SUCH is the magnitude of the event that the definitive account of the financial collapse of September 2008 and its consequences has surely yet to be written.

I do not mean by stating that to deride numerous worthwhile attempts at a first draft of history. Journalistic efforts such as Paul Mason’s ‘Meltdown’, Elliott and Atkinson’s ‘The Gods That Failed’ and Gillian Tett’s ‘Fool’s Gold’, all of which do a reasonable job in explaining approximately what went wrong.

There are even works by economists, such as ‘Crisis Economics’ by Roubini and Mihm and ‘Keynes: the Return of the Master’ by Robert Skidelsky that are accessible for those without a background in the dismal science.

Offerings from politicians include Alistair Darling’s ‘Back From the Brink’, which I have yet to tackle, and Vince Cable’s ‘The Storm’, which I have just completed four years after publication, after picking up a hardback copy in virginal condition for £2.49 at Islington Oxfam. Well, these are tough times, right?

The book was pretty much what I was expecting, being both well written for its genre and grounded in the mainstream Keynesian that the Coalition’s business secretary has long propounded.

Yet what struck me at once is the sheer disparity between the ideas Cable sets out and the practice of the government in which he serves. For instance, after usefully making the point that ‘The General Theory’ is a context-specific work that does not offer prescriptions for all times and seasons, he stresses:

‘But in a slump, Keynesian remedies … involve a calculated additional injection of purchasing power through deficit-finance tax cuts or spending, or both. That is what is needed – and is happening – now.’

Note that in this instance, ‘now’ refers to the fag end of Gordon Brown’s time in Number Ten, routinely slammed by the Coalition as the font of Britain’s economic woes. And then there’s this:

‘I have taken the view that in the current circumstances it is on balance right to attempt a fiscal stimulus, recognising, however, the risks. The alternative – prolonged and deepening slump – would be worse.’

Stances such as these have led one rightwinger around David Cameron outlandishly to deride Cable as a ‘socialist’, even though any politically literate reader will at once discern that he remains the social democrat he always has been.

Such thinking places him formally to the left of many in New Labour, of course. That said, those of us who really are socialists will find his substantive proposals insufficiently radical, unable to transcend the quasi-religious belief in the free market that has dominated recent decades.

My question for Cable is rather this; if you genuinely believed that deficit-finance tax cuts, higher public spending and fiscal stimulus were they way to go four years ago, what has changed in the interim to render these measures no longer apposite?

We all understand that coalition inevitably involves a degree of compromise. But how is it possible for someone who proclaims himself intellectually opposed to austerity honestly to serve in an administration committed to precisely the reverse course?

And if you are still nurturing hopes to lead the Liberal Democrats, and possibly serve as chancellor in a future coalition government with One Nation Labour, what prescriptions will you be offering at that point, given that consistency may not be your strong suit?

Bookmark It

IT’S something of a love that dare not speak its name. But Powellism has remained a major subtext on the British right for something like half a century, with the rise of UKIP marking only the latest incarnation of this ongoing infatuation.

It may seem a bit of a stretch to compare a reactionary intellectual such as Powell, with an organised base that extended only to a few hundred in the Powellight Association, to the leader of a 26,000-strong party, who so effectively adopts an ordinary-bloke-down-the-boozer persona.

But Powell was far from being as patrician as the constant classical references peppering his speeches suggested; indeed, his lower middle class grammar school upbringing was less posh than that of Dulwich College City Boy Nigel Farage.

Moreover, the crux of Powellite politics, as Tom Nairn discussed in some of his influential writings on Britishness in the 1970s, came down to an articulation of England’s latent nationalism, and UKIP likewise captures the current incarnation of precisely that. It just does so in such an appallingly dumbed down manner.

In his day, Powell led the way on UKIP’s two touchstone issues. While he is most famous for his opposition to what was then called ‘coloured’ immigration, do not forget that he swung the February 1974 election by calling for a Labour vote, perceiving Labour to be more opposed to the forerunner of the European Union.

In the years that followed, Powellism mutated into Thatcherism, described by one well-known journalist of the time as ‘Powellism by other means’.

Thatcher was not a racist in any direct sense – indeed, she represented a constituency with a substantial Jewish population – but was all too aware of the potential of sensitivities over immigration as a tool to mobilise popular support for a free market economic programme similar to Powell’s premature anti-Keynesianism.

