Are there no Workhouses?

During the 2022 festive season there were at least eleven productions in London of A Christmas Carol. As the years follow, there seems to be no let-up in London’s appetite for this story: lively and energetic, cheerful and sentimentally tearful. But sentimental though it is, A Christmas Carol is more than just good entertainment; it brings out the social comment of Dickens’ 1840s original: his outrage at the gross inequalities of early Victorian life.

When two philanthropists ask Ebenezer Scrooge to help the poor at Christmas-time, he rudely refuses. ‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’ Many people would rather die, they tell him, than be subject to such a torment. If they would rather die, he says, then let them do so, and ‘decrease the surplus population’.

One of Dickens’ implied targets was the work of the Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus, whose writings had helped to define ruling-class attitudes in the troubled aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. A flavour of Malthus’ analysis can be got from his views on the indigent poor of Britain. He tells the working man that if society does not want his labour:

…he…has no claims of right to the smallest portion of food and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone…(1).

Vicious government

It is not society, of course, which rejects his labour, but the exigencies of the capitalist system. And it is not nature which tells him to be gone, but the succession of vicious administrations which dominated Britain in the early 19th century. This was the age of the the Enclosures Acts, the Combination Acts, the Corn Laws, the Poor Law, slavery, debtors’ prisons, the sentencing of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Peterloo massacre. The ruling classes did not disguise their contempt for, and indeed fear of, the ordinary people

But dissenting voices were raised. Not only Dickens but also Socialists like Shelley, Liberals like Cobden, philanthropists like Shaftesbury and indeed the people themselves, succeeded over the years in achieving changes for the better: repeal of the Corn Laws, Abolition of slavery, electoral reform, trade union recognition and eventually, a welfare state. It might have been thought that the morbidity of the hated Lord Liverpool government of the 1820s would not now return.

No change today

But fast-forward to the 21st century. It is perhaps stretching it to say that a succession of recent British governments has been just as bad as Liverpool’s crass regime, but the comparison is becoming more relevant every day.

I’m sure that many politicians set out wanting to make the world a better place or, to use today’s rather more gnomic phrase, ‘to make a difference’. They may well have ability, honour, a sense of responsibility.  I’m equally sure that there are others who simply relish the power and privilege of politics - and we all know what Lord Acton said about that sort of thing.

Members of parliament are paid, I understand, some £85,000 per year. They also have a generous expense account and are often able to claim the expenses of a second home. They may hold paid sinecures and non-executive directorships, may be paid for speaking engagements and consultancies, and have large-scale personal investments. They may manage to off-shore the profits they make to avoid tax. They may be supported in all this by a coterie of assistants, think-tanks, influencers, contacts, journalists. Above all, their decisions or statements, right or wrong, are protected by parliamentary privilege. Once elected, they are effectively unaccountable for the next five years. 

This imperfect system just about works for the public good if it is treated honourably - but this is where the problems occur. If one wants to measure the efficacy or otherwise of the current system in making our world a better place, then we simply need to look at what it has done over the last fifteen years or so.

The Few and the Many

The main problem, as ever, is the capitalist system itself, and the deepening crises to which it is subject. The idea that a fair and socially productive world can be created by capitalism is, of course, an illusion. Capitalism depends on a social system which favours the few over the many. In a democratic society, the ruling class find it necessary to disguise this by an ideology of national unity. But as society gets more authoritarian, such pretence is not necessary. Deliberate and overt inequality becomes a tool of domestic policy. More and more governments in the world are doing this: reneging on any responsibilities they might once have felt they had for the poor and for minority groups. 

In Britain we now see the deliberate underfunding of the caring public sector, not only of the health service but also of the basic infrastructure of society: local government, housing, transport, social services and much else. We see the government deliberately turn its back on the environmental crisis, on the social effects of the pandemic, on the cost of living crisis and on the problems of refugees or minorities. An almost perpetual policy of overseas warfare increases the social damage. And for anyone who dissents, whether environmentalists, political activists, peace campaigners or trade unionists, the penalties are steadily increased.

At the same time the government protects and favours the rich, shielding them from the burden of taxation which falls on everyone else, and allowing the gap between rich and poor to get ever bigger. To say that the British ruling class despises the poor is hardly an exaggeration, and the practical effects of government policy are moving that way all the time. The illusory kind of ‘change’ that today’s politicians will glibly offer is far less than the fundamental economic and social change that is necessary to stop the descent into barbarism.

(1) from Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population (1803)

Picture: The Peterloo Massacre 1819