It's poverty that matters not the choices that poor people make...

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In recent days both of our leading political parties have, to one degree or another, embraced the idea that the government has some role in regulating people's lifestyles. And especially the lives of poor people. Indeed, we are expected to carry on with the Fabian judgementalism which made Alfred Doolittle and his friends such a problem - their poverty was, it is implied, the consequence of their poor lifestyle choices rather than a response to poverty.

It seems to me, and has done for a very long while, that we don't solve the problem of poor lifestyle choices by authorising the wrenching of those choices from the hands and lips of the people making them. Not just because such a judgement is immoral but because it doesn't work - we know and have seen thousands of times - that bans, price hikes, regulations and controls merely drive the people who choices you want to influence into the welcoming hands of criminals - smugglers, dealers, moneylenders and all the other occupations of organised gangs.

So it was pleasing to read someone writing in the Guardian who points out the central truth about poor people and poor lifestyle choices - these are responses to their circumstance not the cause of that circumstance:

The underclass eats fast food, drinks and smokes, and some of its more unruly members even take drugs. Why? Why?

Listen, I always want to say, if you’re genuinely mystified, answer me this: have you never had a really bad day and really wanted – nay, needed – an extra glass of Montrachet on the roof terrace in the evening? Or such a chaotic, miserable week that you’ve ended up with a takeaway five nights out of seven instead of delving into Nigella’s latest?

You have? Why, splendid. Now imagine if your whole life were not just like that one bad day, but even worse. All the time. No let-up. No end in sight. No, you can’t go on holiday. No, you can’t cash anything in and retire. No. How would you react? No, you’ve not got a marketable skills set. You don’t know anyone who can give you a job. No. No.

Great stuff (even if I don't think people who don't get this are sociopathic - it's an overused and abused term) that sums up the truth. The single mum in a damp council flat - she has a crap life and the Lambrini, the packet of cheap cakes and the fags help make that crap life just a little bit tolerable And the bloke just made redundant for the tenth time in six years, back on the dole and facing the slightly sneering insistence of the DWP - three cans of premium lager, some roll-ups and a £5 flutter at the betting shop help get him through the depressing prospect of trying to find another crap job to replace the crap job he's just lost.

Yet we want to make out that that single mum's problem is that she's three stone overweight not that she lives a crap life in a crap flat. And that the unemployed bloke would be better off if he didn't drink or smoke - as if that would help find him a stable job paying a decent wage. Everywhere I look, I see people wanting to lecture these people - plus the lads on the park bench, the girl's with a bottle of cheap vodka loading up before heading out to places where they can't afford to drink and the old bloke sat outside Wetherspoons on a chilly morning nursing a pint of the cheapest ale that establishment sells.

We need to stop the judgement. Put away the puritan lectures. And focus ourselves on the real problem - that, even in our rich land, there are too many people who have pretty crap lives. Not just because of misfortune but because of poverty. Not inequality but poverty plain and simple. Not having enough of the means for life not to be crap. And the discussion we should have here isn't about how we can take money off one set of folk to give to poor people - as if there is no prospect of them standing on their own feet and only the forced charity of the wealthy can put things right.

Instead let's talk about the barriers to turning folk around - to finding ways for their lives to be a little less crap. Some of this is about money but a great deal is about the way in which we've allowed the mission creep of political priority to make people's lives worse - whacking great big 'green' imposts on fuel prices, ramping up 'sin' taxes making one of the most regressive tax systems known to man, and creating a housing system where without subsidy only the rich can live in the places where there are jobs and where people want to live.

So let's stop treating the less well off as another species - a world filled with indigent drunks and feckless mums - and ask instead how the well-meant decisions of government have made it harder for them to have a life that isn't completely crap. Above all let's stop taxing, banning, regulating and judging the things that take the edge off poverty, that help people deal with the bad stuff and which give folk a small bit of pleasure in an otherwise depressing world.

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I like choice - and so should you

Vivienne's masterpiece salmon

We hear often of the sin that is "consumption". Not the 18th and 19th century killer of literary genius but the preference that many of us have for spending a fair old chunk of the limited time we get on stuff we actually like doing. If you want to call that decadent, uncaring or planet-threatening that's fine by me. But I intend to carry on consuming.

And I am not swayed by the righteousness of some folk who, having failed to persuade us - the consumers - that consuming is a bad thing - have shifted the attack. The problem, they tell us, is choice - there's too much of it, it is making us anxious, stressed and meaning that we are no longer "organising ourselves and making a critique of society".

This little animation from RSA (entitled "Choice") peddled all this stuff - including the quote in the above paragraph. We have here all the regular left-wing anti-choice arguments including jolly little stories about how some bearded professor was uptight about which wine to buy in a restaurant or how some self-indulgent journalist wrote that sex life wasn't like the sex lives described in the pages of Cosmopolitan. Plus the usual rubbish about the stress we get from being over faced by the range on offer in the supermarket.

