It is helpful to say that England in Dickens’s time had the highest real wages ever known by this or most other countries. (It’s a mixed picture as this paper is good at discussing.) Awful things happened, and especially to poor people. Indeed, our own times are a walk in the park compared: but then our own times are pleasanter (at least in material terms) for nearly everyone, nearly all the time, than they have ever been.

It is frankly absurd to say that the material well-being of our times bears comparison with that of Victorian England.

Ian Hislop’s thesis was a muddle. He had the bold premise that Victorian bankers were morally superior to our own. There’s something to be said for the seriousness and moral purpose Victorians showed (and my own interest in a professional renaissance is based on that sort of thought). But he ran out of steam quite quickly: as he pointed out, there were bankruptcies, pure greed, nastiness, and instability in the Victorian financial world, and indeed they had greater and worse consequences than the venalities of some of our own capitalists. Hislop’s ending was about right: we could do with more of the best of the Victorian spirit.

And of course, the big problem of Hislop’s thesis is that the modern affluent pay far, far rates of tax than ever the Victorians gave away in philanthropy. And it is of course a problem of socialism that it makes virtue compulsory and that runs contradictory risks. On the one hand, compulsion robs virtue of its moral quality. On the other, compulsion makes virtue invisible.

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So far as I can see, since the late 2000′s the UK’s GDP has slipped several percent from its historic high. It is now somewhere around its 2005 level, and slightly rising again. If in the decade 2009-2019 it rises back to where it was in 2009 (say), it would only be true that we had lost a decade of growth. But – and surely this means something – at no time in that process were we worse off than we had been in 2005 – and that was an historically affluent year which itself followed many years of amazing trend growth, itself only sometimes interrupted by periods of faltering or sagging growth.

Of course, if the “wealth” we enjoyed in 2005-2009 was largely phoney, immoral, or debt, then in some sense we haven’t lost affleunce as lost the delusion of it.

We are supposed to be enduring a “lost decade” in output and that this is not going to be recoverable. But what does this mean? On the face of it, it is hard to believe we won’t one day produce as much as we did in 2009, or whatever.  We are perhaps supposed to believe that we are losing productive capacity and can’t get it back. Is this anything like the destruction of British factories wrought by Hitler’s bombers, and if so – surely we rebuilt then and could again? Indeed, Germany’s post-war industrial success is sometimes attributed to the fresh start they had as they recovered from the RAF’s depradations.

It is of course peculiar that we have less equality than we are used to (though that picture is quite complicated). It is interesting how hard it is to see solutions to that problem, if it is one.

It is true that the plight of un- and under-employed young people is sad. But I think it may be wrong to think they have lost a decade or are a lost generation. For one thing, they presumably have the means to continue their education, including self-education. Even at a virtual level, they have resources which no previous generation in history can imagine. It won’t be the fault of the capitalist hegemony if this generation fails to produce mountaineers, poets, musicians, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians and even entrepreneurs out of a period of enforced leisure.

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On those lines, we ought to beware any nonsense about “Faustian Pacts” in which it is supposesd that celebrities lose their rights if they ever speak to the media; or invasions of privacy are warranted if the reporting is accurate. A celebrity whose kitchen has once been in OK magazine does not thereafter lose the right to leave her curtains open at night. Part of why Mr Mosley is so important is that his case reminds us that his privacy would have been no less sacrosanct had his sex games involved a Nazi theme.

Mr Mosley is right, too, to insist that the principle of prior notifaction is crucial, and foremost. The problems which flow from prior notification are the ones we have to deal with, not flinch from.

It’s worth saying that my normal response is to be sceptical when people take offence at common abuse and other  nonsense. The “sticks and stones” argument is quite a good one. I have been sentimental about the 18th Century habit of bawdy and scurrilous gossip. Happy days, etc. On reflection, I am not sure they were all that happy, but in any case we are in different territory now.

Indeed, it may be that we need a scrupulously honest professional press now and do so exactly because the gossipy, profane and vicious voices of the masses are out there in hyperspace. The media who are in Leveson’s dock are of interest to his Lordship and the rest of us only because they claim to be decent and honest. We are trying to work out ways of making them be what they claim to be.

