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Culture Culture The World Cup of Ink What does the prevalence of tattoos mean in the era of mass culture? TakiMag Photo by James Fearn/Getty Images My interest in professional sport these days ranges from minimal to nil, but even I could not altogether avoid or evade the hysteria over the recent World Cup, which recurs every four years. It would have been easier to miss the outbreak of the Third (or would it be the Fourth?) World War.  As everyone now knows, Spain beat Argentina in the final, in a match more remarkable for its non-sporting qualities than for its display of skill. There was something of a brawl afterwards. The Spanish were clearly the better side, and while they played a clean game (or one as clean, at least, as can be expected from a professional soccer team), the Argentinians played dirty.  But I noticed another very important difference between the teams: The Argentinians were far more heavily tattooed than the Spanish. Indeed, desultory research revealed that, of the 26 players in the Argentinian squad of players, 20 were tattooed. Could this explain the inferiority of the Argentinians to the Spanish?  I had already observed that when the Germans last won the World Cup, their team was much less tattooed than their opponents. Could it be that, in the modern world, the prevalence of tattooing is inversely proportional to intelligence, and that, though skill at soccer is principally one of physical coordination, higher intelligence is nevertheless an advantage in any match? Those who write on soccer often refer to “footballing intelligence,” as if it were a faculty of its own; but perhaps it is related positively to general intelligence as, say, musical ability is related to it, notwithstanding the populist demagoguery of Amadeus (the misleading film adaptation of the play of the same name). Despite the expansion in the proportion of the population that is tattooed, one would still expect, where a brawl breaks out as it did after the end of the World Cup final, that the tattooed were more likely to be the originators of it than the untattooed. And so it was in this case.  Of course, one would also not expect there to be a one-to-one correspondence between tattooing on the one hand and low intelligence and bad behaviour on the other. Perhaps the greatest player in the history of the sport—certainly one of the greatest—is the Argentinian, Lionel Messi, and he has a hideously, totally tattooed forearm, but is neither stupid nor badly behaved. But generalizations may hold while individual instances seem to contradict them.  I was somewhat alarmed, therefore, to see that several of the winning Spanish team had either had promised or resolved to have the face of their trainer tattooed on themselves if they won the cup. This, I surmised, would be the beginning of the end of the predominance of the Spanish in world soccer, not having lost in their last 38 games in international competitions. If I were their trainer, I would strongly advise them not to have themselves tattooed, and this quite independently of aesthetic considerations (what is called body art is really, and invariably, body kitsch). The phenomenon of tattooing has interested me ever since I noticed in the prison where I worked that almost 100 per cent of white British prisoners were tattooed. (This was hardly a new observation; awareness of the prevalence of tattoos among prisoners dating back at least to the days of Lombroso, the Italian doctor and anthropologist of the 19th century.) Among this population, the tattoos were initially quite amateur, mainly done with India ink, and included things like policemen hanging from lampposts or dotted lines around the neck with a pair of scissors and instructions to “Cut here.”  But gradually, the tattoos became more elaborate, and I noticed in the 1990s that this form of self-adornment (or mutilation) was beginning to ascend the social scale, and that the kind of people who once would never have been tattooed were now resorting to body kitsch.  At first, I interpreted this as an attempt at sympathetic identification by young middle-class intellectuals of weak intellect with those whom they considered the insulted and injured of the world. But if this interpretation were ever correct, it soon ceased to be, for the fashion spread too far and wide for it to hold. Tattoos retained their superficial connotations of rebellion and non-conformity, but they also became—in a deeper sense—marks of conformity, as tends to happen with all fashions, no matter how outrageous they may seem at the start. By means of tattooing, one could rebel and conform at the same time.  The tattooed often claim to be expressing themselves, but more often than not end up demonstrating how little they have to express. In a way, the vogue for tattooing is rather tragic: It points to the ever-greater difficulty people have in individuating themselves in a mass society. This, perhaps, also explains the vogue for giving babies names previously unknown to humanity, and unique to them. As circumstances force us to be more and more alike, we struggle to be different; but convention, like nature, is what cannot be escaped. We are inevitably creatures of convention and must choose between conventions on grounds other than their supposed conventionality or unconventionality. Tattooing provides interesting lessons beyond itself. In the town in England in which I live for slightly more than half the year, there is a street on one side of which a man tattoos those who desire this form of self-mutilation (one famous tattooed person once said that he liked the pain of it).  On the other side of the street, the tattooist’s brother has opened an establishment for the removal of tattoos. He has installed an extremely expensive machine to this end, which will soon pay for itself. Tattoo removal, when the tattoos are extensive, is a long process, requiring many sessions. I was surprised to discover that, at least in England, tattoo removal is much more carefully licensed than tattooing itself.  