The conservative cri-de-coeur

Let's hear it from the Billy Bennett memorial choir, all sub-prime mortgagors and all almost gentlemen:

I was rich but I was honest,
Then she came from 'umble stock,
And her greedy heart was beating
Underneath her tattered frock.

So I thought that she was needy,
I knew not her base design,
So I lent a sub-prime mortgage
To stop her constant whine.

It's the same the whole world over,
It's the rich what gets the blame,
It's the poor what wants the credit,
Ain't it all a blooming shame?

Thenkin' yaow, ladeez and genelmen, thenk yaow. We'll try and get them back again later on. Meanwhile ... on with the show!

But, first to more serious things.

The sinking of John McCain

There's a certain inevitability about what comes next. Nearly a year on from the McCain car-crash (it was in some large part the fault of that nagging woman in the back-seat) and history starts to be re-written.

Surely John McCain knew he had undertaken mission impossible: it was his turn eight years before, when the Bushies stitched him up for the first time. The power of money, the ingrained Bushie lack of principle and Karl Rove -- those last two are political synonyms -- defeated him. In 2008 McCain was again trounced by the same man and the same factors: the dire Bush legacy would surely have been too much for any Republican.

So Dubya slinks off into the shades of history?

Naah! No political movement can afford that round their necks. So, two possibilities:

1. Let's expect a rehabilitation.

Tim Montgomerie's been at this lark for months. In his view, Dubya was Africa's saviour and a great philanthropist, particularly in regard to child-welfare around the world. That last one surfaced in ConHome in recent days; don't tell the family-planners, they'd split their condoms laughing. Anyway, just think of all the Iraqi and Afghan infants he saved for Jesus [concept © Abbot Arnaud Amaury, 22nd July, 1209].

2. A Stalinist air-brushing, perhaps?

That's what Ross Douthat (right) implies in an opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times, extrapolating from a digest article in GQ:

Adding insult to injury, the umpteenth insider look at Bush administration’s dysfunction was unveiled last week as well, courtesy of an obscure second-term speechwriter named Matt Latimer. (Next up: Bush’s White House chef tells all!) Latimer’s memoir, excerpted in GQ, offers grist for Bush-whackers of both parties. For liberals, there’s Dubya the incurious frat boy, flubbing policy details and cracking wise about Hillary Clinton’s posterior. For conservatives eager to prove that the most unpopular president in 50 years was never really one of them, there’s Bush the crypto-liberal, who dismisses the conservative movement and boasts that he personally “redefined the Republican Party.”

Phew!

If there is life, breath, sanity and intellect left among conservative Republicans, Douthat is one of the vital organs. He is to "obscure second-term speechwriters" as Claude Monet to any Saturday dauber (all of whom are "impressionistic" at best). With Reihan Salam, formerly his colleague on Atlantic Monthly, he produced, last year, Grand New Party. The sub-title of that book spills most of the beans:

How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream

Douthat and Salam retread an old path:

The interests of the working class--the common man, the hardworking but unexceptional citizen--have been at the heart of every great American political movement. From Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan, our most successful leaders have sought the democratization of wealth, competence, and social standing--not so that every American might be rich or famous, but so that we might all be independent and self-reliant and secure. In this sense, the American dream is ultimately a dream of home, of a place to call your own, earned and not inherited, and free from the petty tyrannies of landlords, bureaucrats, and bankers. It's a dream of a country in which ownership is available to everyone, provided that they are willing to work for it, rather than being handed out on the basis of wealth or caste, brains or beauty.

That provokes a couple of wry thoughts:

• Doubhat's article, as we shall see, is about to nibble the mortgaging hand that fed just that property-owning dream.
• It is curious how FDR is now being exhumed as the Right's holy relic and shibboleth. Time and again his name re-appears in conservative musings, inevitably in a tone between approval and adulation.
• British Tories, or the few who can cope with anything more taxing than Cameron's dog-whistles, the Sun's grunted monosyllables and Iain Dale's over-simplifications, must be studying Douthat and Salam. Similar rhetoric, however, is denied them. The term "working-class" is being ruthlessly expunged from the contemporary British scene. That's not just the consequence of aspiration. It also reflects the post-industrial context of Britain (and the near-future for the United States): Thatcher effectively eliminated heavy industry and the class-loyalties and communities that went with it: she made "work", in the "working-class" sense, anathema to some, and merely a memory for others.
  