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One episode (“The Calorie”, 24 October 2011) I’m thinking of was devoted to the idea of calorie-counting. The show lined up various people who argued that there was no solid connection between a food’s energy content and its being a contributor to obesity. So far so good, one may say. It may be that it’s no good just going by the calorie count on food packaging. (Thought that’s one of the means by which I am discriminating between foods, and it seems to work, more or less.) Along the way, contributors complained about ”processed food”. The show’s sign-off was to the effect that we might overcome any confusion by insisting on ”real food”.

But this is nonsense, surely, and we were in effect reminded of some of the silliness of the idea in an episode of the show (“Future Food”, 14 November 2011) which looked at a subset of the foodie movement:  “food futurists” are deliberately messing with our ideas about the stuff. They were toointeresting for the Food Prgramme to ignore, but they were mostly off-message.

Some of my irritation with the the FP caliphate is that they are sure that words like “slow”, peasant, natural, old-fashioned, revivalist, heritage, artisinal, organic, free-range, or co-operative are good. I don’t share that, but I get it.

More particularly and seriously I can’t see that anyone would be wise to construct a diet which avoided processing. Even leaving aside the fact that to do so would eliminate cooking, one has to reckon with getting rid of bread, cheese, pasta and butter. All are processed, and all are variously good or bad for slimmers or gourmands, according to circumstance. Of course, most restaurant food is the ultimate in processing, but somehow escapes censure.

But I can’t see that an all-in-one TV dinner, for instance, or a military rations pack, or a Complan drink, must be assumed to be lesser – or unreal – food merely because they are extremely processed.  Ready-meals can be formulated so as to be healthy, tasty, and indeed artisinal, by turns.

Wherein does “real” food consist? One might go for provenance, animal welfare, conservation values, dietary merit, culinary diligence or talent. I see that ideas of authenticity and naturalness will sometimes come into play, for some people. But we have to remember, for instance, it might well be the case that the “unnatural” pig farming of the UK may have much higher welfare standards than the more “natural” farming of a peasant. And someone might well choose to source their food from intensive horticultural firms rather than free-range or organic beef herds.

The point is that there is no such thing as “real” food.

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But it made me uncomfortable only because I am not sure it is proper to let Ricky Gervais pull my chain.

I like politically incorrect comedy only when it is really offensive. Gervais says, I think, that his work is kind, intelligent and PC: it challenges our inner racism, sexism, sizism or whatever. I am happy to have these challenged, but I don’t want them toyed with.  I don’t want to be told in an ambivalent way that if I am somehow the right sort person – in the right sort of know – I have licence from Gervais to laugh at his material because it is only offensive to those who are not in the gnostic secret.

I don’t think one can be faux-unPC; or joke-unPC, or safely unPC. It should be a dangerous business or nothing.

In short, midget comedy ought to outrage all right-minded people. If it did, it might be funny. Its being a guilty pleasure is just what some comedy has to be.

Larry David is better at this: Curb Your Enthusiasm is about a man who is not exactly bad, but he rattles with prejudices and has that dash of Tourettes that ensures the worst of him is always on display. As noted here, The Guard was also good: here was a man who just couldn’t stand political correctness: it offended him. He had the balls to put himself on the line for this peculiar bit of prejudice, which amounted almost to principle.

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The question was: will it be possible for someone to be a full citizen without digital access?

The subsidiary questions revolved around what happens if the answer is No (which I assume people will mostly think).

In particular: Would the state be obliged to provide or mandate access if the market or philanthropy didn’t?

Here’s my attempt at unpicking some of the issues:

(1) How similar are the access problems posed by poverty and disability?

In this context illiteracy is rather similar to blindness: both pose access problems. So it makes sense to note that the disabled are often poor and the poor are often disabled.

(2) Does it help to think of deserving and undeserving poverty and disability?

Society might see illiteracy as a life choice by the idle underclass. But society might equally think that it would pay to use every resource (and perhaps especially digital access) to remedy a socially-damaging concomitant of poverty. A cousin of that thought arises when we think of the obligations of society toward those disabled who volunteer for extreme risk in, say, their sports or by pursuing adventure in the military.

(3) One good analogy is with other services. Is digital access to be considered as the Royal Mail; an energy utility; the BBC; schooling; roads infrastructure? Cautiously, I suppose that it ought not to be like a one-price universal service; we want people to pay for the service if possible; we ought to avoid a universal licence fee; we ought to worry about the deficiencies of a free-at-the-point of use compulsory service; if the state provides infrastructure, that doesn’t mean people have a free right to to use it.

