"The big challenge for us is to ensure that children have ambition; telling them not to see their future as working in a commercial outlet, but aspiring to manage that commercial outlet."

Absolutely fantastic article in the Guardian today about the pejorative, moralistic term 'broken Britain', invented by the former Conservative leaders Ian and Duncan Smith. Look, here's the sort of lovely thing this lovely man says (why o why didn't we take to him?):


"There is a physical effect taking place in children growing up in abusive households, in places where they witness a lot of abuse, perhaps their mum having different, multiple partners. These children's brains will develop physically at a rate which is quite different from those who are growing up in a normal, balanced environment... you will find that the child's brains simply doesn't develop." (IDS)


Eeeewwww. Ok so first he brings up abuse and your first reaction is 'abuse=bad thing, really bad thing; violence, bullying, harassment etc', then he gives an example of abuse which is just polygamy. That's abuse? That's ******* abuse to you? For your mum to sleep with someone? O I'm sorry Mr IDS, did your mother love anyone other than you? Did she have her own life? Was she not a sexless angel? How could you cope! What a vile, disgusting thing to do: to equate single parents having sex with multiple partners with abuse is a) an absurd and unnecessary judgement on those faced with an astronomically challenging task b) an astonishing cheapening of the notion of abuse when violent physical and sexual abuse along with long term psychological abuse remains so prevalent in domestic settings and so under-reported and non-prevented c) only going to perpetuate the notion that the polygamy of one's mother is a shameful thing and thus play a distinct causal role in increasing any bullying that the child may suffer as a result of this situation and d) indicative of a rather hateful attitude towards sex and women on the part of IDS.


Secondly we have the 'science bit', where, like a haunting spin off of a L'Oreal advert, IDS gives us his 'facts' (apparently they're backed up by two pictures, which he presumably drew himself in crayon or faeces or something). Now I never knew that my physical brain size was directly linked to how many people my mum slept with when I was a child, but apparently it is. This is absolutely fascinating, I mean, we'll have to reshape our entire notions of biology and even causality in such a fundamental way. I had thought that brain size was mostly genetically pre-determined, with a little help from nutrition and mental exercise, and this fitted pretty well into a broadly coherent and cohesive world view in which physical phenomena can be explained almost in their entirety by reference to other physical phenomena in an incredibly detailed and consistently applicable causal network: turns out it was all bollocks - how many, precisely. Causality is actually a moral phenomena, whereby the physical world one inhabits is a reflection of one's virtue: you live in grime, you must have a grimy soul; you live in clean decadence, you must have a clean and... decadent soul. Obvious now I think of it. Sarah Palin, you are so wise - who knew that behind those stumbling, incoherent speeches lay a complex, idealist ontology comparable to those of Kierkegaard or Spinoza? We're living in a matrix designed to test our behaviour against a set of largely incidental moral values which rose to prominence in the British Empire under Queen Victoria and which are most powerfully represented by such sacred images as adverts for Bisto and Werther's Originals.


Thirdly we have the quintessential polarising of society into 'them' and 'us' - with them as usual being portrayed by people who live in flats and us being people that live in detached houses and only use the flat (pad) when we've had to stay late in town or want to throw a hookers and cocaine jamboree (this same dichotomy is often referred to by the ironic terms 'taxpayers' and 'criminals'). This is a familiar dichotomy, as it runs through almost all conservative rhetoric - see this earlier post about Bush/O Reilly covering up bad practice with notions of good and evil; it's so 1984 it's stunning! Look at the broken proles! We must fix them with such alien notions as 'fa-mi-ly' and 'wo-rk'. If only they knew that being a morally superior arsehole would solve their problems, suddenly the complete lack of available industry, the squalid living conditions and the patronising prejudice of the society they live in would stop being obstacles, for they would see that - as we have already discussed - the world is not a physical landscape with causal laws, but an imaginary kind of haunted house mirror which reflects your inner rich smug twat.


So there we go, the poorest people in a society are not, as we had previously suspected, poor because they are poor, but they are poor because their mum slept with more than one person when they were children thus leading to brain atrophy which in turned stalled their ambition to (all, obvs) run the local shop (or food delivering van, which the people of Easterhouse have instead), which would have led them to a life of moral salvation through monogamy. Thank you for clearing that up then.












P.S., while I'm here, if you want an explanation of the causes of some of the less attractive features of a society - crime, drug addiction etc - that's a bit less stupid and involves some proper research and graphs and not just IDS's hand-painted dung drawings, I once more recommend checking out The Equality Trust, whose work - along with Nudge economics - seems to be one of the most powerful and compelling socio-political realisations of the 21st century thus far.


Toodles!