• Douthat's and Salam's historical "analysis" (all of one paragraph in the opening chapter) is fatally flawed. The assumption is that American government has consistently been warm, cuddly and caring-sharing, while those snooty Europeans were oppressive and hostile:
  

The contrast with how Europe's governments treated the working class during the same period is instructive. Both continents extended the franchise, but Europe's nations did so out of fear ...

And, it seems, all other social benefits were opposed for similar reasons of social control:

The goal [of European régimes] was to create a docile working class, not an educated and ambitious one. America, in contrast, expanded schooling first and adopted social insurance programs only in the twentieth century. In each case, America's leaders wanted self-sufficiency and independence; Europe's wanted conformity and obedience.

Which, conveniently, ignores that, both sides of the Atlantic, basic rights had to be won -- at Peterloo via Dearborn to Selma and beyond -- with gutters running with working-class blood and guts. It also denies the status given by Scots Presbyterians to self-improvement: one of the prime motivators of schooling in colonial America.

Doubtat on Bush

A swift recursion to that New York Times article, and the original intended thrust of this entry, before Malcolm's usual over-complications, finds Douthat's best effort at rehabilitating Dubya going like this:

Bush-era bipartisanship did produce some defensible legislation (No Child Left Behind, for instance). But more often, it produced travesties like the failed attempt at “comprehensive” immigration reform, lobbyist feeding frenzies like the 2005 energy bill, and boondoggles like the Department of Homeland Security.

By contrast, Bush’s best initiatives often lacked a constituency outside the White House: His AIDS-in-Africa program; his insistence, vindicated by subsequent scientific breakthroughs, on seeking alternatives to embryo-destroying research; his failed second-term proposals for Social Security and tax reform.

Well, bless me:

• Bone-headed blocking of bio-science was a good thing!
• Dubya, single-handedly (there ought to be more of that around: there'd be less of an AIDS problem) saved a million in Africa!
• Pumping out concessions to the mega-rich was a "tax-reform"!

So why not equally celebrate the environmental vision that thought global warming was a wimpy myth? That wanted drilling in the Alaskan reserve? That thought flogging off the forests and wildernesses to Big Business was as "green" as the dollars it would generate?

We can confidently expect all that, and more, to become the mantra of Dubya-deniers, Montgomerie's merry men and suchlike. Yet, were that quotation translated into the Saturday-afternoon performance of a Premier League striker, it would appear as seven attempts at goal, one almost on target, no score.

Douthat's "explanation" for Dubya's failure is equally intriguing. Try it:

it’s worth reassessing one of the major critiques of his presidency — that it was fatally insulated, by ideology and personality, from both the wisdom of the Washington elite and the desires of the broader public.

In reality, many of the Bush-era ventures that look worst in hindsight were either popular with the public at the time or blessed by the elite consensus. Voters liked the budget-busting tax cuts and entitlement expansions. The Iraq war’s cheering section included prominent Democrats and scores of liberal pundits. And save for a few prescient souls, everybody — right and left, on Wall Street and Main Street — was happy to board the real-estate express and ride it off an economic cliff.

At first taste there's a pleasant taste in that. What it means is the shambles of the Bush presidency was all our fault. We, the public, got it wrong. We misled the poor unfortunate Dubya into populist measures.

No: it doesn't work, does it? How can two hypothetical antinomies be reconciled? -- the disconnect of the Dubya government from its electorate versus unreasonable popular demands for sub-prime mortagages and federal bail-outs. No mention of Lehmann Brothers, which must count as the worst call in recent times.

So, welcome back the Billy Bennett memorial choir...

Led by their star soloist and Ricky Gervais lookalike, Mister Ross Gregory Dothat ...

Everybody knows me, Dr. Goosegrease, M.D.
All the best paying patients, I've got 'em.
Harley Street's my abode, No. 6 down the road,
No. 9 if you start from the bottom.

All your doctors are saps - all excepting me, p'raps,
And I speak without swank or bravado.
I've taken the place of the late Dr. Grace,
Doctor Crippen, and Doctor Barnardo ...

Sphere: Related Content

Reality alert!

The Economist, due to hit the news-stalls, has an important article on the Irish economy. And, no, if you're a banker, a director, or a Big Ball in Cow-town, it's by no means negative.

After the inevitable throat-clearing, there's a bit of observation:

Ireland is having a deeper recession than any other euro area country. The economy probably shrank by 2.5% in 2008 and may contract by another 6.5% this year. Unemployment has jumped from 5% to 10.4%, a faster rise even than in America.