I feel so sorry for all these sensitive folk living in their convenient little anecdotes. But the argument - so typical of pop psychology - is founded in story and prejudice rather than in the reality of consumer behaviour. Yes, consumers will tell you they don't like choice. But consumers also use heuristics to mange and moderate choices - mostly they're called brands although they may also be choices about shopping location or, today, the use of comparison web-sites. There is an entire academic discipline - consumer behaviour - that studies such stuff.

More substantially, however, the argument against choice presented here tiptoes towards anti-capitalism - not just through an ignorance of what, precisely, we might mean by capitalism (it is presented as the creator of our consumer society) but through the contention that choice is used by "capitalism" to prevent us from achieving "social change". I have to smile at the manner in which "capitalism" is anthropomorphised - made to have an existence as master of an "ideology of choice".

But what is the alternative to this "ideology of choice"?  Logic tells us that the only alternative must be an "ideology of choice denial". Our choices - whether of wine with dinner, of places to live or of clothes to wear would be constrained, limited and even stopped entirely (bit like healthcare really). And one presumes - although this isn't stated - the limitation of choice would require mandation. Somebody will have to set out the choices we can have - assuming that "somebody" actually thinks we should have any choice at all.

So the argument presented - for all its wit and literacy - is profoundly illiberal, requires a mechanism for limiting choice (so we are not stressed or otherwise pained by our choices) and represents the continuation of the Nancy Klein attack on that choice. Or rather on the "wrong sort of choice" (as we can characterise Ms Klein's argument) - the idea that the brand "McDonalds" is essentially different from "Liberal " or indeed from "Chateau Lafitte Rothschild". All are those pesky heuristics - short-cuts to decision-making - that enable a complex consumer society to work.

Although the RSA do not present any alternative - "organising to achieve social change" is as far as it goes - the vision, characterised by the use of bees as a metaphor, owes more to Aldous Huxley than to a happy vision of the future. Indeed it could be this:

"Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

Please let it not be so. Let us be free. Stop speaking of some idea of social change as if "social change" is absolutely desirable. And stop offering excuses that permit governments to control our lives, to remove our choices. And stop already with this angst, this post-millennial ennui, this pseudo-guilt trip - choice is good, it makes us happier, healthier, wealthier and, each day, the chance to do it differently means that innovation, change - even social change - takes place.

However, the sad little assault on choice will continue, partly because some folk makes choices that people who do cute animations for the RSA disapprove of (you know getting drunk, smoking and eating the wrong food) but mostly because the social change that is driven by choice isn't the "social change" such people want. Rather than the controlling hand of the benevolent masters directing the ignorant towards enlightenment, we get a messy, exciting, chaotic mish-mash of changes - some fantastic, some problematic but all of them driven by the individual actions, initiatives and, yes, choices of men and women doing stuff they like doing.

Choice is good. And don't ever forget it!

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An outsider's thoughts on Labour's choices

Although I guess it’s none of my business, I can’t resist penning a thought or two about the Labour leadership election. I understand that, so far, we have a brace of Milibands and are expecting Balls to join in over the next couple of days. And we may yet see a candidate from the ‘left’ – perhaps John Cruddas. Game on as Labour tweeters like to say!

But catch your breath for a minute and ask yourselves a question – what sort of party do you want Labour to be over the coming few years? Be cause it’s plain that these candidates each offer a different direction. You have a choice between European-style social democracy, a tribal and cynical union-dominated approach or a real attempt to remake the party as a voice for ordinary people.

The Milibands – privileged background and education, pro-European, urbane, metropolitan – represent the shining besuited Euro-elite, the sort of candidates that Paris, Bonn and Madrid would approve. But this positioning means nothing to the ordinary working class voter who’s probably a bit doubting of the EU project and thinks the bloody foreigners should butt out of British politics thanks. The Milibands are part of that patronising Labour elite that gave us Mandelson, Harman and Blair.

Balls – despite his (well-disguised) posh background, Balls represents the cynical side of Labour politics. Lots of sound and fury followed by remorseless attacks on the Party’s enemies (internal as well as external). This is the trade unions’ party (as distinct from the trade unionists’ party), the party of group rights and the party of big government. It is the approach rejected by the electorate on May 6th

The third choice for Labour is to find again the place from which it sprung – the needs and aspirations of hard-working people employed in the private sector. These people – some are trade unionists but most are not – stuck two fingers up at the nannying, hectoring, interfering government of Brown. These people look across at public sector workers and see feather-bedded, protected employees – and worse, that comfort is achieved with their taxes. And these people want to drink beer, smoke fags, go by plane to Benidorm and Paphos, drive pick-up trucks, eat pies and give their kids a chocolate bar to go in the lunch box. They have absolutely nothing in common with the metrosexual niceness of the Milibands or with the bullying authoritarianism of Balls.

It isn’t my business but if the Labour Party wants to find its voice and place they have to get through to these voters – and to the 75% and more of C1/C2s who didn’t vote Labour – they have the chance to change the narrative. To be the party that say to ordinary folk: “you enjoy the money you earn how you like and we’ll try to look after your interests. To help protect your jobs, to support business, to provide doctors, schools and coppers and to defend the country.”

Maybe someone will step forward and make that offer. If they do Labour members would be mad not to take it.

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