Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer with an interest in “urban inequalities,” questions the “rosy image of mixed communities.” And yet he wants to ensure more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.”
When trying to create a better social mix, the focus is almost always on deprived areas. Aren’t the posh bits a problem too?
You see, in his mind,
Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the other.
He therefore entertains a “physically radical intervention.” Specifically,
The idea that we must demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing is still way off the agenda. Maybe it is time this changed.
He’s so daring, our academic. And hey, what a headline.
If we really do want to mix communities, where better to start than in west London, in the decidedly unmixed Belgravia (average house price £4.4m)? Of course, such a move is unlikely to happen any time soon. The powers that be tend to live in such areas, after all,
Unlike Guardian columnists and editors, or leftwing academics, who invariably seek out only the most humble accommodation.
and are unlikely to appreciate the deliberate urban degeneration.
Imagine those three words, in bold, on the policy document. Followed by, “It’s what you people need, good and hard.”
As someone who grew up in what would now be considered a “deprived area,” amid lots of “social” housing and all manner of inventively antisocial behaviour, and then escaped, I’m not sure I’d appreciate a second taste of what it was I was hoping to get the hell away from. It’s hard to feel nostalgic for casual vandalism, routine burglary and bus stops and phone boxes that stank reliably of piss.
Our postcode class warrior also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to,
Achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.
But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.
The report that Dr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour.
A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”
Despite such omissions, Dr Matthews tells us that,
Neighbourhoods of concentrated deprivation only exist because we allow neighbourhoods of concentrated affluence to also exist.
That word, allow. Damn the tendency of people to prefer neighbourhoods, and neighbours, that match their own self-image and standards of behaviour. Why won’t we just do as our betters tell us? Inevitably, Dr Matthews’ boldly punitive tone and the prospect of some “physically radical intervention” draws out the most pious of Guardian readers, the kind whose high-minded humanity just gushes forth:
I would love to see that [bulldozing] happen.
And,
The rich have become a luxury WE can no longer afford.
And,
No need for rich parasites.
And so on, and so forth. The above being a very small sample of those I could have chosen.
Update:
And so, to recap:
Dr Matthews, our pious leftist, is wildly incoherent and seemingly driven by spite. An urge to inflict some random malice on people about whom he knows nothing, but whose homes are nicer than his own.
And hence his desire to “demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing” – a process he refers to as “physically radical intervention” and “deliberate urban degeneration” – while simultaneously noting that such “mixed communities” don’t actually help those he deems most “marginalised.” With transplanted proles experiencing “some of the worst outcomes and intense feelings of dislocation and inferiority around their new affluent neighbours.”
And yet he still finds the idea titillating. Indeed, Dr Matthews spends quite a bit of time enthusing about forcibly creating these doomed and dysfunctional “mixed communities” in posh parts of town by demolishing homes that he, a sociology lecturer, cannot afford. Presumably on grounds that at least it would make some rich people feel unhappy too.
That’s it. That’s his leftist piety.
And for which he is applauded by other Guardian-reading leftists.
Update 2:
As so often, it’s interesting to contrast Dr Matthews’ assumptions with one’s own experience of growing up in the rougher parts of town. Our fretful Guardianista doesn’t seem to understand antisocial behaviour, why it tends to be concentrated in those areas, and why people spend so much time and effort trying to get away from it.
When I was a child, a nearby garden, one that was clearly looked after, was targeted for littering and abuse. Trash would be thrown at the flowers, decapitating them, and thrown across the lawn, over and over again. When empty pop cans failed to decapitate their targets, flower heads were simply kicked off by spiteful laughing morons.
The morons in question, the gleeful garden wreckers, didn’t appear to desire their own presentable gardens. I think it’s fair to say they had zero interest in horticulture, or the effort it entails. They just didn’t want anyone else to have one, and eagerly directed their efforts to that end. The fact that the garden was attractive and orderly, and a labour of love, was precisely the reason for it being targeted in this way.