To Malcolm's surprise, the author of the piece largely discounts the banking crisis:

Irish banks may be free of the toxic securities that have poisoned rivals’ balance sheets, but they are blighted by souring property loans.

Huh? Nothing, but nothing, about the corrupt doings around the AIB, and all the way up to the national Central Bank? Oh, well:

C'est la vie, say the old folks,
Which goes to show you never can tell.

Then, the essential passing gloat:

It is easy now to dismiss the rise in living standards in the “Celtic Tiger” years as illusory, particularly as Ireland enjoyed house-price and credit booms that were big even by British standards. But ...

There's a "but"?

But to focus on the bursting of the housing bubble would be to miss the lasting gains that were made.

See what Malcolm means by "no means negative"?

The article segues into a piece of valid, if superficially superficial analysis:

Ireland’s expansion went through two phases. The first, led by exports and powered by foreign direct investment, ended roughly in 2002. Foreign companies, mainly American, provided bags of capital and know-how. Ireland offered in return a young, educated, English-speaking, low-cost workforce. State grants, a low corporate-tax rate and access to the EU’s single market made things sweeter.

That gave way to a period of growth on weaker foundations. Low interest rates, a consequence of euro membership, lit a fire under property prices and spurred a building and retailing boom. The boom got a fillip in 2004 as migrants from the EU’s new members flooded in. Continued growth gave the impression that all was well.

Decode that, and, perhaps, it's not quite that superficial. It is saying that the original boost came with the coalitions of 1992 (FF and Labour) and 1994 (FG, Labour and DL): note, there, the leftist involvement.

Then Fianna Fáil, under the Teflon Taoiseach, went rightwards with the PeeDees; and cynical opportunism was the name of the game, or (as the Economist puts it, so diplomatically)

a period of growth on weaker foundations.

The aftermath is mentioned:

• the deterioration of the current-account surplus;
• the Big Cats became fat cats, and the young cubs demanded their share at the kill. In other words:

Inflation had picked up and unit labour costs (ie, pay adjusted for productivity) rose sharply relative to Ireland’s main trading partners.

Why is it the Economist never quite gets away from the rhetoric (circa 1912) of coal-owners facing an irate work-force demanding a minimum wage of 12/6d a week? It's all the fault of those greedy, grasping employees, in particular those in the public sector who shamefully lack the entrepreneurial spirit to go out and exploit others:

State workers grumbled that they had been left behind by the private sector. The review led to a hefty increase in pay, a symptom also of a generally lax approach to public finances.

Nota bene: fair wages = "lax approach"

Then the Economist swiftly glides over:

• the budget deficit, a direct consequence of basing an economic policy on ever-rising house-prices, financed by ever-larger €-loans, dependent on ever-inflated salaries.
• the consequent increase in the cost of borrowing, particularly because the Irish economy was out-of-kilter with the core Euro-zone.
• the rash and unlimited guarantee, given last September, on bank deposits. The British Treasury's sense of Omertà means this is a blood-debt still to be exacted; and the Treasury is possessed of an elephantine memory.
• the Irish 12.5% corporation tax. This is financed by the consumer with 21.5% VAT (see Malcolm's previous post), and maintained by the pensions levy. Leave that one to Frau Merkel: another score to be settled. Curiously (well, perhaps not), the Economist overlooks the health and welfare taxes, including those guaranteed to kill the elderly, and young girls not inoculated against cervical cancer. Ach! they're merely persiflage.

That noted, the Economist goes back into coal-owner mode:

Ireland seeks salvation in lower wages, even though its households are also heavily indebted. Whereas many countries want to lift their economies by fiscal expansion, Ireland is tightening its budget.

So wages must fall in nominal as well as real terms.

The Irish hope for a payoff in improved confidence among foreign investors and at home. Consumers are aware of the gap in the budget and know tax rises are coming, says Alan Barrett at ESRI, a research institute. Spending may even pick up if the uncertainty over taxes is ended.

But, hooray! The workers are compliant! They can be suborned!

... For all its ills, Ireland has form when it comes to retrenchment: it cut debt sharply in the late 1980s. If adjustment within the euro means wage cuts, that is a price Ireland seems ready to pay.

Ah, shucks!

It's the rich what gets the pleasure.
It's the poor what gets the pain.

Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's Classy rumination

Blame it on Our American Cousin. Zach introduced a new dimension by commenting on a recent posting:

As to whether or not you're free. Well you still have a Monarch and an unelected upper house of parliament for what it's worth.

