Quality | 2008.12.26
Madeleine Bunting: The anger is justified as bad times bite. But the targets are all wrong
Sharon Shoesmith, the disgraced former Haringey director of children\'s services, went to Pret a Manger last week and then out for a pizza with friends. Who knows, and who cares? But it still warranted a substantial picture and story in the tabloids, to whom this woman has become a hate figure. This is how the 21st century does voodoo: instead of sticking pins in wax dolls, newspaper reporters crawl all over the victim\'s life - relatives, in-laws, homes, and even their trips to a sandwich shop.
Several hundred miles away and a million miles in life chances, another woman\'s life has been mercilessly exposed to public vilification: Karen Matthews. She was "pure evil", a slob who had never done a day\'s work in her life. Matthews behaved appallingly to her daughter and she will rightly go to prison for it, but her life story was one of such desperate inadequacy that it demanded pity alongside our judgment, not demented mob hysteria.
These two have almost nothing in common - one the professional high flyer, the other an unemployed, unemployable mother of numerous children by different fathers. But they are both women, and the way their stories have been covered in many parts of the media in recent weeks is tantamount to deranged. What goes completely overlooked is the context that the vast majority of domestic violence is perpetrated by men on their wives and children; instead, the moral outrage is whipped up to fever pitch and a few women are singled out to be subjected to its onslaught.
The only appropriate analogy is the witchcraft craze of the late 17th century. At a time of social and economic uncertainty, the collective anxiety was displaced on to women - not any women, but specifically women who couldn\'t fight back because they lacked the family connections or economic power. Both Shoesmith and Matthews meet the criteria: no one wanted to defend either of them. They were thrown to the wolves - our own rapacious needs to express self-righteous anger.
Why is this so important to understand? Because we are heading into intense economic dislocation. Living standards will fall - for some people, dramatically so. The most pressing political priority over the next few years will be how to manage the anxiety and increasingly, the anger. These are powerful, highly contagious collective emotions which can focus on vulnerable targets such as the poor, women, ethnic minorities. This is all displacement from what and whom we need to be angry about. If the anger can be redirected away from witch-hunts, it could even be constructive in forging a new politics and a re-ordering of economic priorities.
This is a once in a generation moment: 30 years of an economic orthodoxy is bankrupt and, as it collapses, we see starkly what this era of capitalism created: a plutocracy that has accumulated unprecedented wealth to passport its children through life. Those on median incomes were sold down the river: they were cajoled, persuaded and seduced into piling up punishing levels of debt and putting an unprecedented amount of household labour (double earners became the norm) into insecure jobs.
Robert Skidelsky writes in Prospect magazine this week that we are facing not just an economic crisis but a moral one. What was the legitimacy of a system that pursued economic growth for its own sake with "wilful disregard for whether it produced the good life"? It has resulted in the highest levels of inequality in a century and squandered our environment, communities and wellbeing.
Too many of us may have been fools to accept this swindle, but at least now the swindle is being exposed. That is another good reason to be cheerful. After a generation of the mantra "There is No Alternative", people are at least asking what\'s the alternative, and that is the necessary first step in inventing one.
The Greek word kairos is the origin of the word chaos, but for the ancient Greeks it also described how some moments of crisis are decisive - they offer both danger and opportunity. They are moments that require courage and boldness of judgment. Roosevelt grasped that point of kairos in 1933, and produced his New Deal. Something comparable from our politicians may be necessary in the next 18 months when tinkering with the system proves insufficient to restart the UK economy. They could set the tanker on a new course, and it could be a much better direction of travel with a more credible definition of wealth creation and the good life.
The 1930s depression prompted a concerted and successful effort over the middle decades of the century to reduce inequality, points out Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield. Skidelsky writes of how the pendulum has swung back and forth between public purpose and private interest over the last century: we could be entering a time when it is not just possible to reassert public purpose but necessary and effective.
"We are all in this together" can be the only appropriate political imperative in a serious downturn, argues Stephen Haseler, professor of government at London Metropolitan University. A proportionate sharing of the hardship is the only strategy that can contain anger and ensure a degree of social stability.
What would that mean in policy terms? Is there anyone in government trying to work it out, or are they too busy trying to keep the old show on the road? Treasury ministers look boggy-eyed with exhaustion; it\'s hard to imagine them having the time to start thinking of the bold strategies we may need. Meanwhile, James Purnell brings out crack-brained welfare reforms conceived in another era to drive welfare recipients back into the jobs that are disappearing.
Someone has to start getting a plan B together. Here\'s a starter pack: it might include a right for councils to purchase homes on the point of repossession to ensure families keep a roof over their heads (which is cheaper than bed-and-breakfasting them). It might lead to a new national volunteer force to mop up the flood of school-leavers and graduates whose chances of a job in the next few years will be meagre. Or Dorling\'s neat idea of doubling the number of staff in every primary school in deprived areas, which would raise standards and cut unemployment. Expensive plans to be funded with big tax hikes: all share the pain. The alternatives are far worse as the Greek students enraged by high unemployment have been reminding Europe as the streets of Athens burn.
Skidelsky asks whether "we have the moral resources" to reorientate our political and economic priorities, or whether we will revert to the nationalism of the 1930s. We no longer have the institutions and ideologies that cultivated those moral resources in the past, but the raw material of outrage at injustice is there.
The coverage of Shoesmith and Matthews is evidence of that; beneath the hysteria is the thirst for justice. What is needed now is not victimisation of the hapless but a compelling explanation of how we arrived in these turbulent times, and how we have no reason to be fearful because we can transform them.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]hoesmith-anger-bunting-comment
