Lies, damned lies and statistics.

One in five, that’s a lot, isn’t it? Less than a quarter maybe, but 20% of most groups, collections or accumulated masses is usually quite a large number. If one in five of, say, all the residents in your neighbourhood suddenly disappeared it wouldn’t take you long to notice the difference. If one in five people suddenly upped and left this country for pastures new pretty much everything would change, everyone would notice. Life in the UK would change considerably and very significantly.

So, in the context of the population of the UK, I’m prepared to stick my neck out here and say that one in five is an unbelievably massive figure. One in five- less than a quarter but not that far short- still one heck of a lot!



If only! Thanks to Cle0patra's photostream

One in five, incidentally, is the number of people deemed to be living in poverty in the UK: thirteen million people, 3.8 million children, 2.2 million pensioners and, get this, 7.2 million working people. This might bring into question the figure at which the minimum wage is currently set- too low perhaps? Either that or else the will to enforce this minimum is sorely lacking.

Six million, now that’s also a lot. Far less open to abuse or misinterpretation as a statistic; whereas one in five rather depends upon the size of the sample to which we’re referring six million is always going to present as being on the large size. Anyway six million, that’s the number of sub-standard houses currently still occupied in the UK. Six million; just to enable you to get your head around this one that's every house in London, and some!

So, one in five people living in poverty and six million sub-standard houses still occupied in the UK. That’s hardly surprising you might- if you’re extremely naïve- be thinking, given that we’re in the midst of one of the biggest recessions in many peoples’ living memories. And, as we’ve already been reminded, far more often than is diplomatically sensitive, ‘we’re all in this together.’

I’m guessing that this is perhaps the ‘light’ in which ‘our’ government would encourage us to view these statistical facts. Somewhat disingenuous this would be, but then, if you’ve taken much of an interest in the machinations of the New Labour machine, you would be most unlikely to expect anything else.

But just in case you might be tempted to go along with this mode of thought, let’s all remind ourselves, shall we, that the good ol’ ‘third way’ thinking UK managed to achieve these targets not during this recession, but during the so called ‘boom’ years that preceded it.

‘Booming’ Britain actually brought about not only a climate in which one in five people might live in poverty and six million occupied homes might slip into a state deemed unfit for human habitation but also the climate in which this horrendous disparity between rich and poor was thought, in many circles, to be a price worth paying.

Just in order to dwell for a little longer within this stench of hypocrisy, ‘we’ created a society where the choice few were left free to accumulate property, land, shares, holidays, yachts and riches beyond all sense of decency, while millions lived in or approaching poverty. Of those who have 'managed' to negotiate a route through a mortgage of maybe five or more times their annual income, without having their home repossessed somewhere along the way, many have watched the cost of living spiral beyond reach, until they could no longer afford to carry out basic repairs upon their own homes. And these were the ‘boom’ years, don’t forget.



Thank you blech's photostream

And now that these ‘days of plenty’ are behind us, suddenly, ‘we’re all in this together.’ Am I the only one struggling to swallow this bovine waste-matter?

A raving idiot- ‘cos that’s what you’d have to be- might have expected ‘our’ Chancellor to claw back some of those millions from the crooks (is it permissable to use this generic term for the city boys?), or for those caught with their fingers in the cookie jar to hang their heads in shame and repay some of those fiddled expenses. I, however, would contest that the term, ‘we’re all in this together,’ entrusted to the wrong lips, will continue to shift ‘seamlessly’ from general population to the outrageously wealthy, or vice versa, as frequently as is deemed necessary in order to ensure that the British people will almost certainly never find themselves in any situation, ‘all together.’



Thank you bre pettis' photostream

If you, like my lovely niece, have spent a significant number of years working in the ordinary ranks of the public sector, you will no doubt recall the New Labour mantra that, ‘we must not allow run away pay rises to damage our ‘booming’ economy.’ Thus, you will also have endured a decade of pernicious pay restraints that sought to deplete your purchasing power, whilst ensuring that those at the top were not to be ‘overly’ burdened by things such as taxes.

Now that the bubble has burst, does it not strike you as a tad unfair to be cited, yet again, as the sacrificial lamb? Don’t forget, ‘we’re all (supposed to be) in this together!’

Aspirations.

Aspirations? Maybe the names that some parents give to their children, wishing perhaps that these might, mysteriously and inexplicably, impart some minute aspect of that celebrity ‘privilege’ that saturates our TV screens and tabloids, or else a tiny fragment of glitter, plucked furtively from the pavement recently trodden by last week’s pop princess? Aspirations, for all their obvious shortcomings, may yet be a furtive glimpse at the starry heavens of a far superior world.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having realistic aspirations, the world would be a great deal less exciting without these hopes and dreams. It may be ridiculously easy to find fault with some of the more deluded ones but the best are wonderfully ambitious and may yet conspire to conjure munificence from the very aether.

A fine example of aspirational thinking might be the concept of ‘democracy’. Haven’t we all heard it said, “It may not be perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got”? And it’s difficult to argue with this premise, not impossible but quite a challenge given many of the alternatives currently in operation. “Not perfect, but the best that we’ve got,” discuss at leisure.