The people doing this, some of whom I went to school with, weren’t “marginalised” or somehow oppressed by a lack of “services.” In fact they seemed to suffer much less than the elderly gent whose garden was being destroyed – by people whose attitude wasn’t too dissimilar to that of Dr Matthews.
And this vandalism wasn’t happening because somewhere, across town, bigger houses existed. It wasn’t a function of not living next to a big house, or in a big house, or of not being given more of other people’s earnings. And the garden being targeted was in front of a house no more grand than the houses of the people trashing it.
And yet Dr Matthews seems to imagine that if only we didn’t “allow neighbourhoods of concentrated affluence to… exist,” then people in rough parts of town would suddenly not behave as people in rough parts of town often do. And therefore other people, better people, wouldn’t want to get the hell away from them.
It’s a bold view of the world, if foolish and hopelessly unrealistic. And this fool, our Dr Matthews, the Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers.
Telling them how it is.
When they built the highly-praised (at least, highly-praised by people who didn’t have to live there) ‘walkways in the sky’ flats above Sheffield railway station there was the steady rise of piss-stinking lifts and stairwells, the gradual decay of the environment, the growth in petty crime around blind corners but above all the delight of rubbish thrown from upper levels as it saved residents taking it downstairs — though this may have been because of the aforementioned smelly journeys downstairs — highlighted by the way TV sets could be thrown over any parapet.
I think Sheffield council were actually worried about this for a time, but being the good socialists they were they quickly recognised a person’s right to hoist a telly possibly on to the heads of pedestrians far below was a delicate matter. Better not to offend the residents, perhaps.
So would we all welcome such lively housing in our own part of the world? Of course we would, ‘cos the Guardian says so.
What happens to a society in which everything that is both valuable and visible is stolen or destroyed? I think I can see a future where the only big houses are those guarded by the state or by private armies: the ‘heavily guarded family compounds’ mentioned by all self-respecting reporters on the third world; and where the normal thing to do with wealth is to convert it into gold and hide it, or smuggle it abroad.
highly-praised (at least, highly-praised by people who didn’t have to live there)
That.
Reminds me of Peggy’s smugly righteous boyfriend in Mad Men who insisted they live in a crime-infested slum in the name of social equity.
She stabbed him. Good for her.
If we really do want to mix communities,
Big if. It really depends on who you’re being ‘mixed’ with. The chav scum who live next door to my dad and throw dog shit into his garden for a laugh? No thanks.
Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the other
And yet poverty existed long before affluence. An academic, you say?
What sort of idiot wants “deliberate urban degeneration”? What purpose is served by creating it?
Oh and there was this line I noticed from Matthews’s article:
… people who used vouchers to move to the most affluent neighbourhoods experienced some of the worst outcomes and intense feelings of dislocation and inferiority around their new affluent neighbours.
I knew someone who paid upwards of £250k for a single ‘flat’ (more like one of those Japanese capsule hotels to be honest) in a smart new apartment block in Hackney.
In addition to the mortgage, he was additionally required to pay something like £4k a year for building maintenance, security etc.
Of course, Hackney Council had only given permission to the builders to put up the apartment block on the condition that a given percentage of all the apartments would be given over to social housing.
OK, fine you might think.
However, I helped him move in and also visited a few times in the 2-3 months before the social housing tenants moved in.
Naturally, it later became immediately obvious once those tenants had moved – or some of them at least. The smart and shiny new lift that took you to the top floor had been scoured with a knife point, had also had ‘Die rich wankers’ carved into the mirror and something human – that to this day I fervently hope was dried spittle – was flaking off the control buttons. He had also noticed their arrival, with rubbish tossed off upper balconies landing on those below and thumping drum and bass parties going on all night from one particular flat.
No doubt far better minds than mine can explain why this was a good thing.
Perhaps they think my friend should see it as paying penance for embarrassing others by having had the temerity to make something of himself in London.
Needless to say, he moved out.
Dr Matthews also seems to be oblivious to the fact that it is not unknown for some council tenants to sublet their property as a source of income (legally or otherwise).
