Ok, I know I promised a detailed and entirely scientific analysis of why Thatcher, Bush, Blair, Cameron et al are almost certainly psychopathic, but that is going to have to wait, although the following may provide an evidentiary case study.
I actually cried today on hearing Cameron's proposals to abolish housing benefit for the under twenty fives. I'm not under twenty five. It won't affect me. So why the tears?
It's the callous, glib heartlessness of the man who is not even bothering to pretend to care any more about the "lower orders", as he undoubtedly thinks of us. Three quarters of the homeless are under twenty five and that figure is set to explode if this insane proposal comes to fruition. Cameron apparently thinks young people should continue to live with their parents. Well, that's all very well if mummy and daddy can afford to keep you for an extra ten years, and if all is well. But let's remember that many families are abusive and dysfunctional, and in these cases staying at home is not an option. And that's not to mention those already vulnerable and often sadly emotionally damaged youngsters who grow up in care homes - kicked out at eighteen? Where are they supposed to go for the seven years before they qualify? Our streets and prisons are already littered with the human detritus who have fallen through the cracks - the abused, the kids who have run away from care homes or unimaginable abuse at the hands of parents supposed to keep them safe, the mentally ill, the dispossessed. It's a depressing fact that these vulnerable legions who most need help and compassion are exactly those considered disposable and worthless by the Old Etonian millionaires club that makes up the current cabinet. (I also find it interesting that he has the gall to talk of a culture of something for nothing, when that is exactly what he is asking of already beleaguered parents - to extend indefinite care for adult children, with presumably no extra financial help on the table.)
Cameron is the living, breathing embodiment of a system which unashamedly extends laissez faire to those at the top, who create the inequality, but regulates and controls the poor by means of what the sociologist Loic Wacquant has called a carceral assistantial net - prison on the one hand, and the transformation of welfare on the other into a system where even the most miserable, minimal assistance comes with endless hoops to jump, surveillance and a complete stripping away of human dignity. Whatever you get, they'll make sure you know you're a worthless and inadequate specimen for needing it. The removal of housing benefit for under twenty fives is also another example of the cynical targeting and scapegoating of young people, who at the end of the day do not by virtue of being young somehow need food and shelter less.
It will also bring about an explosion in US style working poverty, as documented in Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich went undercover to investigate life in low wage USA, and met many coworkers who were homeless, or just one paycheque away from homelessness - that is, if they met with an accident or unexpected illness or couldn't work, they would lose their accommodation. The US has no equivalent of housing benefit, and we should remember that Cameron's talk of a culture of entitlement obfuscates the fact that housing benefit is also there to help those on low incomes keep a roof over their head. But then a minimum wage people can actually live on without topups isn't "business friendly" and we can't have that of course.
I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again, but the brazen hypocrisy of a government which appoints the billionaire Philip Green as an "efficiency advisor", a man reputed to have dodged a tax bill of £300m, is sickening. Again and again, the super rich get away with it and those at the sharp end get squeezed and squeezed until we can barely breathe. Young people especially are being left a legacy of no money, no jobs, no prospects, no hope. The riots may only have been the beginning - Michael Young's 1950s prophecy of a meritocratic elite, who justify their power by controlling what constitutes merit, and an underclass so disenfranchised they take to the streets is coming eerily, terrifyingly true.
As for supporting families who want to work, who is Cameron kidding? A friend of mine confided that to put her baby son in a creche while she worked would cost £36 a day. It simply makes no economic sense, she'd be no better off and so you can't blame her for wanting to spend the time with her son instead. The Tories also idolise the family and stay at home mothers - remember John Major's ill fated "Back to Basics" campaign? So are working mothers the agents of moral deterioration or do we support them now after all? Or is it more like they'll take any position that paints the poor as immoral, feckless and thus deserving of the constant attacks on them?
One final word. Feckless families? I don't know how he has the cheek. I know a lot of parents who are making ends meet on very little, but not one of them has ever left their child behind in a pub toilet.
Monday 25 June 2012
Wednesday 6 June 2012
National Pride? Or a sham and a shame?
Well, thank God that's over.
Was it only me who was rendered mildly nauseous and seized with the compulsion to remain indoors in a dark room until the madness had passed during jubilee weekend?
Is it only me who finds the whole thing in poor taste in a recession? A hollow spectacle of pomp and ceremony, hereditary privilege and the worst in British jingoism and triumphalism? Does it make me shamefully lacking in proper national pride that the union jacks attached to every possible consumer good - including, natch, a small one stuck in a flowerpot with a few dying twigs of lavender and flogged for a tenner as a "Jubilee Planter" - just made me want to swear?
I don't think so, and for several reasons. When people are going hungry, losing jobs and cripplingly in debt right left and centre - literally, the financial crisis was politically egalitarian and took no heed of political creed; only those so swaddled in personal and yes, often inherited, wealth could continue heedlessly living in their houses of gold and diamond studded toilets. I exaggerate, of course, but not by much, and certainly not in the case of the Royals - is a display whose subtext is, essentially, Look How Much Money We've Still Got appropriate? I have no personal beef with the Royals, although I strongly suspect we wouldn't get on. But the idea of hereditary privilege, of being born to rule, of the rest of us being mere commoners and subjects, is deeply morally offensive to me. The argument that the Queen is by now just a symbolic figurehead holds no water, either - with the vast personal fortune, supplemented by public money, property portfolio of palaces and country houses and, as a recent Facebook share that made me laugh out loud had it, a £1 million hat, I doubt that bothers her overmuch.