(4) We need to consider the way the culture is being replicated behind paywalls (the Inland Revenue and the latest blockbuster and opera and book and live event are all likewise available in analogue and digital form). This is hugely liberating. What providers can charge for, they can also discount or donate or be paid to distribute.

(5) Early conclusions

Digital access is a good thing and the poorest need it most.
3G dongles and elementary tablets are cheap as chips.
Digital paywalls make it easy to give poor people cheap access.
Digital services can communicate easily with disabled people.
The state has a right to use digital communication only.

The right-wing trick is to square these circles with as little state involvement as possible.

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I was a little uncertain that I’d enjoy the Burra show in Chichester. I am not good at surrealism, for a start; nor amazingly fond of the timid walks on the wild side made by self-conscious artists. I had hardly considered the Sussex landscape works.

The Pallant show knocks seven bells out of such wary complacency. The several rooms are filled with wonders, and each is needed to house the sheer range of works in which on the one hand one marvels at a person as good at cafes as moorlands and on the other at Burra’s consistency in eye. Nothing is without his characteristic taste for the bizarre; and nothing, either, without a strong, representational honesty. There’s always a great seriousness, too: his grotesques are more Francis Bacon than Beryl Cook.

I beg doubters to go.   Why not make it a thorough Sussex pilgrimage? The train-ride from Victoria to Chichester is one of the country’s best. It gives one (around Petworth) a glimpse of the landscape which made the county ideal  for Burra and Eric Ravillious alike. To pass the time, one could do far worse than read R C Sherriff’s A Fortnight in September (about south Londoners on holiday in Bognor).  After the Pallant, the Nag’s Head carvery is a five minute walk, if that, and a real treat (beef served in a lovely room with marvellous garden photographs which might have come from Country Life in the 1970s).

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Visby, first, then. (The rest of the island of Gotland, below.)

This is a perfect medieval city. It’s a trading relic: merchant’s houses, warehouses, battlements – and an excellent Co-op in a shopping plaza  just beyond the walls. Visby has a special status in Sweden’s thinking, and perhaps especially Stokholm’s (being a short flight or ferry ride from the capital).

Visby seafront sunset

It’s a place of what looks close to a sort of national pilgrimage. Within the walls, it’s been preserved in something like Disney’s aspic. One could think Carcassonne, or Mont St Michel. One would say that there’s quite a lot of Venice in the mix: but Visby does not convey very much decadence. Good honest trade and shipping; money being made; but not many courtesans. Its art gallery, for instance, is comically thin on anything like old paintings, and what there are seem to be the rescued work of a castaway 19th century Englishman. Its modern exhibits were the worst sort of Euro-normal installation tosh.

Visby front door

There is an element of Southwold: people of sufficient means and niceness live in small, exquisite houses, and in the erstwhile cottages, hovels and bothies of the old city’s less fortunate. It so remarkably elegant and pretty by turns that a harbour full of white plastic motor-yachts adds a dash of welcome vulgarity without denting the ambiance.

I was there in July, during the annual political festival which sees Sweden’s PR and political elite strutting their stuff in what looks like all our separate party jamborees rolled into one. At the time, I speculated mildly on the thriller-writing prospect of a bit of Wallander-cum-Dragon Tattoo girl  mayhem unfolding here; events in Norway were to make that seem tasteless. The city was heaving with expense-account diners: one’s finding it difficult to get a table was ameliorated by the sheer delight in such overt recession-beating, cheerful good-timing. And everyone was so damned good-looking, which helps.

Gotland rent-a-wreck

The weather was heavenly, and I found myself swimming from a jetty just by the deep water harbour. Such places are where any maritime town shows its best: its muscle marys and good old girls, its young families and wrinkly old men (one so prefers those who know that Speedos only look unpervy on the under-thirties). The water was nearly warm: the brochures say that the sea here is clement, and often reaches bathing temperature by late August. Visby is built on the side of a hill: dropping down to the harbour or striding back up steps and slopes added a welcome mild theatricality to a dip.

As to restaurants. They say there is only one fish restaurant in Visby. It’s not quite true, but there is a simplicity about Bakfickan which is certainly distinguished. They didn’t have the fish soup when we went, which reduced us to lovely things done to prawns, smoked salmon and herring. It’s minimalist stuff, but served so beautifully on the pavement or inside that one knows one’s place.

