The high price of failure

I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more of his money to the Conservative party. The term ‘rich bastard’ is the one which I was habituated to use when I was a member of the Labour party and which I have disinterred now to give my opening sentence a little more punch. It was axiomatic to us that anyone with sufficient dosh to consider squandering a few hundred thou on a political party must be a bastard and was both immoral and undeserving of his wealth. Wealth in any shape or form appalled us in an almost Freudian fashion – Sigmund, you may recall, equated potty training with the accumulation of money, and the supposedly subconscious link between faeces and money has never quite been expunged from the left. The rich are still seen, rancorously and jealously, as the enemy.

Indeed, the left goes even further these days and does not like to see people who are simply reasonably comfortable and who use the food bank only because it’s a little closer to home than Waitrose and the stuff is usefully free. It is a very odd sort of selling point for a political party – to make yourself the implacable enemy of hard work, success, good luck, happiness etc. But that is what the left has done and that distrust of wealth has migrated to the centre and the centre-right parties, too, both here and across much of western Europe.

Increasingly policies are geared towards benefiting the stupid and the bone idle, or people who have made ‘questionable life choices’. There is no notion of a deserving poor any more – those who have done the right things and work hard but are still skint and could maybe do with a bit of a leg-up from the state.