Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain. They would grasp the loathing better if they went back through the arguments they made in opposition, and realised that their leaders have failed to follow through the logic of the ideas they once espoused.

The best Tory criticism of Gordon Brown to my mind was that he had stood by while the boom bypassed large parts of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the North and South West. He left them with Soviet-style local economies, dominated by the public sector. Their populations’ prosperity depended on state subsidy rather than private endeavour.

True enough, but now Conservatives and Liberals are cutting the public sector, without ensuring that the private sector is ready to plug the gaps.

There’s more, all very pertinent to the question of what actually motivates the coalition. His remarks about crime are especially galling:

Note as well [the belief of working class people in Worksop] that the government will withdraw what protection the police offer them from the violent drunks and addicts, who infest their town.

If they really believed in Liberal economics, wouldn’t they try to create the conditions for growth in deprived areas that now have “Soviet-style local economies”? Tax breaks and free ports in Liverpool and Hull and Middlesbrough would drive wealth from the South East to the North, which would be a good thing, but also see new wealth generated there. People might even be weaned off the habits of Labour voting if they saw their areas regaining some of the dynamism of the nineteenth century.

I have seen nothing to undermine the suspicion that they don’t really believe their own free-market, enterprise-based talk. I hate to say this, but there’s a strong whiff of Tory protection of their own and disregard for the rest.

Richard North wrote recently:

About half a million pensioners spent Christmas in bed, in order to keep warm.

[...]

What people forget, though, is that the greenie objective, quite deliberately, is to increase the cost of energy…

Just so. And the mechanism for raising prices is tax (duty is tax).

The Telegraph mis-reported that:

Levels of bankruptcy among men and women aged over 65 are the lowest in Britain, but the rate at which numbers have increased has shocked observers, having risen six times in a decade and at a 50 per cent faster rate than other age groups.

The analysis by The Insolvency Service found that among women aged over 65, the rate of bankruptcy has grown even more sharply, more than 10 times between 2000 and 2009 and it is 43 times higher in London.

The average age of someone who is bankrupt is 41, which is close to the average age of the population.

Charities described the increases as “shocking”, saying the rising cost of essential bills is hitting households hard.

Una Farrell, from the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, said: “Dealing with debt is particularly hard as you get older…”

Mis-reported, because the problem isn’t debt. Debt is a symptom. The problem is tax, and the recent VAT rise will worsen that.

East Cambridgeshire, where I live, has about 34,000 households. I’ll find out in a few days how many are Council Tax payers – in other words, how many have to pay the tax themselves rather than have it paid by benefits. Before Christmas, I filed these question to the council, under the FOI:

1. in 2009 and 2010, how many households have been visited by Bailiffs on behalf of the Council in respect of unpaid council tax?

2. During this period, on how many occasions have the bailiffs removed property from the households?

3. On the occasions that property has been removed and sold at auction, in what percentage of cases has the amount of money thereby recovered been LESS than the fees charged by the bailiffs?

4. In how many cases do the fees of the bailiff company add at least 30% to the indebtedness of the household?

The reply was:

1. For the Financial Year 2009/10 – The Bailiff’s would have visited 977 cases

2 – 4 The Council does not hold the information requested in points 2 -4. Unfortunately the Bailiff Company that carried out the work for 2009/10 are no longer employed by the council, an email has been sent to the Bailiff company to request this information but to date we have not received a response.

I asked again this week, and was told no reply had been received from the bailiff company.

Even assuming every household pays Council Tax in full, this means about 3% of households were visited by bailiffs in a single year. Subtract the subsidised ones – subsidised in part by the poor people who have had the bailiffs set on them – and this percentage will be higher. I’ll post again when I have the figure.

I have a feeling that when goods are removed, the extra fees charged by the bailiffs get close to, or exceed, the money recouped from auction sales in a significant number of cases.

But such is the insouciance of the council (I ought to say the FOI department has been excellent, responsive and helpful), they don’t know. They don’t know how many people are having their doors broken down, their possessions taken by hired goons entirely for the profit of those same goons.

