ANOTHER VOICE
What shall we do about the poor?
AUBERON WAUGH
0 bviously there are two views on the German court ruling which granted a par- tial refund of a family's holiday costs because they had to share their dining- room with handicapped people. The couple with two children had found themselves in a Turkish hotel with ten handicapped peo- ple, some of whom 'had been unable to eat in a normal way and their food dribbled out of their mouths onto bibs tied around their necks'. The judge, at Mensburg, northern Germany, said: 'The unavoidable sight of handicapped people in a small room at every meal created feelings of revulsion and affected the welfare of the couple and their children. The sight was a constant and unnecessarily stark reminder of human suf- fering. Such experiences do not belong to a typical holiday.'
Even in Germany, this ruling has excited noises of outrage from handicapped pres- sure groups. The result is a national debate. I think I can see both points of view, and am rather taken with the idea of a 'typical holiday' in which the spectacle of human suffering has no place. Other Germans, of course, may choose untypical holidays which will be entirely devoted to the con- templation of human suffering, whether in Somalia, Calcutta, or Russia, or in the leper colonies of central Africa.
But does the spectacle of human suffer- ing have any place in the typical working week? Should we not be protected from it on our television sets, unless on a special channel available for those who choose to watch suffering, whether from enjoyment of the fact itself or the enjoyment to be derived from compassionate feelings? The Australian Treasurer (this is what the Aus- tralians call their Chancellor of the Exche- quer), Mr John Dawkins, recently returned from a trip to Europe and complained to the Australian parliament about the home- less who occupy the doorways of Australia House in the Strand every evening in their cardboard boxes and their sleeping bags. It did not occur to him, as an unsophisticated Australian, that some English people might rather enjoy the spectacle of their fellow citizens in this situation. We may be a poor country and getting poorer, but we still rel- ish our 'differentials'. The fellow in the cardboard box acts as a wholesome reminder of what might happen to us if we suddenly decided not to get out of bed in the morning. In earlier times such people were hustled out of sight. Now it is assumed we all need a good look.
As I contemplate what is needed to put this country on the road to economic recov- ery — the requirements are spelled out week after week by Neil Collins, city editor of the Daily Telegraph, and nobody has any excuse for not being familiar with them — I feel certain that no democratically elected government will even begin the task. In happier times, people used occasionally to go mad contemplating the National Debt. I defy anyone to contemplate the growth in public expenditure (as a proportion of GDP) over the past 12 years of Conserva- tive government and remain sane. If any Conservative government ever dares raise taxes, it will only be to increase public expenditure still further. It seems to me inevitable that we are heading for the pre- sent situation in Russia, where only one in four children is healthy at school-leaving age, and 80 per cent of young Russian men are unfit for military service.
All of which adds a certain immediacy to the question raised by Matthew Parris in the Times recently: what shall we do about the poor? Parris was not concerning him- self with the bogus or Pilger-poor — those whose income falls below a certain arbitrar- ily determined proportion of the national average wage and who are therefore deemed to be 'in poverty'. He was dis- cussing the real underclass of hopeless cases, those unfit even for military service, whom we used to call the Jolliffe brigade: the sickies, the dafties, the thickos, the alckies and druggies, compulsive lazy-bones and other unemployables who are unable to stand on their own feet in the modern world, let alone compete in a free market.
What is to be done about these people? Does anybody really care about those who cannot even be bothered to vote, although socialists like to use such examples to advance their own irrelevant agenda of income redistribution?
'Those on the left who have muddled wealth and equalisation with the argument about helping the small minority whose condition is truly pitiable, have done a real disservice to the weakest citizens of all,' Parris argues. The reason for this is that the British middle class smells a rat and looks
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away as soon as it hears a suggestion for helping the bottom 2 per cent which involves expropriating the top 60 per cent.
The short answer to the problem of the Jolliffe brigade, as with so many human problems, is to throw money at it. The bot- tom 2 per cent is such a very small propor- tion that it need really cost us very little, so long as we define our target clearly enough. But then of course you get whingeing pil- gerite layabouts and the others on Peter LiIley's little list trying to climb upon the Jolliffe bandwagon. As soon as you start throwing money around, everyone makes a grab for it. These people are temperamen- tally incapable of helping themselves and offer no threat whatever to the existing social order. Yet when all is said, basic human decency requires that something should be done.
In earlier, if not necessarily happier times, such people would presumably hav.e been accommodated within the village soci- ety where they found themselves. LazY- bones stayed in bed at their parents' home until both parents were dead, when they moved their mattresses and sponged off a more energetic sister or brother. I remem- ber that in the Languedoc village where we settled for a year in 1963 there were 1w1 village idiots who were permitted to We around and make small nuisances of them- selves, pilfering fruit and disarranging unimportant objects. The Protestant ethic always tended to whisk such people awe, just as we used to whisk the homeless off the streets ...
I think, allowing for the fact that we are a Protestant nation, the best and only thing to be done for the Jolliffe brigade is to pro- vide better, more comfortable and more dignified prisons for them. They are bound to spend a part of their time in prison: At present, owing to a peculiarity in the British character, prisons are used to humiliate them still further, which is the opposite of what is needed. Prison is where they should learn self-respect, enjoy the advantages of a self-disciplined, ordered life. To dePrive prisoners of freedom of movement, of the_ company of the opposite sex, of alcohol and also possibly of tobacco is punishment. enough. Where solitary confinement an no television is the ultimate punishment, prison can yet be seen as a means of pro- viding alternative accommodation for those, unable to keep their ends up in the worlu outside.
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