The past 14 years of austerity and increasing poverty, an unprecedented ideological onslaught that may have resulted in over a million additional deaths by 2019 alone, was possible because of two key groups in our society – our political class and our ‘commentators’. While politicians have some form of democratic mandate (albeit sometimes exceedingly tenuous), commentators and columnists have none. They’re paid to have opinions on things but, in many cases, operate like intellectual fly-tippers, dumping toxic ideas on the public then moving along hastily.
I’ll leave aside the openly racist, homophobic, and transphobic men and women ‘of letters’. Their efforts to divide and defile society are well documented and need no repetition. It’s more instructive to examine one of our society’s widely accepted prejudices, mobilised throughout austerity across all media and particularly among the commentariat: the baiting of those who are in poverty or struggling.
Attitudes towards poverty
Since 2010, as the number of people in relative and absolute poverty has swelled, attitudes towards poverty have gone into sharp reverse, resembling Victorian arguments based around self-help. In this formulation, poverty is due to lack of self-discipline, ambition, hard work, abstemiousness, and common sense. Poverty has no structural or social causes and to suggest as much is wokery, even treasonous.
We’re treated to our increasingly merged political and media classes explaining that property ownership would be available to all if we just learned to be more thrifty, like our imaginary forebears were during the second world war. Most of this rhetoric is churned out by educated, intelligent people with access to information on inflation, property prices, living standards, and wages. It becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that either willful ignorance or deliberate disingenuousness must be at play.
Suggestion after suggestion of new ways that the poor could live, or how the state could withdraw basic help in order to ‘liberate’ them, have been mooted. Columnists allied to the Conservative Party – and who enjoy close connections to the dark money-funded right wing ‘think tanks’ of Tufton Street – present often dramatic, life-altering (in the most negative of ways) proposals for their readership to nod along with.
Times, Telegraph, Mail, and Express readers do not apparently live the lives of the people who are the intended target of screeds by columnists. They don’t, as a rule, have to decide between heating and eating. They don’t have children whose growth has been stunted by austerity, or have to consider the prospect of turning to sex work and its dangers to feed their families. What would happen if a right wing newspaper columnist was actually forced to write for the audience they’re writing about, for once? We’ll
likely never know.
Punching down
Several columns stood out recently as particularly egregious examples. Matthew Parris is often considered a more liberal voice by his admirers due to his criticism of Boris Johnson and Brexit. However, he’s also written inflammatory articles about Gypsy, Romani and Traveller peoples that would find a comfortable home in a far right publication. He thinks people game mental ill health to make money.
Parris recently made an economic case in both the Times and The Spectator for relaxing the rules around assisted suicide. He posed the question: “How are our economies going to pay for the ruinously expensive overhang that dare not speak its name: old age and infirmity?”. He thinks the future will be Logan’s Run for low-income people because we’ll grow to accept that.
In The Spectator he was equally bald, saying: “At root the reason is Darwinian. Tribes that handicap themselves will not prosper.” That a supposedly sensible centre-ground figure could present this argument as commonsense, advocating that our worthiness to continue living should be balanced against the costs involved, should concern us. He uses the word ‘dying’ rather than ‘suicide’; perhaps writing that frankly about encouraging people to kill themselves was too much even for him. But in the ‘burden on society’ model it’s a small step from ‘you’re a drain on the system’ to ‘and you must stop being that’.
Matthew Parris is 74.
Should there not be a basic licence to be a columnist? A series of short but rigorous psychological evaluations through which sociopathic attitudes are weeded out? Perhaps those who don’t make the grade could be allowed to write for specialist publications where the readers are on a Home Office watch list?
Columnists and graft
Another Times piece was penned by Alice Thomson: educated at Marlborough College and a granddaughter of Nobel prizewinners, she resides with her husband and children on a country estate. Such contextual information is important when considering that she has advocated for a relaxation of UK child labour laws.
She wrote eloquently of how her grandmother, during the first world war and aged 15, dealt with the pressures of life and uncertainties of conflict through life’s special sauce – graft. Perhaps this rose-tinted story, based on diaries and letters, is truthful, and work did result in some degree of mental or spiritual emancipation from the cares of the world. However, it surely cannot be a serious proposition to compare the experience of a well-to-do Edwardian teenager to the realities of a broken nation in which an unprecedented number of children exist in abject poverty.
Just this weekend, up popped a columnist in the Telegraph on the subject of work, with the you-can’t-make-this-up name of Sophia Money Coutts. Her column is titled “Gen Z are an employer’s nightmare – my twenties put them to shame”. The lede elaborates: “Like most of my peers, I hustled at all hours for my career – a far cry from this minimum effort generation and their ‘Lazy Girl jobs’.
What, lazy jobs like filing columns wildly generalising about people who aren’t daughters of barons and offspring of a famed banking family? Who know that, no matter how hard they work, they may never be able to buy a home? Whose grandfathers weren’t editors of … the Telegraph?
Good-for-nothing wastrels
When columnists made arguments for shirkers, skivers, and layabouts to face benefits sanctions, our political class responded with enthusiasm. The result has been despair and death. Homelessness itself is now, it’s said, to be made illegal. The absence of working class and impoverished voices in our national media has resulted in columnists, a media gentry, writing about lives they couldn’t possibly hope to understand.
They proffer buck-your-ideas-up solutions to social and psychological problems so complex it takes a team of social workers, support workers, housing officers, probation workers, teachers, mental health crisis team professionals, and doctors to make any headway. Their newspapers are fine with any resulting outrage because they’re desperate for clicks.
You can trace ‘people don’t want to work’ pieces back through a century or more of hackery. None of the writers know anything about the corrosive effects of poverty, trauma, and the mental health issues that go with both, so vacillate between Dick Whittington thinking and coded sadism. In this regard, unfortunately, they reflect the values and experiences of many of their readers, for whom the poor are sometimes objects of pity, but often of contempt.
If newspaper columnists truly wanted to perform just one act of genuine care and concern for people who’re in poverty, struggling, or striving, that would help them immeasurably, let it be this. Please, please stop writing about them. Just stop.
