If symptoms persist.. .
THE OTHER day I met a young teacher who felt (very strongly) that poverty is entirely the fault of the rich. If the rich didn't grab all the money, she said, there would be enough for everyone. And she put me firmly in the category of grabbers — quite wrongly, as it happens, because I don't even charge BMA rates for my court appearances.
She had had a Catholic education, so I thought she might rather appreciate my argument that poverty is to wealth as evil is to good: the one is necessary that we may know the other. I was disappointed in my hopes, however. She retorted with a long list of inalienable human rights, among them the right to decent housing.
`And who is to pay for it?' I shouted.
`You are!' she screamed.
The following day, as it happens, I was consulted by a patient who worked in the city's ptlblic housing department. I said I supposed her work must be very difficult, something of an understatement in the light of what she told me. Her difficulties arose because of all the requests she was obliged to turn down.
One recent Saturday afternoon she was shopping with her 60-year-old moth- er in a crowded arcade when she was attacked by the boyfriend of a single mother, whose request for a transfer to another area — nearer the boyfriend she had just turned down. The boyfriend punched and kicked her, and then turned on her mother and meted out the same treatment to her. Meanwhile, the other shoppers commendably minded their own business.
My patient went to the police. She had the name of her assailant — a well- known violent criminal, recently out of prison — and several witnesses, but the police said that since the assailant had not actually broken her skin, it was only a common assault, a crime which they did not prosecute. Thereafter, the crimi- nal boyfriend slashed the tyres of her car several times while it was parked outside the office. Eventually, she herself requested a transfer to another office, which was — reluctantly — granted.
One of her first customers there was a single man who kept 40 ferrets in his one-bedroom flat and requested that he be moved to a three-bedroom house for their sake. This was not a request which, in the current financial climate, could be granted, so the man began to send death threats through the post. These the police decided were not serious, and advised her to take them with a pinch of salt, as they were clearly the work of a disordered mind. So far their advice had not led to her premature demise.
Morale in the housing department, she said, was low. This was not merely because it had constantly to deal with the distinguished British public, but because at least two members of staff were always under suspension (on full pay) pending investigations into their conduct. A black customer had only to complain that a white official had declined a request on racial grounds to produce his suspension for three months while the matter was investigated. And now an employee had been suspended for six weeks on full pay by the Munici- pal Inquisition for passing a remark (Pregnant again, I see') at a pregnant typist: the worst form of gestationism.
It seems, therefore, that if we cannot afford housing, we can at least afford a housing department.
Theodore Dalrymple
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