What is this “poverty”?
Let them eat…grouse? Truffles? Caviar? Foie gras? Saffron-infused fish and chips?
Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Unicef of “playing politics” after the charity launched a campaign to help feed children in the UK.
The Tory MP said the charity was meant to look after people in the poorest countries and should be “ashamed”.
It comes after Unicef said it would pledge £25,000 to a south London charity to help supply breakfast boxes over the Christmas holidays.
Unicef said every child deserves to “thrive” no matter where they are born.
Surely even Jacob Rees-Mogg can grasp that living in a rich country is compatible with being personally very poor. If you live in a rich country with crap social services and an enormous disparity in wealth and incomes, there are going to be some poor people in that country. If you live in the United States, to pick an example entirely at random, there are going to be many millions of poor people. I hope Rees-Mogg understands that the fact that he is rich doesn’t mean everyone else is rich, or even prosperous enough to have plenty to eat.
Mr Rees-Mogg was responding to a question from Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the House of Commons.
“For the first time ever, Unicef, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children, is having to feed working-class kids in the UK,” she said. “But while children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches.”
She asked if Mr Rees-Mogg would “give government time to discuss the need to make him and his super-rich chums pay their fair share so that we can end the grotesque inequality that scars our society”.
Certainly not, peasant.
Responding, Mr Rees-Mogg said Unicef “should be ashamed of itself”.
“I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, l think, £25,000 to one council,” he said.
“It is a political stunt of the lowest order.”
that’s the problem with turning your country into a poor one. Someone might notice and want to help out.
Having lived in a “rich country” my entire life, and spent some large chunks of that life not rich, and most of my childhood, as well as a large chunk of my son’s childhood, poor, I am disgusted. I give money to the local food bank now that I am in a position to help feed others, but people like me, solid middle-class, can only do so much. More is needed, and that more needs to be coming from a government safety net. We have a very tattered safety net full of holes in the US, and as I understand, the UK has been doing a lot to dismantle their safety net (though I am open to correction on that, since I don’t live there).
I think Mr. Rees-Moog should become the subject of a Charles Dickens novel; his name is perfect for a Dickens’ character, too. Anyone know how to do a successful seance so we can bring Mr. Dickens back to life long enough to write about this callous asshole?
iknklast, Mr. Fang, the magistrate from Oliver Twist leaps to mind for his callous attitude to the impoverished.
As for Lord Snooty himself, I have a sense of foreboding that Johnson’s incompetence will result in his being ousted from office early in the New Year, which would be good news were it not for the very real possibility that Rees-Mogg could garner the necessary support from the Tory faithful to take Boris’ place.
How dare UNICEF feed [checks notes] hungry children?
William Rees-Mogg, the great man’s father, was at least as obnoxious. The character of Somerset Lloyd James, the most unpleasant scheming character in Simon Raven’s series of novels called Alms for Oblivion (which features a galaxy of unpleasant scheming characters) has been claimed to be based on William Rees-Mogg (who was at school with Simon Raven). In another life 45 years ago I was an avid reader of those novels.
Alas how true. For the past four years I’ve been thinking that the main down side to getting rid of Donald Trump would be that he would be replaced by Mike Pence — almost as nasty and much more intelligent, not to mention being a religious nutter.
I recommend – well, I don’t really – James Dale Davidson & LORD William Rees-Mogg’s book, ‘The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age’; it allows you to see from whose loins the Rees-Sprog wormed its way into the world and the clearly inherited lack of empathy or understanding of what used to be called the common weal, as well as the clearly inherited contempt for anybody who does not share his class, wealth and the supposed intelligence that naturally, he supposes, goes with his class and his wealth. He reminds me of some minor public-school character in a novel by Evelyn Waugh, a novelist I loathe with a passion.
