Toynbeeising Soaps

Polly Toynbee's call for soap opera's to become more politically engaged has inspired me to have a go at writing a Polly approved script for Coronation Street:

Betty: Pint of your usual Ken?

Ken: How can I drink when child poverty is increasing by 13% a month according to an Institute of Studies report and the Tory government are determined to throw the poor onto the bonfire?

Betty: Oh I know luv, I've tried getting a grant to turn the Rovers into a Sure Start Centre but it was impossible thanks to vicious Tory Cuts.

Ken: I don't have time to drink anyway, as I've got to get home to watch Ed Miliband's speech to the TUC now.

If anyone has any other ideas for Toynbeeising the soaps please feel free to offer your contributions.

Quote Of The Day- Polly Toynbee Edition

Polly Toynbee writes about the effects that child care policies of successive governments have had:

all these sent the number of Sure Start places soaring, even though child poverty was falling.

I may have changed a couple of details.

Deja Polly

Polly Toynbee's latest article praising the appointment of Ed Balls as Shadow Chancellor seems strangely familiar:

Ed Balls the bruiser is the man to confront these Tory lies

Oh yeah, here's the earleir version:

Alan Johnson can wipe smirks off Cameron's chainsaw mob

A Sense Of Proportion

Polly Toynbee writes of the government's spending cuts:

At last the Tories have a final solution for the poor

Football Before Sky

Polly Toynbee writes:

Was it Rupert Murdoch wot lost England the World Cup? With shedloads of sports rights money he corrupted the game, turning clubs into highly leveraged financial instruments overpaying their players, while fans pay for what was once free on TV. So say some, but I leave that to football aficionados.

It isn't true that Rupert Murdoch simply charges people for what was free before, in the days before Sky the terrestrial channels did very little with the rights to live top flight football with barely 2 dozen games shown live each season. They didn't recognise the value of what they had and Rupert Murdoch did. In other words he substantially improved the product that was on offer.

Incidentally I'd be willing to bet that corruption was a far bigger problem before Sky as well, back in the 1960s there was an infamous betting scandal that cost several players their careers. Underpaid players are much more vulnerable to corruption that the disgustingly rich. It is the love of money that corrupts not money itself and people tend to love it just a bit more when they don't have any.

Leeches

Polly Toynbee writes:

Cameron and Clegg are pre-modern leech doctors: the more they bleed the economy, the sicker the patient, the higher the deficit – so the more they apply leeches.

Leeches are actually very useful in medicine, they help patients recover if used right.

Shameless

The Labour supporting pundits who are wailing and shroud waving over who is going to be hurt by the new government's budget cuts are by and large the same people who cheered the massive expansion of public spending that has left us with a deficit so large that cuts are necessary.

Cuts are brutal, even when they are made in areas where the government shouldn't really have been spending that much they will cause real pain to the people employed there who are not personally to blame for the deficit.

However the likes of Polly Toynbee are like arsonist jeering at the fire brigade because they damage doors when they knock them down. They are at least partly responsible for the complete loss of fiscal discipline by the last government that have landed us in this situation.

Chickfight!*

Polly attacks Hattie, not savagely but given that they are two peas in a pod it is noteworthy none the less:

Harriet Harman, as elected representative of the party, did nothing to save it from certain defeat

Harsh, Harriet Harman did everything she could to save Labour by staying away from the TV screens for 5 weeks. She probably cost the Conservatives an overall majority by that selfless act alone.

* If the title seems a little bit sexist, then I should say that it is a reference to this, which can be seen on some god awful digital TV channel somewhere.

Quote Of The Day

Many of those on the right won't be voting Conservative because they think that Cameron is a sell out and a liberal in Tory clothing. Let Polly Toynbee reassure you otherwise:

A Financial Times survey of Tory candidates this week pointed to the scale of climate change denial in the party. Most resist a cap on bankers' bonuses and want less financial regulation: many come from the financial sector, others from PR and marketing, and they want the 50p top tax scrapped. Conservativehome.com finds them rabidly Eurosceptic. All that is radical, a fundamentalist return to Conservative roots. No change there, then.

Doesn't that reassure you doubters?

