John Wight's Blog

With each passing week it becomes more apparent that in 2013 Britain is being governed by a gang of rich, privileged, and completely out of touch sociopaths, whose conception of society sits somewhere between Edwardian and Victorian times.

George Osborne's Tory Party conference speech, outlining the government's determination to not only continue its attacks on the unemployed but increase them - through making them work for their benefits or via daily visits to a jobcentre daily - was an insult to human decency and the collective intelligence of a nation plunged into the worst economic recession since the 1930s by the greed of the rich.

The primary objective of the Tories since they entered Downing Street in 2010, maintained their by their Lib Dem coalition partners, has been to beguile the nation into believing that rather than an out of control and under-regulated private sector, the root cause of the economy's ills is a bloated public sector. Their success in pulling off this confidence trick is measured in the ability of the chancellor and his Tory cohorts to couch a transparently vicious, callous, and carefully calibrated attack on the most vulnerable people in the country as official government policy.

Adding another layer of indignity onto the indignity already suffered by the most demonised, dehumanised and near-criminalised demographic in the country - the unemployed - can only be described as an obscenity. That the policy is targeted specifically at 'helping' the long term unemployed back to work or back to the 'habit of work' rings hollow. The clear inference is that everyone claiming out of work benefits is stealing from the taxpayer in order to support a life of leisure while everyone else has to get up early and go to work.

The inarguable fact is that the policy of austerity being slavishly adhered to has achieved nothing but a steady worsening of the recession - choking off investment, demand, and with it consumption - measured in a crisis in youth unemployment and the fact that not only unemployment but underemployment is now the new normal in Britain.

Furthermore, punishing the unemployed by coercing them into forced labour sounds the death knell of the entire concept of social justice which underpinned the creation of the the welfare state. It was based on the understanding that the unemployed are victims of an economic system prone to cycles of boom and bust and therefore not responsible. This understanding no longer obtains under this government, replaced by something akin to a mass experiment in human despair, which the Tories and their supporters have the temerity to describe as progressive reform.

It is difficult, even when trying to step into his expensive handmade shoes, to understand what George Osborne thinks will be achieved with this policy. Does he they believe that it will scare the 2.47 million people who are currently unemployed into rising from their slumber to scurry around and secure employment, thus saving the taxpayer the millions they are accused of stealing? Does he believe that this hate campaign will help the untold thousands of the children of those 'unemployed criminals' by increasing the pressure and stress on already stressed out families? Or is he fully aware that the stress and sense of worthlessness already felt by the unemployed will now be increased, leading to a spike in incidents of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, and the various other maladies connected to poverty?

If the former, it means he is too ignorant to be in government, while if the latter it means he is too wicked. Most likely it's a combination of both.

The economic logic behind austerity remains as flawed now as it was when first announced by the coalition. Rather than understand the deficit as a consequence of a global recession decimating demand in the economy, with a sharp fall in tax revenues due to a sharp rise in unemployment, the government is intent on deepening the same cycle by introducing drastic cuts in spending in the forlorn hope that the private sector will invest and create new jobs to replace those lost. But with a lack of demand for goods and services, the private sector is still refusing to invest, despite sitting on a huge cash surplus. The most obvious example of this is the banking sector's continuing refusal to lend, despite repeated pleas by the government, and despite being bailed out by the UK taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of pounds over the past four years.

It is here, when it comes to the vacuum left by the lack of private sector investment, that the government's role as the investor of last resort is desperately required. The reintroduction of demand into an economy suffering a crisis of under-consumption is needed as a matter of urgency, yet instead this Tory-led coalition remains determined to continue down the path of austerity even in the face of the evidence. The recent boast of a return to growth is based on an increase in London property values, inflated by rich investors from overseas and likely to be further inflated by the government's ill advised Help to Buy scheme.

Rather than admit this and change tack, this government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich has decided to turn its guns on the poor and unemployed, further marginalising people already struggling to hold onto a semblance of self worth and self esteem.

It is class war and when the rich wage war it is the poor who suffer.

Periodically, I am invited onto the Call Kaye radio phone in show on BBC Scotland to give my views on various issues. Presented by Kaye Adams, it’s on every weekday morning and covers stories particularly relevant to Scotland, though invariably UK wide in this regard.

Last week I received a call from one of the producers. They were planning an item in response to a new campaign initiated by the Scottish Government clamping down on the illicit trade in counterfeit goods. Looking for guests to speak to the issue, he asked me for my thoughts – whether I thought it was right or wrong for people to knowingly buy counterfeit goods – clothes, perfume, mens and womens accessories, etc – this on the basis that according to the police and the government people who do so are essentially funding criminal gangs that also deal in drugs, people trafficking, and are involved in more serious criminal activities.

