Let this be the year Britain stops lying to itself
Blaming others for our problems has become a national pastime. It’s time we all accept responsibility
Among the new year’s resolutions – for me, “bath dog more”; for the dog, “take fewer baths” – let us put “stop lying”. The British do it constantly. Take the case of Conservative MP James Daly, who said that most of the children who struggle in his constituency are down to “crap parents”. We all know this is true. We whisper it all the time. Yet the moment a Tory says it, the double lie goes round that “none of us think that” and the person really to blame for kids getting into knife fights is James Daly.
His local Labour rival said: “rather than insulting [parenting] skills”, Conservatives like Daly should be held to account for failing to invest in public services. The individual, it seems, has no part to play in their own narrative. All problems are caused by the government and must be solved by it.
OK, state policy does matter: parents are overworked and underpaid. But ’twas ever thus. My late father, a socialist, frequently pointed out that having grown up dirt poor to a single mother, he still had the self-possession to improve himself without once breaking the law.
This, however, contradicts the welfare state logic that says our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control – inflation, depression, sugar, video games – in which case, to judge someone for failing to feed or clothe their kids is unfair. So unfair that the locus of shame shifts from the person doing something wrong to the person who has the gall to point out they are doing something wrong.
Daly is clearly a monster. Had he raised the alarm that he’d spotted someone drowning, I’ve no doubt that rather than call for a lifeboat, the Labour Party would issue a press release denouncing the Conservative Party for failing to invest in swimming lessons.
A lie is a performance; politics is a place for acting, not fixing problems. If someone raises a tricky topic – family breakdown, immigration, falling birth rates – we don’t debate the topic but debate whether it should be debated at all, and a pious politician runs on stage to deliver a passionate soliloquy in defence of those who often don’t feel offended in the slightest. No one is more sceptical of illegal immigration than migrants who joined the queue; no one more despairing of benefit cheats than their working-class neighbours.
Daly is not, I think, a snob. He made the remarks while promoting the New Conservatives, a group of mostly Red Wall MPS sitting on tiny majorities – Daly’s is the smallest in England – who are the most interesting thing happening in the Tory party. Many of them came up from communities where, thanks to family breakdown, healthy values are not being transmitted, and it might be necessary for the government to fill the vacuum.
But whereas Labour would just hand out cash, replacing dependence on family with dependence on the state, the New Conservatives ask “how can we empower people to live independently?” Education is surely the answer. The model is headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh, who by emphasising self-discipline has produced every teacher’s dream: a silent classroom that gets top grades. A school’s problems, she has said, won’t be fixed with “more money” but “better ideas”, by tackling bad behaviour and reducing bureaucracy.
Birbalsingh is, of course, hated by Left-wing teachers. She’s too strict, they say, too judgmental. The irony is that nobody in Britain is more judgmental of crap parents than teachers, who will tell you – privately – that poor grades are nothing to do with bad teaching and everything to do with lazy mums and dads. Britain is a nation united by the common belief that someone else is to blame for all our problems.
My dog, Bertie, has turned three. He is a good dog. People say “you are lucky”, but it’s down to his Victorian education. Visiting family with two liberated dogs, Bert sat on the settee like Jacob Rees-mogg, watching their antics with astonishment, clearly thinking: “By Jove, these dogs are out of control!”
We’ve been staying at my mother’s, which doubles his workload, for Bert has had two people to look after. On Boxing Day, I was upstairs, Mum was in the garden – and Bert started barking at the back door. I went downstairs, told him off and put him in his basket. I was halfway up the stairs when he did it again, so I tore him off a strip. At that point, my mother came in from the garden, covered in earth, soaked in dew. “I fell over,” she said. “He was trying to get your attention to help me.”
“I am so sorry,” I cried. My mother opened her arms, thinking I was apologising to her, only to realise I was talking to Bert. He got a big cuddle and is now called Lassie.
In other news, though animals are usually good at picking up on ghosts, Bert has shown no interest in what we are convinced is a poltergeist. One afternoon, we heard a bang upstairs: my laptop had flown across the room. An hour later, a crash from the bathroom: a vase had fallen into the bath. The most likely culprit is my late father.
Later that day, when she thought I was out, I heard my mother remonstrating with his spirit. “Don’t you start haunting us! You’ve no reason to be angry with me!” I was listening to a domestic from beyond the grave – and just as in life, my father never got a word in.