This is especially tempting in high-rent areas such as London and the South-East more generally, and the practice has other unintended consequences: for example, migrant workers who become tenants of such privately sublet council properties may inadvertently inflame tensions amongst the local population. Even though the migrant workers will in fact be paying private rent, to locals who may have been on the housing list for many years, it can appear as if the Council have been awarding social housing to ‘bloody foreigners’ over themselves, leading to bitter resentment, racism and violence.
Now imagine that same scenario, but played out where the “social housing unit” is in an area such as Holland Park or Belgravia – wouldn’t that be tantamount to an incentive to the successful applicant of social housing to sublet the apartment to ‘young professionals’? How would that therefore change anything as regards the distribution of where people live? Other than creating the potential for social housing tenants to skim a profit off the back of the Welfare system, what exactly would such a move have achieved?
When trying to create a better social mix,
Did anyone actually ask to be ‘mixed’ with ‘the poor and marginalized’?
There are no bad areas, just areas with bad people.
Rich areas tend to be places with concentrations of people who are market-productive (a combination of meeting social needs and government enabled rent-seeking), this is basic Ricardo’s law of rent.
It’s another case of the consistently proved wrong marxian faith that you can cure bad apples by placing them in good barrels.
“What sort of idiot wants “deliberate urban degeneration”?”
The Marxist kind.
Heh.
Peter is a lecturer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. So he’s not making enough to be neighbours with JK Rowling, but probably doesn’t live next to Sickboy and Begbie either.
Incidentally Heriot-Watt has a fine reputation in the oil industry as a technical college, but Mr Matthews is living proof that no educational institution is safe from the Marxbots.
Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the othe
No. Zero sum fallacy. Like saying the existence of healthy people is to blame for others being ill. Or that the existence of puling leftie dweebs on Comment is Free somehow creates awesome and sexy people with great hair like Steve.
when trying to create a better social mix
Why would we want to do that?
He rightly goes on to pour cold water on the idea of “neighbourhood effects” – the notion that living next to a doctor will magically transform hoodies and feckless single mothers into productive members of society.
To improve neighbourhoods in the longer term and have an impact on people’s lives, then we need to invest in services in the most deprived neighbourhoods
We don’t already? Well, damn. Where is all our welfare spending going then? It’s not the kids in Belgravia who have their own social workers.
and make more of them into escalators for people to move through as their lives change.
I don’t know what he means by making a neighbourhood into an escalator, but we have a reliable route out of poverty which has served us well since the Industrial Revolution. It’s called the free market.
That’s why Dickensian poverty no longer exists in this country.
I fear such time-tested solutions won’t find favour with our professor though. Here’s his advice to the City of Edinburgh Council on what to do about privately owned land held by Forth Ports:
CEC should plan for bloody agricultural land on the site, reduce the value to nothing, compulsorily purchase the lot and plan for something that will help Leith and Edinburgh and bring the profits right back into the CEC’s coffers.
Rule of law be damned! The people who brought you a £1Bn tram line will know best what to do with that land.
Doesn’t this boil down to “some people are eternal students”.
Many of us went through a period after Halls of Residence where living like “The Young Ones” was the norm. What could be better than to get a shared house in Rusholme: Parties, endless lines of empty milk bottles, stolen road signs, peculiar smells, arguments about washing up and lost deposits.
Strange really that so few of us stayed there.
Because the Projects were such a rousing success.
http://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
Start by demolishing HIS house.
There are no bad areas, just areas with bad people.
A few years ago I revisited my childhood stomping ground to see how much I remembered and how much it had changed. When I was a kid, there’d been plenty of pee-stink bus stops (and pee-stink buses) and general eyesores – the house across the street, inhabited by a notoriously rough family, had a wrecked car in the front garden for ten years or so, untouched by human hands and slowly disintegrating. Other parts of vehicles, provenance unknown, grew in piles around it. I remember lots of tutting and disapproval from other neighbours, but I don’t think anyone dared to complain directly to the family, presumably on account of their reputation.
