Update – I of course take full responsibility for what I write, but I really need to avoid ever writing posts after midnight. This was one of many such mistakes:

Laurie Penny seems to be a well respected blogger in the Red blogosphere, yet this piece in Liberal Conspiracy slapped me so hard I decided to respond here.

She complains,

…what we need to talk about urgently is when, precisely, it became good form to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person. When did it become alright to call the poor ‘evil’?

Digital fingers (ha! I made an etymology joke!) are pointed in the direction of Orwell Prize winning Nightjack, specifically this post called, “http://nightjack.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/the-evil-poor/”

Of course, one could argue that “The Evil Poor” is simply a sensationalist modernisation of the “indolent poor” or the “undeserving poor”, as a name gifted to a subset of people catagorised as “poor” by people who do such things.

But let’s not quibble over semantics. Let’s quibble over perceptions of reality. See, unless I’m very much mistaken, what Nightjack has is actual experience of the reality on the ground.

Whose perception of reality are you going to trust? Now Nightjack will suffer from the same problem that all police officers have, which is that they see the very worst elements of society all the time, while normal people, especially middle class kids living in a theoretical bubble world of Marxist dialectics can live in blissful ignorance.

To my profound embarrassment I spent 7 years of my adult life in a horrible council estate where the reality of what life is like there slowly dawned on me. Illusions were shattered and my desire to ‘help’ these people was exposed for the ugly, futile, middle class guilt that it was.

Laurie writes:

I am a twenty-something trying to make it in the big, bad world of journalism

Now I know journalism has changed, but I would argue that romantising the poor and failing to report reality as you find it is not very good journalism.

What Nightjack writes reflects the reality of the world as I – and many, many others – have experienced.

I recommend Laurie starts by getting herself down to a council estate to discuss her political beliefs and opinions with the first gang of pissed teenagers she come across. Then she should go door to door, canvassing the opinions of residents who’ve got the misfortune to live anywhere near an off-licence and ask them what they think. I challenge her to listen to them rather than write off their opinions and feelings as a political irrelevance, or ‘brainwashing’ by the media. That’s what I thought at first. I thought my job was to figure out a way of turning these people around. I’m sincerely ashamed about that these days.

It’s not about ignoring poverty or pretending it doesn’t exist – it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The difference is that the part of my brain that used to want to help, that wanted to be kind and generous and make a difference got bludgeoned to death after having, “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT” shouted at me by a gang of chavs at a bus stop. Things like that tend to make an impression. Suddenly I ‘got it.’ It’s probably one of reasons I so rarely sound like a stereotypical Lib Dem, I expect. Except I don’t just want the police to go flying in to smash their faces in – I want real systemic changes to stop yet another generation growing up like this.

Orwell would not spin in his grave at Nightjack’s well deserved award. Nightjack, in contrast to Laurie, is observing the real world the way it really is and reporting it to us, in the very finest traditions of journalism. He does it with style and character and writes in the most absorbing and compelling way.

Laurie, has some skill as a writer – I especially liked, “I find a have a lot of month left over at the end of the money”, but her appeals to our charity ring hollow because, basically, and without wishing to seem too rude, and whilst wishing to avoid cliché, the way she reports the world is from the inside of her own head, not from reality. She should take a long, serious hard look at herself and ask what she really knows about council estates and real poverty and real disadvantage, and why she feels qualified to lecture anyone about what they should and shouldn’t do or should and shouldn’t care about.

Has the quality of socialist debate gone down, or has it always been like this? How was I ever impressed by rhetoric like this? The mind boggles.