What living standards really are at one time or another in Britain is a difficult question. Discoveries of poverty always come as a great surprise — to the newspapers, at least. This indicates that the imagination of the conditions of life among those who opine on such subjects is consistently wrong. In the nineteenth century an outbreak of cholera would produce a burst of information about misery and crowding and unwholesome conditions. Parliament would inquire and report, pestiferous slums would be razed, and quiet would settle again over “public,” that is, polite, consciousness, before, alack, the poor who had lost their dwellings were provided with others. Slum “clearance,” like the pulling down of villages that depopulated the English countryside, merely emptied an area of irksome people. Once out of sight, they could be forgotten.
The Road to Wigan Pier, which George Orwell wrote in the thirties, is a sort of song of innocence and experience which shows with unusual clarity how two contradictory apprehensions of working-class life coexist in one “lower-upper-middle-class mind.” Orwell has penetrated this life, not quite as a “visitor,” one of the philanthropic inquirers who entered the houses of the poor to inspect for demoralization, but as something very near akin. He uses the word “inspect” with irritating frequency, and he discovers demoralization. The conditions Orwell describes — poor food, crowding, brutal and uncertain employment — are the staples of this sort of writing. Orwell shares dirty food and a fetid bedroom. The inspiration to stay in a boardinghouse in order to observe his subjects intimately might have come from, for example, Charles Booth, who likewise claimed to have formed an affection for the classes in which he immersed himself, and who likewise reported that a particularly intense happiness was the good fortune of the typical working-class family.
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.