For those who haven’t leafed through a copy, or read the extracts in the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s new book is effectively an extended diatribe against the Unjust Rewards of those who, say, work in the City, or who went to Oxbridge universities. It’s a one-note attack – with scant room for subtleties – and Giles Coren mercilessly lampoons it in today’s Times. Here’s my favourite passage in the Coren piece, in which he takes on the book’s description of Oxford:
“Not only did the word ‘spires’ appear twice in the same short extract, but the lawns, bless them, were ‘manicured’. Except they’re not, Polly. They’re just mown. Same as everywhere else. You don’t have to be rich, or posh, or evil to mow the bloody lawn. They mow the lawn on council estates too. It’s you, Polly, and you, Dave, who are trying to present Britain as a cartoonish, divided society to suit your own arrogant, dim-witted, outdated Weltanschauung.”
But it’s a comment attached to Coren’s piece that does the best demolition job on the Toynbee/Walker thesis:
“My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?” – Raj Chande, London, United Kingdom
Toynbee’s book can’t help but remind me of the Labour campaign in Crewe and Nantwich, with it’s attacks on Tory toffs, and the Mirror’s gleeful revelation that ‘Tory activists’ drove around in a (locally-made) Bentley. Raj Chande’s comment reveals just why that approach is losing all poltical relevance.
P.S. Do read Tim Worstall’s take on the Toynbee/Walker book over at Trading Floor.
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