Through much of the book Orwell particularizes his aversion to these people by describing his intimate observation of them. He finds them bitter or imbecile and uniformly evil-smelling. He remarks on the physical revulsion one of his caste feels for the lower orders, confessing that while he could not abide being touched by an English valet, he had not objected in Burma when his Asian “boy” dressed him. In any case, at the end of his bleak account of Wigan he describes his fondest memory, which is, inevitably, of a scene he did not see. Certainly like nothing at Wigan. It is a memory, not specific as to place or occasion or the people involved in it, of a working-class family gathered contentedly around a hearth: mother, father, son, daughter, dog—Mum serene over her sewing, Da in those tranquil throes of pleasure stimulated in working-class men by racing news. I think it must be to this scene that all such observers refer when they describe working-class life, which is always assumed to be good and comfortable, when it is posing no egregious problem of which the press or Parliament must take note.
Orwell’s book demonstrates that even immediate experience cannot touch or disrupt this ideal, and equally that his idealization removes nothing of the stigma he attaches to the evil-smelling classes. Rather, he reinforces the aversions of his own class by allowing them the authority of an eyewitness. At the same time, his sentimental evocation of the special happiness of working-class life defines his hopes for them. He expressly dreads a future economic security that will rob the racing news of its fascination.
The present British government is pulling down the great edifice of British philanthropy. Margaret Thatcher is full of busy invention, for example, the poll tax, which will tax by the head, assessing everyone over eighteen equally, rather than taxing property. Taxation will be based on voting lists. The logic is very straightforward. People who live crowded in cheap flats are the primary consumers of social services, so they should be the ones to pay for them. The reform will induce responsibility, since people will be reluctant to vote for services if they must count the cost. The purity of cynicism attained in these reforms is oddly hilarious. The best of them so far has been the dream-of-home-ownership scam. The Thatcher years have seen, along with burgeoning poverty and raging unemployment, a vigorous increase in the numbers of homeowners. How has this miracle been accomplished? By raising rents, and at the same time offering mortgage payments lower than the new rents.10 So poverty actually spurs this fancied embourgeoisement. Do these policymakers laugh over their work? Having bought a council house to avoid the cost of continuing to rent it, let us imagine that Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner suffer a setback—say, the loss of a job, or a cut in some welfare allowance, or a rise in the cost of living, or a rise in the interest rate, which is reflected in all British mortgage payments. Any of these contingencies is highly probable. Then Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner lose their dwelling, and it passes into other private hands. Creating all these private owners of erstwhile public housing is simply a way of destroying public housing. Foreclosure rates are the highest in history. Already, council houses in rural towns are being bought up by city dwellers as second homes. Those displaced from desirable housing will be crowded into undesirable housing, which demand will make expensive. The housing of the British working class is, historically, the crowning scandal in an appalling record of abuse. Public housing was the great postwar pledge that all that misery had ended.
In my eagerness to share my appreciation of the devilish wit of Conservative housing reform, I have skipped over certain implications of the new per capita tax which are well worth considering, including, of course, its impact on the finances of low-income home buyers. Margaret Thatcher is Nassau Senior back from the dead, and reliving that great period, after 1834, when, by enhancing the severity with which paupers were treated, he caused them to disappear by tens of thousands. In this milder age, a poll tax could work as well.11 Since mere existence would imply a tax liability, people for whom a tax would be burdensome might tend to avoid drawing official attention to their existence, especially if they fell into arrears. They might not report crimes against them, or seek medical treatment, or sign up for the dole, or register to vote. A new buoyancy would come into the indicators of social well-being if the unfortunate classes kept themselves to themselves. School-leaving age will probably soon be lowered to fourteen—already only one child in five is in school after the age of sixteen—and schools are springing up which do not require attendance, an answer to the crowded classroom. “Redundant” British people have always been invited to disappear, and then they are found again by the pornographers of squalor, who stimulate cries for humane reform, the object of which is always to make the poorest disappear, by pulling down their slums, or encouraging them to emigrate, or punishing them to improve their character and encourage independence.
It is characteristic of the British official mind to take things to a certain point, and then, as it were, go blank. If only the worthy destitute should be helped, what should happen to the unworthy? How can a subsistence wage be calculated if workers have dependents? If you pull down a slum, where will the slum dwellers go? If you cut back health care for a poor and aging population, what will the consequences be? If you pump plutonium into the sea, will it return? Things, people, consequences disappear in Britain, into a deep reservoir of denial. They surface frequently, but not for long. The government is not observant or reflective, but invasive and peremptory, improvised, as if distracted from more important business. Yet, like an authentic modern government, it deals in the lives and safety of people, and enjoys the extraordinary powers conferred on governments by high technology. To be able to imagine actions unshadowed by their consequences is a source of enormous confidence, and great savings, but of neither wisdom nor moral seriousness.
