economistadentata Economista. Gin fancier. Not Writing a Book.

A man bedding down for the night, opposite the High St Job Centre, his eyes as empty & dark as the shut-down shop in whose doorway he sleeps.

Consider these two facts:

1. The Labour Party is assisting the government in rushing through emergency retroactive legislation to enable to government to avoid repaying illegally-imposed sanctions on those placed on workfare schemes.
2. The government is proposing childcare tax breaks for families with joint incomes of < £300,000.

I am, for my many and various sins and those of my forefathers and -mothers before me, Old School, Fabian, tribal Labour. Growing up, of course my family voted Labour. It’s just what people like us did. We’d no more think of voting Tory than we would consider eating our own children.

Not because we were (or are) working class, (I remain deeply sceptical about the whole class warfare schtick of some on the Left; I can see why it works for them, but I’d rather unite around our common humanity, thanks. Yes, I know; I would say that) but because it was a matter of simple human decency.

Low-paid work is shitty. Often literally. Doing it, not as a laugh whilst between school and University ie on the way to doing a not-shitty job, but day-in, day-out in order to put food on the family table demands that the people doing it have access to certain things, as a matter of social justice: decent houses to live in, decent schools for their children to attend, and decent healthcare. Labour was the party that stood up and argued, proudly, for those rights. Above all they argued for the right of the poorly-paid to have the value their work added to a company’s profits acknowledged via the medium of a decent living wage.

The debate of the right level of a minimum wage (or if there should be such a thing-guess which side of that row I’m on?) is for another day. Suffice to say, if a family is bringing in £150,000 pa they’re probably not working as cleaners. Or in childcare. Twice that? Well….call me old-fashioned, but I rather think they can cough up for their own au pairs. Either that or perhaps they could benefit from the same help with budgeting that is so often advocated for the poor whose children are going to school hungry.

This is the point at which someone will jump in and say things about: how much revenue the well-off bring to the Treasury, how they create employment, how they pay for school fees and nannies out of their taxed incomes, how long the hours are in the City, and my goodness, recession or no recession have you seen the price of a house in London these days? Oh and there’s usually a swipe about the ‘politics of envy’ with a dash of ‘taxation is theft’ on the side.

I know. No really, I do-because old school Labour or not, my family are those people with houses in London, who have paid school fees and hired cleaners, who work in the City (both Grandads, Dad for years, & Mummy as a trail-blazing woman (gasp!) in the Sixties). Why would I be eaten up with envy of those people? I am those people.

But where (& the rest of my tribe) part company from those arguing that the rich are in fact poor-ish, whilst poor simply lack motivation is this: we know how bloody lucky we are. Yes, lucky. And we pay our taxes, all our taxes, so people who cannot find work, or who are disabled, are not forced to work, free-at-the-point-of-use for their ‘employers’ instead of receiving support until they can find work that pays a wage.

Workfare is an abomination. It cuts the link between back-breaking/boring/dull work and the reward of the hard-earned pay packet at the end of the week. It is the worst sort of welfare; welfare for companies and therefore for the already-wealthy who are their shareholders. It make a mockery of this government’s stated political aim to shrink the state as it makes the state a recruitment agency for the private sector.

Ah, yes. The politics. Well, people on high incomes who feel poor are the Tories core target constituency, that’s true. And bashing the poor for the failings of the wider economy is as Tory as fox-hunting. It was ever thus.  But this is what has changed: there was a time when Labour MPs would have spat in the face of the idea of workfare. And laughed at anyone advocating ‘help with the costs of the help’ for the rich. The Tories haven’t changed. But Labour sure as hell has.

I am Labour in my bones, my very DNA. I have stuck with it through thick, thin, the Michael Foot years, an illegal war, three consecutive election victories and endless bloody leafleting rounds. But enough.

‘Don’t leave’ some friends and family have said, ‘Stay and make it better’. But that’s just it: I haven’t left my party. I could never leave my party. It has left me.

AFTERTHOUGHT: A further note about the politics: why, exactly, does the PLP think that the same Secretary of State who will cheerily introduce retroactive legislation in order to duck the consequences of his own department’s failings, will honour in perpetuity any concessions the PLP have ‘won’? It’s quite an achievement to be both profoundly naive and horribly cynical over the same issue, but it seems to me they may just have managed it.

I have, as followers of my nonsense on Twitter will already know, Been Ill, with first a sickness bug and now a dreadful cold/flu. Not seriously ill, not requiring a hospital stay or even a GP’s visit, but ill enough to need time off work and volunteering and to leave me feeling grimly frustrated and tearful at my inability to live my life without thinking about it for the last ten days.

Walking to the shops is exhausting. I can’t breathe properly, or sleep. I can’t concentrate. My throat is agony & I’ve come close to losing my voice. Last week…well, I’ll draw a tasteful veil over it, suffice to say I spent rather more time in the bathroom than usual, and not for reasons of vanity.

I am utterly sick and tired of being sick and tired. But I know I will get better.

This afternoon the thought struck me: what if I didn’t know when or if I was going to get better? What if I wasn’t even sure what was wrong with me, and my GP couldn’t tell me? What if, in short, I was in the same place as sufferers of conditions like ME, arthritis, or god forbid, cancer?

