This week Sir Alan Sugar attacked what he called "expectancy culture". In a bid to plug his new series of 'Young Apprentice' he said, "There's too much of what I call an expectancy culture of things being provided. And I'm afraid to say the goody-goody benefits system we have in this country has made it a bit too cushy for people". So what should young people expect? According to Lord Sugar (the Young Apprentice) "goes to prove that you can make money and stand on your own two feet", does it? Last time I checked for every winner of the apprentice there are a dozen losers who are driven home in a taxi after being humiliated by Sir Alan just for trying to succeed, not to mention the thousands who spend weeks auditioning. Now that I think about it, if there's one place with an "expectancy culture" it's got to be Sir Alan's own boardroom. Anyone who's ever watched the first episode in a series of The Apprentice must have realised that almost every candidate expects, with little doubt, that his or her victory to be as definite as the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.
However, hypocrisy aside I do have a substantive issue with Sugars tumbrel assumptions. There is a characteristic that many sofa bound benefit claimants share with the vast majority of aspiring entrepreneurs and that is a distinctly nihilistic motivation of self-interest. While I'm sure both groups are victims of lazy stereotyping, I've never heard a contestant on the apprentice cite anything other then the inflation of their own wallet and god given brilliance as reasoning for success. Remember that it was not the "expectancy culture" of the disenfranchised working classes of England, most of who do want to work, that lead to today's remarkable levels of youth unemployment, but the somehow excusable expectancy of those who wanted to work for themselves, those who wanted to work with an ambition not to improving the world, but to improve their own personal situation. However because greed has somehow found itself superior to indolence on our fractured moral compass the 'scroungers' are demonised and the 'aspirant' idolised.
This sentiment was mirrored in a much more extreme way by Herman Cain, a successful business man turned republican presidential candidate who responded to the Occupy Wall Street protest by saying "if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself". Seeing as how 9% of Americans are currently jobless and well over 90% would be considered working or middle class, this can only be viewed as a supercilious insult to the US public. A comment like this suggesting that most people are simply either too stupid or lazy to become wealthy and successful is the turgid swamp at the bottom of Sir Alan Sugar's slippery slope of sociological arrogance.
It is my belief that the vast majority of people do want to work, because work is not only honest and dignified but one of the few things that validates our existence on earth. It is not an "expectancy culture" that is to blame if people would rather be on a sofa then behind a desk, if anything it's the very opposite. It is more likely that an 'unexpectant culture' alienated and disenfranchised by the disparity between the materialistic values of western society and a life of long hours and fuel poverty at the bottom on minimum wage.
The grand irony is that if Alan Sugar has had an effect on British culture it has been to tarnish the true spirit of entrepreneurship and diminish it to the level of a cheap ego-fuelled sackrace.