Interesting Definition Of 'Right'

Polly Toynbee ends her latest column, about Gordon Brown's admission that contrary to what he had previously been saying, there would have to be cuts after all, with this:

Sadly, being right is not always enough.

The whole point of the Brown U-turn is that he was not right. He had been knowing telling the public untruths about what his government would do, in order to create one of his beloved 'dividing lines' between Labour and the Tories.

Incidentally this just confirms what has been obvious for a long time- Gordon Brown is the Wile E Coyote of British politics. He is an inveterate schemer but utterly useless at it. He thought it would be a brilliant wheeze to seize on Andrew Lansley's comments about there being a necessity for cuts by pretending that there wouldn't be cuts under Labour. The plan was always going to backfire and leave Brown looking dishonest when he made the claims and feeble when he was forced to back down. He also squandered a potentially effective approach for Labour- making the debate be about whom the public trusted to make the necessary cuts.

Misunderstanding Human Nature.

Polly Toynbee writes about why she is on the left:

To live on the left is to live optimistically, believing in progress despite setbacks, hoping despite frequent disappointment, urging progress against rightwing nostalgia for illusory "better yesterdays". Life on the left means trusting that the better side of human nature can prevail against selfishness and greed. Good argument can always persuade enough people to see that a more socially just society is in everyone's best interests.

Whether human nature can somehow prevail over such innate qualities as greed and selfishness is dubious and policies that rest on that assumption will be disastrous. It would be a cheap shot to say that Toynbee hasn't quite managed that feat herself, despite her belief that changing human nature on a societal scale is a reasonable objective. It is no surprise that anyone who gets human nature so wrong is likely to misinterpret what the likely effects will be of massive increases in welfare spending that often provide incentives for poor behaviour.

If you assume that greed and selfishness are inherent parts of human nature then you can begin to devise policies that direct those impulses to useful ends. If you make no allowances for such impulses then it is hardly surprising that 'setbacks' will constantly occur.

Whilst greed and selfishness aren't the most attractive traits, despite being universal, they aren't as destructive to a society as envy and resentment.

Polly For Laureate.

I don't know much about poetry but I know what I like- none of it. Some people might see this as proof of what a heathen I am, but I say that poetry is only really popular in preliterate societies where long stories have to be put into a rhythmic pattern in order to be memorised and retold. Once you've learnt to read you can write things down and refer back to what you have written at any point so lose the need to put the words into poems.

Carol Anne Duffy has been appointed as the new Poet Laureate, but the real purpose of court poets throughout the ages has been as an official sycophant praising powers of the day & Duffy doesn't appear to be willing to do that.

Therefore I propose that either Polly Toynbee* or David Aaronovitch should replace Duffy immediately. They might not technically be poets but as I explained poetry is basically prose for the illiterate**, the real talent is churning out several hundred words of ecstatic approval for whatever New Labour do.

* Polly went off the reservation this week and attacked her Viking, Gordon Brown, but that was probably out of disappointment with being overlooked.

** I could also explain my theory that theatre is television for those without electricity & that painting is an inferior precursor of photography.

Polly & Harriet Go Fact Finding.

I see that Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman and assorted other left wing women are going off to Ghana to learn about women's equality. Whilst I will never begrudge using taxpayer's money to send those two off to Timbuktu I can't help wondering whether Ghana is an obvious choice of destination to learn about women's equality. It seems like going to Bhutan to learn about coastal erosion.

Luckily the World Values Survey which I referred to in my previous post allows us to compare Ghanaian and British attitudes towards gender equality and it doesn't cost taxpayers a penny.

Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women

Great Britain: Agree- 16.2%, Disagree- 76.1%
Ghana: Agree- 53.6, Disagree- 37.4%

Okay Polly, Harriet, you know what you have to do in these hard economic times, resign so that a man can have your jobs. Of course that's just one variable, the folk wisdom of the Ghanaians is far more enlightened than that of our capitialistic patriarchal society, we need to look at some more questions:

If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?

GB: Approve- 33.5%, Disapprove- 34.7%, Depends- 31.7%
Ghana: Approve- 6.2%, Disapprove- 92.0%, Depends- 1.2%

I sure hope Polly and Harriet are learning from the vibrant cultural traditions of Ghana. I'm not even going to dwell on the results for " On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do", because I'm sure that if Ghana had Gordon Brown then their result would be closer to our 20% than their 77%.

