Fairies at the bottom of the garden

2 July, 2012 (14:50) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

It’s never pleasant, being harangued, but especially so first thing on a Monday morning. It was a Tory, of course, on Radio 4’s Start the Week – one of Cameron’s ‘New Radical’ Conservatives, Elizabeth Truss.

We must work harder, behave like a young country and free our entrepreneurial spirit, cut regulation and enable the making of money. Apparently. Again. From the South Sea Bubble to the dotcom revolution, from the credit crunch to the global financial crisis, from the miracle pill to the longer willy, all over again.

Leaving aside the crassness of a viewpoint utterly discredited by history, how people like Truss win votes by telling us all to work harder so rich people can make more money is one of the great mysteries of modern politics. Why do people not say: “Um, no thanks. We do all the work and see none of the benefit? Don’t think so.”?

But what about cutting regulation, reducing red tape – the mantras of the modern Tory, the panacea for all our ills, the magic pill, the silver bullet, the cure? Cutting regulation. Reducing red tape. Freeing business. Removing the shackles of the state.

How short memories are. Do people really need reminding that if they take a quick glance at the global financial crisis they may see the results of unfettered unregulated capitalism writ large?

Do people really still believe that rich people, greedy people, unregulated, will make all our lives better?

Looming large here is the phrase “trickle down economics” – enrich business, enrich the wealthy, and they will spend their money so that the benefits trickle down to all of us.

What this means is that if a rich man is enabled to achieve business success he will be able to buy new shoes, which means he will need to spend money getting them shined. And that’s where I come in, presumably.

Ah, but it’s the only way, insist the likes of Truss.

Well, indeed it is if you’re white, middle class and live in the west; tell the Chinese or Indian economic miracles to remove the shackles of the state, why don’t you? Or tell more than a billion people who still live on less than a dollar a day – 79 cents in 1979, 78 cents in 2004; that’s progress – tell them of the success of trickle-down economics. Tell an African American in the ghettos of Chicago how it works; tell a former mining village in the north of England about trickle-down. But do it from a safe distance.

I could go on, but let me signpost you to Francis Wheen’s excellent How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (Fourth Estate, 2004) which places trickle-down economic theory squarely and clearly where it belongs – alongside alien abduction, crystal healing and fairies at the bottom of the garden. His destruction of any shred of credibility anybody could ever have thought to have attached to the theory is absolute.

He offers, neatly:

“ ‘What I want to see above all,’ Reagan said, ‘is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.’ And there was no shortage of hucksters willing to explain, for a fee, just how this could be achieved.”

Boom boom.

It’s interesting to muse on economics.

I’m part of the picture, you see. Last year, a house seller and a house buyer. Since October, a house restorer and improver. We have spent money, paid taxes, employed people, bought products.

And do you know? Not one single aspect of the process, not one, has gone in a straightforward way. New products haven’t worked, or have been damaged, or have needed remedial work. Every job has had to be returned to at least once for one reason or another. The hours I’ve spent on the phone and in the car getting replacements and organising things. God, the hours.

So it just strikes me that maybe, just maybe, instead of concentrating on freeing our inner entrepreneurs maybe we could concentrate for a moment on actually doing the things we already do, right? Properly?

Do you think it might catch on?

Or is inbuilt uselessness now a vital cornerstone of our economy, enabling the quick turnover of crap? Sell something that lasts? Why, that would mean a long time before money could be made again…

Mud at the bottom of the garden

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to turn. It is July 2nd, and the rain is sheeting down. The garden is a morass, an unattended swamp, the veg patch slowly mildewing away, the dog standing forlornly in the cold grey greenhouse staring out at the mud. The children have gone off on a trip to the beach with school, in wellies, waterproofs and clutching bin liners to sit on. Tories are lecturing me to work harder. Everybody wants money from me, and I’m still struggling to work out for what.

This morning I look around for comforts. Italian coffee. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. And, spotted on the poets’ shelves, Edward Thomas, may he rest.

Thomas lived to write but dismissed himself as a hack; his poetry achieved immortality only after his death at Arras in 1917, in the same offensive that claimed my own great uncle. His poem is a writer’s prayer:

Out of us all

that make rhymes,

will you choose

sometimes –

as the winds use

a crack in a wall

or a drain,

their joy or their pain

to whistle through –

choose me,

you English words?

Let me sometimes dance

with you,

or climb

or stand perchance

in ecstasy

fixed and free

in a rhyme,

as poets do.

His wife Helen wrote movingly of their relationship in World Without End (1931); he, in verse, described what gifts he would give her – “many fair days free from care and heart to enjoy both foul and fair” – and ended with exquisite poignancy:

“…and myself, too, if I could find

Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.”

So I sat and read Edward Thomas and listened to music and ignored the crashing rain and marvelled at the beauty there can be in the world – when you can shut out the sounds of a Cornish summer.

 

 

Comments

Comment from Hamster
Time July 2, 2012 at 4:56 pm

Flaming June is over, we can only hope flipping July is better.

Comment from Hamster
Time July 2, 2012 at 4:59 pm

This weeks Hamster Top Tip – Get your winnings from last weeks HTT and put it on Andy Murray, its going to be his title this year.

Comment from Stuart
Time July 2, 2012 at 9:42 pm

Andy Murray for Wimbledon? Call that a Hamster’s Top Tip? The winner of the 7.20 at Kempton’s got a better chance of winning Wimbledon…. give us more nags, Hamster, more nags. I’ve got a cricket ticket to pay for.

Comment from Hamster
Time July 2, 2012 at 9:46 pm

Nags or gags? Lol

Comment from StentsRus
Time July 3, 2012 at 9:11 am

As much as it sticks in my throat…I have to agree with Fraser…Murray-No-Chance…but I am grateful for the tip on how to get rid of the the three monkeys in my shed.

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