But there had always been respectable families there too, with modest but scrupulously tidy gardens. Into which garbage was often thrown by those less scrupulous. When I went back it seemed that most of the residents who were remotely bourgeois, or visibly aspiring to such, had either left or died out. Certainly the place felt very different. Graffiti had spread over practically every “social” (i.e., non-private) surface and I lost count of the houses, many still occupied, with boarded up windows, like missing teeth.
A grandson of mine has just finished his first year at the Watt, doing a proper degree course, and staying in halls of residence.
He was complaining for a while about some students who seemed to have the leisure to stay up half the night watching television, keeping everyone awake, and playing the old tricks with other people’s property and food. I was surprised, as I remembered acquaintances from the old Heriot Watt from 45 years ago: work damned hard until Saturday night, then hit the Rose Street bars.
I may now be able to tell him what sort of course the creeps are on. I will have to wait until he returns from his summer job, helping to build marinas in the Middle East, in temperatures up to 120 Fahrenheit.
David: a painful journey home.
– Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin –
But they are not.
This is the typical economically ignorant leftie trope based on the fantasy fixed-pie of wealth. You can have, as has been pointed out above, poverty without wealth. And wealth does not depend on having poverty. Like shit, it happens, due to people doing stuff to improve their lot. We can help it along or (like all good socialists) hinder it.
If you are going to define poverty as the poorest 10% they we will always have poverty, but I would invite a Jarrow marcher to be unemployed today in modern Britain and after 10 days ask him if we have solved poverty or not through wealth transfers to the economically disadvantaged. He would probably be shocked and possibly worried about the negative effects of so much (compared to him) for nothing.
I grew up in a small town in Lancashire in the 1960s. Our house was an end terrace, with no central heating and lino on the floor for the most part. We did not think of ourselves as poor, but we were probably only one step above the poverty line for my first ten years of existence.
However- my parents, despite not being educated beyond the age of 16 (my father, local grammar school) and 15 (my mother, poor school in the backstreets of Rochdale) were enterprising and hard-working and determined that my sibling and I would have a chance of a better life. And so they saved their money, worked two jobs- anything to get an advantage. I became the first in our family to go to university (a good redbrick, degree leading to a professional qualification, my becoming modestly successful, shedding my strong Lancastrian vowels and picking up my aitches, marrying a lady who spoke five foreign languages and English, the latter with an exquisite RP accent…. becoming firmly middle class, in other words.
I was sent to school clean-scrubbed, in freshly-laundered clothes and on coming home underwent the nightly ritual of nit-combing (they were endemic in those days). I was dubbed “posh” by some of the scruffier kids because of this; that and the fact that we went to church on Sundays and my Dad owned a car (he had many and various shitboxes, bangers and MoT failures welded up by his mate for the price of a pint- Standards, Morrises and Vauxhalls) served to make me, and one or two other children of similarly-minded parents, the object of envy, ridicule and occasional bullying.
It was just a matter of attitude. Some of the rough kids came from bigger families than ours, but at the time our town had virtually full employment and it was possible to earn good money as a skilled- or semi-skilled machinist on a production line, especially as many were paid piece-work rates on top of their weekly wages; they undoubtedly earned much more than my Dad who was then a nylon shirt, tie and brown smock wearing junior manager. So it seemed to me then, and still seems now, about how you went about living your life well. My parents did not smoke, rarely drank and my Dad’s sole vice was placing the odd sixpenny bet on the horses (he usually won, being intelligent and a good reader of form). They belonged to various am dram societies, helped run the youth club; my mother would go to night-school to learn touch-typing, but also indulge in courses on opera, music and literature. Other kids’ parents didn’t do that- they went to the clubs and pubs and got drunk and fought between themselves and with the police. Their kids were scruffy, smelled bad, wore unwashed clothes and in some appalling cases were undernourished and diseased. There were, of course, some genuine cases of real hardship where the parents (not many single parents back then of course) were unable to work and I do not dismiss such cases lightly. But in the main, it was about choices- your house was clean and tidy, your car was washed, you and your kids dressed as best you could. One of my Dad’s cricketing mates was a”time-served” joiner, an alderman and a very young magistrate; he lived next door to one of the hardest and nastiest families in the borough, father, mother and six sons, most of whom were probably psychopaths. Four of them died before the age of thirty-five; heroin did it. My Dad’s mate became mayor and chairman of the bench and his two kids grew up to become decent people. Attitude, again.
