Deserving and Undeserving

This week: on the sentimentality of the winter fuel payments row; some new walking routes from Transport for London; and Benjamin Harrison, the meat in a Grover Cleveland sandwich.

A number of big things have happened these past few days. The government confirmed that HS2 is going to Euston, and not stopping, bafflingly, at an industrial estate in the wilds of West London after all. In a harbinger of climate change and the decreasing livability of one of the most populous bits of the United States, a second enormous hurricane is on course to hit Florida in just two weeks. The Tories looked momentarily like they were going to pick the least stupid candidate for leader but then made clear they would not be doing that, and the Downing Street chief of staff has “resigned”. Sure she has.

These things I would describe as “very good”, “very bad”, “oh” and “ah”, in that order, and I could probably get a few hundred ill-informed words out of any one of them. But in each case, I’ve either done it before or would rather not think about exactly what they mean – honestly, neither hurricanes nor chiefs of staff are supposed to do that – so I’m going to talk about something else instead.

One of the most incredible bits of political communications I’ve spotted of late was this Conservative Party video concerning Labour’s cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners. I’ve not been especially moved by this story, I must say: it felt to me like taking money from a group of people, large numbers of whom don’t need it, to fund much needed pay rises for public sector workers, large numbers of whom do. And if prioritising their base was good enough for the Tories surely it’s good enough for Labour, too? All that said, I’m open to the arguments that changing universal benefits to conditional ones is not something a Labour government should really be doing, or that it’s put the line between “deserving” and “suck it up, rich people” in the wrong place. 

The Tory video, though, didn’t go for those attack lines. It instead claimed the policy would mean pensioners choosing between heating and eating this winter, while showing a series of quite obviously well-off people in big houses. One of them had a piano. “Tell me my party’s social media team did not film a pensioner losing the winter fuel allowance wearing a solid gold Rolex?” asked one young Tory on Twitter. It had.

This was of course hilarious – but what really grabbed me was the number of responses arguing that such visible wealth doesn’t matter. At least some of this was surely performative, but many people seem genuinely outraged at the idea of taking benefits away from pensioners – any pensioners. The idea that some may not need it; the objectively accurate fact that they are as a class richer and better housed than those coming up behind them, whose benefits have been slashed or taxes raised with nary a word from the same people – these arguments cut no ice. Some people, not all of them Tories, simply feel on a visceral level that taking money from pensioners is wrong.

It’s tempting to look for rational, or at least explicable, explanations for this. The older generation have dominated politics for the last 15 years by being the main block voting for the government, and even now they aren’t they retain outsized influence by virtue of being the most reliable consumers of so much media today. Then there’s the erroneous but still prevalent idea that we owe them a debt because, well, they fought a war for us. (Almost none of them did; the youngest pensioners today were the punk generation.)

But I’m not sure there’s that kind of logic at work. It feels like this one’s more primal: perhaps people just think of their nan. Whatever the cause, though, the idea of cutting money for old people is horrifying, even if they don’t need it; while the idea of cutting money from working age families, and thus hurting children who do, is fine.  

in 2018 an Ohio-based composer named Frank Wilhoit described conservatism thus:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect

This quote – often wrongly attributed, amusingly, to another Frank Wilhoit who was an actual political theorist but had been eight years dead at the time – has always stuck in my head at least partly because it was such a good description of Boris Johnson. But I wonder if it can be extended beyond conservatism to a broader, more depressing theory of welfare policy. There are those who are deserving no matter how rich – and those who are undeserving, no matter how poor.

Self-promotion corner

Hey, Canadians! And also those of you who live in the English-speaking bit of North America who are not so blessed! This is the week my latest book, retitled A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps for reasons I don’t entirely understand, becomes available in your country.¹

That isn’t the only change – some of the more confusing Britishisms have been replaced with local references, and the audiobook is now read by Matthew Lloyd Davies who, while British, is not in fact me.² The Centre for London’s Patricia Brown was kind enough to let me know she’d spotted me in a bookstore in Brooklyn:

Those on this side of the Atlantic who want to hear my voice – and indeed see my face – are reminded that I’m on the panel for the first Paper Cuts liveshow, along with Miranda, Grainne, Marcus Brigstocke and Coco Khan. It’s at the Clapham Grand this Saturday at 3.30. Come along!

Half-forgotten US president of the week: Benjamin Harrison

Lived: 1833-1901

23rd president: 1889-1893

What a dull man. Image: Library of Congress/public domain.

When I started this series, the plan was that entries would be brief – the same 300-400 words I’d give to an amusing map of Birmingham, upside down, or a particularly weird species of wombat. But the issue I ran into was that I kept discovering things that were too interesting to leave out. Okay, finding the fascinating in the potentially tedious is very much my MO, and I love a bit of US history, which is why I was doing it in the first place. But nonetheless, this was not the plan.

I am delighted, then, to be able to tell you: I’ve finally found a president whose story is so completely and utterly tedious I may actually need to pad it out. Buckle up.

There are two things to know about Benjamin Harrison up front. One is that he was from a big Virginia political dynasty. His great-grandfather, Benjamin “the Signer” Harrison, had signed the Declaration of Independence; his grandfather, William Henry, had actually become president, briefly.³ (No coat, dead in 30 days; we don’t need to go over that again.) The other is that he was only 5’6. As a result, according to his official White House biography, “Democrats called him ‘Little Ben’; Republicans replied that he was big enough to wear the hat of his grandfather, ‘Old Tippecanoe’.” I’m not sure this is a clapback that’s really stood the test of time.

Like seemingly everyone in 19th century US politics, Harrison was born and raised in Ohio, where he trained as a lawyer. After fighting in the Civil War, he failed to be elected governor of Indiana at the 1876 election, when the Democrats tarred him with the damning label of “Kid Gloves Harrison”, and became a senator instead. The source of that nickname may have been that – this from the White House bio again – “he championed Indians”. If so, that would later come to seem pretty ironic.

Despite these struggles, Harrison became the Republican party’s candidate for president on the eighth ballot at the contested 1888 convention. His opponent in the general election that year would be the Democrat incumbent, Grover Cleveland.⁴

I’m going to dwell on Cleveland for a moment, partly since he’s pretty essential to the story of US politics in this era, partly to fill out my word count, but mostly because he’s a damn sight more interesting than Boring Gloves Harrison. 

Less forgotten US president of the week: Grover Cleveland

Not the one from Sesame Street. Image: Library of Congress/public domain.

Lived: 1837-1908

22nd president: 1881-1885; 24th president: 1889-1893