For a more intense sort of decorative thrill, there is a quayside fish restaurant, Österdahls Brygga,

in what one imagines might have been a customs office or a crew room. ((Telephone 0498 21 77 88. For location, try Visby Hamn in Google maps and hone in on the large round structure at the top right of the harbour: it’s a spit from that.) This small room is almost heart-breakingly pretty: full of light, plain linen, candles. The food is simple and even austere. For starters I had a dish described as ”three kinds of herring”, and there was certainly some difference between each of the fillets, and more between the three sorts of sauce draped over each.

Orchid by the airport

I very nearly took the whole thing seriously. Or rather, something odder happened. I remembered to be amused, but was actually swept up, as though I had stepped momentarily into a sort of Babbette’s Feast, and this was perhaps an item on the taster menu. And at the outside tables there were sun-tanned, well-off people off yachts; and then a gnarled photographer from a city paper, with a Leica on a thong around his neck, had something even simpler than I had and left; and the waitress on her way to Barcelona to advance her career; and all the time the owner, precise and quiet, dipping, arranging, clipping, was central to proceedings with a complete absence of assertion. He didn’t flinch when someone dropped something in the kitchen. I saw no sign of anything which could be called cooking: maybe the chef did not like to have his hair smell.

Walking away from that supper, I very nearly topped-up with a bratwurst from the brilliant snack-stand at the harbour’s northern end. But one of those for lunch is quite enough when one is in Visby-mode.

We didn’t go to any of the full-on upmarket places, nor to the zillions of routinely gorgeous, cheerful spots which litter the town. They all looked as though they delivered exactly and decently what their price range was capable of. We had a brilliant steak (on offer everywhere) at  Restaurant Celine, a place which was a little more, well, ordinary, on the main pedestrianised shopping street in the upper town. It was almost restful to find it wasn’t on parade in quite the Visby way.

The poor bloody English find Swedish, let alone Visby, prices a little intimidating. £7.50 for a glass of wine, etc. Remember, Scandinavia’s always expensive and at this moment the exchange rate makes things hurt additonally.  But don’t fuss, scale back, and one sort of manages to feel decently-done-by, and that’s the real point.

Gotland, beyond Visby

Kovik fishing station museum, Gotland

This isn’t magnificence and nor are there granite skerries and bleak moorland. The island is sandy tracks down to summer huts and pebbly beaches and jetties. In some spots, there are wider marshes, in others, there are woodlands which are a little wet underfoot. Killing half an hour near the airport, I found a sunny glade with cotton grass, sedges and orchids. I was so chilled-out, I didn’t mind the notice board with all the species photographed and named.

Almost every road was fringed by a profusion of wild flowers: tall, dazzling; waving as cars sped by. I should perhaps mention that ours was a rent-a-wreck from a business based at the airport. Maybe a third or half the normal price, our red Fiesta had been loved or joy-ridden nearly to destruction, but the essential equipment worked even if the radio and the cigar lighter didn’t. Highly recommended.

We ran south, dropping by unamed beaches, and lunched at the fabulously unpretentious timber port of Klintenhamn, where – amongst “project” wooden boats in every state of neglect and restoration – there was a lovely habour cafe with crepes filled with some local fruit which looked

Klintenhamn harbour cafe

sort of blackberry-ish but apparetly wasn’t. And then on down to the church at Frojel: plain and Calvinist one might think; but then inside there is just that flash of candelbra and crucifix which lets one know why Swedish taste is for a plain canvas with one splash of the roccoco.  Every pew had a minute corsage and the garden was being tended by a bent crone who spoke – refreshingly – no English which she was prepared to waste on us.

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Here’s my brief to myself.

I think the document Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom makes some important mistakes, and in particular it makes the mistakes common to the leftish poverty campaigning of the socialists and the churches.

Here’s a core statement from it:
“It is entirely uncontroversial that being at the bottom end of a highly unequal society is much worse than being at the bottom end of a more equal society, ie that equality is better for the poor.”

This is claptrap. It rehashes The Spirit Level argument which is wrong in several ways. (And which I reviewed at the Social Affairs Unit site.)

Try this test: Pakistan and Australia are about as unequal as each other. Bangladesh is a little less unequal than the UK. China is a little less unequal than the US. So we are supposed to be indifferent whether we are poor Pakistan or Australia and positively to prefer to be poor in Bangladesh or China than in the UK or the US. Right. Tell that to the poor people who long to emigrate to the unequal Anglosphere West. (See below for a link to the CIA Factbook evidence.)