But the point of my story is this: that both brothers contribute similarly to the country’s GDP, which metric, I suggest, is therefore not adequate to measure the welfare of a society. If Alexander Pope were alive today, he would not write that the proper study of mankind is man; he would write that the proper study of man is tattoo. And in mankind, I include (for those who object to the word) womankind, for in one of the strange reversals of our time, more women are now tattooed than men. The post The World Cup of Ink appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Can Burnham Tackle Entitlements? The prime minister must make hard decisions to stop Britain’s fiscal spiral. UK Special Coverage Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth – WPA Pool/Getty Images Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, has set a blistering pace in his first full week in office. From 10 Downing Street has come a torrent of dramatic announcements about the future of the country (indeed, it resembles nothing so much as the spate of executive orders from the Trump White House in early 2025). Burnham says he will honor the UK’s commitments on defense by spending 3 percent of GDP on the military. He tells us he will “call out” Trump on foreign policy, and promises to set up a National Care Service to halt the “collapse of the NHS.” He proclaims his intent to reopen the North Sea to (some) oil and gas development, and pledges to give local authorities broader legislative and tax powers. Critics say that this is all talk. But British voters seem to like his energetic approach. Labour is now leading in some opinion polls for the first time in two years. A recent survey shows Labour up four points (to 28 percent of the electorate), while the right-wing Reform and left-wing Green parties have registered corresponding drops (to 24 percent and 8 percent, respectively). Other polls have Reform—which spent much of this summer at the top of the polls—even with Labour. And Reform could face further reversal in the contest for Andy Burnham’s vacated Greater Manchester mayoralty, which, thanks to the “Burnham Bounce,” is expected to go for Labour over Nigel Farage’s insurgent alternative. But there is one standout promise Burnham has made that may both test his command of public opinion and lead his party to ruin: his promise last week to cut the UK welfare bill. This has been rising inexorably, and now costs British taxpayers well over £300 billion annually: a sum equal to the total revenues raised by Britain’s income tax.  Disability benefits in particular have been skyrocketing, and are expected to amount to around £100 billion by 2030. A disturbing feature of the “benefits culture” is the rise in the number of young people who are falling out of the labor market altogether because of mental health problems (or neurodiversity, as it is now called). A million young people are languishing as so-called “NEETs,” which stands for “not in education, employment or training.” And around half of these are having work requirements waived for things like anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorders. Many of these conditions barely existed 20 years ago, and conservative politicians and think tanks like the Policy Exchange suspect many young people (and adults) are simply aping the symptoms of mental illness to avoid facing up to the challenge of working for a living. Since Covid, it has become vastly easier to claim benefits for these conditions. In many cases young people can sign on and receive benefits without even a face-to-face interview.  There are websites and social media influencers (“sickfluencers”) who advise on how to present symptoms to get the best benefits. According to the Centre for Social Justice, it is now possible to acquire a suite of benefits that is not only higher than the minimum wage, but equal to or greater than the UK’s average wage. Burnham seems to agree that the system is broken. The PM says he is “not squeamish” about cutting the welfare bill. He is considering making young people do voluntary work or training as a condition of receiving benefits. Such schemes operate in the Netherlands and Germany, where governments have been more successful in getting youths into jobs than in Britain. A forthcoming report from former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn is expected to give some support to the PM’s view that not enough is being done to get young people out of their bedrooms and into offices. Milburn says that the state has given these young people “an income but not a way out of the benefits trap”. But getting people off benefits and into productive jobs is a tall order for a left-wing politician. Many of these young NEETs will have had their conditions certified by a doctor or health professional. To challenge these diagnoses is to challenge an entire culture of entitlement (amply documented in Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent The Age of Diagnosis, which shows how our obsession with labels turns mundane problems into medical issues). Milburn agrees to some extent, though he insists that very few young people are actually “lazy.” Many really want to work. Yet mental health conditions like depression and autism are not hard to simulate, and there are undoubtedly some diagnoses that are bogus. But forcing a neurodivergent person into the world of work before they are able to cope could lead to breakdown, self-harm, or even suicide. However, the “King of the North” claims to have partially addressed this problem in Manchester by rejiggering education and eliminating the sense of existential failure experienced by many working-class youngsters. His Greater Manchester Baccalaureate program aimed to accord vocational and technical subjects the same status in school as more university-oriented subjects. And Burnham now wants the entire UK education system to “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.” From 2028, 14-year-olds will be able to choose a technical career and acquire work experience with local firms in everything from AI to plumbing, instead of being automatically propelled toward university. This will be welcomed by many employers who lament the limited real-world skillsets of school-leavers, but it will not address the problems of overdiagnosis and is unlikely to reduce the welfare bill. Indeed, placing NEETs in voluntary jobs or training would actually cost money, as would tightening up the monitoring of their conditions and ending the “fit-note culture” by rigorous face-to-face interviews.  To reduce welfare will mean cutting entitlements, and that will involve some people with recognized medical conditions having their benefits trimmed or taken away. Burnham’s predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, attempted to reduce expenditure on non-means-tested Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which help 4 million people with neurodivergent disabilities manage their lives. That led to a Labour backbench rebellion which forced Starmer to retreat. It was revealed in June that Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, had said in a private WhatsApp chat that many Labour MPs seemed interested only in “who we can tax in order to pay benefits to others.” He later insisted this was not a statement of policy, just an expression of momentary frustration. But it was revealing nevertheless. And it underscores just how hard it will be for “dynamic Andy” to turn welfare into work. The post Can Burnham Tackle Entitlements? appeared first on The American Conservative.