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Perhaps life was a little more straightforward when those dear old hippies Crosby Stills and Nash urged us to teach our children well.

Now? Tough, bringing up kids, isn’t it? You spend all those years teaching them to be polite, to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, to be kind to others, to help out when asked, to contribute to Save the Children and Operation Shoebox because it’s good to help others, to take part in the school’s links with schools in inner cities and in Africa because it’s good to make friends with other people no matter what they look like or where they come from.

Then you have to explain to them why people don’t return phone calls, why people don’t mend broken things, why they can’t log onto their computers, why their friend so-and-so has holes in his shoes, why the news has reports about people being turned away, why so-and-so says he looks after his sick wife at home because he doesn’t trust the health service, why sports facilities are so expensive even though everybody tells them they should be fit and active and healthy.

Last week I was moved to tears by Song for R, by The Be Good Tanyas, because it talks about how easy it is to fear and dislike the ‘wrong’ people and reminds us that every junkie was once a child, ‘arms stretched out for love’. It made me think of my boys as toddlers, arms reaching high for a pick-up and a cuddle.

And this world in which they will grow up? What will be their fate when I am gone, if they stretch out their arms for love? What will be their fate if, gods forbid, they become poor, or break the law, or take drugs, or live on Benefits Street, and they stretch out their arms for love like the children I once tried to teach to be kind to others?

Irate

I’m sorry to harp on about the same old thing week after week, but somebody needs to say it and when the media is so dominated by the London elite’s rosy view of a politics in which nobody gets hurt and Iain Duncan Smith deserves respect, I can’t help it. I get so angry. So…

No wonder the Tories love Channel 4’s odious, racist, fascist Benefits Street – the reason the hopeless tenants are living so helpfully in such picturesque squalor and poverty is partly down to one of their own.

Paul Nischal, who stood for the Tories in 1983 and 1987 and owns a property empire in the midlands and the north, owns three of the properties featured in the programme. The tenant of one told the Daily Mirror that his children have to sleep in their clothes because the heating’s broken, that damp runs down the walls, that no repairs are carried out. He works. His rent is £215 a week. The state pays about half to the overcharging benefit scrounging millionaire who owns the property.

But we must enjoy the poverty porn of Benefits Street and we mustn’t listen to the tenant, because he’s black and he’s poor. So stuff him.

Low rate

Property, of course, is not a problem to everybody. Some don’t even have to find the rent – Iain Duncan Smith, for example, lives rent-free in a mansion thanks to his millionaire father-in-law.

And while the bankers angle for a rise in interest rates that will cause massive financial distress to families across the country, one home-owner needn’t worry. George Osborne, gifted his fortune through inheritance, has a 2% deal through Royal Bank of Canada, which specialises in wealth management for the super-rich, according to its website. Not that the mortgage is a problem – he rents the Notting Hill property out for £10,000 a month.

Somebody will say this is the politics of envy – which, to an extent, it is: everybody who has nothing is envious of those who have everything, even more so when those who have everything have it through no achievement of their own, when those who have everything have it because of their unearned good fortune, and when those who have everything seek to deny anything to the rest of us while lying through their teeth about being all in it together. Ask the top 1% of earners to pay 50p tax and it’s the politics of envy; take money away from the poor and it’s just balancing the books.

The lying liar Iain Duncan Smith, for example. Now he’s proposing to snatch 4% of child support payments from single-parent families to help fund the Child Support Agency. All you supporters of IDS and Benefits Street will no doubt be thrilled that single parents are to be punished for their lifestyle and behaviour. But what about the children? What have they ever done to deserve their little lives being made harder? What about them, Duncan Smith, you callous, hate-filled shit?

Punishing children. The politics of the millionaire Iain Duncan Smith and the millionaire George Osborne.

Some have been asking how people like that sleep at night. The answer: very well. Untroubled. Because they really don’t give a damn. The only thing that would ever hurt them is to take their money away.

High rate

You can see just how much they fear losing any of their precious money from the squeals of protest from business leaders about the economic iniquity of charging the top 1% of earners in this country – yes, the top 1%, not 50%, not 24%, not even 10%, just the top 1% – an extra 10p in the pound in tax on everything they ‘earn’ over £150,000.

The thought of losing their money! The thought of their money helping to cut the deficit they use as an excuse to keep wages low! The thought of their money helping to tackle the poverty they find so offensive when they see it on Benefits Street! The very thought!

Clearly low taxes on the super rich have been of enormous benefit to the other 99% of the population, haven’t they?

Low taxes on the super-rich have helped our wages keep pace with inflation, helped keep utility bills down, helped create lots of full-time jobs paying a living wage, helped take millions of the working poor off housing benefit by keeping private sector rents affordable, helped curb bankers’ bonuses (why would the super-rich want a bonus if their tax is low?), helped fix the roads, helped us afford flood protection schemes, helped improve the performance of the health service. No, low taxes for the super-rich have been a triumph, haven’t they? Why would we want to try anything else?

And of course we should listen to business leaders when they tell us what our economic policy should be. Why wouldn’t we listen to people who are so committed to this country and to those of us who live in it that they even reveal to us the price of their love for Britain and its people: 10p in the £ over £150k. That’s how much they love Britain.

We must believe their truth, mustn’t we? The rich will only work if you give them money and the poor will only work if you take their money away.

And finally

Now there’s a toughie: a spat between two of history’s biggest threats to the ideals of education in this country, the ludicrous Michael Gove with his dogma of enabling corporations to sponsor schools that employ unqualified staff and are answerable to nobody, and the ridiculous ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, who believes shouting and screaming at teachers and children for being useless while placing them under unimaginable pressure is what makes education successful.

Is it too much to hope that they’ll fight each other to a standstill and therefore remove their tiny minds from our national life so we can get on with educating our children in a positive, hope-filled, level-playing-field environment unsullied by big business and the profit ethic? Is it?

And, I think, that takes us back to where we started. Our grandparents created accountable ownership by the people of public services, free health care, education free for all. We’ve taken that precious legacy and we’ve made the most gods-almighty shambles of it, squandering the things that generation fought and died for in an orgy of greed and selfishness, of survival of the fittest and to hell with the hindmost, of material wealth and backs turned to the sick and dying of the world; how are we going to help our children make a better fist of it?