needs a multi-stage plan to reopen the events industry along with the rest of the economy, as other countries have.
Brain rot: What about, instead of supporting this enormous amount of people who are doing skilled jobs that they love and that bring everyone joy, they retrain for “better” ones instead?

When the furlough scheme comes to an end on Halloween lots of us are going to have worse troubles to deal with than a bunch of 11-year old’s mercilessly egging your front door for not handing out V-Bucks. For instance: the £70 billion industry you’ve spent your life working in collapsing because the Tory government has decided it’s no longer “viable”.

This week the Business Secretary Alok Sharma said in the House of Commons that the solution to the impending evisceration of the creative, event and art sectors lies in our “welfare system” and training schemes for “better jobs”. Health Minister Heather Whately also appeared on Sky News this week to reiterate the new party line that “it doesn’t make sense to continue supporting jobs where there simply isn’t work”.

What blue sky thinking by our government to fix the issues at hand with such a comprehensive and studious plan!

It seems we really are being prepped to do the 1980s all over again, just without the aesthetics, hooliganism or good cocaine. Britain is an island of eternal recurrence, where the Tories engineer the destruction of critical industries, replace them with absolutely nothing and belittle you in the process as some sort of luddite unable to adapt to the modern world, throwing your dirty wooden clogs into the machinery in a futile protest.

Alarm bells were already ringing when Rishi Sunak announced his “Job Support Scheme”, which will replace furlough and aims to cover 22 percent of workers’ wages – but only for jobs considered to be “viable”. What that means exactly is unclear.

For the “party of business”, it’s pretty fucking astonishing the Tories have managed to concentrate all their efforts into ensuring the pockets of massive recession-proof corporations don’t get picked by the virus while our cultural industries get ransacked.

This lack of support for workers in the events industry has led to protests across the UK, as people demand answers as to why industries that contribute so much to our wellbeing and the economy are being left out in the cold. It’s just typical that Britain is so wrapped in up self-grandeur we’re overlooking the three areas we are actually world class in: grotty nightclubs, the arts and events.

These were viable businesses before the coronavirus rocked up and fucked over 2020, and if the government timeline of a vaccine, or herd immunity, or whatever the fuck they proclaim is to believed, then we will need these industries more than ever when it fucks off.

Allowing irreparable damage to these sectors is cultural erasure, not to mention terrifyingly short-sighted. The Tories have already plunged Britain into an insurmountable debt of two-trillion pounds, so don’t tell me we have maxed out the credit card on those meal deals in August just so everything that isn’t a franchise fades into a forlorn memory of days gone by.

It is almost like our government is on an unflagging voyage to ensure everything actually valuable about Britain is confined to memory by the end of decade. The only plus side might be Britain developing a case of nostalgia for something that was genuinely good, and not a world war in which 85million people died.

If Britain is to “get back on its feet”, it’s probably a tidy idea that we all have something to fucking enjoy after all the sacrifices. I don’t think ordering in a fucking late afternoon Costa brie and turkey panini is going to scratch the itch we’ve all been feeling.

People will want to go to gigs again, and smoke the entirety of the show outside. We will want to pretend to enjoy a curated art performance beyond the first ten minutes and free glass of wine, and dance like a cunt on an actual dance floor. The notion that music is being made and released this year solely to be set to Netflix trailers or Peloton workout soundtrack fills my bones with a deep melancholic chill.

Can you imagine how fucking ballistic the events industry in the UK is going to go when we are allowed to fuck about again? Almost anything and everything will be sold out. The hotline to see Neil Morrissey in Jack & The Beanstalk will be like be attempting to book a yurt package at Glastonbury. The Kebab Awards will be treated with the same reverence as the Oscars. The first karaoke night is going to be as culturally significant as the as that 1976 Sex Pistols show in Manchester.

The sheer arrogance of our government to suggest all these people should find “better jobs” than the ones they already have and love, and that provide millions of people across the country with fulfilment, joy and memories (and that also happen to bring barrowful’s of cash into the economy), is disgusting. We’re one step closer to realising the Tory wet dream of presiding over a nation of browbeaten, brainwashed serfs so mentally exhausted by a lack of culture and opportunity that all we have left is performing whatever thankless task improves their billionaire donors share dividends.

Wasn’t it the Tories 40-years-in-the-making economical masterplan to push Britain into a solely service-based industry? The cheeky cunts can’t just wash their fucking hands with us and go “oh well, try something else”. There isn’t. They’re the cunts who put all its eggs into one basket in the first place, and now they’re blaming the hens for laying too many eggs when they’re the dopey wankers who dropped the wicker box.

Boris Johnson said they can help give these people the skills to find and create “new, better jobs”.

Well, I have three words for you: “shut up, cunt”.

@MULLETFANNEO