Thanks to paul goyette's photostream

Anyway, let’s allow that one to stand for the moment and consider, if you will, some of the various components within this, “best we’ve got,” society shall we? Maybe we should look more closely at the rise in the activity and impact of gang culture upon far too many of our town and city streets, maybe that yawning gap that separates the most wealthy in society from ‘their subjects’ and ‘lessers’? Alternatively we could spend a while analysing the alarming spread of anxiety- approaching obscene levels of stress- now ‘accepted’ amongst children who have yet to reach their teen years, or the patent disregard ‘we’- the general population- seem to have for our environment, or perhaps the means by which ‘information’ is ‘shared’ or distributed amongst the population via its ‘elected representatives’, those huge lumbering monstrosities, the Councils, or the ‘serving’ Police?



Thanks to paul goyette's photostream

We could ponder the detrimental affects of the National Lottery upon ‘our’ nation- some day to be recognised for the dangerous and cancerous growth it actually was- maybe the not so subtle affects it has had upon the oceanic currents and tides of monetary flow. We could contemplate the fact that late night TV now sinisterly encourages the lonely viewer to enter a virtual world of cowboy poker games where homes and families might be silently frittered away- mugging by another name?

One might argue that it would be unreasonable to hold the decision makers responsible for all of these ‘disconnected’ traits, within our society. This, of course, would be at best naïve, at worst horribly dishonest. You see, at some point in the decision making process someone has decided that the ghettoisation of certain neighbourhoods is a price worth paying in order to devote a police force to duties more business-friendly. Certainly the exponential rise in upper incomes has been offset against the stagnation of pay amongst the country’s poorest, who in turn will be more likely to live in the aforementioned abandoned neighbourhoods.

We could, at this point, choose to acknowledge that those most likely to ‘invest’ more heavily in the National Lottery will surely be drawn largely from those with the least to feel satisfied with. Like those final pieces of the giant jig-saw puzzle everything quickly becomes that much clearer, not really such chaos at all, unless you happen to be living right in the middle of it.

Is it really the case that each of the last seven UK elections has been won by the party that has ‘secured’ the support of the Sun Newspaper? If so we could break away, momentarily, to consider a more reflective and accurate wording for that ‘all important’ Blair legacy, when it finally becomes indelibly etched upon the golden plaque of national ‘heroism’, but let’s, instead, retain our current focus. Although I do think that this election fact (?) might shed some serious doubt upon the aspirational aspect of a so called democracy.



Thanks to paul goyette's photostream

Aspirations, the very word seems to conjure images of fairy-tale-like-perfection within my head, and yet the society I inhabit doesn’t, on the surface, appear to be awash with this manner of aims and ambitions. Instead, I see people tired with worry, worn-down by the stress that has been perniciously built into our working lives (as a motivational tool?), I see edgy and habitually confrontational individuals with enough hatred to power a small village, and I see life as the kind of poker game where the two of diamonds will every time trump a royal flush in the suit of hearts. I could attempt to take the analogy further, but I’m sure you get the picture- everything has been allotted a monetary equivalent, family security, love, life death, your very soul.

As we close in on yet another pointless and turgid General Election, listen to what real people are actually saying and, like me, you may conclude that most of them are not actually preparing to vote for someone, something, a belief, a hope; most are instead preparing to vote against a set of values that displeases, worries or appals them. Had the electorate ever been genuinely involved in the first place we might well be living in a very different world, addressing a completely different set of questions.

Here might be an appropriate place to shed some light on the ‘democratic’ anathema of the quango. Quango: a supposed non-government organisation, derived through non-democratic means, in order to carry out the work of government, thus not democratically accountable to the electorate. Sounds ‘promising’ for an aspiration of democracy, doesn’t it?



Thanks to paul goyette's photostream

A far more politically attuned individual than myself once summed up the presence of Quangos with these highly pertinent questions: “What power have you got?” “Where did you get if from?” “In whose interests do you exercise it?” “To whom are you accountable?” “And how can we get rid of you?” He went on to clarify that if we can’t get rid of those who govern us then we are not living in a democracy. Tony Benn might have added that if the numbers of Quangos are in the ascendancy then ‘aspirations towards democracy’ might therefor be considered to be in some peril.

To conclude this rather depressing consideration of aspirational democracy I feel bound to recall the awful case of Fiona Pilkington and her tormented daughter Francecca Hardwick, who were driven to suicide by a gang of feral thugs. One wonders what sort of changes to our aspirational society the more socially responsible residents of this neighborhood will be hoping for at the next election. But my final point really concerns the responses of the local police to the desperate pleas for help of these poor people, driven to the very edge and desperate beyond most powers to comprehend, and then the consequent remarks of the Home Secretary (Alan Johnson), once the situation had ‘progressed’ significantly beyond salvation. To summarise, the police response initially was (to paraphrase) that, “The mother was over-reacting to the issue.” The Home Secretary’s later addition to this was that the case was, “exceptional.”

So, are we to assume, on the one hand, that the police (taken at their word- never a wise move) regarded this systematic victimisation as acceptable youthful high-spiritedness? Or did they not fully and properly investigate the issues. Remember that these are the people we are required by law to rely upon in order to resolve these kinds of issues, we are not permitted to take action against these criminal activities, no matter how justified we might well be. On the other hand we have the Home Secretary telling us that the case was an “exceptional” one.

Is it just me, or do these two reactions seem to contradict one another?