There are too many tomes on the British class "system" and its psycho-pathology. A few are just about readable. Most are ill-digested and barely literate, spewed out of the Ph.D. factories of minor universities. As it used to say, just above the toilet-roll holder in number 4, Trinity College, Dublin:

Sociology Degrees: please take one.

A French encounter

A couple of decades back, in a small town in the Hautes-Alpes, Malcolm was settling his hôtel bill.

Prominent, beside the desk was a framed photograph. Madame and her son (a local sporting hero) were with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. To lighten the ceremonial swiping of the credit card, Malcolm felt he should acknowledge this image:

"Ah, Monsieur le Président!"
"Non!" was the decisive reply, "Monsieur le Président de la République française!"

Malcolm was suitably chastened.

What struck him was such a comment would be unthinkable in Britain:

"Ah, the Queen!
"No: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

It simply doesn't work, does it?

The brain-death of monarchy

The Royals (even that term contains a dismissal) are fragments of the universal "celebrity" culture. The Diana Spencer moment, now fortunately past and gone except for an ever-shrinking delta-minus semi-moronic rump, is regarded as a disastrous experiment in populism. The only remaining issue there being whether

• with a couple more brain-cells she could have been a plant, or
• was she so dissimulating that she was truly a calculating minx.

The current batch of princelings, noted mainly for night-club frolics, are not likely to upset that pattern.

For many, Helen Mirren is The Queen as much as the original article. Indeed, she seems to have edged aside Betty Boothroyd as a potential republican Head of State. Idle chatter of that kind tells Malcolm that there is a perverse lingering wish for a bossy, even brassy female figure to be National Governess. As was Margaret Hilda Thatcher of spine-shuddering memory.

But what to do with the Lords?

Zach's other thrust is more pertinent.

The Blair reforms, stripping out the lumpen mass of hereditary peers, went a long way; but it remains an incomplete project.

There are arguments for the great and the good to be there. "Statesmen" (i.e. retired parliamentarians) deserve a place: after a due period of silence, their comments may have worth. On the whole they don't insult the captain or spit on the deck. Since Parliament makes the laws, senior Justices should be allowed their voices. Religious leaders, too: better in the Chamber, where they will be heard critically, than in their pulpits, where they have unbridled licence. Appointment, too, should not be totally dismissed: Roberts Winston and Skidelsky are unlikely to gain a place by other routes.

Then comes the issue of election. How? It obviously should not be an adjunct to a General Election: that would merely ensure that the Upper and Lower Chambers are of similar complexion. Should the Upper House be as (party) political as the Commons? The logic of that is fixed-term, proportional-representation, without constituency boundary; in effect, a list system: yet that, in turn, gives factional groups power to "fix" the lists.

Perhaps, though, the British system even as presently constituted is not as bad as possible alternatives.

We do not want a "Senate" on the US model (too powerful) or on the Irish model (too ineffectual). Seanad Éireann is a pale, subservient creature: it is a model of what happens when patronage imposes on its clients. Its "electorate" is a self-mockery. As for the US Senate: Blagojevich in Illinois, the curious doings around Caroline Kennedy in New York, and the Minnesota Franken/Coleman stand-off suggest not all is well. Then there are the senatorial families: the Rockefellers, the Gores, the Bushes, the Kennedys, whose continued eminence suggests inbred, nepotistic dynasties are not just a British phenomenon.

Gunning for the aristos

This all arose from a chance remark about guns and government.

Malcolm grew up, with the Holkham Estate to west and south. The Earl of Leicester would host shooting parties at Holkham, to which royalty would arrive. At one time, perhaps still, the record "bag" for a day's shooting was set at Holkham, in a hecatomb of partridges helped along by Phil the Greek.

It is all too easy to be cynical about such events: the pre-metric assessment of running a shoot was "up goes a guinea, bang goes sixpence, down comes half-a-crown". And if the upper-class were prepared to finance their sport so lavishly, others could benefit.

For every gent with his Purdeys there was a Fred Hooker. Fred could snaffle moonlit birds as easily as anything. Among the up-and-comers, young Barry "Salts" Davie had a deadly silent catapult and an overcoat with poacher pockets. As Malcolm recalls, the view from the lower orders was short in condemnation for the malefactors: excoriation was left to Tommy Cook on the bench of the local magistrates. The class system can be seen from both sides: the exploitation was not all the one way.