And then add to that the rhetoric coming from government about ‘scroungers’, the pressure and contempt from the DWP, the fear of losing one’s income and one’s home.

What if this wasn’t for 10 days, but potentially for ever? I have suffered from depression before and know what it’s like to not be able to see an end in sight: but at least I knew why.

The last ten days have been completely infuriating: and they have made me more appalled than ever by this government’s complete disregard for the long-term sick. So, when I do get better, I’ll confront their inhumanity with even more determination, on behalf of those who through no fault of their own, can’t muster the resources.

Now, can someone pass me the tissues? Thanks.

Be in me as the eternal moods

             of the bleak wind, and not

As transient things are -

            gaiety of flowers.

Have me in the strong loneliness

            of sunless cliffs

And of grey waters.

           Let the gods speak softly of us

In days hereafter,

            The shadowy flowers of Orcus

Remember thee.

shame

/SHām/

Noun

A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

Verb

(of a person, action, or situation) Make (someone) feel ashamed: “I shamed him into giving some away”.

Synonyms

noun.  disgrace - dishonour - dishonor - ignominy - opprobriumverb.  disgrace - abash - dishonour - dishonor

Shame is arguably an emotion without which, we are not fully human: to have lived without having felt shame is to be unaware of other people’s opinions & or in extremis, even the possibility of their existing. Humankind being as we are, only a extreme narcissist or an utter fool would think this possible or desirable.

Shame is the emotion which polices the boundaries of acceptable behaviour: Adam and Eve lived without shame until falling prey to the temptation to ignore the rules by which Eden was governed. In a post-theocentric world, the role played by God in this set-up is now filled (rightly or wrongly) by social institutions, most prominently the various branches of what used to be called the Establishment.

The government is looking at measures other than income to measure child poverty. These include, at present: drug/alcohol abuse in parents, worklessness, family stability, unmanageable debt, parental mental health diagnoses, and access to quality education. Measures of income, particularly relative measures are increasingly dismissed as ‘not telling the whole story’.

No-one in their right mind would argue that money tells the whole story of a child’s life chances: absent or indifferent parents, frequent changes in school, and poor role modeling can all have a deleterious effect, regardless of the wealth of a household. But just as more money can ameliorate those effects, having less will surely exacerbate them.

All the factors cited by the government in the person of Iain Duncan Smith will have socially-expressed effects on a child: whether it’s embarrassment at not having the right shoes on PE days & then being told off by a teacher for it, not feeling able to invite a friend round for a meal, being teased for being unwashed, feeling ashamed of Dad turning up reeking of drink on Sports’ Day- all these are things felt by the child. The responsibility lies foursquare with the adults: but the effects are visited upon the person least able to change their material circumstances.

One thing that truly shocked me on becoming a parent is just how strong a child’s desire to ‘fit in’ is, both with their family and with their peer group. There will always be the cheerful, charming eccentrics, gamboling like lambs in the face of others’ disapproval-I count several amongst my dearest friends-but relying on this to dismiss most people’s need to belong is misguided, at best. Children need to feel they belong: shame tells them they don’t.

Shame felt about an action or an attitude that can be redressed or changed is one thing: it has a social utility. But shame about something we cannot control is something else entirely. A child becomes ashamed not of something they have done, but of who they are. You don’t have to think very hard to see where this leads: a child ashamed of themselves is clearly less likely to speak up, to join in, to ask for help, to aspire to better, for fear of inviting further condemnation as being ‘wrong’. Better by far, to keep one’s head down.

This government has repeatedly, to its eternal discredit, encouraged the judging, the shaming, of those who are poor for no other reason than their poverty.  Moreover, the contrasting tendency over the last 30-odd years has been to lionise the rich for no other reason than their wealth. It is not merely in terms of wealth that the top and the bottom have been falling out of  touch.

The factors that are cited as being causes of poverty- alcohol abuse, mental health problems, poor literacy, poor life choices (read any tabloid if you want proof that these things are not the sole preserve of the poor) are primarily manifestations of existing poverty. It is very hard to make good choices when your horizons have been constrained since birth by a want of financial resources.

The government has made great play of its emotional literacy, its wanting to think outside of mere numbers in order to tackle the root causes of child poverty. Fine. Perhaps they might like to ask poor children about how often & how intensely they have felt ashamed of themselves, their families and their lives & use their answers as one of the DWP’s indicators. But I suspect for that to happen, the Cabinet might have to feel some shame themselves, a human gesture of which on the existing evidence, they seem utterly incapable.

A recurrent criticism of Hilary Mantel’s depiction of Thomas Cromwell is that it is both too modern and too flattering. On this evidence, however, he seems to have had the sort of realistic grasp on Parliamentary politics that contemporary politicians could do well to emulate:

‘I among others have endured a parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we commoned of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, perjury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemprance, treason, murder, felony, conciliation, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also contained within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say as well as we might, and left where we began.’

(Thomas Cromwell, in a letter to his friend John Creke, after the dissolution of the unproductive Parliament of 1523)