In more recent years, any hint of sympathy for the proposition that ‘Enoch was right’ has been a hanging offence in what was supposed to have been a detoxified brand. One Tory prospective parliamentary candidate in a winnable west Midlands seat after was forced to step down after making just that claim only a few years back.

But Powellism hasn’t gone away, you know. The support that has always been there, numbering hundreds of thousands of voters, is precisely that layer now being so effectively tapped by UKIP.

There are differences as well as similarities with the past; no longer is anachronistic nostalgia for imperialism a viable basis for an electoral project.

Moreover, UKIP is devoid of the intellectual content Farage evidently cannot deliver. That probably works to his advantage, given contemporary British culture’s dislike of smartarses and the desperation of all party leaders to come across as pretty straight guys.

Hence we are left with the logical absurdity of a ‘libertarian’ opposed to gay marriage and unfettered immigration. Farage reduces what is a serious political philosophy to a demand for the right to smoke fags in pubs.

He starts from two single issues and proceeds to bolt on populist prejudice pretty much ad lib, plucking random numbers of Bulgarians out of thin air with which to scare the Home Counties horses, while his supporters propose buying in policies from think tanks off the shelf. And why ever not, so long as they tally with the marketing proposition?

Where this project is going remains unclear. Some of Farage’s utterances indicate that not even he sees UKIP becoming a viable party of government in its own right, capable of superceding the Conservative Party as the main vehicle for the British right.

He has even portrayed its role as analogous with that of SDP, restricted to drawing one of the mainstream parties in the desired direction. If he succeeds in that, and he well might, Powellism will finally have reached it final posthumous fruition.

UPDATE: After writing this piece, I came across this interview with Farage himself:

When I ask him who his political hero is, he instantly cites Powell, the rightwing Conservative who made the famous speech about immigration anticipating “rivers of blood”. “Enoch Powell was an extraordinary fellow. I admired him for having the guts to talk about an issue that seemed to be to be really rather important – immigration, society, how do we want to live in this country.”

I think that rather makes my case.

Bookmark It

In the context, quoting one of the ghosts of Labour past might not be entirely appropriate. But Tony Blair’s recent ‘comfort zone’ attack on Ed Miliband puts one in mind of the jibe Clement Attlee famously directed at Harold Laski; a period of silence on Blair’s part would be welcome.

Recreating Old Labourism is not only the last thing Miliband has in mind, but would now be impossible, even if that were what he sought to achieve.

What appears to have irked the PR man for Kazakhstan is Miliband’s correct insistence that Britain needs to reach a post-Thatcher settlement. Somehow our erstwhile moderniser seems to have developed a bit of a downer on modernisation since leaving office.

Miliband deserves the space and the support to help him articulate policies that are both as radical as the situation demands and capable of securing mass electoral support.

The usual suspects could serve this effort best by not painting every deviation from a script penned almost a generation ago as one-way ticket to a second Winter of Discontent.

It is worth noting that very concept of Old Labourism is very much a Blairite invention, deliberately designed as a retrograde designation.

Those who opposed the rewording of Clause Four could thus be painted as cloth cap wearing whippet owners who maintained shrines to Kier Hardie in their living rooms. And in truth, the left was hardly reticent to be pidgeonholed.

To this day, Labour’s principle leftwing pressure group, the Labour Representation Committee – of which I am a member – names itself after a title used by the first Labour MPs in the early 1900s, while its logo essentially reproduces an enamel lapel badge discontinued in the Kinnock period.

Meanwhile, film director Ken Loach used the release of his recent documentary about the Attlee government to call for the launch of an Old Labour-style new party. The title of the film? The Spirit of ’45.

The extent to which zeitgeists can be recaptured is surely open for debate. But as any self-professed Marxist will instantly recognise, the balance of social forces that make any given transformational project viable cannot simply be conjured at will from the Vasty Deep.

One obvious reason is the extent of the social change that has resulted from the systematic favouritism shown towards finance capital rather than manufacturing under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron alike.

Don’t get me wrong. Whatever the findings of the latest half-baked pop quiz sociology masquerading as academic research, the working class is still there and still makes up the absolute majority of British population.

But it is unarguably very different from the working class that those of us who grew up in blue collar households in the 1960s and 1970s remember.

In particular, it is far more atomised than the one Loach celebrates. Gone is the cohesion once induced by large workplaces and single industries – or even single employers – dominating entire towns.

Despite all that nonsensical ‘Labour’s union paymasters’ scaremongering served up in the rightwing press, the institutional arrangements by which union delegates made up majorities at general management committees, decided policy and selected Labour candidates, long ago disappeared.