I DO know that bailiffs sometimes charge for visits that weren’t made, and bump up the fees like that, mercilessly profiting from the misery of people who, unlike them, are trying to make a decent living. I have a documented, proven case of this that is in the process of being referred to the appropriate court.

Then there is income tax and corporation tax and VAT, which drive many businesses to the wall. As Tim pointed out yesterday:

Some portion of [unpaid taxes] will simply be people who have gone bust. There just isn’t the money there to pay the tax.

This is the human cost of the profligate state. Hard working men and women, driven to bankruptcy, losing everything they have worked for, to keep John Prescott in Jags, Polly in Tuscan villas and Shameless in buckie and roll ups.

It’s a scandal. And NO political party is likely to take it up as a cause. But, as the success of Chris Christie shows, it’s an open goal. You CAN take on public sector unions. You can take on the tax-addicted state.

You just have to want to. And you have to have the guts.

NB – if anyone reads this, googling about tax and bailiffs, and has any information that could be helpful to a campaign, please email me at prisdon@gmail.com. If you’d like to help turn over this particular rock, please email.

The confusion, I think, comes from the desire of Marxist socialists to be considered of the left. Leaving them aside, temporarily, there’s a very simple definition of right and left available. These positions reflect tendencies or broad positions and constitute a spectrum rather than two neat boxes. But we could say that the right tends towards the support of institutional authorities exercising absolute power, and is concerned with grouplets – nation, race, religious identity – whereas the left tends towards human universalism and is suspicious of institutional power, seeking to limit it.

That makes the Papacy right wing and secularists left. It makes Monarchists right wing and republicans left. So far so good, that makes instinctive sense.

So what of Marxist socialism? It’s plainly right wing. It obsesses about grouplets (class mainly, but there’s a tendency for Marx’s anti-semitism also to be emulated). It seeks to institutionalise complete, totalitarian power. Both the BNP and the SWP show up as right wing under this definition, which seems right. The Greens are right wing, as any glance at their aristocratic leadership would suggest.

This would mean that most of the (socialist) middle class the Telegraph piece is talking about started on the right. They might have shifted a bit, but they remain on the right. Which isn’t nearly so remarkable as the piece suggests.

Prof Mike Kelly, the public health director at Nice, added: “This isn’t about telling individuals to choose salad instead of chips — it’s about making sure that the chips we all enjoy occasionally are as healthy as possible.

“That means making further reductions in the salt, trans fats and saturated fats in the food we eat every day.”

Betty McBride, the director of policy and communications at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Creating an environment that makes healthy choices easy is vital. Government, the health service, industry and individuals must all play their part. We must see industry making major efforts now to reformulate products with less saturated fat.

“Cutting our ‘sat fat’ intake would have a major impact on heart disease.”

Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, added: “The Nice guidance demonstrates conclusively why we need to change radically our approach to this vast and silent killer.

And this comment, from a thread at Harry’s Place today:

I find it hard to justify the pay rises of about 10% per year, for the last 13 years. Is a GP really worth a cool quarter of a million?
Normally, if a profession is high paying, then more people train to do it, not the case in medicine. The number of doctors trained is controlled by the medical profession, making sure that not enough are trained. This means they are well paid and that we are forced to strip-mine the third world for medics.
On the subject of nurses, making it a graduate entry profession has cost a fortune and actually decreased the length of service time of the profession.

Hospitals are being built and you know, not a single hospital has been built to be cleaned. UK operating theaters still have tiles and cement grouting. These are very difficult to clean and cleaning has to be done manually. Theaters and the wall/floor meeting points of corridors could be made out of stainless steel, which would allow steam cleaning. Hospital furniture could be designed to survive a UV/ozoneolysis chamber, but they are not.
UK hospitals could be air conditioned to stop the spread of infections, as done in the US, but they are not.
All light switches could be touch free, but they are not.
You have more chance of catching a lethal infection in a British hospital than in any other location.
You have more chance of knowing if your MP is fucking his secretary than you have of knowing if your surgeon has a poor performance rating and a higher than average death rate. A bad surgeon in the UK will be allowed to work until he/she does a ’spectacular’ and can then be safely sacked for incompetence; without the hospital risking the BMA kicking the crap out of them.

Some body, some day, will eventually stand up to the BMA and the Quacks; bring pop-corn.