Talking of loathsome people, the now exonerated Cardinal Pell, according to an article in the Grauniad, in addition to suggesting that it was machinations by foes within the Vatican that led to his downfall (what a lovely place the Vatican must be), asserts that ‘Trump is a barbarian, but he’s our barbarian’, echoing F.D. Roosevelt’s perhaps apocryphal but infamous remark on Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza García, the murderous Nicaraguan dictator, that ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’ Ah, all those Catholics in the Supreme Court, and what theocracy may bring about…
Rees-Mogg (and I have to include a picture of him in case anyone doesn’t know what we’re talking about here: https://www.platinumpublishing.co.uk/uploads/magazines/platinum-business/rees-mogg_topHat.jpg) has also recently suggested that billionaires donate more money to the poor so that the government can tax them less.
How sweet, let’s have billionaires decide which of the poor deserve money and what hoops they have to jump through to get it. Plus they – the billionaires – get to save money while they do it! And the government gets to claim success for the (billionaire-enforced) happy smiling faces of the poor! It’s win-win-win!
To answer your question, Ophelia, no. No I don’t think Rees-Mogg does believe that people can be poor. After all, poverty stems from idleness and harder work is the cure so why would people choose to be poor?
Johnson’s shambolic performance could well see him out of a job soon. We’ve reached the stage where the only thing the government counts as a win is if one of Johnson’s lies goes unnoticed for a while amongst all the others. The only stage left is Full Trump, in which the government stops even pretending to care about the truth. There’s a possibility, slim as it might seem, that that’ll be a step too far.
And so we might end up with Rees-Mogg in charge. But even that starts to sound pretty good when you consider that the only other viable candidate is Priti Patel.
Not so long ago, just before I was silently banned from commenting on Jerry Coyne’s blog, there was reference to some exceedingly rich American philanthropist who had decided to give money to educate a number of poor Black American boys in return for their promising not to do this or that or the other. But, alas, none, or few, of them kept their promises and gave up the idea of being educated and some of them (oh, horror!) became ‘felons’, something that seems to be not so difficult if you are Black, since any trivial or trumped-up charge may serve to damn you. This seemed to be taken as evidence of the incorrigibility of Black Americans, and of there being something wrong with ‘Black culture’. I made myself unpopular by asking why on earth did people think this provided any such evidence? The whole situation is fundamentally humiliating (as in the end it is meant to be, though this does not cross the minds of such as Rees-Mogg, and didn’t seem to be cross the minds of the other commenters or of the blog-master); on one side, a condescending billionaire, on the other a group of disadvantaged young people who are supposed to feel eternally grateful to their benefactor.
This excuse, playing politics, is used every time somebody criticise the level of inequality in the UK! Listen people! It’s very simple: the current situation (extreme poverty for some, widespread child malnutrition, multiple increase in the use of food banks and the like), the current situation is NOT political. Asking for change? Now that’s political! Basically any situation that is not the one where the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk are at the absolute top and can do as they wish is unacceptably political!
I found that post, Tim.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/08/04/another-antiracist-book-to-read/
Your comment is *****. I hope that’s not what moved Coyne to ban you from commenting.
Another winner from Rees-Mogg! That was just a few months ago but I had already forgotten that until reminded by another great article from Marina Hyde! Mind you, the man is like buses, you miss one of his howlers, don’t worry: a new one will come along shortly.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/05/jacob-rees-mogg-says-grenfell-victims-lacked-common-sense-staying-put-11042402/?ito=article.amp.share.top.twitter
And I second Ophelia, Tim: great comment, just going against the flow, I suppose…
I remember that one. I think I may have squawked about it here…
Nope, apparently not.
Ophelia@10
I think it was the beginning of the end, which happened shortly afterwards.
I have been reading for the first time (to my shame) James Baldwin. What a wonderful man and writer.