Without the conveyor belt provided by a unified labour movement, the sort of young women and men who – like me – were automatically drawn towards the Labour Party Young Socialists are more likely to get involved with UK Uncut or the Occupy movement. Many would not spit on the Labour Party if it were on fire.

With the disappearance of this social base, the organisational models and ideological frameworks available to the twentieth century left are no long there. Whatever happens next, it will not be a case of Back to the Future, to cite another famous film director.

In sum, this is not 1945. Nor is it the Blairite year zero of 1994. This is 2013. Dusting off old manifestos is not enough. As history books tell us one Labour leader once said, the task is to find a way forward, not back.

Bookmark It

MARGARET Thatcher stands in the same relationship to the last five leaders of the Conservative Party as James T Kirk does to subsequent captains of USS Enterprise; they represent ideal types against which the fan base can haughtily dismiss other holders of the same job title as irredeemably insipid.

So powerfully does she dominate the mindset of the grassroots right, Tory and UKIP supporters alike, that they will dismiss the claim she was actually anything but a conservative in the ideological sense as simply preposterous. Most of the left, too, see Thatcher as the very yardstick by which to measure the creed.

Yet precisely this argument was once popular on the patrician wing of the party she headed, and still succeeds as immanent critique, demolishing her track record by the standards and presuppositions of the system of thought within which she nominally located herself. Not only was Thatcher no conservative, but she may well have put paid to the doctrine as a going concern, in this country at least.

Back in the mid-1970s, men such as Peter Walker and Sir Ian Gilmour were quick to realise that Thatcher represented not a continuation of, but rather a rupture with, the type of politics that had hitherto dominated the Conservative Party throughout the postwar period.

Indeed, the One Nation Tories – as they were known – made many criticisms of her that would sit easily in the mouth of One Nation Labour today.

Governments should abjure strident ideology, they opined, and stick to what they described as a ‘middle way’ between Old Labour statism and what was at that time called laissez-faire capitalism.

Taking their cue from older thinkers such as Burke, Disraeli and Shaftesbury, this layer counselled inclusiveness, insisting that all legitimate voices in society should be heard and have their interests taken into account.

Apparent broadness was entirely for show purposes, of course; whatever seats on tripartite bodies were doled out to a grateful TUC, the political function of Conservatism has always been to advance the interests of the finance and manufacturing capital and the aristocracy, granting such concessions as necessary to keep middle class and ‘angel in marble’ working class elements on board.

But the One Nation Tories did have a point about Thatcher, who rejected the outlook of those she nicknamed ‘the Wets’. In its place came a project inspired by Hayek’s update of nineteenth century liberalism, which deliberately took the postwar settlement apart, brick by brick.

The free market was extended as far as possible into social life, as state-owned industries were cheaply sold off, social housing provision rendered nugatory, the more combative unions smashed and the weaker ones weakened further still, and a relentless ideological struggle was waged against both social democracy and One Nation Toryism. None of this could have been farther from conservatism as my mother and father knew it.

The result was what we came to know as Thatcherism. However triumphant that dogma seemed in the 1980s – and in whatever splendid colours the dealers in nostalgia in the rightwing press paint it even now – it should not be forgotten that by the 1990s, it had rendered the Conservative Party unelectable.

So toxic was Thatcherism in the public mind at that point that David Cameron was forced to proclaim a determination to revert to a style and content of which Gilmour and Walker would have approved.

Who knows? In happier economic times, perhaps Cameron would even have tried to convert the Conservative Party back to conservatism. But the odd thing is, we don’t hear very much about

As we await the £10m funeral of Thatcher the woman, her ideas are very much still with us. It is conservatism that is buried and Thatcherism that is still alive.

Bookmark It

IF A Trot paper of the type I used to sell in the 1980s had accused Margaret Thatcher of ‘bourgeois triumphalism’, it would have been laughed off the pitch for resort to boilerplate cliché of the worst kind.

But the formulation was famously first levelled by traditionalist Tory Peregrine Worsthorne in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, then even more than now a Conservative house organ, and must have hit home all the harder for it.

‘Why does he talk about boo-jhwa?’ she famously retorted. ‘Why can’t he find a plain English word for the plain people of England, Scotland and Wales. The boo-jhwa live in France.

‘The danger is that all this talk about bourgeois triumphalism will be used to cast discredit on the common sense, the voluntary spirit, and the generosity of the British character. British, not bourgeois.’