I detected surprise when I told him that the issue came down to well off middle class people pointing the finger at poor working class people and telling them how bad they are. As for the argument about propping up organised crime, which deals in human misery, I told him there was no moral difference between that and buying an item from a high street retailer produced by workers kept in conditions of near slavery throughout the Global South.

Further, if we don’t want people buying counterfeit goods we need to make sure they have enough money to buy the real stuff. Why should poor people be locked out of society and its norms? In the West we have been conditioned to believe that we are what we buy, signifying our value and status.

Poverty doesn’t just have a material impact on those who suffer it, it has a psychological impact, crushing the spirit. Counterfeit designer goods allow those without to enjoy the feeling of belonging, to being part of the mainstream, which is vital to a person’s sense of self esteem, however false.

In the end, the producers decided not to have me on the show to discuss this particular item.

But what struck me about this exchange was the extent to which it revealed a widening disconnect between the haves and have nots, on the level of morals as well as income, exacerbated by the recession and the current government’s policy of making the poor pay for an economic mess effectively created by the greed of the rich.

The values of the rich are dominant everywhere you look. They literally scream at us every minute of every day, holding up individualism, materialism, consumerism, money, and success as the sine qua non of human happiness and worth . Neoliberalism, or untrammeled capitalism, sits at the foundation of these values, an economic system predicated on competition and with it the separation of society between winners and losers.

In the current climate the number of ‘losers’ in this ugly scenario are increasing at an alarming rate. Worse, given the aforementioned role of the Tory-led coalition government currently in power, the consequences of ‘failing’ are more grim than they have been for a generation.

The normalisation and acceptance of foodbanks up and down the country – a concomitant of the assault on wages, benefits, and incomes of the poor, both in work and out – is proof positive of the callous disregard for the well being and dignity of the victims of poverty in Britain in 2013.

The idea that the dominant values and morals of the rich and well off should or even could have any purchase among those whose lives have been reduced to a daily struggle to keep body and soul together merely adds insult to injury.

This is further illustrated by a recent story that appeared in the Mirror on the revelation that shoplifting is on the increase, particularly of basic food items such as meat and cheese.

Is anyone surprised? Moreover, it begs the question of whether people struggling to feed themselves and their children are morally justified in stealing food in order to do so.

I believe the answer to this question is unequivocally yes. Those who take the opposite view – both on the issue of purchasing counterfeit goods and shoplifting – will argue that neither is a victimless crime, as many seem to believe.

Perhaps, but neither is poverty. In fact, more than a crime poverty is an abomination, especially when it has become as widespread as it has in the UK – one of the richest economies in the world – in the 21st century.

The real criminals in society are not those who steal food from supermarkets in order to keep food on the table. The real criminals are those responsible for creating, championing, and maintaining the grotesque inequality, despair, and poverty which compels people to do so.

As the 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote: ‘Where the material necessities of life are absent, then morality necessity is also absent’.

Modern literature suffers from the lack of an epic novel that encompasses and defines the times in which we live, containing as a result that elusive but necessary quality of timelessness necessary to accord it the status of the classic. Perhaps Don Delilio’s 'Underworld' (1997) is the closet there has been to claiming that mantle over the past thirty years or so, but since then there has been little to get excited about among the plethora of vacuous tripe proffered by the mainstream – which in the main consists of novels written by middle class people for other middle class people wherein the most common issues being grappled with are unsatisfying sex lives and deciding on the colour of the wallpaper in the sitting room of the second house in the country.

Where is the serious work of western literature that deals with seismic events such as 9/11, the war on Iraq, the war on terror, Guantanamo, Palestine; on issues such as the plight of asylum seekers, immigrants, the struggles of the poor and dispossessed in the 21st century?

Having just read Victor Hugo’s magnificent 'Les Miserables', this lack of serious literature in and of our time is even more evident.

Les Miserables – the story and its characters – has been a permanent cultural fixture for the best part of a generation, most commonly associated with the musical adaptation, which has now been performed in 21 languages in 42 countries around the world and is estimated to have been seen by 60 million people since first opening to poor reviews in Paris in 1980. The movie version of the musical, starring Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, was released earlier this year to excellent reviews, but previous to this there had been three movie adaptations of the book; the last of those starring Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush in 1998.

In addition there has been a radio production, a TV movie version, and a TV mini series, further evidence of the enduring resonance and impact of the characters created by Hugo in his great novel, which was originally published in 1862.

The themes encapsulated in the novel – redemption, love, justice, crime and punishment, morality, and human solidarity – unfold in the course of a story that begins at the end of Napoleon’s ‘hundred days’ after his return from exile on Elba, and ends in 1832 just after the short-lived June Rebellion of Republicans in Paris against the monarchy of Louis Phillipe.

The central thrust of the story revolves around the ongoing efforts of escaped convict Jean Valjean to escape the clutches of his nemesis the fanatical police inspector Javert, who is obsessed with putting him back in prison.