This symbiosis goes back beyond dynasties, beyond history. There is, underlying that class-system and petty-snobbery to which Americans like to point, a parallel sub-culture. The urban worker detests and ridicules his bosses: the rural one has evolved long-standing pre-industrial ways around the landlord. As so often, Kipling, recently risen to land-owner on the back of his personal talents (and later brother-in-law of the Prime Minister-to-be), caught the mood:

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Kipling, of course, refused all titles, most honours, knighthood and ennoblement. Queen Victoria profoundly disapproved of him. To Malcolm, the biggest strike against this otherwise admirable and egalitarian man is not his alleged racism, nor his ambiguous imperialism: both are marks of the times, with which Pandit Nehru had no problem. No: it is his militant anti-Home Rule Unionism, sprung from a long friendship with Carson.

Little removed from that, the neatest definition of "Anglo-Irish" is "a Prod on a horse". Sphere: Related Content

NeoCon tricks

"Anarchy in Britain"! But who's to blame? Well, try this, it's straight from the same "shock jock" cesspool as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the benighted Ann Coulter. So, welcome Phillip Blond:

Blame the killer kids on the middle classes
Meddling liberals have destroyed working-class culture

_____________________________________________

After that headline, it takes Blond a while to really get the boot in. He even starts in the same ball-park as some sort of reality:

Mrs Thatcher created an economic underclass in the 1980s...
Despite the endless targets of social programmes, it is harder now to climb up from the bottom than it was in the Edwardian age. Far from securing the benefits of economic growth for the working class, Labour has abandoned its original constituency for the 100,000 middle-class voters that can turn a British election. The fact that the bottom 50 per cent of the British population own less than five per cent of the wealth has not troubled Gordon Brown one bit.

Where to start?

Well, let's work from the top.

Malcolm will not apologise for the Thatcher government's economic policy, except that its cardinal error was to start a class war at the very moment Britain was hit by economic recession, the concomitant of the oil-price surge. Result: three million unemployed. In effect, Thatcherite economics were a frenzied response to that first miscalculation. This was compounded by the neglect of education and training: an essential area where the private sector could not or would not make good the lack of direct government action, and essential to re-skilling and raising productivity.

None of that, however, is anywhere near relevant to Blond's hysterical headline.

The Edwardian myth

Next that nonsense about the social movement of Edwardian society. How can such a gross generalisation be proved or disproved? All Malcolm will note is that he had an aunt who went through life with the name "Minima", because she was born in the 1912 Yorkshire Miners' Strike. The issue of the strike and the basis for her name was the demand for a "minimum wage" of 12/6 a week (the younger element may need that explained: 62½p a week).

For comparison, the second Duke of Westminster inherited his title in 1899 and "a guinea a minute" from his London rents. He was a serial adulterer with fascist sympathies. Malcolm notes that the present Duke of Westminster is worth £6.6B, well sufficient to support his taste for call-girls, is still the country's biggest landowner, and a very close associate of the Prince of Wales. So no similarities there, then.

The second Duke's contemporary, the Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, worth the modern equivalent of £3.3B: his heir inherited a million a year from coal royalties alone (and still was not accounted in the same wealth league as Londonderry or Newcastle, those other noble coal-owners).

What price social mobility, then or now, in that lot?

Labour's "original constituency"

The barb in Blond's outburst starts about here.

We should start by recognising that the Labour Party was never the party of the most deprived tier of our society. The Party was the creation of, and for a long time the creature of the craft trades unions. Since crafts are less significant in modern business, Labour's present natural "constituency" is the aspiring technological classes as much as skilled labour. That is recognised by any analysis of voters' behaviour. NOP and ICM suggest that C2 voters (the traditional "blue-collar" workers) went Conservative by a significant margin in 2002 and 2005. Labour's strength, and present "constituency" has been among mortgaged house-owners. There has also been a greater acceptance of Labour among women, the so-called "school-gate mums", liking the social policy, childcare, health and education.

The underclass

Blond's Parthian shot is that bit about:

the bottom 50 per cent of the British population [who] own less than five per cent of the wealth [which] has not troubled Gordon Brown one bit.

Malcolm does not want to quibble, but the National Statistics table he is looking at says half the population share 7% of the wealth. That figure been pretty stable for at least 30 years. However, that share was worth just £19.6B in 1973, but is worth £265B now. There is a difference (for us ordinary folks) between wealth and income: we accumulate wealth in our working years, but inevitably expend it in our retirement. Our income is often at its highest when we have least disposable income (thanks to children, mortgages and our lifestyles).

