Crabb, recent Tory convert to the notion that Mistakes Were Made. Photo via BBC news.
The great advantage of a culture war is that it’s cheap.
Not for the people whose lives and futures are weaponised, of course. If you are a migrant, or a trans person, or a low-waged worker, then you might well find a culture war extremely costly. But for those in power, waging a culture war is almost as galvanising as the real thing, and for a low, low price which you won’t have to explain to any doddering tax-dodgers who might torpedo your political career. That’s the second greatest advantage of a culture war. We’ll get to the first one later. Culture wars are cheap. Not like, for example, social security.
This week in Parliament, the British government redoubled its commitment to cut the top-up payments of Universal Credit made to almost six million people struggling on welfare benefits during the pandemic. For those six million people, those twenty pounds were essential in a way that cannot be comprehended by those for whom ‘budgeting’ affects how many times a week you might eat out, not how many times you eat at all. The proposed change will tip 800,000 people into poverty. But there were a few surprising voices of dissent.
Stephen Crabb MP, with frantic background Slytherin energy, tried to persuade the Conservative party not to return to a policy he himself had helped design. Universal Credit, he argued, doesn’t actually help people get jobs, it just makes them poor and angry.
"I was part of the team that took that decision to freeze benefits,” the former Work and Pensions minister and alleged text sex pest told BBC news. “Wages didn't go up in the way that we believed they would. Levels of poverty increased.”
What’s that, Steve? That sounded suspiciously close to the an admission of the eensiest fraction of responsibility for the wreckage done to millions of lives in more than a decade of callous Tory mismanagement. Everyone knew that Universal Credit was going to be a disaster, but ministers ploughed ahead anyway with that particular malicious incompetence which has defined the British ruling classes for centuries. Just make it all up as you go along, old boy, and never apologise. Saving face is more important than saving lives.
We are eleven years and seven changes of leadership into the shambolic and pitiless Tory austerity project which proved once and for all that the choice between evil and ineptitude isn’t always available at the ballot box. After hundreds of thousands of excess deaths and a decade of misery, it is no longer possible for the political right to point a gammony finger at the ‘mess Labour left us in’, as if the choice to saddle the people of the country with the debts of the financial sector was somehow both inevitable and out of their hands. And now, when absolutely everything that you were told would happened has happened, now that child poverty, in-work poverty, homelessness, illness, confusion, grief and despair are stalking the land you promised to return to its problematic former glories and we are fighting a literal sausage war in the Irish Sea, what do we get?
“We should seek to learn the lessons of that rather than just repeat it."
That’s it, is it, Steve? That’s what people get, after a decade of humiliation and malnutrition and isolation and indignity and grief? The former Work and Pensions Minister admitted that yes, actually, a lot of people in his local constituency who relied on Universal credit to supplement their meagre and dwindling incomes are not, in fact, works by scroungers blowing those twenty juicy pounds on decadent treats they don’t deserve, that they are in fact taxpayers and citizens and almost half of them have jobs already. He stopped short of acknowledging that all those studies and petitions and protests desperately insisting that work is no longer a reliable route out of poverty and people were going to suffer and die were bang on. Almost as if wealth were not a measure of personal morality.
These are hard facts to masticate for members of the more heretic-hunting, sharp-stakes-and hellfire sects of the Protestant work ethic. But no, as it turns out, you don’t magically create jobs by making people poorer in the middle of a recession, for the same reason that you don’t make winter coats by stripping people naked in a gale. This has been explained with varying degrees of patience by everyone from economic experts to NGOs to protestors to the UN human rights council to heartbreaking suicide letters - but facts don’t matter when moral cowardice wants to avoid its own face in the mirror. I’m sure that Crabb, along with any number of quisling Tory jobsworths, did believe that the reason so much of the country was poor and getting poorer was because they weren’t sufficiently incentivised, which is wonkspeak for frightened of becoming homeless. I’m sure some of them believed it. I’m sure they still do.
People will believe anything they need to believe to justify choices they’ve already made and harm they’ve already done.
This has been the driving question in British politics since Feudalism. Do the poor and landless deserve to live with dignity, or at all? How much suffering and humiliation should those without title or property be put through before they are permitted to eat? This question has been weighed and discussed with degrees of civility over many centuries by those whose business it is to decide which lives are valued and which are not. But perhaps the most succinct pronouncement on the issue was made in 1978 by Steven Williams of Crass. It runs as follows:
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they fucking do.
The most useful aspect about a culture war, you see, is the way it draws people‘s attention away from the common enemy. If you can whip enough of the voting public into guilty concern-gasms over all those trans kids and woke statue vandals coming to destroy our British way of life or, I dunno, Meghan Markle’s most treasonous hat, then you can redirect all that pain and shame and rage. You can offload the blame, at least for long enough to grab the next election and run - as far and fast as you can, until your conscience catches up with you.
Do They Owe Us A Living?
Damn, girl. I've missed your fire. Oh, and I'm utterly jealous of the way you can turn a phrase. The whole Protestant line made me laugh out loud and yell at my sister that I had to read to her pretty much half of this essay.
It's good to have you back. Not that you were gone exactly. Just... dunno. That's how it feels. :)
"callous Tory mismanagement" "that particular malicious incompetence which has defined the British ruling classes for centuries"
?? Do you really think incompetence and mismanagement has more to do with this than plain ideology and desire? It's always been about what the ruling class and their mouthpieces have wanted (buttressed by ideology); bringing the question of competency into the mix doesn't help. They rarely have the ability to play five-dimensional chess, but they don't need that level of skill, intelligence, or competency to get their way.
"Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do."
Please. It's like demanding your money back from a thief. You don't beg for it: you stop the thief from doing it ever again (after _taking_ your money back).