Nagging the working class remains the priority for the middle class Great and Good, however. Who said class warfare is dead?

At least, that was always the conventional, “official” history. As Carl von Rotteck put it in his General History of the World: From the Earliest Times Until the Year 1831(1842)

The Hungarians fell over Austria into Bavaria (955), greedy for plunder, inhuman as in earlier times, more formidable than ever in number and equipment. They conquered and ravaged the country as far as the Lech, crossed this river, and besieged Augsburg. Otho fought these barbarians in the great plain, which is extended from this city between the rivers Lech and Wertach. The most splendid, the most complete victory, crowned the well-commanded forces of Germany. From this battle-day in Lechfeld, Germany was forever delivered from the Hungarians.

This account is echoed in Wikipedia:

The Battle of Lechfeld (10 August 955), perhaps the defining event for holding off the incursions of the Magyars into Central Europe, was a decisive victory by Otto the Great, King of the Germans, over the Magyar leaders

And in Britannica, with a little bit more nuance:

their raiding forces suffered a number of severe reverses, culminating in a disastrous defeat at the hands of the German king Otto I in 955 at the Battle of Lechfeld, outside Augsburg (in present-day Germany). By that time the wild blood of the first invaders was thinning out, and new influences, in particular Christianity, had begun to circulate.

By the 1950s, a new wave of historians had started to question these “official” versions of history, and the great French scholar, Marc Bloch, in his 1964 work Feudal Society, brought his spotlight to bear on the battle of Lechfeld.

He wrote(.doc, 2MB, p.26):

Si brillant qu’il fût et malgré tout son retentissement moral, un fait d’armes isolé, comme la bataille du Lech, n’aurait évidemment pas suffi à arrêter net les razzias. Les Hongrois, dont le territoire propre n’avait pas été atteint, étaient loin d’avoir subi le même écrasement que jadis, sous Charlemagne, les Avars. La défaite d’une de leurs bandes, dont plusieurs avaient déjà été vaincues, eût été impuissante à changer leur mode de vie. La vérité est que, depuis 926 environ, leurs courses, aussi furieuses que jamais, n’en étaient pas moins allées s’espaçant. En Italie, sans bataille, elles prirent fin également après 954. Vers le sud-est, à partir de 960, les incursions en Thrace se réduisent à de médiocres petites entreprises de brigandage. Très certainement un faisceau de causes profondes avait fait lentement sentir son action.

One isolated feat of arms would not have stopped the Magyar invasions, especially one that didn’t even reach the Magyar lands. Magyar raids had been dimishing since 926. In Italy, they had ended, without any battle, by 954. They had virtually ended in Thrace by 960.

Bloch pointed out that Hungarian society had been changing, no doubt in part because of the influence of captives, hostages and slaves, from a nomadic, raiding culture to a settled, agricultural one. It’s reasonable to suggest the defeat at Lechfeld was important to the Magyars, but it wasn’t the reason why their raids ended. They were ending anyway, through a process of gradual change.

The implication here is profound. Although the idea that this battle ended these invasions persists, it is wrong. It isn’t, as you might think, and as it might be intended, a simplification. It’s just plain wrong.

Though there have been great people and significant events, they tend to decorate, rather than dictate, the movement of history. But that’s not how we like to see it. We like the simplicity of raids –> battle in which raiders are defeated –> raids stop.

These are also the terms in which social history has tended to be framed. But although there have undoubtedly been conflicts of interest (between workers and employers, for example), battles and victories, and great personalities and ideas, there has also been more continuity than has often been appreciated. Take, for example, the history of the English working class.

In his book The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson chose to start in 1790. This was much too late. Marx started with the emergence of the Capitalist mode of production in the sixteenth century, and suggested that:

The owners of capital are the dominant capitalist class (bourgeoisie). The working class (proletariat) who do not own capital must live by selling their labour power in exchange for a wage.

From this conflict arose. But he did not understand the continuity with the past, and so started much too late.