My parents moved to a larger, detached bungalow in a slightly nicer part of town when I was ten; they lived there for the rest of their lives, even though my Dad made millions developing a hugely successful business that he started once I’d left university. Attitude, again.
When I go back to my hometown (not often these days) I go and look at the little primary school I attended and the roads and streets in the neighbourhood and I think that it too has changed for the worst, but here and there you can see where people are making an effort. I wanted away from all that thirty-odd years ago, but I’m not sneering at the ones who stayed, far from it. But I read articles like that of Peter Matthews and I can’t help thinking “wrong, wrong, wrong”, simply because some people just don’t get it and never will and will make all the wrong choices in life despite strenuous attempts made by the State. E.O. Wilson was right- “beautiful theory, wrong species”. And I might have rebelled against the very notion when I was a teenager and then a know-it-all student but there is not a lot wrong with having bourgeois values.
What sort of idiot wants “deliberate urban degeneration”? What purpose is served by creating it?
It is what the Left is all about. Everything is through the lens of race/class/gender, individuals don’t really exist and the alter upon which all must be sacrificed is absolute equality
So what if everyone* is poor? They will be equal!
Obviously Matthews read Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron as a “How-to” book. He yearns to be Diana Moon Glampers.
*everyone doesn’t include those noble, tireless, self-sacrificing leaders carrying the heavy burden of running everyone else’s life. They deserved that dacha.
The
richleft have become a luxury we can no longer afford.Many of us went through a period after Halls of Residence where living like “The Young Ones” was the norm. What could be better than to get a shared house in Rusholme: Parties, endless lines of empty milk bottles, stolen road signs, peculiar smells, arguments about washing up and lost deposits.
Strange really that so few of us stayed there.
Oh yes! But I was Fallowfield, Withington, and Victoria Park. 🙂 Shortly after I left university in 2000 somebody sent around an email entitled “20 ways you know you are no longer a student”, the most memorable of which was “A fire in the kitchen is no longer a laugh”. As you say, most people grow up.
Of course, when the rich actually do buy houses in the poorer districts, because they are cheap, and then rennovate them, it is called gentrification, and is reviled for changing the tenor and quality of the neighborhood, as well as driving up costs for the poor.
Maybe the best solution is the Soviet one – have the poor move into the houses of the rich, together with the rich. They have MUCH too much empty space in those houses that should be shared with their fellow citizens. This worked so well back in the 20s, in the USSR. /sarc
entitled “20 ways you know you are no longer a student,” the most memorable of which was “A fire in the kitchen is no longer a laugh.”
Heh.
The entire reason I worked hard, save money and bought a car is because I don’t want to live near nor ride with the poor. I grew up among the prolific pissers and no decent human wants to be anywhere near those degenerates.
There may have been a genteel lower class at one time, but that was when they could be whipped for show disrespect to their ‘betters’. That ain’t the case anymore.
Poor people are dangerous … don’t be poor.
The goal here is equality, even if it’s the equality of the graveyard. Prosperity is not even on the radar.
Peter Matthews . . . wants to ensure more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.”
Just starting the read through the page, but the first thought when reading the above is that perhaps Peter is lonely and wants people to come live by him?
“The goal here is equality”
At least for ordinary people. Peter Matthews, on the other hand, expects to be an apparatchik with all the perks that go with being a servant of Big Brother. (Although the biggest perk, of course, is being paid to boss people around.)
“perhaps Peter is lonely and wants people to come live by him?”
