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.

Continuing from the first post, I now tackle the other bit of the comment. I call this an ultrafisk because it’s like fisking except you respond to one sentence with a diatribe. 

The second bit of Tom James’ comment was:

I don’t see why just because someone is poor and/or lazy and/or stupid they should have a bad life just so a bunch of better-off smarter, hard-working folks can buy themselves additional useless tat they don’t really need.

So there’s a few rather revealing things here. I hope Tom doesn’t feel I’m being unfair putting this level of scrutiny on what was probably a rather quick throwaway comment.

But quick throwaway comments are the best, because they expose the subconscious links between concepts that we’re barely aware exist. For working out how people think, get their gut reaction. 

But anyway, let’s take one bit out of context:

I don’t see why just because someone is poor and/or lazy and/or stupid they should have a bad life 

Me neither. The version of capitalism we have might not be perfect, might not be entirely “Free Trade” but it has delivered higher standards of living, made all sorts of labour saving devices affordable to even the most modest incomes and it’s given us technology that makes entertainment ubiquitous and widely available for next to nothing.

My beliefs, such as they are, are about this process continuing. Better technology, cheaper costs, more efficiency and better quality of life for everyone. It’s 100 years of Capitalism – wealth generation and technological advance – that have made the biggest difference to the lives of people compared with Gladstone’s era. Not the welfare state. 

So no, I don’t believe the stupid/lazy/poor should have a bad life. A good life should be accessible to all – it’s the means. My friend Jock Coats has much to say on the subject of how Land and Rent related issues do more to keep people poor, and Tristan Mill has a lot to say on the perils of Corporatism. Both of these guys are, like me, economic liberals and both of them are just as concerned with insummountable obstacles that keep people down.

But none of us believe the solution is to cheat and simply take money from those who have it and give it to those that don’t. That addresses the short term symptoms but it does not get to the root cause. We also believe this makes the situation worse. 

But let’s get back to Tom:

…should have a bad life just so a bunch of better-off smarter, hard-working folks can buy themselves additional useless tat they don’t really need.

It’s the ‘just so’ bit that I find fascinating. It implies that ‘the bad life’ for the stupid and/or poor and/or lazy would be caused by not taking money off the better off, smarter, hard working folks. 

This isn’t the truth though.

The smarter, hard working folks might not need their tat but they’ve earned their tat, it’s theirs. 

It’s about incentives, at the end of the day. Economists are obsessed with incentives. If you reward need, you encourage need. If you reward effort, you encourage effort. 

So if the quote becomes, “I don’t see why poor/stupid/lazy people should have a bad life and better off/smarter/hard working people should have a good life” then it becomes an entirely different proposition and much more morally ambigious. 

Except that’s not the end of the story. Whilst I have no problems whatsoever with stupid or lazy people having a worse life than clever or hardworking people – I mean, really, I don’t at all. Does this make me evil? – I do have a problem with the clever, hardworking people being made poor. That’s a problem.

But the quote said, “bad life ‘just so’ ” as if the obligation is on those who are against redistribution to justify why the better off people need the money back, while those on the other side are debating the morality of taking it in the first place.

So you can see, it’s all rather messy, and to get all Spin Doctorish, it’s about not accepting the premise of the question. 

Of course there’s always going to be some level of taxation – there’s services that must be run in order to keep the country going. I’m open as to what those might be, but that’s a subject for another day.

Tom, I apologise for subjecting you to this, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity to write a post like this. Thank you.

It’s embarrassing to have to change the design on the same day you go live, but I simply had no choice.

See, it’s hard being evil. Sure, Capitalism’s great but, you know, it’s evil, with people doing things for profit which is really very super ultra evil. On a scale of 1 to Chris De Burg, profit is a whole other dimension of evil.

I thought I’d be able to live with myself, put aside those nagging doubts but, turns out, I can’t. Enough with the sleepness nights. Enough with the daily baby sacrifies and enough with beating up homeless people, orphans and children with speech impediments. I can’t take it anymore – I renounce evil!

While I was away from blogging I reread Marx and I thought, you know, wouldn’t it be nice to be on the side of Good for a change? To love my fellow man uncondititionally, to work towards peace and equality?

Obviously things are going to be difficult to adjust to. Learning to grow up and accept the need to make sacrifices for the Greater Good of the Nation will be hard, and I’ll miss my evil friends, but it’ll be worth it.