Valjean, an escaped convict, is a heroic figure whose courage and compassion – revealed in the face of dramatic and extreme episodes of cruelty, tragedy, and injustice – points to the disjuncture that exists between the law and morality in a society in which obscene wealth and status exists on a foundation of poverty and injustice. Jean Valjean’s personal journey takes him from the depths of despair as a convict to the heights of social status and comfort as a wealthy businessman turned mayor of a small provincial town, before being plunged back down to the depths when he reveals his true identity to Javert and is sent back to prison.

Thereafter he once again escapes to ultimately find happiness as guardian of the infant Cosette, whom he rescues from the cruelty of her previous guardians the Thernardiers, in whose care she was placed for a price by her suffering mother Fantine.

There is not enough space to unpick the novel in its entirety, but it contains some of the most dramatic, heartrending, and inspiring scenes ever written in a work of historical fiction. Unlike many historical novels – where the story unfolds in and around actual historical events – the characters created by Hugo are equal to the backdrop rather than dwarfed by them, as they are for example in Gustave Flaubert’s Salambo, set in Carthage during the epoch of the Barcas.

Hugo’s description of the Battle of Waterloo, which takes up nineteen chapters in the book, is worth the purchase price alone. I found myself inspired to source more factual material about this famous historical event after reading his treatment of it, especially the charge of the French Cuirassiers over the sunken road against the massed squares of the British infantry at the battle’s climax. It is a section of the novel that invites comparison with other great historical works in which major battles have been depicted.

Tolstoy’s 'War and Peace' is perhaps the most obvious in this regard. His depiction of the Battle of Borodino similarly humanises one of the most important military encounters of the Napoleonic wars. Ernest Hemingway cited Tolstoy’s treatment of the battle as his inspiration when writing the battle scenes in his A Farewell to Arms. Another historical novel regularly praised for its battle scenes is Stephen Crane’s 'The Red Badge of Courage', which follows the exploits of the story’s protagonist, Private Henry Fleming, as a soldier with the fictional 304th New York Regiment during the US Civil War. The interesting thing about Crane is that he wrote the novel never having tasted combat or life in the military.

The only contemporary novel I can think of which sits on a par with the aforementioned works when it comes to graphically and effectively describing the fear, tension, courage, and brutality of war is 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks – especially the tunnel scenes under the trenches with Jack Firebrace, which are exquisite and unforgettable.

Les Miserables eclipses each of the aforementioned when the story moves beyond the battle scenes, however. The characters of War and Peace, for example, members of the Russian nobility, leave you cold with their bourgeois conceits, while in The Red Badge of Courage Crane only skims the surface when it comes to the Civil War, focusing instead on the personal exploits of one particular soldier in battle and in the process missing the opportunity to unpick the political and social issue of slavery that served as the backdrop to those battles. As for Hemingway, mawkish sentimentality runs in parallel with some of the most poetic prose every written in the English language in his 'A Farewell to Arms'. As a result I am willing to assert Hemingway’s other great war novel – 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' - as the better of the two and more deserving of being considered to have stood the test of time as a classic.

But getting back to Les Miserables, some of the many truly wonderful scenes depicted, apart from Waterloo, involve Jean Valjean rescuing Cosette from the cruel treatment of her guardians, the Thernadiers, already mentioned; the suspense of Valjean’s escape with Cosette from Javert through the streets of Paris, culminating in them taking refuge in a convent; the courageous defence of the barricade in Paris against Royalist troops during the June Rebellion, where the idealistic and defiant young Republicans hold out until every one of them, apart from Marius, is killed.

Then, immediately after the barricade falls, we have Jean Valjean’s heroic escape from the troops through the sewers of Paris, carrying the wounded Marius on his back. This section of the novel in particular includes some sublime writing that succeeds in reminding you why great works of fiction often eclipse works of philosophy in helping us understand the human condition.

In comparison to other classic works of literature which explore the human condition in a time of great social and political upheaval, Les Miserables is up there with Dostoevsky’s 'Crime and Punishment', Turgenev’s 'A Sportsman’s Notebook'; Emile Zola’s 'Germinal'; and Upton Sinclair’s 'The Jungle'. As for Dickens, he couldn’t lace Victor Hugo’s boots as a novelist – not with his penchant for substituting caricatures for living breathing characters in his novels and his irritating paternalism when it comes to his treatment of the poor.

The recently deceased President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, credited Les Miserables with turning him into a socialist. Reading the novel it is clear to see why. Even Homer’s 'Iliad' pales in comparison when it comes to the epic sweep of the story and its characters. Indeed, it would be impossible to come up with a more courageous, noble and heroic character in all of world literature than Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean.

In explaining his motivation for writing the novel, Hugo wrote that

'I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: “open up, I am here for you”.'

Surely there could be no nobler or more profound justification for a work of literature ever articulated in the history of western culture.