COVER -> DAY ONE
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It is one of those unquestioned assumptions of our day that civilisation has somehow progressed.
You can understand why the initiators of the idea of progress thought that they had engineered some intellectual advances. From the standpoint of the early 18th Century the 17th, dominated by the Thirty Years War between Catholic and Protestant powers, looked decidedly inferior. Diderot, d'Allembert and the other Encyclopaedists could not imagine how civilised people would ever again slaughter each other over the matter of dogmatic difference in religion.
With some minor exceptions they were right but we have found much less edifying things to fight about than the legitimacy of bishops or the connection between their appointment and the wielding of secular power. Indeed, we have become so assured and sophisticated in our ways that we scarcely know why the First World War was ever fought. I spent a wonderfully pleasant but ultimately fruitless year at Harvard trying to find out.
That was only the first and, in cruelty and statistical terms, not the worst of the 20th Century's great slaughters. Again, we are so undifferentiatedly sophisticated that we don't precisely know to the ten million how many people were killed in a variety of political massacres.
On statistical grounds alone, then, the initial claim that civilisation progresses looks rather shallow.
Yet this comfortable assumption of chronologically manifested moral superiority is simplistic at another level. Within democratic societies different parties place a different economic value on life.
With the exception of the valuation of the lives of unborn foetuses, the people of the right, including the religious right, value human life less highly than the people who are liberal. It is an oddity of this position that the unborn foetus has an inalienable right to life until the very moment when it is born --- but thereafter it may die of poverty, misfortune or violence as a simple matter of actuarial calculation.
On the whole, however, the generalisation holds. If you vote Republican in America, Conservative in Britain, Christian Democrat in Germany or Gaullist in France you are making a simple statement that you are not prepared to invest so much money in preserving human life as you would if you were ruled by the Democrats, New Labour, Social Democrats or Socialists respectively. This assertion is not, of course, made baldly.
Nobody says, let them rot in their ghettos while we live behind our fences; let them crash in their trains while we glide in our cars; let them stay ignorant while our children go to private schools; let them descend into the desperation of drugs while we ascend with our skis to the snowy heights; let their hands be sliced off in the factories because we are irked by red tape. They do not say these things but watch the proposals on taxation and spending, watch the pressure for deregulation, watch the condemnation of regulations and 'red tape'.
There may well be one exception to this general rule of indifference.
Capitalism has always been keen on using the taxation of the moderately poor to pay for their better education and that of the very poor to ensure that the labour force meets the requirements of capital without it ever having to bother its head or its purse for the purpose. On this there is, therefore, a fair degree of bipartisanship though the motives may be very different. What liberals want for its own good capitalists invariably want for their own.
The plainest evidence lies in the area of infrastructural spending which may have a role in alleviating poverty by providing jobs through public sector capital expenditure. But -- even in the short term -- such spending does not improve the lot of the poor.
If you raze an insanitary ghetto and shunt its denizens into a bleached ghetto it will not be long before the second replicates the first.
As I have remarked before, the economics of misery are stubborn; it is much easier to become desperately poor than it is to escape that condition.
To engineer such a desirable end takes a huge amount of human input. Let nobody say at this point, as the plutocratic sirens want to say, that there is no point in throwing money at it. If you want highly competent social and community workers, midwives, home visitors, nursery school teachers, child minders, youth workers, alcohol and debt counsellors, then, to repeat the arguments of the free marketeers, you have to pay what the market requires.
For too long the economic free marketeers have assumed that the private sector is subject to their nostrums while the public sector can somehow continue to function effectively on a shrinking and shrinkingly talented and remunerated workforce. Indeed, it is an imposition that those who work in the public sector, and particularly with the poor, want to be paid at all. This is the nastiest variant in the capitalist lexicon which says that whereas rich people need much more money to provide the incentive for their activities, poor people need less if they are to be effective. This argument might convince me if anybody could rationally draw the dividing line for me between the one class and the other.
In Britain last week after a trial so unpleasant that I could hardly bring myself to read the proceedings, a little girl was murdered by distant relatives; she had been injured in 128 separate places.
There were three predictable outcomes: the murderers were imprisoned; an enquiry was established; and the family social worker was suspended.
There will be two further predictable outcomes: the enquiry will make the same recommendations of scores of its predecessors; and no matter what the enquiry says the social worker will carry most of the blame. Better that, after all, than the niggards who manage not to pay any tax at all from their vast earnings should be blamed. And in case you think that I am prattling in generalisations, I might just remind you that Mr. Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers will cane the social worker harder than anyone else in the world, does not pay a cent in tax to Britain where he owns more than a third of its commercial mass media, and where the child was murdered. Who is he who will not even pay the equivalent of a single social worker's salary as his annual tax to call for more social workers dedicated to the protection of children?
But do not look for a supervisor with a whip, nor the abolition of protective railings, nor the tearing up of food vouchers, look instead at the inexorable, paring and sneering as wealth in fractions of cents is moved from the care of the poor to the care of the rich. An extra inch between the safety railings, the non-replacement of a social worker who has resigned, a percentage increase rounded down, a small cut in industrial inspections. Whether or not the wheels of the Lord grind exceeding small you can be sure that those of His self appointed moral guardians here on earth certainly do; and not always to their own disadvantage.