And since it was the right that initially framed this discussion in traditionally Marxist terms, it is only polite to continue it in a similar vein.

Although a number of left publications and blogs have since her death characterised Thatcher as ‘a brutal ruling class warrior’ – and she was undoubtedly that – the designation is inexact.

It tells us little about how she saw herself, or about how her followers saw her then, and how they continue to see her now she has died.

Essex Man, sitting back on the MFI sofa acquired on HP after the council house had been purchased, would not have made the instant connection that the left does between Thatcher’s policies and the interests of the financial elite. Nor would his white collar counterpart, temporarily flush with the proceeds of stagging British Gas shares.

Far from it; to them, Maggie was the woman Denis Healey famoused dubbed the La Pasionaria of middle class privilege, a fantastical distorted projection of the ambitions of everyman. British, not bourgeois, if you will.

The reality is that Thatcher served a class other than the one from which she originated. Her own upbringing, as numerous biographies attest, was within a textbook petit bourgeois family from the English provinces.

A small shopkeeper, such as her father, is indeed a boo-jhwa of sorts, an entrepreneur who consumes the labour power of others, even if only his immediate family, much in the same way as a real bourgeois does. But the scale of the operation is such that the difference is one of kind rather than degree.

It characteristic state is one of constant insecurity, of perpetual fear of proletarianisation. Its condition of being squeezed between the two primary classes in capitalist society can generate both hostility to organised labour and ressentiment, however obsequious, towards the ruling class.

As Karl Marx himself emphasises, most notably in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, individuals from this milieu will often seen themselves standing above or beyond class entirely, and as representatives of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’.

While this is of course illusory, it can serve well on the plane of electoral politics, gifting petit bourgeois politicians with enhanced opportunity to win votes from all sections of society, rather than campaigning on a specified class appeal. Certainly Thatcherism possessed the attested ability to extend the electoral base of British Conservatism well into what had hitherto been Labour territory.

This, I think, is where Perry Worsthorne was on the money, and perhaps put his finger on why the Tory backbenchers are more avid for her memory than Conservatism’s recrudescent patrician wing.

For the Old Etonians, Thatcher is a superficial icon who can be dusted off when it suits their sporadic attempts at populism; for the backbenchers, the personification of everything they stand for politically.

Yet Thatcherism served the ultimate purpose of restoring the Conservative Party to those to whom it has traditionally belonged. For that, I suspect, Cameron and Osborne will be properly grateful.

Bookmark It

‘SAY what you like about Maggie, but …’ was supposedly a taxi driver catchphrase in the 1980s. Now’s your chance to do just that. I’ll write something more reflective later this week.

Bookmark It

THE greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, as the Kevin Spacey character argues in The Usual Suspects, is convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

Given our government’s success in persuading the electorate, millions of claimants included, that it doesn’t need the welfare state, I’m starting to suspect that Old Nick numbers among Lynton Crosby’s sources of inspiration.

The sheer crudity of the Daily Mail’s now infamous ‘Vile product of welfare UK’ front page, directly linking Mick Philpott’s murder of six kids to his receipt of benefits, probably came across as just that little bit too strident for the ostensibly detoxified mainstream of what claims to be no longer a nasty party.

But that didn’t stop George Osborne serving up a watered down version of this muck for the benefit of an audience of low-paid supermarket distribution workers the very same day, piggybacking on the inevitable furore to boost to his own media exposure. Only the cynical will suspect co-ordination here, and in this case, you can include me within the ranks of the cynical.

What also seems clear is that these notions are gaining traction. Look at some of the statistics contained in an otherwise lamentable piece by one-time Revolutionary Communist Party stalwart Brendan O’Neill. Which newspaper did it appear in, I hear you ask? Guess.

Ignore the gloating, almost hysterical, tone of the piece and the uncritical wholesale acceptance of questionable dependency culture sociology, imported directly from the US right. Set to one side the clichéd invocations of ‘middle class liberals’, who are depicted to a woman and man as ‘plummy-voiced radicals’ and ‘left-leaning do-gooders in Britain’s leafier suburbs’.

Indeed, all you posh boys and girls should immediately put down the macchiato coffee O’Neill accuses you of drinking, and ponder instead the British Social Attitudes Survey findings he quotes.

