For decades we’ve been led to believe it’s the hypocritical, chintz-curtained, conservative, suburban middle classes who can’t bear too much reality – we pretend everything’s hunky-dory in our safe, protected environments, while secretly mainlining valium, drinking like fish, cheating on our spouses and abusing our children, and refusing to recognise the dreadful suffering of gays, ethnic minorities, the disabled, the mentally impaired and the underprivileged.
But, of course, it’s left-wingers who flee reality for the comforting embrace of words. For instance, Polly Toynbee has thrown a hissy fit in the Guardian (where bloody else?) about the word “chav”, after a Lib Dem peer used it in a tweet. (Ed West is very good on this in the Telegraph.) Our Polly probably doesn’t spend a lot of time in those areas where the undeserving poor - more specifically those ineducable young knuckle-draggers who don’t need to work thanks to benefits and the proceeds of crime - tend to hang out (her house is worth £1.5 million and, inevitably, she owns a villa in Tuscany). But, naturally, that doesn’t stop her getting her privileged knickers in a right old twist: “Poisonous class bile is so ordinary that our future king and his brother played at dressing up and talking funny at a chav party mocking their lower class subjects.” Yes, William and Harry – it’s all their fault.
Chavs, of course, are the toxic by-product of, amongst other things, an equalitarian education system which has rendered many working class youngsters unemployable, a criminal justice system which encourages criminal behaviour thanks to an undue obsession with the rights of evildoers, and a benefits system which rewards idleness. The undeserving poor have always been with us, but in the old days they had to live below society’s radar in order to survive – nowadays they don’t have to bother keeping a low profile, because no one would dare punish them just for being antisocial and feckless. Our politico-media elite abandoned the concept of shame a long time ago.
So, having created an uncontrollable underclass which makes the lives of decent working class people a misery – and which costs the rest of us a fortune to maintain – left-wingers like the farcical Ms Toynbee do what they always do when their lot has made a balls of things and (a) blame the mess on those sections of society which are utterly blameless, and (b) try to cover up the disaster by making sure we’re only allowed to talk about it in language which deliberately masks the truth.
It’s become a standard manoeuvre. For instance, criminalise the use of racially abusive terms and the problems caused by the mass immigration which the vast majority of us never asked for, and which the vast majority of us would have voted against, given half a chance, simply disappear. If we can’t use the language which is a symptom of racial tension, there is no racial tension - we’re all getting along perfectly splendidly!
Ban the term which indicates just how fed up we all are with a moronic, costly and socially corrosive underclass, which none of us asked for, and which most us of would happily see rotting in prison or dying on the street rather than pay another penny towards – and, hey presto! the undeserving poor are no longer a problem. After all, Polly can’t see them from the windows of her expensive home(s) and nobody’s actually talkingabout them, so all those lovely, caring left-wing policies must have worked – just like she said they would!
The Left’s obsession with language is, I’m convinced, also at the bottom of the “Care” Homes scandal revealed so brilliantly by the BBC’s Panorama. Ever since our public life became drenched in the language of official compassion, ever since we started encouraging everyone to constantly tell us how bloody “caring” they are, and ever since we started banging on about how insensitively we used to treat the disabled, the mentally ill and the elderly, many of the people charged with exercising all that lovely, publicly-funded compassion seem to have turned into vicious sadists – I mean, for the love of Christ!, how did we reach a state where doctors have to prescribe water for patients because, otherwise, nurses would let them die of thirst, and where we deliver the most vulnerable people in our society into the hands of conscienceless monsters?
No doubt Polly Toynbee and her ilk would be horrified if anyone called any of the victims at Winterbourne View “retarded”. Me, I’d prefer to live in a society where words mattered a lot less than deeds, and where spouting the language of compassion hadn’t replaced the need to actually behave like a human being.
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