The starting point actually needs to be the status of slaves in the late Roman Empire. Slaves were valuable, and gravestones attest to the fact that sometimes they were valued. Slavery was not so bad that people would not sell their own children, or even themselves, into it to pay debts. What’s more, slaves could obtain their freedom, sometimes by buying it. In other words, in an odd sort of way there was social mobility. The agriculture of the Roman Empire depended on slave labour and so, as the influence of Rome receeded in the third century AD, England was left with a Villa system of land settlement, in which large estates were cultivated by slaves who lived in more or less tolerable circumstances.

Scroll forwards a few hundred years, and you find a Manorial system of large estates cultivated by serfs who were not free, but who lived in more or less tolerable circumstances (there were also freemen and tenants). There’s little documentary evidence for those centuries we scrolled rapidly through, but the possibility of continuity between the two systems seems obvious. It wasn’t, though, to past historians. The continuity of Romano-British culture with that of the Romans was downplayed, the “invasion” aspect of the Anglo-Saxon settlements was emphasised, in England the ferocity of the Norman conquest was thought to have swept away much of the Anglo-Saxon settlement pattern. Battles caused changes. A narrative developed wherein feudalism developed as a response to the barbarian invasions, Magyar, Viking and Saracen, and was then modified as commerce developed until it became capitalist.

This narrative spoke of a system of military service being rendered in return for land holdings, and those holdings being cultivated by serfs who were tied into labour by armed lords. But service for tenure goes back to the Romans, and there is evidence even of the later aspects of feudalism like scutage (the remission of the duty of service in return for payment), something that was taken as a symptom of the expiry of feudalism, in the Dark Ages. Always there is continuity, when history is examined closely.

Let’s take a look at the late Roman slaves. They had little freedom, though even this varied and some were almost day labourers who were free to do as they liked when not working. Some, indeed, were quite comfortably off. They did, though, have an extraordinary degree of security. They had jobs for life. They had places to live, provided by their owner. They had little responsibility. For the ambitious, there was the possibility of freedom; for the unsuccessful free there was the possibility of slavery.

The same things were true of the medieval serf and remained true of their agricultural labourer descendants, down to the tied cottages. The focus of their lives was the estate and its lord, their freedoms were limited but so were their responsibilities. For the ambitious, there were possibilities of military service, the monastery, even commerce. For the unsuccessful elsewhere, an opposite path was open. These structures have persisted into living memory, though mechanised farms generally rent out the old tied cottages in England today. The farm workers have gone, but this process began with the industrial revolution when they started moving into cities to work for the new types of employers.

But little else changed. Employers still built and provided housing, and jobs for life. Freedoms were limited but so was responsibility. Slavery was mutating, evolving, modernising even. But it was still slavery, and a second-century Roman would have recognised it as such.

What, in the past half century, has differentiated a lower middle class person from a working class person? Not necessarily income: skilled trades pay very well indeed. It’s attitude. One, the working class person, will live in a council house or flat. This is the direct descendant of the corporation house, and the factory-built house, and the tied cottage, and the serf hut that were its ancestors. They can’t repaint the outside or change the front door. They can’t move where they like when they like. But they have subsidy, and a lack of responsibility. A middle class person on the same or even lower income will pay their own way and take the freedom that comes with that responsibility.

That both might have had the same grandparents shows that social mobility still exists, and that on this level at least it is a matter of volition.

But this also casts an odd light on the labour movement and on trades unions. Through their adherence to the ideas of jobs for life, and their demands that working class people be able to depend on benevolent and paternalistic forces, be they employers or the state, or both, and take the consequent lack of freedom that results from this they not only stand in direct line of descent from Roman slaves, but they also demand that they be able to remain as slaves. The dignity of labour is no more than the degrading comfort of the steel slave collar on the neck.

And for all their Pooterish, John Major, Little Chef aspects, the lower middle classes have this in their favour: they came from there. They would not accept the collar. They aspired to independence and freedom.

Until the psychology of the working class disappears, Britons will always include some slaves among their number. Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the past couple of decades is that a resurgent left has spread the idea that dependency is respectable to the point where even the wealthy collect state benefits (especially child benefit); even those who could support themselves are taxed until they cannot, then turned into dependent slaves by benefits that give them back some of their own money; even those who will not work are allowed the benefits of slavery.

Another half century of this, and all Britons shall be slaves.