According to this non-partisan source, in 2003 a surprisingly high 40% of benefits recipients agreed that ‘unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work’. By 2011, that figure had risen to 59%, a clear majority. Understanding this point has to be the baseline for any sober leftist assessment.

Simply pointing to the Spirit of ’45, by way of protective incantation against evil in an era when support for the postwar social democratic consensus is crumbling after three decades of ideological assault, is as insufficient as it is commendable.

What we need to grasp is that the welfare changes introduced last week, reprehensible as socialists find them, are evidently popular among voters.

Had Blairism still been the dominant force within the Labour Party, its instinctive reaction would have been to enter into a Dutch auction with the right, as it devised ever more ingenious methods of paring down benefit entitlements ever further. The likes of Caroline Flint or James Purnell would no doubt have drooled at taking on the task.

As it is, opposition work and pensions spokesman Liam Byrne has come up with a timid attempt at triangulation, rewriting a famous Marxist slogan as ‘from each according to his contribution, to each according to his contribution’.

This might seem savvy now, given the feedback from the focus groups. But the half-heartedness is all too apparent, and leaves the political initiative entirely in Tory hands.

The alternative – mounting a positive defence of universal welfare provision, on ethical and pragmatic grounds alike – requires a degree of moral courage that Labour has long found it difficult to muster.

After all, there are many more Daily Mail front pages to come between now and the next election, and not a few will be revisiting the territory covered in the last few days.

But it will not be impossible, especially as the impact of austerity will not spare that tabloid’s readership from its ravages. The success of the petition to make IDS live up to his ‘I could live on £53 a week’ and the grass roots campaign against the bedroom tax demonstrates that the right is not immune to challenge on this terrain.

Unfortunately, Byrne’s tactic of splitting the difference with Dacre, envisaging as it does the reduction of the welfare state to little more than a glorified insurance scheme, concedes defeat from the outside. He should remember that if this ground is lost, it may not be regained for decades.

Bookmark It

WHEN I give food to the poor, I’m propping up David Cameron’s Big Society programme. When I ask why the poor have no food, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing in the Labour Party any more.

Recent weeks have seen the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, 42 other Church of England bishops, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist and United Reformed churches all speak out against poverty, which for many people on the left is the very issue that galvanised them into political commitment in the first place.

Nothing wrong there. Every organisation in civil society has the right to express an opinion, of course, which will carry weight to the degree each listener accords it credibility.

Inevitably, there are elements of hypocrisy involved. The Vatican is fabulously wealthy and runs its own bank, which is famously somewhat less than incorruptible, and the CofE owns a £5.5bn investment portfolio, which has previously included substantial shareholdings in armaments manufacturers.

As to the financial affairs of the others, I know little. But none of these denominations seems to be in a mad rush to follow Jesus’s advice in Matthew 19:21, which was to sell that thou hast and then tip it into the alms plate of the nearest leper.

However, these churches deserve credit for highlighting what is perhaps the central fact of contemporary capitalist society, namely the contrast between Canary Wharf and the rest of Tower Hamlets, between the skyscrapers that dominate the City and the places in Hackney from which they can easily be seen.

That used to be the job of the political left, which had an analysis of what was wrong with capitalism and what it was they sought to put in its place.

The horizons of Labour leaders sporadically expanded beyond the obsessive desire to appeal to the prejudices of the Murdoch press and the need to appeal to the self-conceptualised ‘squeezed middle’.

Sometimes they would even proclaim their desire to eradicate poverty, simply because eradicating poverty is both entirely attainable and the right thing for a wealthy society to seek to achieve. However unfashionable it is to use the term, that constituted an admirable moral purpose.

It is one that Labour lost since circa 1994, when it got shot of intense anger about the millions of Britons that were dirt poor, and instead found itself reclining on the sunlounger of a Russian oligarch’s superyacht, intensely relaxed in the company of the filthy rich.

Behind the Labour Party was a self-confident trade union movement and an influential Communist Party and far left, none of them ready to accept that the text for each day’s lesson should always be Matthew 26:11: for ye have the poor always with you.

But whereas once they would be listened to, all these layers have been marginalised to the point where their voices are scarcely heard at all.

So it would be wrong simply to deride sincere Christian condemnation of social inequality, lacking in ultimate answers though it might be. Thank God someone is saying what they say, and still able to secure column inches in which to say it.

It all sounds positively radical in comparison to a Labour front bench that is prepared to abstain on something as basic as the retrospective legalisation of unpaid work on the part of benefit claimants.

