Supporting the single and lazy

All politicians say that they want to support hard-working families and a lot of bloggers have already written about how tired they are of seeing the tick-box phrase 'hard working families' unthinkingly shoehorned into every political speech and manifesto. I think this knee-jerk bias towards industrious people who are in a relationship and have, preferably, reproduced is getting so serious that it's time for idle singletons to get together and form their own political party (always assuming they can be bothered).

If they did, they'd get my vote. As a fully paid-up family man, who isn't spectacularly idle,* I don't have a dog in this particular fight, so to speak, but I still believe that everybody deserves a fair share of pie. Besides, I think that what's good for the lazy and unattached would be good for the rest of us:

1. Everybody who hasn't been thrown out of work by macroeconomic chaos seems to be complaining about overwork and stress. I resent politicians who ratchet up the Stakhanovite rat race by encouraging the sort of can-do idiots who solemnly promise to give 110% to selling more mobile phone contracts or whatever other form of soul-sucking wage-slavery they've signed up to. If we've simply got to out-perform our neighbours every minute of the waking day, then I'd prefer it if a few of my neighbours goofed off, took it easy and cut me a bit of slack.

It'd take the pressure off everybody, hard-working parents included. I remember the days before parenthood; lazy, indulgent Sunday mornings, leisurely breakfasts, followed by a bit of lounging around with a coffee and the Sunday papers and doing a lot of nothing in particular. No longer possible with a small child in the house and no grannies or other rellys less than an hour or so's drive away. Do I resent singletons who can still do this? Hell, no. Good luck to them, I say, and to hell with the workaholic freaks who squander their precious free time taking work home to prepare for that all-important, boss-impressing regional sales meeting on Monday.

2. Stressed-out, overworked lives would be enhanced by increasing the pool of happy-go-lucky underperformers who are actually fun to be around, and draining the swamp containing the smug, serious, driven, monomaniac, sour-faced, control freaks who thrive on stress and beating their personal best times for sucking every trace of joy out of a room.

3. Whatever happened to "working smarter, not harder"? Was this phrase from the management handbooks as meaningless as a fortune cookie motto? If it did actually mean something, we should be praising people who work more efficiently, not just harder. People who marshal their resources and don't end the day drained, because they've been giving 100% all day. People who don't make stupid mistakes because they're dog tired from trying to work as hard as the hyperactive insomniac without a life who just got a certificate in a plastic frame for being employee of the month, but won't have any friends at his funeral when he works himself into an early grave.

4. If you're idle and single, but not actually out of work, I'd like to thank you. Your taxes are helping to educate my son, an expense that doesn't benefit you directly, but which you can't avoid. You contribute to stuff you don't use, but you're probably too good-natured to whine and bitch about it. I'm suitably grateful and I fully support your right to have as loud a voice as any member of a hard-working family. And if you are out of work, I'm cool with that, too, because it's probably not your fault.

5. The crash that put millions out of work was largely the fault of the allegedly brilliant Wall Street weirdos who got up at bugger-me in the morning and worked their butts off till after what-the-hell-time-do-you-call-this at night, scorning wimpish human needs like lunch and toilet breaks in pursuit of the almighty dollar. They, and their counterparts in the City of London, undoubtedly worked hard, and screwed up even harder. Wouldn't the world have been a better place if the Sir Fred Goodwins of this world had taken a decade off from beavering away at deals to enrich themselves and just loafed around a bit, gone fishing or even sat around on the sofa watching daytime telly? Useless activities, no doubt, but what they worked so hard to do proved to be far worse than useless.

6. Virtue, they say, is its own reward. The vice of idleness is, likewise, its own punishment. Ceteris paribus, if you don't work hard, you probably won't be able to afford the lifestyle you want. The number of people so attached to idleness that they'll willingly forgo a comfortable lifestyle is probably too small to worry about. There is, therefore, no need for self-righteous prigs to endlessly lecture the feckless on the error of their ways, as the problem is self-regulating, with people's internal thermostats balancing the desirability of idle time with the necessity of earning enough money to make that idle time endurable.

7. Politicians, especially very senior ones, generally work very hard. The hours and workload are punishing and only the truly driven can hack it. They also generally have traditional families - there are a few single or openly gay politicians, but it still seems to be considered good PR for politicians to have a photogenic family for the election leaflets.

This makes me suspect that the "hard-working families" trope isn't ubiquitous merely because such families represent a target voter demographic. People tend to think that other people share their own circumstances and values, so I reckon that workaholic politicians with families like to talk about "hard-working families" because they imagine they are talking to people just like themselves.

Unfortunately, the home life of senior politicians isn't exactly a template for happy families. The immense pressures of the job take a terrible toll on politicians' families and relationships. Cast your mind back to the philandering Bill Clinton, or to the unfortunate daughter of John Selwyn Gummer being force-fed burgers on TV at the height of the Mad Cow Disease scare, or Jonathan Aitkin's daughter being forced to lie in court, in an attempt to save her high-flying daddy's rep, or Strictly star Edwina Currie's notorious horizontal mambo with John Major, or the Milibands' fratricidal struggle for the Labour leadership. If this is life in a "hard-working family", you can keep it.

As far as I'm concerned, the next politician who feels compelled to stick a bit of boilerplate about "hard-working families" into another keynote speech can bugger off. I'm voting for the lazy singletons' party next time. If they can ever be bothered to get their finger out.

*According to me - other opinions are available.