I agree that most very unequal societies are horrible: many are in Africa. I agree that some equal societies are very nice: but some of them are in Scandinavia. I wouldn’t want to live in either class of society.

Do not be blinded by the happiness of the egalitarian Nordics and Scandinavians. They are fairly cheerful because they are rich, not because they are equal. They do pride themselves on their equality, but they are losing some of it and anyway take far more tranquilisers than the apparently uncheerful Brits. (See below RDN mini-essays which over some of this.)

The document assumes that poverty is bad and that inequality must be bad because it increases poverty. I think there is the additional thought that inequality is bad because it is a sign of the indifference of the rich toward the poor.

Actually, in Western societies poverty is not necessarily all that awful since it is defined (as the document notes) as having less than 60 percent of the median wage. When the median wage rises, lots more poor people may be created, but these “new poor” are no worse off materially than they ever were.

The document makes what is surely the mistake of linking poverty and inequality without spelling out the terms of the link. There is certainly a correlation between inequality and poverty in some Western countries. But that there is a causal link is way less sure and certainly not proved. I mean: the link is not remotely proved. We have no evidence whatever that increasing inequality increases poverty in any real way. Indeed, the poor generally benefit from economic growth, and if inequality is a stimulus to growth, then the poor may well benefit from it.

It is generally assumed by the left (and the document) that a very unequal society ought to be balanced up so the rich get less rich and the poor get more, generally in a straight swap. But it is already the case that the rich pay a hugely disproportionate of the nation’s tax and it is not clear how wise it would be to tax them more, even from the point of view of the poor.

It’s worth noting that in the UK the top 10 per cent earn 15 times as much as the bottom 10 per cent. But after tax and benefits are taken into account, that shrinks to about a five times difference.

It is sometimes argued that there is less social mobility in unequal societies, almost by definition. This seems absurd. The US was once the capital both of inequality and social mobility. This was always much more true of England than the left likes to admit. Nowadays, the US and the UK are famous for becoming less socially mobile.

This may be the case, in the sense that we may have lost the key to educating and motivating the working class and especially the underclass to success. This may have many causes: liberal education has made schools pretty hopeless as launching pads; the cream has already floated out of the lower classes; modern job demands are far greater than they were; benefit dependency has lead to what amounts to a moral erosion; deteriorating parental skills and standards have become endemics; and so on. (There’s a very good account of  these processes – more PC than mine – in the New Statesman, under the title “It’s not all bad news on social mobility.”)

It is important to stress that the modern world has made social mobility demanding: not policy; not the malevolence of the rich and their class interests. Anybody, from anywhere, can acquire the skills and get the luck the modern world needs. Indeed, people from good and bad backgrounds probably share about the same amount, but not type, of advantages.

I am struck by the poverty of policy recommendations made in the document. It’s more about soup kitchens than about motivating the poor to rise above their circumstances. I think this flows from an attitude which is more old-left than spiritual, or religious. It risks casting the poor as victims; as not spiritually the equal of the better-off.

I should perhaps add that the right is not necessarily indifferent to human suffering, but it is committed to the view that the state is not likely to do much good when it tries to do good. So there are tense and interesting issues for the right in all this.

Useful resources:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html
http://www.ifs.org.uk/comms/comm118.pdf
http://www.ifs.org.uk/projects/347
which leads us to:
http://www.ifs.org.uk/budgets/gb2011/11chap12.pdf
http://richarddnorth.com/2010/03/rdn-on-affluence-and-envy-on-bbc-news-channel/

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Isn’t it that in their very niceness and that of their parents and teachers, they were not taught that they are fallible, impressionable, overly-trusting young persons? They were not inculcated with the sheer fearfulness, the taboos, the prejudices which have made most previous generations fear authority, aim to keep their heads down and steer clear of trouble.

Paradoxically, these naive young people think they are street-wise because they’ve been sick in the back of taxis once or twice. Nobody had told them to fear mobs – they had not been taught that crowds are dangerous.

It’s also likely that one should blame media. Not the media, as in horrid films and video  games. Isn’t it more that they simply don’t have much sense of the boundaries between reality and fiction? A boy lobs a fire extinguisher off a medium-sized skyscraper; a sociology graduate with her own Polo and 27″ TV steals a flat screen. They were “caught up in the moment”: but it was a multi-media moment more than a real place and time.

They lived in cloud-cuckoo land. When they get out gaol, we need to be kind to them, but hope that they become ambassadors for reality.

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