Victorian Values.

The bunch of ex-public schoolboys currently running Britain have been rattling their sabres again. (For the benefit of those who might not know, British public schools are where the rich and privileged go – the sort who certainly used to think they had divine right to rule, and probably still do.) As usual, their target is Welfare; or, to put it another way, as usual their target is people at the bottom of the social heap. Well, why not? What would a bunch of ex-public schoolboys know about life at the bottom of the social heap? Prejudice always directs its fire at those it knows least about.

So, as usual, it’s the people at the bottom of the heap who are to be held accountable for our economic difficulties, and responsible for putting things right again. The budget deficit has to be reduced, and welfare is the prime target.

But hang on a minute. There appears to be a convincingly broad spectrum of opinion that the banks caused all the problems, with their profiteering policies and narrowly self-serving attitudes. The banks, as you might expect, claim differently. They’re so hard pressed that they’ve had to reduce interest rates to a point where it’s hardly worth opening a savings account now. The banks can’t afford to pay proper interest, poor things. They’re having a tough time too. So can somebody explain to me why there have been some news reports lately to the effect that several major banks have just announced record profits? I wonder why those profits can’t be tapped into as a way of reducing the budget deficit. The Duke of York did say recently that £50bn is a tiny sum in the world of high finance. It seems to me that a few pots of £50bn would go an awfully long way. No doubt there is some compelling reason why that can’t be done. Whether it’s a valid reason is another matter.

And another interesting little news item recently. The economics experts of academe did some research on the relative wealth levels among different strata of British society. They concluded that the wealth gap between rich and poor is greater now than it’s ever been in modern times.

I wonder whether all these things are connected. There is more than a whiff of the unjust in the air, and it certainly seems that the ex-public schoolboys are guiding us back to a point where they can justifiably claim a divine right to rule. Maybe they’re taking inspiration from Mrs Thatcher’s infamous call for a ‘return to Victorian values.’ Charles Dickens wrote about Victorian values. It wasn’t a pretty picture.