The pursuit of happiness

23 May 2007

Boris Johnson issues a clarion call against the new Puritanism of the coming Brown era, in which risk, pleasure, bunking off, poetry and all forms of play will be imperilled

These Puritans genuinely seem to believe that our happiness will be just a function of the cash produced by our work, and so in the last 30 years an ever-growing proportion of British women have been ‘incentivised’ or socially gestapoed into the workplace, on what seems to me to be the dubious assumption that the harder a woman works, the happier she will be, when I am not sure that is true of women or anyone else. The more closely we identify our happiness with our work, and the more we rate our achievements by the size of the numbers on our payslips, the more depressed we are likely to get, because the wretched truth is that differentials have been rising under this government, and status anxiety has been growing.

The colossal expansion in the numbers of female graduates is in many ways a marvellous thing; but it has boosted the well-documented process of assortative mating, by which middle-class graduates marry middle-class graduates and thereby entrench their economic advantages, pooling their graduate incomes to push up house prices and increase the barriers to entry for the rest. The result is that in families on lower incomes the women have absolutely no choice but to work, often with adverse consequences for family life and society as a whole — in that unloved and undisciplined children are more likely to become hoodies, NEETS, and mug you on the street corner.

Of course I am in favour of women working, and the world would be far nicer if women ran it, but I sometimes wonder if they — we — really want to work quite so hard. Far from reminding us of the limits of money, and work, in the production of happiness, the New Labour Puritans have encouraged us to value nothing else, and that is why it is now time to have done with them.

Po-faced, pompous, prudish, pedantic, they are simultaneously money-grubbing and obscenely profligate. They have created an economic system whereby families are bullied to work ever harder to generate the tax revenue needed to service the vast and growing Labour vote-bank in the public sector, so that one way or another we are all working for the state.

They just do not understand that the point of work is not to add to Gordon Brown’s tithe barn, but to have the time and freedom to bunk off, read a book, play with the children, do a picture (no matter how useless), write a poem (no matter how bad), draw up plans for your expedition to the Mato Grosso or just sit and get sozzled in the sun. They do not understand the point of economics or the point of life. They have no concept of the limits of government, and in their narrow GDP-obsessed way they are a threat to the transmission of the glories of our culture from one generation to the next. In the words of Hesiod, who will be rarely off the lips of the coming Conservative government, they are fools who know not how much the half is greater than the whole, nor what blessedness there is in mallow-grass and asphodel. In fact, I doubt these Puritans would even know what an asphodel was, and the real scandal is that they are not giving the rest of us the time and the chance to find out.