Yes R-M on the Grenfell Tower fire, going on in his soft, carefully modulated ‘sincere’ voice in that interview, and saying, among the other ridiculous things that he said, that there was no ‘evil’ intent, it was just all very sad, nobody could be blamed, nothing could have been done or should now be done, it was very unfortunate… What has become very clear is that there was evil intent – not of a directly active kind (an arsonist, for example), but deliberate actions on the part of the company or companies that provided the cladding to ignore standards in order to save money, and the Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council’s studied neglect of their responsibility to ensure that standards were met.
And of course cutting corners to boost profits doesn’t count as evil intent, it’s just What Capitalism Does. It works exactly the same way with wages, which is so thrilling. It’s not evil intent to pay the workers as little as you possibly can, it’s just The Market. It’s just a beautiful beautiful thing.
Yes, it will all work out happily in that end which never comes, so misery, pain and death along the way doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things.
“You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
Joe Hill
I recall Karl Polanyi in his book ‘The Great Transformation’ speaking of how powerful and, in one or two cases at least, well-meaning British people ‘steeled themselves with science’ (that is to say, the wholly unscientific dogma about not interfering in the ‘free market forces’ that were working everything out for us in the best possible way without our having to lift a finger) in connexion with the response to the Irish Famine.
There’s one of Martin Rowson’s good cartoons in the Grauniad today: it’s about the insufferable Rees-Mogg.
One thing I learned about 40 years when I was in the Biochemistry Department at Birmingham: people from rich countries are not necessarily rich, and people from poor countries are not necessarily poor. The wealthiest student in the department came from Jordan, and drove a fancy car at a time when most students had no car at all. One student who had a lot of financial problems (not due to wastefulness on his part) came from the USA. If Jacob Rees Mogg cares to explore some of the less salubrious parts of London or Birmingham he will find that there is plenty of poverty in the UK.
I was a bit taken aback by that, and was wondering what naughty word has five letters and would fit the context. Then I realized it meant that the comment was worth five stars.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Jerry Coyne’s blog for several years and no longer look at it regularly, after one too many posts about how everything Israel does is just great, and how Palestinians should be grateful that they have any rights at all.
Thinking about it, I suspect I was kicked off Coyne’s blog because I was critical once more, on another thread soon after (as I was on the thread you, Ophelia, you have discovered), of Stephen Pinker’s ill-advised tweet about race not being an issue in police shootings (this one was not published, I think I recall rightly, and it became clear I had been banned, with no notification). Coyne reveres Pinker, and does not like criticism of him for some reason, and I had criticised him earlier over his absurd remarks on music and his misrepresentation of Virginia Woolf for merely polemical reasons in one of his many books. But enough of that. I learned many things from Coyne’s blog, for which I am thankful to him, and one of them was that scientists, when speaking outside their area of expertise, are often no less foolish than the rest of us.
Heh, sorry for the opaqueness.
Yes, Athel & Ophelia, I was a bit shocked by that and wondered what I had said to prompt such a take-down! But then I realised I had been awarded five stars and was properly chuffed!
It was Nancy McClernan at Heavens to Mergatroyd who opened my eyes to Steven Pinker’s shortcomings. She’s not necessarily 100% right about him, of course, but enough to suggest that his declarations need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
As for *****, I find it irritating that journalists are sometimes unable to write what they mean. It’s not as if we can’t guess what is meant when they refer to Trump grabbing women by the p*ssy. When The Guardian wants to say “fuck” it says “fuck”. Even worse than f*ck, in my opinion, is “the f word”. Who is supposed to be protected by that?
I used to work with a man from Ghana. I, a white woman, was on food stamps. His family were quite wealthy. My car barely ran; he had a brand new Honda Accord. He had been educated at all the best schools; I went to a small state college. To his credit, he understood that. He was under no illusions that all people in wealthy countries are wealthy, or that all people in poor countries are poor.
A former colleague of mine from Kyrgyzstan took a trip through the American south. She was horrified at the conditions she saw in some area of the south, conditions worse than what she saw in Kyrgyzstan in many ways, and in the wealthiest country. She had no idea such poverty existed here until she saw it for herself, and in the midst of all the plenty that exists in our stores.