I would greatly enjoy forcing Peter to live with violent and depraved criminals.
“deprived”? By whom? The language is Marxian, suggesting not only that someone has taken something valuable from the ‘poor’ but also that restitution is due. I prefer ‘disadvantaged’: it’s more value-neutral, if you will excuse the jargon.
And all of this of course comes at great taxpayers expense. “Affordable” housing is only “affordable” because it is subsidized by the taxpayer. When New Orleans tore down its most notorious housing project–the St Thomas, housing that had been all white in the 50s– and replaced it with dispersed stand alone town-houses in a park-like setting the cost/unit was $350, 000 in the 90s. Likewise when the equally notorious Fischer housing project of small apts on the “Westbank” across the Miss river from New Orleans proper was rehabbed, the cost was $175,000/apt And this is all paid for by the taxes of hard-working, law-abiding middle-class people living in small towns in the middle-west whose homes avg $64, 000 in value. Where is the “morality” in THAT!
I guess I could argue that people that play by the rules should be subsidized too. I served my country as a USAF officer who pulled two combat tours in Vietnam, came back and earned my PhD. My wife is an RN with an MA in Abnormal Psych. We started our own business, worked like dogs and have contributed mightily to society, but when those projects were built we certainly couldn’t afford a home costing that much, Shouldn’t we and all others like us deserve “affordable” housing to the tune of $350K too even tho we can’t pay for it? Where is our “social justice?”
Signed: Still waiting for my check..
Wait a minute. He wants to bus council tenants into Belgravia (after demolishing half of it) but he doesn’t like ‘mixed’ communities.
He sounds a bit confused.
He sounds a bit confused.
It’s almost funny. Mr Matthews challenges the “rosy image of mixed communities” and their assumptions of osmotic social improvement. He lists the many ways in which such projects don’t help those he deems most “marginalised,” and how these “mixed communities” may actually make things worse – gentrification costs, displacement, isolation, self-esteem issues, etc. He nevertheless spends quite a bit of time enthusing, rather spitefully, about forcibly creating “mixed communities” in posh areas by demolishing homes nicer than his own. Presumably on grounds that at least it would make some rich people feel unhappy too.
I can’t help thinking it says something about the kind of chap he is.
Is it Mr. Matthews’ assumption that more contact with the poor by those with more wealth will make the latter more favorably disposed towards the former? Or is it simply a good thing in itself, regardless of the effects?
It seems likely to me that more contact between rich and poor will probably lead to the rich thinking a lot less of the poor than they currently do, and perhaps being less inclined to help them in the future. This has been my general experience, much like many examples given above. The poor can be a lot easier to sympathize with in theory than in practice.
I guess this is similar to “integration” efforts at bringing people of different races into more contact with each other, assuming that this will bring more harmony despite the rather long and clear track record of greater discord.
I went to high school in North America. At my junior high, they made a great show of plucking one kid from the “marginal” class, and putting him in with the “bright” kids in another. I remember what happened – out of his depth academically, Mike made a big deal of poking fun at teachers, school, and learning in general. He was 15, in Grade 9, and already smoking, drinking, and doing drugs.
The upshot? Mike stayed exactly the same – he did not go on to university like almost all the bright kids, but not before he pulled a couple of bright kids into his orbit, and they ended up not graduating from high school either.
The old saw about one bad apple is not “an old wives’ tale”; it is operant wisdom.
by demolishing homes nicer than his own
This aligns with what Instapundit has noted: that the start point for punitive taxation is usually just above the max that a journalist/academic couple could make in the US (about $ 400k/year if i recall correctly). There is little doubt that Prof Matthews makes comfortable middle or even upper middle class living given his position as a professor. Lot’s of modest wealth and tidy streets in his own neighbourhood that could do with some Chav-ification, but why bother when there are people who have the temerity or good fortune have more that him in Belgravia who can be put out.
pst314,
Peter Matthews, on the other hand, expects to be an apparatchik with all the perks that go with being a servant of Big Brother. (Although the biggest perk, of course, is being paid to boss people around.)
