Never So Bad

This week: some jokes on decline, some notes on borders, and some people who Henry Kissinger has outlived.

A recent thing I found funny. A couple of weeks ago now, there was a 36 hour period in which three of the stories leading the politics sections were Anne Widdecombe telling people they shouldn’t have cheese sandwiches if they couldn’t afford them, some no mark red wall MP yelling at voters to switch to cheaper beans, and former deputy-PM-in-all-but-name Damian Green claiming on ITV, in not so many words, that he often swam in sewage as a child and that it never did him any harm. It’s pretty obvious how the Tories have backed themselves into this position – they can hardly admit to the role their terrible government has played in leaving the country in this state, can they – but it makes for a brilliant message, roughly 18 months out from a general election, nonetheless. “Everything is bad, and you don’t deserve better. Vote Tory.” 

A longer-running thing I find substantially less funny. Quite frequently, when faced with sob stories about what the rising cost of living is doing to everyone, some government MP or another will suggest that, if people don’t have enough money, they should maybe pull their finger out and get a better job. The very fact of this suggestion, I think, indicates the speaker is in a profession in which they imagine that they’ve chosen to give up some share of potential income in order to do something more creative or prestigious: not everyone will be able to sell out, but the belief that you can implies a position of privilege nonetheless. 

Worse than that, though, is the way the belief that anyone can just earn a bit more money if they really try turns a matter of structural economic forces into one of individual weakness. It forgets that – as Marie Le Conte wrote in a column this week, and as Caryl Churchill was writing entire plays about 41 years ago – not everyone can occupy the pinnacle of their field. By definition some people need to do the less glamorous jobs. Shouldn’t a functioning country ensure that they have access to a decent standard of living, too?

I wouldn’t mind, except that the exact same people would be howling about inflation if everyone did manage to get a pay rise at once.

All of these things are a manifestation of the same problem: the fact that, whether you are minded to see it as the result of 13 years of Tory government or merely something those years have failed to arrest, it is increasingly obvious to everyone that the machine is broken. For 20 decades or more, we could have a rational expectation that wages would rise and life would get better, and that the purpose of government – whether by actively intervening (if you were on the left) or getting out of the way (right) – was to facilitate this. 

There’s not much that unites Harold Macmillan, who built houses, and Margaret Thatcher, who flogged them off cheap; except the belief that they were making life better for, at the very least, their people. You could say the same about Clement Attleet building the welfare state, and Tony Blair reforming it. Almost every past government was, to use a word associated most with the last of those guys, aspirational. 

The modern Conservative party is not aspirational. The modern Conservative party tells us to buy cheaper beans. They have now spent a longer time in office than New Labour managed, yet the country is very clearly no better off than it was in 2010 and is on many measures worse. But they can’t admit to that, and so they can only tell us we don’t deserve better. 

This is, of course, why they’re almost certainly going to lose. But there are days when that isn’t that much of a comfort.

Some notes on borders 

(Or, if you haven’t worked out what my next book is about by now, you can’t have been paying attention.)

1. The longest border in the world is that between Canada and the United States, which clocks in at 8,890km (to put that in context, it’s a couple of hundred kilometres further than the distance from London to Pyongyang). 

There are, as you’d expect with any line that long, a few odd things about this border. In the east, for example, it cuts what looks from the air to be a single village into two villages in different countries (Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont). In the west, the decision that the border should follow the 49th parallel chops off the bottom of Canada’s Tsawwassen peninsula, leaving the Vancouver suburb of Point Roberts marooned in Washington state. 

Perhaps the oddest thing about it, though, is this: for much of its length it’s