That’s the US in a nutshell. Top of the lists in wealth but also top of the lists in inequality. The better rich countries have less inequality, and do better at providing the basics to everyone. The US is shit at both. It’s shameful.
Tim @ 21 – this post I think:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/05/the-purity-posse-pursues-pinker/
It’s an interesting read. I think I’ve read [some of] it before – this stuff keeps coming up. I sort of get where the Coyne – Pinker – Dawkins faction are coming from; I find some of the canned verbiage of the woke people tiresome or grating or wrong too (“Karens” anyone?); I part company with the woke people entirely on the trans question; yet…I’m not of their faction either (the CPD one).
There’s a lot of common ground though. I think Coyne’s blog would be more interesting if he let people of that type keep commenting. On the other hand his blog flourishes, so whatever.
Ophelia, I really cannot remember which thread it was. I suspect it was another one, when, as I recall, some scientist (a woman, I think, and – again, I think, someone vaguely connected with Pinker) was quoted, among other defenders of Pinker, as (rightly) disagreeing with the swarming attack on him by the woke brigade, as I did, too, but also, as I recall, rightly saying that she wished he hadn’t published that particular tweet.
Anyway, there is enough (though very much less than there used to be, I think) that is of scientific interest on Coyne’s blog, but I became pretty fed up with the banging on about ‘wokeness’ and certain more ‘liberal’ websites, and what seemed to me to be a wilful neglect of the far greater danger to the American polity from the extremist right.
Athel #24.
Thank you for introducing me Nancy McClernan at Heavens to Mergatroyd; I have just read as many of her articles on Pinker, and feel that they make clear that many of Pinker’s declarations need to be taken with rather more than one pinch of salt. The palling about with that appalling individual Steve Sailer (and a few other not so savoury individuals) I find extraordinary.
The biggest argument I had on ‘Why Evolution is True’ in connexion with Pinker was over his attitudes to music, in which I brought in an excellent work on music by a genuine scientist (‘Music, Language & the Brain’ by Aniruddh D. Patel) to compare with Pinker’s amateurish and philistine musings.
To be fair to Pinker, I greatly enjoyed The Language Instinct and learned a lot about modern linguistics from it. In particular I learned about Noam Chomsky’s contribution to it.* Before that I mainly knew Chomsky from his political writings in Le Monde Diplomatique (doubtless published elsewhere first). I still think that The Language Instinct gives a basically correct account of the subject. I’m less keen on his later books. After ploughing through The Blank Slate I felt that I’d read a couple of hundred pages designed to convince me that the Moon was not made of green cheese. As I had never, even in my youngest days, thought that it was made of green cheese this seemed a bit pointless. Before I had read Nancy McClernan’s criticisms of The Better Angels of our Nature I enjoyed the first three-quarters, where he set out what he claimed to be facts, and was bored to tears by the last quarter, where he tried to interpret them.
As for Richard Dawkins, he remains the greatest popularizer of science of present times, but as a person I’ve gone off him in a big way, starting with his Dear Muslima letter. His autobiography Brief Candle in the Dark should have more accurately called Famous People I’ve Known, or maybe Why I’m so Famous.
*I had dinner with Chomsky once, with him, me, my wife and our daughter (then 15) as the only people around a table. However, that’s very grand way of expressing something almost trivial. The table was quite big, with him at one end and us at the other, and any conversation we had did not rise above the level of Could you pass the salt, please? I had no idea who he was until he had left, when someone at another table told me. He had been invited to give the keynote talk at a meeting in the Certosa di Pontigniano (Siena), where we were staying. I was put on the same table because I was spending two weeks (a completely wasted two weeks, apart from the touristic aspects, as it turned out) as an invited professor at the University of Siena. I hadn’t realized before how conscious of rank Italian universities can be: it would never do to have people like Chomsky and me eating dinner with the peasants who were just participants in the meeting. In France it can be exactly the opposite.
