* faints *

It’s interesting how each of us finds from our own viewpoint something to blame for this. Economic liberals blame the welfare state – cut their benefits and they’ll be forced to behave. Socialists blame poverty – give them more benefits and they’ll behave. If you’re my age, the problem is they’re “Thatcher’s children” – brought up in an era which celebrates aggressive promotion and stepping in others to pull ahead, the solution is more hippy peace and love. If you’re a bit older, the problem is all due to 1960s liberalism, get back to 1950s family values and the problem will be solved. If you’re a BNP supporter, well, we know what your diagnosis and cure is.

The funny thing is I think there’s something in all of these, it’s not an easy problem with an easy solution, and some of what we observe is the flip-side of other things we value.

The old council estates where everyone knew everyone else did keep the bad’uns under control with a social disapproval mechanism. The bad’uns felt shame and cleaned up their act, or at least tried a bit. But this was also terribly restricting. If you were an outsider or a bit different, the same sort of warm communal feeling that kept people behaving could be cold and oppressive.

For various reasons, everyone doesn’t know everyone else on the council estates these days. Maybe the big fear is that a tipping point gets reached where social disapproval works the other way round. It’s the good’uns who are made to feel wrong and out of place, and forced to try and keep their heads down. It’s those who are swaggering and aggressive and feel it a sign of weakness to show care for others, and a sign of being “gay” to show any sort of intellectual or aesthetic interest, who dominate and set the tone for everyone else.

It’s not all like this, there are a lot of great people on the council estates, doing their best, keeping little social groups going formal or informal, being good neighbours, wanting a future for their kids. But I know they do sometimes despair and drop out, and those getting the new allocations tend not be able to carry on doing these things.

What makes you think that? I was a councillor for 12 years for such a council estate. I’m not unusual amongst LibDems in that. Abusive comments like this were not uncommon, and when canvassing it was pretty unpleasant to get this sort of thing and “you’re only in it for yourself” etc thrown at you when reality is you poured your life into defending these people, and the allowance from being a councillor is piddly compared to what one could earn for much less effort elsewhere and one’s day job career and/or family life going down the pan because one spent too much time being a councillor. But it helped having grown up on a similar estate, and knowing how things have deteriorated on these estates since, well about 1979. I knew the anger of the older people who’d seen things change and why this might lead them to the BNP. I also did experience huge gratitude from those I did help out.

All this is fundamental to why I have the politics I have. If I sometimes get angry at stupid assumptions, or even occasionally exercise the odd politically incorrect thought, it’s because of this.

Then there is the problem of what Nightjack (much deserving, from what little I’ve read already, of the Orwell) calls “the evil poor.”

The poverty of the first lot can be sorted out with straightforward progressive taxation. Cut taxes on the poor and increase taxes on the wealthy. Then give them decent public services, schools, hospitals, etc.

The second lot, the “genuinely socially dysfunctional, ‘multiply disadvantaged’ element of the urban poor” are a bigger problem.

There are two broad options with regard to this 2%:

1) Accept that there are always going to be some no-hopers and that there is very little that any state body can actively do to “help” them.

2) Accept that it is the function of a good society (read: *society*, as defined in the OED, and not the state) to provide a decent life for the citizenry and further accept the corollary of this that Something Must be Done.

Neither of these scenarios really appeals to me: 1 sounds really mean and nasty and 2 is OK but that Something Must be Done scares the bejeezus out of me.

But then problems wouldn’t be problems if there were easy solutions to them.

Partly the situation occurs because I know I’m lucky; I have a weird compulsion to try and look after people as much as I can, and I’m not alone in that, so I set up a self-supporting quasi-commune thing to take care of people I loved. That makes it sound very one-sided; but actually, these people do look after me, too, in lots of ways. We get by.

In my view, the thing to do with privilege is to view it as a gift, a gift that you don’t necessarily deserve, but you can’t send back, so you may as well use it and if possible share it around. Currently I’m working very hard in the hopes of one day earning enough money being a Famous Lady Journalist to be able to take my partner out to dinner and move us all to somewhere nicer and quieter without cockroaches. Also, I’d like to be able to afford to buy and take care of a puppy.:)