Journal of the Plague Years

• Tweenies.
• The Undeserving Poor.
• Man's life is cheap as beasts.
• The lack of 'God-Given Talents'.

Tweenies.

22 February 2008 .

Apparently there is a higher proportion of the population of England in domestic service than at any time since 1860.

That fact alone might give you pause for thought... or perhaps not... until you combine it with what's been said of London for some years:

that London is the most expensive city in the world to live in for almost everything - property prices, travel, food, entertainment, services and utilities - except for domestic help.

You have to think about that one for a moment or two.


The Undeserving Poor.

05 February 2008 .

So an MP of whom I've never heard, but apparently of some influence (A minister? Caroline Flint?), is flying a kite about whether people in council houses should be evicted if they don't find a job. The word 'deserving' has been bandied about. Rings some bells... The opposition are saying that the idea is unworkable; personally I suspect that the idea is part of this thing this government has for scaring people. Like the seemingly sudden decision to back-tax low-earning pensioners...


Man's life is cheap as beasts.

29 January 2008 .

The Independent gave space yesterday to James Purnell, Hain's replacement in the DWP. One or two quotes herewith:

In answer to the question, 'Will you mount the same attack on benefits as (Hain) was planning?':

• 'For people who can't work, I think that independence means getting in to work.'

When asked how he would get one million people off benefits:

• 'Replacing incapacity benefit with the new employment and support allowance will mean that those who can't work won't have to...' (Okay, I chopped that one a bit, but it is what he said.)

Elsewhere:

• We'll have 'a system which for the first time ask people what they can do, not what they can't.'

Which sounds fine - until you think about it in terms of a minister whose declared aim is to stop benefits for a number of claimants which has, after all, been plucked out of the air (there's no evidence that there are one million people who shouldn't be on benefits).

His favourite lines from Shakespeare:

• 'A good motto for any pensions secretary might be: "O, reason not the need!... Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beasts."'

Hmmmm.


The Lack Of 'God-Given Talents'.

28 January 2008 .

Oliver James, in the Independent yesterday, was writing about Thatcherite neo-liberalism - what he calls 'Selfish Capitalism'. I found the article disturbing, because what he had to say reflects and reinforces what I've spent most of my adult life feeling - and much of it trying to not to acknowledge:

• that the social Darwinism at the heart of 'Thatch/Blairism' since the late 70s, re-emerging as evolutionary psychology, was (and is) quite prepared to condemn the poor, the ill, the unsuccessful, as undeserving.

And not only as undeserving. He reports US sociologist Charles Murray: 'the rich are rich and law-abiding, and the poor are poor and criminal, because of their genes... those at the bottom of the gene-pool have sunk because of their defective DNA.' I refer to my governor-of-a-hospital dinner companion (q.v.) who regarded the non-paying patients there as 'the scum of the earth' and meant it - however eleemosynary* he may have supposed himself to be.

*I've been longing to use that word since I read it in Tom Jones as a teenager. Much like 'charitable', to you ignorami.

[I'm far from being a 'left-wing Islington teacher', but I was teaching in Islington throughout Thatcher's premiership. I tried, all that time, to deny what was increasingly obvious; that a large part of the Thatcher constituency regarded my students - whose families were often immigrant, North London working class, single parent, or other such less than exalted folk - as dross. Can I prove that this was the case? I can't - you had to live through it, try to cut through the party politics, be objective about events which cried out to be accepted subjectively, in order to understand the contempt - I can't prove it but I am as certain of it as can be. I had to ignore it, or even deny it to myself, because to accept that that was how so many 'winners' saw my kids would have been soul-destroying.]

Mr. James suggests that while 'Nouveau' Labourites say they support equality of opportunity for all, the sub-text is 'that the poor will always be with us because of defective genes...' As I was reading this, I thought that he really was beginning to go a bit OTT, until I read the next bit: '...unable to take the opportunities because of their lack of "god-given talents" (as Blair once put it).' And I thought, that's right, The Dear Leader did say that; and I'm thinking he may (unconsciously?) have meant it like that, too. And I believe in my waters that that's what Cameron thinks, as well.

(Did The Dear Leader believe that he himself was especially endowed with 'god-given talents', I wonder?)

Whether the article is correct or not (and all I'll say is that it's rather pessimistic), I'm afraid it did succeed in yanking some of my chains. Herewith a few more giblets, selected not quite at random:

• 'The wealth of the wealthy has massively increased since the introduction of Selfish Capitalism (Thatch/Blairism) in the late 1970s. There has been no increase since then in the average real wage for English-speaking people at all, no trickle-down effect whatsoever.' It's the second sentence here that gets me; it's regrettably vague (does he mean all English-speaking people? and if he's talking about Brits, surely what he says isn't actually true), but at the same time it rings bells. Should it be ringing those - or any - bells?

• 'Those of us in the English-speaking world are twice as mentally ill today as in the 1970s. We are also twice as mentally ill.... as relatively Unselfish Capitalist mainland western Europe. This is stuff we could do something about and Social Darwinism has been a great distraction from doing so.' How true.

• Dawkins' The Selfish Gene supplied the "scientific" underpinning for Selfish Capitalism, says Mr. James (his quotes, which at least makes me feels supported in my doubts about Dawkins' "science"). He adds that this is '...along with the work of his friend, Matt Ridley... principal British cheerleader of evolutionary ideology** and a loud advocate of cutting back the state, explicitly linking the two.' It's the next sentence which suddenly brings a whole new perspective: 'It's a mind-boggling irony that Ridley was, until recently, also chairman of Northern Rock, which the taxpayer is to bail out following its disastrously ill-regulated dealings.'

**Something quite different from my form of evolutionary ideology (mentioned elsewhere on this site), I might add.

There's a deep, deep part of my soul which has believed for years that children I spent my life teaching were damaged by an unholy philosophy which gripped (and justified) a rapacious and devil-take-the-hindmost society. You would expect arrogance a priori; but it's when you see just how utterly hopeless so many of the adherents of that philosophy are (Ridley in running a bank, Dawkins in his "science", bush in the oil business - or at war, etc.) that you brush with despair.

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