An "underclass"?

Malcolm is aware that he has himself used this term loosely on occasion. He suspects it is another term that has been imported into the general (and therefore his own) consciousness without precision or context, and based on an inexact parallel between US and UK societies.

There was, some years back, an essay, applauded by Frank Field, by Alan Buckingham of the University of Sussex, which made this point. It went on to identify the characteristics of the British "underclass", which amounted to 5.5% of a cohort sample. Apart from

the characteristic of long term unemployment, the individuals who make up that 5.5% have very little else in common which could identify them as a distinct 'class'... The chronically workless are more likely to have been sacked, to have gone to prison and to be single parents. The qualitative part of the dataset, which is aimed at gauging people's attitudes, shows a common trend toward lack of motivation, lack of commitment to work and family, and general apathy.

And therein lies the proper answer to Blond. He identifies a particular and limited social malaise with the "working class". Blond uses "the poor" and the "working class" as synonyms:

the centralised and imposed system of the welfare state was a creation of the middle-class that ultimately destroyed the self-help culture of the British poor...

The working classes originally wanted a more mutual welfare state where entitlement was based on what they put in; instead the middle classes, irritated by the ability of the poor to organise themselves, determined their needs for them - creating a depressing dependency culture in our inner cities.

The poor might have survived this if middle-class culture had not invented progressive values. In the 1960s, the middle classes abdicated a wider social responsibility and decided that the culture of their parents was paternal and repressive. They bought the idea that notions of service and responsibility were an unjust imposition and embraced the pursuit of wealth, drugs and sexual liberation as self-evident positives, in the process repudiating any idea of a common national vision.

Annus mirabilis

Ah, it's that sex and drugs and rock'n'roll thing again. Perhaps nobody told Blond that Larkin
was prone to irony:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Or perhaps Blond is impervious to irony, even his own:

While toxic to civilised middle-class life, such values were lethal to the working class. In the absence of a culture that was genuinely their own, the children of the poor embraced this middle-class decadence. They gradually abandoned each other and instead embraced glamour, greed and sexual promiscuity as if they were a form of liberation.

(Oh, dear: you weren't trying to drink at that moment, were you? Don't worry, the stain will wash out!)

Blond's solution:

Blond is right (very, very right) alongside, if not even ahead of Dave Cameron here:

[Cameron] has to give power, money and organisation back to the working class so that they can once again develop their own high culture. And he should remind the middle-class liberals he courts that it was their values (or lack thereof) that caused these problems in the first place.

(Now, Malcolm just warned you about drinking and reading at the same time!)

Don't you just lurve that conceit about "high culture"? Where did that come from? Translated into real English, it means:

Phillip is an internationally recognised theologian and philosopher. Educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he edited Post-Secular Philosophy, one of the founding texts of a new radical theology.

He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He writes regular comment and editorial pieces for the International Herald Tribune. His aim is to make theology and philosophy culturally relevant and intellectually exciting.

Or, in short-hand, he's paid by the line, needs an adjective, and "high" is about as neutral and lacking in overt condescension as he can get.

Where did he get this guff from?

Well, Aldous Huxley might be in the frame. Again, though, Blond seems to have missed the irony and social satire:

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able ..."

How can anyone be so wrong?

Blond has this misconception:

Before the Second World War, working-class communities, though far poorer than today, lived lives largely free of violence and crime.

On one level that is John Major treating the Tory faithful to a muddling of George Orwell:

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist' and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.

[Orwell's 'old maids' hiked, not biked. At least in Malcolm's text they did.]

More seriously, anybody, like Blond, who believes that the 1930s were a crime-free paradise should go back to the statistics. Then he should remember that it's not comparing like for like. Two examples,

• the Metropolitan Police recorded "thefts" as "lost property" until the 1930s, and
• in the bad old days of capital punishment, with the unwillingness of Juries to convict, "murder" was a charge used in only the most extreme cases.

And some of the worst crimes, like the 1934 Gresford Pit disaster, went unrecognised, and unpunished. Of course, that was part of the working class's "high culture": one in seven miners seriously injured, maimed or killed in a working life-time.

Malcolm is still horrified that a serious academic (being generous to Blond) can get away with this tosh, this windy diatribe, this ignorant babble, this con-trick on the reader, or be paid for it.

And even do it sober.

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