(via Mr Eugenides)

Welfare, Not Well Fair At All.

Polly Toynbee writes:

A Financial Times poked from his briefcase to announce he did not belong in this London jobcentre. But there he was, a former Lehmans banker, signing on two weeks after his employer went bust. He had been earning £75,000 - but was left with virtually no savings. If ever there was a symbol of how everyone, high and low, feckless and thrifty, needs to feel the protection of a government that is always there in time of trouble, here it was.

Er no. If someone who had been earning £75000 a year has no savings then it a symbol of the irresponsibility the welfare state encourages even in the affluent. Personally I think anyone earning that much really ought to insure themselves against losing their job.

The rest of the article consists of advice on how the government can spend even more money that it doesn't have.

Then & Now.

Polly Toynbee in June last year:

'But then, as they stepped into No 10 yesterday, here was as decent and clever a team of ministers as ever graced the cabinet table.'

Polly today:

A cabinet of minnows and spineless backbenchers include many - perhaps most - who want Brown gone, but lack the nerve to act.

A 'Daily Nuclear Strike'

Polly Toynbee, with her usual sense of proportion, writes:

Associated Newspapers, the owner of the Daily Mail, has used the London Evening Standard as a daily nuclear strike in the city's mayoral campaign. Its billboards across London every day claim spurious "scandal" after "scandal" involving Ken Livingstone. Few read the paper, but all London sees the newsstands.

Thankfully the Guardian shows how a proper newspaper should cover the London mayoral race:

Today:

• Dave Hill, "here are the 10 reasons to vote Ken".
• Polly Toynbee, "A vote against this effete and frivolous Tory is a no-brainer". No brainers are Polly's area of expertise I guess.

Yesterday:

• Richard Reeves on the dangers of 'progressives' splitting the vote.
• Martin Jacques declares that Livingstone is a demigod and asks of Boris Johnson "Does anyone really think that Johnson has any serious commitment to public transport or knows what it means? Does anyone believe that he can represent the 40% of Londoners who are non-white when his own racial prejudices have been made so apparent?". Perhaps Ian Wright could represent them.
• Dave Hill (again), "Livingstone has acquired the expertise that comes with experience whereas Johnson cannot tell us who his transport specialists are going to be. Which of the two would you prefer in charge?"
• John Carvel on Ken, "He is the same witty, articulate, self-deprecating, stubborn, leftwing pragmatist that he was then."

I may expand this article into last week's Grauniad and beyond, later today. I'm sure I could find well over a hundred articles scaremongering about a Boris Johnson victory.

Stupid Poor People.

Polly Toynbee writes:

Child poverty is "boring" because it hasn't entered the political bloodstream..... But the word "poverty" plays badly with focus groups, even with the poor themselves: people are unconvinced it exists outside Africa.

So the people whom Polly is so keen to rescue from poverty, don't actually consider themselves to be in poverty? To me this suggests that the formal definition of poverty is not really measuring poverty. To Polly Toynbee this shows that she is better able to judge whether someone is impoverished than the poverty stricken wretch themselves.

Polly Toynbee Says Something Intelligent & Insightful.

I've always detested the way many on the left use the word "Progressive", for exactly the reasons that Polly Toynbee gives:

"but "progressive" fails the political test: if any party can use it, forget it. Would any party call itself regressive?"

It must be the festive spirit taking hold, but that is exactly how I feel about the word too. It is both meaningless and question begging.

Polly Quote Of The Day (Sort of)

Ok not actually a Polly quote but a quote from a Polly admirer in her comment section:

Great news! - if the promises are fulfilled - but there's still a fundamental fla. My experience is as a play-worker, and I know children benefit enormously in their early years from well resourced play provision

Play-workers!? Children generally manage to work out how to play on their own.

Polly Quote Of The Day.

Polly Toynbee today illustrates her keen understanding of the democratic system:

Former top brass find the brass neck to stage what is virtually an insurrection from the Lords red benches. A confident government would have slapped the old junta down.

She really does believe that any criticism of New Labour is tantamount to treason.