The top two political leaders in Britain, Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss, both seem to believe that the British worker is an idle scrounger. Having spent a good part of my twenties working in manual jobs in Britain and France I can confirm that there is a system of “skiving” in Britain, a way of getting out of work while still at work.

In my first year of working in Britain, I discovered there was even the culture of going to the pub for lunch. In one of the few office jobs I had, I was caught skiving. A man came and rattled a set of keys above my head when he discovered that I was taking a brief two-pint-induced shut-eye. He had found me in a small side room at the British Museum when I was meant to be doing some data entry.

I am not sure what the exact psychological history of skiving is, but what I can say is that in many ways it is the result of anger. It is a small piece of revolt. “Why should I care about this business?” is a refrain I often heard while working in factories. It seemed to me that at least the “idleness” of the British worker was a direct result of the class system, a failure of inclusion, a realisation that “I am simply not part of the same system as the owners.”

If ever there is a country where the narrative of “the idle” has taken root and become a hobbyhorse, then it is South Africa. Speak to some people in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town about the people who work for them, and you will discover that they are the most idle, work-shy set of sluggards ever to enter into an informal work contract.

This is, of course, mostly uttered by people who have never cut bushes, raked leaves and mowed an unending lawn for R200, or carried 50kg bags of cement all day, or dug a trench the length of a city block, or worked in a factory on an assembly line placing a piece of boneless chicken on to a polystyrene tray for nine hours a day, for 45 hours a week. Try that, and I can assure you, the desire for idleness takes root pretty quickly, particularly when you are excluded from society both socially and financially.

But the narrative of idleness goes back, as most of our problems do, to the colonial era. What is interesting is that in the colonial era there were two narratives. One was that hard labour was the cure to idleness and was the only way less “civilised” men could be brought into society. The other idea, as advocated by the humanitarians such as John Fairbairn and Dr John Philip, was that higher wages and equal rights were a method of stopping idleness and including people of colour in a modernising society.

The people who held the former view were generally the wealthier British merchant class who found political cause with the Afrikaner farmers. And it was these men that would, for most of our history, insist on trying to create vagrancy laws. Make people carry passes, lock the idle up and force them to work was, they claimed, the only method of curing their idleness — and it is a refrain that can still be heard today.

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Another great advocate of this theory was Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes even attempted to reintroduce the whipping of servants in 1890, something that had in fact been abolished in the Cape in 1828. Rhodes and his Glen Grey Act (1894) also made it law that the men living in the Eastern Cape’s Glen Grey area were forced to earn a living outside of their district and were fined 10 shillings if they didn’t, thus enforcing migrant labour.

The idea that hard labour is somehow a corrective of idleness that sets people on the pathway to inclusion is of course an utter fallacy. The reason why we have one of the most unequal and least inclusive societies in the world is that the migrant labour system destroyed a social fabric and community values.

The idea that sections of our population are idle and need discipline, ignores two facts. One is that all the hard work in the country has largely been done by “the idle”. The second is that they have received almost nothing in return for hard work.

It is worth acknowledging that it is in some senses true that the 48-hour working week, or “Protestant work ethic”, is something that was unfamiliar to most cultures. The very fact that it has been linked to Protestants of northern Europe tells us this.

But to suggest that the people of South Africa are idle is a falsification of the bare-faced facts. What the problem is, in both Britain and South Africa, is that despite all the working classes’ hard work they have been continually excluded. What is more, the cultures they developed on the mines and factories have, certainly in Britain, been ripped from them after these closed down.

Brexit has been the result of this breaking of culture. Left with little understanding of how they fitted into society, the British workers of the north have, in recent years, given up on their traditional middle-class intellectual allies in the Labour Party. Instead, they threw their lot in with the upper-class privately educated populist of the Conservative Party. In the false hope that their plight would in some manner be acknowledged. Instead, they now have a prime minister who simply agrees that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world”.

With these issues in mind, we should, in South Africa, be cognisant of the facts. One is that there is no idleness in this country, there is only exclusion and what essentially amounts to slave wages. This, like in Britain, drives a wedge between the owners of capital and those that work for them.

One issue leading from our current plight with Eskom, which is barely discussed, is, what happens when renewable energy begins to eclipse coal? What will happen to the communities that are dependent on coal mining, and have developed their own cultures and ways of life? Will they simply become yet another community excluded from economic society? Just what was the plan with the idle miners once the coal pits of Britain and the industries in Europe closed or collapsed? There wasn’t one. And the direct consequence was the rise of the populist right, who have swept to power across the continent.

In South Africa, the narrative is either that of the trade unions who wish to keep a status quo, or the capitalist reformers and the profits of efficiency, who want to see the mines modernised and a green economy. Tied into many of the latter’s narrative is the idea that there is idleness amongst the miners and the unions.

Neither side, however, is willing to recognise the impending threat. Re-educating and training our labour force and keeping them employed in the communities they have developed is an issue nobody talks about. If the country is not going to descend into further chaos, we need to resolve the issue of just how we are going to modernise without breaking up communities and creating a new demographic of excluded people.

This is no idle threat. We have been warned, the canary died in the mine shafts of Europe. DM