This morning, on the way up to my desk, I bought a croissant. In doing so, I immediately penalised almost everybody who sits anywhere near me, because I had one and none of them did. And I didn’t even feel particularly guilty about it. I’m a right bastard, me.
And that’s not all. I came into work by Tube, using my Oyster card. In doing so, I now realise I was penalising all those people out there who would be just as good at doing my job as I am, but can’t afford the £2 to get to Wapping. If I had any decency, any soul, I’d forgo Transport for London altogether, and my bike (which I penalised bikeless people by buying), and walk to work, thereby creating a level playing field. But I don’t. A bastard, like I said.
Still, it’s swings and roundabouts. The other guy on my desk, Ed Smith, is a dapper sort of gent, forever turning up to work in tailored suits and intriguing tweedy things, which penalises me because I’ll often come in looking like I’ve slept in a bin. Behind me, also, there are at least three or four people who are quite a lot cleverer than I am, which renders me liable to be penalised in conversations when I occasionally don’t understand what they are talking about.
Somebody, somewhere is always being bloody penalised. It’s exhausting. If you come down just on the wrong side of the child benefit threshold, but others come down just on the right side, then you’re being penalised. Um, sort of. If universities are going to increase their fees, then nobody is quite clear whether it’s poor students who will be penalised or middle-class students who will be penalised, but it’s bound to be one or the other. When house prices go down, homeowners are penalised, but when they go up first-time buyers are penalised.
Once you get into the habit, you can always feel penalised, as long as there is somebody out there who has something which you do not. It’s meaningless. One does not even have to be, as Peter Mandelson once was, ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ to accept that people who are filthy rich can buy more stuff. In the new language of penalty, though, it’s not them who are up, but the rest of us who are down.
It takes a special sort of chutzpah, as has occasionally been pointed out, to make ‘we’re all in it together’ your catchphrase, when the only people who glaringly aren’t in it at all are people like you and almost everybody you know. That’s fair criticism of Cameron and Osborne, and damning too. Only, it’s entirely unhelpful to go on, as so many do, to suggest that this effectively means that everybody else is being penalised, and they alone aren’t. Some people just have more stuff than other people. It makes their lives better. This is not new.
To suddenly care about this looks sniping, and small, and eternally self-interested. So by all means slam the practitioners of cuts, and their defenders, in all manner of ways, but please, stop calling them a government of millionaires beset upon penalising the needy. The first bit makes sense, the latter just doesn’t. Coherence of abuse, that’s all I’m asking.
I went down a mine once. It was a diamond mine near Kimberley in South Africa. A mile and a half down, it really wasn’t very nice. Noisy and dusty, yes, but it was the close, stifling heat that I found particularly gruelling. You’d think it would be cold down there, with layer upon layer of rock between you and the sun. Once it gets hot, though, it stays hot.
The big fear in a diamond mine — in any mine, for all I know — is what they call ‘mudrush’, which is sudden torrents of high-pressure dark, sticky oomsk. A bad one can shut down a section. They show you the handrails to follow if the lights cut out, and the safe room in which, if you can get there, you can hold out for months. Like I said, not nice.
Only, plenty of things aren’t nice. People spend years in solitary confinement in Third World dungeons, which isn’t nice. So why has the world gone so mad for the miners? I wouldn’t like to have gone through their ordeal, hell no, but there are plenty of things I’d like to go through a lot less. It hasn’t been about them, at all, this two-month story of hope and drama and exploded diagrams. It’s been about something else. But what?
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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