Why is it that so many “Studies” professors (or lecturers in this case) frustrated wannabe-Commissars?
“Why is it that so many “Studies” professors (or lecturers in this case) frustrated wannabe-Commissars?”
Because most “Studies” departments were created to employ commies and disseminate communist lies–I mean scholarship.
“Mr Matthews challenges the ‘rosy image of mixed communities’ and their assumptions of osmotic social improvement”
A chemist’s solution to urban blight:
Step 1: Construct a semipermeable membrane, permeable to everything but yobs and chavs….
Scholarship. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The 1960s won’t leave us until the 1960s’ campus radicals finally leave the campus.
A certain amount of honest introspection is necessary from time to time in order to check that one is not guilty of the psychic deformations one is decrying in others. And so, I stop and ask myself how I really feel about the super rich. I find that as regards their wealth qua wealth, I feel not a hint of envy. My attitude to seeing someone so much better-off than me is not to ask how I can appropriate some of his moolah (either for myself or for some third party), but to ask what steps would be necessary to get that wealth on my own, and whether I would be willing to take those steps.
I do find, however, that my attitude towards the wealth-holder depends on the method of acquisition. The hedge fund managers and private equity people have not enriched themselves in any way at my expense – likewise the Waltons or Ellisons. However I see red when it comes to people like the saprophytic Podestas, who have gained their vast and vulgar wealth precisely by introducing A to B for the purposes of pillaging C, who is not present and certainly not consulted. Political jockeying really is a zero- or negative-sum game; if it merely breaks even rather than being actively destructive of wealth we are lucky. As Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” And there are few ways in which a man can be less innocently employed than in deciding the disposition of someone else’s money.
To David Gillies:
I’m not certain that there are hedge fund managers and PE firms that have not enriched themselves at my expense, given the number of insider trading cases being prosecuted. However, I AM certain that many large banks have indeed enriched themselves at all TAXPAYER’s expense, because they were not allowed to fail, as they so richly deserved, but were and are being ‘bailed out’ by virtue of their ability to borrow from central banks at rates approaching zero (an opportunity denied to us), and then relend the same funds to the same central bank/government by buying their longer term, and higher rate, bonds, in effect, creating a positive money pump for them that will eventually be paid by (or will force the default of) the state, which of course means you and me. (Apologies for the run-on sentence!) Johnson’s jovial aside didn’t allow for the existence of central banks and gravity defying stock and bond markets.
OT
Just seen this doing the rounds on the Internet – It’s a lengthy quote from an interview with Emma Goldman. It’s so awesome in its crassness that I’ve quoted it in full.
Plus ca change …
Everything wrong, crime and sickness and all that, is the result of the system under which we live, she continued earnestly. ‘Were there no money, and as a result, no capitalists, people would not be over-worked, starved and ill-housed, all of which makes them old before their time, diseases them and makes them criminals. To save a dollar the capitalists build their railroads poorly, and along comes a train, and loads of people are killed. What are their lives to him if by their sacrifice he has saved money? But those deaths mean misery, want and crime in many, many families. According to Anarchistic principles, we build the best of railroads, so there shall be no accidents… Instead of running a few cars at a frightful speed, in order to save a larger expense, we should run many cars at slow speed, and so have no accidents.’
‘If you do away with money and employers, who will work upon your railroads?’ I asked.
‘Those that care for that kind of work. Then every one shall do that which he likes best, not merely a thing he is compelled to do to earn his daily bread.’
‘What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?’
‘No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.’
“Just seen this doing the rounds on the Internet – It’s a lengthy quote from an interview with Emma Goldman. It’s so awesome in its crassness that I’ve quoted it in full.”
Geez. I knew she had shit for brains, but I didn’t realise she was five years old her whole life.
I think Goldman was thinking of the Big Rock Candy Mountains rather than Bakunin or Proudhon.
I love big rock candy mountain because there’s a lake of stew and whiskey too and you can paddle all around them in a big canoe….