Some would accuse me of the politics of envy, but that is and always has been a spurious line trotted out to mask the astronomical gap between rich and poor and the ghettoisation and exclusion of the have nots - defective consumers, as Bauman has it, who are shut out of the brave new world and blamed for their own rejection again and again. Never mind that the recession has put brakes on the spending of many previously invited to the consumer party, the discourse of scroungers, layabouts and drains on resources is back with a vengeance now that cutting off aid to those who need it most requires justification.
Which brings me to my second jubilee related point. Just who are the parasites and scroungers here? I'm not a fan of those ugly, distasteful words but in the language of the tabloids, the civil list is a drain on decent taxpayers to the tune of millions - which puts the few weekly quid shaved off already paltry weekly allowances in perspective.
And maybe I'm a cynic or a horrible person, but I actually found the sheer numbers who did buy in, who did jump on the union jack waving band wagon, disheartening and depressing. How willing we are to participate in our own subjugation, whilst indulging our peculiarly British - to indulge momentarily in essentialism - superiority complex which finds its apotheosis in the lovely Royals, and didn't she look lovely, and wasn't she dignified, and on and on. What happened to all the left wing firebrands? Me, I spent the weekend wallowing in nostalgia for the days when I used to burn with pride for my Dad, who refused to stand for the national anthem at school events, who instilled me with principles that caused me, as a seven year old putative Brownie, to refuse the promise on the grounds that I categorically did not promise to serve the Queen as I was against the monarchy (and furthermore, how could I do my duty to a God I didn't believe in?) and who taught me we are NOT anyone's subjects.
I did burn with pride for my Mum, though, who informed her colleague in no uncertain terms that the only way she would be toasting the Queen was if she'd died. We're not beat yet, then. At least not round my manor.
Was it only me who was rendered mildly nauseous and seized with the compulsion to remain indoors in a dark room until the madness had passed during jubilee weekend?
Is it only me who finds the whole thing in poor taste in a recession? A hollow spectacle of pomp and ceremony, hereditary privilege and the worst in British jingoism and triumphalism? Does it make me shamefully lacking in proper national pride that the union jacks attached to every possible consumer good - including, natch, a small one stuck in a flowerpot with a few dying twigs of lavender and flogged for a tenner as a "Jubilee Planter" - just made me want to swear?
I don't think so, and for several reasons. When people are going hungry, losing jobs and cripplingly in debt right left and centre - literally, the financial crisis was politically egalitarian and took no heed of political creed; only those so swaddled in personal and yes, often inherited, wealth could continue heedlessly living in their houses of gold and diamond studded toilets. I exaggerate, of course, but not by much, and certainly not in the case of the Royals - is a display whose subtext is, essentially, Look How Much Money We've Still Got appropriate? I have no personal beef with the Royals, although I strongly suspect we wouldn't get on. But the idea of hereditary privilege, of being born to rule, of the rest of us being mere commoners and subjects, is deeply morally offensive to me. The argument that the Queen is by now just a symbolic figurehead holds no water, either - with the vast personal fortune, supplemented by public money, property portfolio of palaces and country houses and, as a recent Facebook share that made me laugh out loud had it, a £1 million hat, I doubt that bothers her overmuch.
Some would accuse me of the politics of envy, but that is and always has been a spurious line trotted out to mask the astronomical gap between rich and poor and the ghettoisation and exclusion of the have nots - defective consumers, as Bauman has it, who are shut out of the brave new world and blamed for their own rejection again and again. Never mind that the recession has put brakes on the spending of many previously invited to the consumer party, the discourse of scroungers, layabouts and drains on resources is back with a vengeance now that cutting off aid to those who need it most requires justification.
Which brings me to my second jubilee related point. Just who are the parasites and scroungers here? I'm not a fan of those ugly, distasteful words but in the language of the tabloids, the civil list is a drain on decent taxpayers to the tune of millions - which puts the few weekly quid shaved off already paltry weekly allowances in perspective.
And maybe I'm a cynic or a horrible person, but I actually found the sheer numbers who did buy in, who did jump on the union jack waving band wagon, disheartening and depressing. How willing we are to participate in our own subjugation, whilst indulging our peculiarly British - to indulge momentarily in essentialism - superiority complex which finds its apotheosis in the lovely Royals, and didn't she look lovely, and wasn't she dignified, and on and on. What happened to all the left wing firebrands? Me, I spent the weekend wallowing in nostalgia for the days when I used to burn with pride for my Dad, who refused to stand for the national anthem at school events, who instilled me with principles that caused me, as a seven year old putative Brownie, to refuse the promise on the grounds that I categorically did not promise to serve the Queen as I was against the monarchy (and furthermore, how could I do my duty to a God I didn't believe in?) and who taught me we are NOT anyone's subjects.
I did burn with pride for my Mum, though, who informed her colleague in no uncertain terms that the only way she would be toasting the Queen was if she'd died. We're not beat yet, then. At least not round my manor.
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