Yes, I, too found ‘The Language Instinct’ interesting. As for ‘The Blank Slate’, I hold much the same opinion as you do: Pinker was setting up a straw-man and indulging his interest in scoring points against this and that and silly artists like Virginia Woolf – silly because all artists are silly, unlike hard-headed scientists, among whom Pinker likes to be numbered. I did buy and try and get through ‘The Better Angels’ but gave up, since the the song and dance about its getting better all the time while all the time cherry-picking evidence and, to take an example, taking a swipe at the Vietnamese for standing up to the Americans, while never mentioning American war-crimes, or that the Vietnamese had had to put with the French before them (Norman Lewis has an interesting book about that) I found singularly unconvincing. The fact that a smaller percentage of certain groups of people were murdered by the Nazis than in, say, certain Mongolian massacres, did not seem to make Nazi behaviour any less terrible or the suffering any less real. Nor am I convinced by Pinker’s constant recourse to citing the Enlightenment, as if it were one single thing, and not a motley group of intellectuals with differing ideas. Again, what reason have we suppose that things are going to continue to get better in the future? The great juggernaut of our civilisation proceeds on its destructive way, and there seems to be little that we can do to stop it. Pinker appeals to science, but science – for which I have great respect – is a double-edged sword: it is not something that is confined to academies, out of the dust and heat of the world, but is one with the economies, politics, nationalisms, hatreds of our world, and though it has done much good (neither my wife or I would be alive today without it) and certainly improved the lives of millions in many ways, the advances it has made are also responsible for many evils – the chief among them being global warming, which I fear is not a readily soluble problem (and it really is not sufficient to blame this on politicians). I find the knock-down claim that science is responsible for all, and only, the good in the world really rather blinkered.
Incidentally, a rather good take-down of Pinkeresque pretensions can be found by Googling:
Darwin on the Mind
Evolutionary psychology is in fashion-but is any of it true?
Jeremy C. Ahouse and Robert C. Berwick
One of my additions, I’m afraid, in connexion with what I was saying about science. The most profound lines in ‘Hamlet’, to my mind, are the usually unnoticed lines of the Player King:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown:
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
And by ‘thoughts’, Shakespeare means ‘intentions’.
Here is the article Tim Harris mentioned, a review of Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” by Ahouse and Berwick. Starts out great, I look forward to reading the whole thing. Thanks, Tim.
https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR23.2/berwick.html
Thank you, Sackbut. I’m afraid I’m hopeless with computers.
It’s a thing about Hamlet especially that it’s absolutely laced with internal references and nudges and connections of that kind.
Tim @ 31 –
And yet…he’s married to one of those silly artists: Rebecca Goldstein, who is a philosopher and a novelist. And a damn genius. I read and was smitten by her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, decades ago. She brought the house down at one of the CFI Women in Secularism conferences with a talk on an idea she invented in that novel, the mattering map, and how it connects to the eccentric idea that women matter. I mean the bringing the house down part pretty literally: a thunderclap of standing up applause and hollering. It was exhilarating.
But then, now I think of it…maybe they got together after The Better Angels was published.
consults Wikipedia
No, marriage is pre-Better Angels.
I have Rebecca Goldstein’s ‘Betraying Spinoza’, which is an admirable book. I shall get hold of ‘The Mind-Body Problem’.
And, yes, ‘Hamlet’ is an extraordinary, riddling echo-chamber, isn’t it? The only other work I know that is so filled with echoes is ‘Paradise Lost’, where phrases recur in different contexts, those of Heaven & Hell, and Eden before and after the fall, the contexts changing their significance.
Yes, it is. It gives me goose bumps.
I realized today that she has a website at https://www.pinkerite.com that is more clearly focussed on the alt.right (not so much stuff about the Beatles, etc.). She hasn’t forgotten her antipathy to Steven Pinker and his friends.
Thank you very much! I shall look into it.