I fear such time-tested solutions [such as the free market] won’t find favour with our professor though.
Can the Left micromanage the free market?
By definition, no. No it can’t.
And that right there explains all — and I mean ALL — of their antipathy for the free market and its implications. Any puling about income inequality is merely a pretext for micromanaging an entire society.
Which means that it’s useless to argue against their pretexts for seizing power and we should focus exclusively on their irrational if not evil desire to wield power over the rest of us.
Of course, Mr. Matthews seems thoroughly unacquainted with the notion that “the poor” might have plans, intentions, or desires of their own. (Or if he is, he’s failed to return this notion’s calls, or keep his appointments with it.) Apparently, they should be put places, allocated, distributed, according to whatever theory is making the rounds among the would-be Haussmanns, the makers of elegant plans.
Once upon a time, the poor needed only to be concentrated and elevated, in sanitary, modern high-rise accommodations, the low Victorian hovels swept away. Their homes would be open to the fresh air and the sunlight, whereupon – like flowers, really! – they would bloom forth into a cheerful thriving, yet also remain indefinitely content with being assigned their rooms, like children at a boarding school. In fact they tended more to continue wilting, but maybe we just didn’t apply enough fertilizer.
Then the theory was that if the poor could be diluted in the districts of the better-off, prosperity and well-being would rub off on them, somehow (though miraculously, they would not lose their sense of jolly peasant-esque solidarity, and we would be spared the shame of having transformed them into a bourgeois class.) That didn’t go terribly well either, though at least their chances of being firebombed dropped somewhat. So now, Mr. Matthews gets the idea that the problem is merely that nice houses *exist*, and that everybody else must be as miserable with envy as he seems to be. Instead of that maybe, shuffling around large numbers of complex, different individuals as though they were chickens or cabbages, isn’t very humane or respectful. Gosh, it might even be classist.
I grew up and was schooled in one of those socially mixed neighbourhoods, and like most people anywhere, most people there were decent and respectful of each other. But you’ve truly never seen “classism” until you’ve seen the reaction of weary, immigrant, war-refugee, night-shift-working parents to the discovery that their children have been cussing at the teacher, drinking during the lunch hour, and spending quality time with those snarling teenagers on the corner. It would absolutely blister Peter Matthews’ eyeballs. Mainly with the reality that it’s not actually classism – hating somebody simply for their economic circumstance – and more that violence, vandalism and thuggery are no more popular amongst most of the poor than anybody else. (Again, excepting Guardian writers – who are apparently made to feel right at home by a little smashy-burny.) They usually just have fewer escape hatches from such things. And unless the planners and people-allocators are prepared to take seriously the safety and individuality of poor people, I’m prepared to dismiss them as not really grasping what’s important. I was once going to be an urban planner – five years of university in – but the closer I got to the profession, the more it seemed to be a vast Legoland operated by sociopaths and narcissists.
The rich will remain safe and well-housed. Tear down a Belgravia, and a wave of renovations will sweep the Barkings and Brixtons. The rich don’t mind terribly – one mansion’s as good as another. But the poor will be out another few thousand modest, affordable homes in okay neighbourhoods, another master-planned social housing project will begin rotting immediately upon completion, and the planners will congratulate themselves on having made a difference.
“The goal here is equality”
The goal here, as always, is control.
“Achieving equality” is the pretext for seizing power; as we’ve seen, actual steps toward equality vanish as soon as the State acquires total control over the economy.
The equality of grinding poverty is what happens when The Party takes the entire pie and tosses a few crumbs toward the masses. The Party members end up being exactly what they accuse the capitalists of being.
Not ironically — inevitably. You can always tell what Leftists want by what they accuse you of being. Clinical narcissists compulsively project their bad intentions onto their enemies. They can’t help themselves: their pathology consists of never recognizing their flaws or mistakes, so the bad impulses must be yours, you wicked thing.
Not equality, not fairness, not multiculturalism, not an end to racism/sexism/homophobia: control.