The depth of British memory, as it can be seen in the recurrences of highly particular notions and obsessions, is at the same time remarkable. The poll tax exempts real estate from taxation. Similar logic was used at the beginning of the century to exclude landed property from taxation. The impulse to shelter wealth on the grounds that those who burden society should bear the cost of the burden they constitute—the rationale of the poorhouse—has persisted all these years intact. It is a systematic and principled rejection of the idea of community. The Fabians wrote approvingly about “creeping socialism,” meaning institutions such as the post office and public sanitation, to which the mass of people enjoy access. State-supported education, that is, public education, is considered socialist as well. In other words, such inevitable enhancements of general welfare as derive from the evolution of civilized life in the last century and the first half of this one are considered the expression of a moral-political drift now being reversed. The Dartford Tunnel, a major conduit of traffic into London, is being leased to a consortium of banks, to be managed for their profit.
The bedrock British political assumption is that absolutely nothing belongs to the general public inalienably, by the logic of collective interest or by right. To understand why Britain has felt itself a Gulliver tied to the earth by innumerable threads of socialism, one must understand that public ownership of a bridge, a tunnel, or a river is for them a departure from the natural order of things.
William Beveridge went through a little interval of disfavor with the government when he submitted his report to the coalition dominated by Winston Churchill, a tight-fisted fellow even by British standards. The authorities first printed up an abstract of the report as if to distribute it to British troops in the field, then snatched it back at the last moment. Needless to say, the soldiers found ways to pilfer copies despite all, and the report was read avidly, with great excitement. I suspect this may have been no more than very deft marketing. Louis XIV, to make French peasants interested in planting potatoes, is said to have stationed armed guards around fields in which they were planted. The fields were in due course thoroughly plundered.
The British government rumbled and grumbled over Beveridge’s proposals, while he toured an admiring America
in triumph with a bride of mature years who wrote a book about the experience and its ironies. Meanwhile, in Britain, pressure in favor of his report grew.
There was apparently impassioned opposition, of exactly the kind the newest Poor Law should inspire. The Reverend W. R. Inge launched a Malthusian attack, calling it “a heavy bribe to the slum dwellers to have large families.” In this view, “artificial dysgenic selection has never been carried so far” as in the Beveridge Report, “the most gigantic effort of blackmail ever made by a frightened government.”12 British soldiers dreaded the misery which they had left and into which they expected to return. Inge alludes darkly to the fact that slum dwellers have been discovered to be “a deadly danger in time of war.” One comes across such remarks fairly often. Whether they refer to disorder at home or among the soldiers I have not discovered.
At any rate, in the midst of war, the dawn of a new order began to appear in the sky. In due course legislation based on Beveridge’s plan was passed, supplemented with provisions for the National Health Service, education reforms, and industrial nationalizations. Interestingly, Beveridge himself lost election to Parliament. A Labour government was selected to preside over the novus ordo seclorum, on the strength of an overwhelming majority of the votes of the returning servicemen.
And the standard of living fell. The government used its new powers to lower wages, and continued to impose wartime rationing, in severer forms. Poor Law institutions were rechristened, hospitals and pensioners’ homes purged of their bitter histories by a change of name. The National Health Service is still defended as a vast improvement over the horrors of the system which preceded it, also called the National Health Service, developed from the fact that poorhouses were increasingly the refuge of the destitute sick and old. Reports commissioned by the government, released in 1981 and 1987, indicate that class differences in illness and mortality have widened greatly and steadily from World War II to the present. Since, according to The (London) Times,13 the “economically inactive,” a group including “all illegitimate births and many of the permanently sick as well as many single parents,” are not included in national statistics, the poor cities in the North, where health care is worst and unemployment exceeds 20 percent, would not figure appropriately in this measure of the success of the Welfare State. For it is the Welfare State, the high-water mark of British socialism, whose successes are to be measured in this decline in the relative well-being of the poor. Mrs. Thatcher’s new dispensation can only exacerbate this trend, presumably, since poverty, unemployment, and radiation exposure, among other factors which correlate strongly with ill health, have all increased under her government.
I have no reason to believe that illegitimate births do not occur under the auspices of the Health Service, that the chronically ill do not die in hospitals, at least fairly often. How can the government not have information about these people? On what principle can it exclude such information? Does the midwife keep no record of delivering an unwed mother’s child? Is National Health Insurance really insurance, in the sense that it covers only those who have paid for it? Then what becomes of the others? If there is a charity health system for the indigent, how can the government fail to have access to its records? If it has access to them, how can it rationalize their exclusion from health statistics?