After all, if even a cleric compromised by complicity with the Videla dictatorship can position himself alongside the world’s worst off, it should be a doddle for Ed Miliband.

Bookmark It

BRITAIN is about to witness the first co-ordinated attempt by multiple local authorities to obstruct a Westminster edict in almost three decades. Good news, but don’t dust off those ‘defiance not compliance’ badges just yet.

Sassenachs who haven’t been keeping up may need to be told that eight Scottish National Party councils are to follow Dundee’s lead in refusing to evict bedroom tax victims who fall behind with rent. South of the border, England’s solitary Green-held municipality in Brighton has also adopted this policy.

The only potential parallel in recent history come from the mid-1980s, when a number of left-led Labour councils deliberately declined to set a legal budget, in protest at cuts in central government grants that inevitably entailed hardship for many of the people they represented.

Indeed, the roots of the subsequent split between what became known as the hard left and the soft left came in 1985, when Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council threw in the towel.

This time around, Labour councils are so far nowhere to be seen. Honour is only partly redeemed by the prominent role that Eoin Clarke’s Labour Left think tank is playing in organising anti-bedroom tax protests.

There are other important differences between then and now, of course. Let me just give you three points, as Chris Huhne famously said to Vicky Pryce.

Firstly, unlike failure to set a budget, non-eviction is not illegal. Councils can undertake this tactic and remain within the law. So any municipal politico looking to pick up a few radical Brownie points without entailing career risk simply can’t go wrong here.

Secondly, SNP and Green councils have endorsement from their party leaderships, with Alex Salmond even highlighting the issue in a major speech yesterday. Those fighting rate capping were openly disavowed by ‘Walworth Road’, as Labour headquarters were known at the time.

Thirdly, one important motivation for a significant minority of Trotskyist-influenced Labour councillors in the Thatcher years was the explicit intention to confront what was called in the jargon of the period ‘the central state’, in the hope that this would act as a catalyst for mass radicalisation.

This is plainly not a factor today. All that Dundee, Brighton and the others are doing is reasserting the duty of democratically-elected councils to stick up for the local residents that elected them. The revolution doesn’t start here, then.

Labour has no excuse not to follow their example. In Scotland in particular, it would be crazy not to.

Fortunately, friends tell me that a number of Labour council leaders are considering doing so, and I really hope that is the case. Maybe Ed Miliband will prove himself at least as bold as Salmond, and endorse this stance, although that sadly seems unlikely.

It is easy enough for some in the Labour Party to deride the SNP as ‘Tartan Tories’ and the Greens as irredeemable yoghurt knitters. But push has now come to shove on this one, and these parties are making Labour look bad.

If moral suasion forces Labour councils ultimately to emulate their lead, all one can say is ‘better late than never’.

Bookmark It

BACK in the 1830s, the Tories and the forerunners of the Liberal Democrats were of one mind concerning the need for sweeping reform of Britain’s horrendously expensive welfare provision.

Not only did the Speenhamland System constitute a direct incentive to indolence, but with the public finances in disarray after a series of ruinous military episodes in other countries, such generosity was patently unsustainable in the long run.

According to the popular caricature of the time, knocker-up Britain toiled for hours longer than their counterparts anywhere else in Europe, while the uncapped nature of outdoor relief did nothing to curb the procreative enthusiasm of the feckless.

The rightwing press was clear that too many immigrants were heading to the more economically prosperous areas, undercutting the wages of British workers. In some cases, parishes were forced to expel the jobless many miles away, in order to lessen the drain on the public purse.

True, some effort was made to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor. But it is now plain that prevalent attitudes were largely born of a de haut en bas distain for the Great Unwashed, on the part of an emergent middle class and an aristocracy largely educated in the same public schools as today’s elite.

Unsurprisingly, given widespread belief in the virtues of unfettered free market economics, an institution known as the Workhouse began to emerge in place of handouts, even prior to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Naturally, most present day readers will find the idea of people with no prospect of gainful employment being forced to work for no wages morally repugnant.

But perhaps we should not rush to judgement. After all, the Britain of that period was a far poorer place than the Britain of 2013, and was characterised by towering levels of inequality between the superrich and the exploited majority of the population.

Incidentally, what put paid to all this was not any rhetorical commitment to well-meaning One Nation politics, but the eventual emergence of a mass trade union movement, and ultimately a Labour Party, that recognised the injustice of these arrangements and was ready to struggle to change them.

How glad we all should be for that.

Bookmark It