I would suggest that we have here the modern incarnation of the unworthy poor, Booth’s Class A. The Welfare State is made for the deserving, and desert is established by employment, as it has been for five hundred years. Are these “economically inactive” neonates the descendants of the wandering beggar women punished for burdening the parishes with their babies when Edward VI was King?
What would happen to infant mortality figures in America if official statistics excluded illegitimate births? What would official motives be in excluding such births? What would the government be expressing in terms of its social vision if it took no account of the condition of the most vulnerable? This British method of accounting is no recent innovation but established official practice.
Britain has only a shadow government. Its opposition is the shadow of a shadow, and fading. It is a government made not to shape reality but to conceal it. Yet the uncountenanced reality replicates itself like a compulsive gesture or an obsessive fantasy.
British records and social institutions are shielded by the laws that protect military secrets. There was a government attempt to suppress the 1987 report on inequalities in health that led to its being distributed from behind a guitar store, according to the press. Yet there is a profound respect for the conventions of secretiveness reflected in the willingness of distinguished men to compile and interpret information which conceals the conditions their work purports to describe.
Secrets are not merely kept, I think, but treasured. They give latitude to the old vice of punitive and abusive behavior, which lends piquancy to the great apparent seemliness of the people who preside over these same abuses. I have, over the years, gathered stories about the extraordinary exploitation of a boys’ orphanage in Northern Ireland, and about an elderly woman horribly murdered, apparently by the police, because of her involvement in nuclear issues. Accounts of abusiveness and, especially, filth, in hospitals, prisons, insane asylums, and military training camps are very common, and simply too disgraceful to repeat. Anyone who is curious can go to the library.
In the nineteenth century the uncountenanced poor were called the “residuum.” The same word was used to mean sewage. Scholars will note the powerful association of the socially rejected with filth. For example, British prisons have no toilets. Prisoners share densely crowded cells with a plastic bucket, which is emptied by them once each day. Some of these prisoners are debtors, of course, who have lived with such insult and nastiness since Britain first began its half millennium of misericordia.
That there should be a great secret, and a great denial; that the secret should involve filth and violence, in forms that are rarefied but at the same time quintessential; that there should be manufacture and world commerce and enormous profits involved, and a work force disciplined by poverty; all these things make Sellafield seem of a piece with its cultural setting. Finally, however, I am at a loss to describe the place it occupies in reality, wreathed as it is with distorted perceptions, with information pulled out of shape by the strategies of denial. I do not know the meaning of the violence the British government has done to its country and the world. I am sure no one could explain it to me. I think I am describing pathology.
In 1909 the quondam Fabian H. G. Wells published a novel titled Tono-Bungay, which anticipates the British nuclear enterprise in its most extraordinary aspect, the commercial importation of radioactive waste. Wells introduces the subject almost as an aside, yet with an eerie precision of detail. The stuff is called quap, “ … the most radioactive stuff in the world. That’s quap! It’s a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, curium and new things, too … There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don’t know … There it lies in two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting.”
The quap lies along the coast, “an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred.” It is to be imported into England to make light-bulb filaments and gas mantles. These futurists should be listed too: British Nuclear Fuels now uses the radioactivity of gas mantles to make the point that radioactivity is a homely and familiar phenomenon. On two occasions British Telecom has disposed of tens of thousands of tritium-filled (therefore luminous) telephone dials as radioactive waste, and there are plans to bury a million more. False teeth and exit signs contain radioactive materials.14 Since no law controls the use of radioactive materials in British products, no doubt other ingenious applications have been found for them. In Wells’s fictio
n, the quap, which sickens the crew of the ship used to transport it, eats its way through the bottom and is lost in the sea.
Tono-Bungay is about British enterprise, a raw novelty in the early twentieth century, as it had been through the three or four centuries preceding. It eludes description in the terms of traditional moral understanding, being, therefore, a vast field for opportunism and improvisation, as it had been for three or four centuries and as it is now. The obsessive bringing to bear of disapprobation upon “unprofitable” elements of the population has always implied an enormous freedom for those who float in the ether of profit.
The key to interpreting British behavior is always economic. Clearly H. G. Wells knew eighty years ago what consequences would follow from the accumulation of nuclear detritus along a coast. He wrote: “There is something—the only word that comes near it is cancerous—and that is not very near, about the whole of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying … To my mind radioactivity is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It spreads.” Despite all that has happened since to confirm Wells’s view of radioactivity, nevertheless “quap” has indeed been imported into England as part of a commercial venture.
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution Page 12