New Poverty

When Mother needs a few objects for the church Bazaar she goes to Liberty's, leaving Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane (with the Lamb to be kept happy and entertained) on their good behaviour; but with adults in the house as well. The burned nursery carpet is replaced with a persian rug from the secondhand shop in nearby Camden High Street. The children display an education that covers literature, grammar, geometry, history, geography, and considerable social skills.

So how much a year is there here, in this English middle class family living respectably but prudently on Father's work? £100,000 would not be enough, £150,000 would be on the low side.

Today the reckoning so often predicted by economic doomsayers has arrived, not with the cataclysmic instancy predicted but with a slow, irreversible loss of lifestyle for millions.

While the middle class was never millions' strong, it punched above its weight spectacularly, proffering a civilized, interesting, enjoyable way of life without offending sensibility on exclusion - social or economic. Aspiration and determination led to inclusion, and the compexity of its cultural endowment (whatever culture it might be, for middle classness is found in all our cultures) could be passed through the generations even when misfortune or incompetence led to economic poverty.

Centuries of writing centre on the social consensus to support this ideal; Fanny Price may live in a Portsmouth slum with a pig of a father but she, and her siblings, are gathered back ( motivated naturally, at first, by family self interest). Leonard Bast may end up dead, (and today Charles Wilcox is released), but he got far enough to be killed. Pick your own novel, but no-one is denied the chance to try or denied the support to stay.

Until now. In the last ten years there has been the most vicious attack upon the most characteristic, the defining, notion of our open society. And, in the name of 'equality', 'the ending of poverty', 'social integration' we are to be confined to our own sphere, controlled by the withdrawal of economic independence, education, intergenerational ties, family connexion, personal privacy, and freedom of movement.

Punitive taxation, gift prohibition, inheritance denial, means testing, social imprinting rather than the acquisition of culture and learning, the atomisation of kinship groups, and grotesque invasions of personal privacy by 'health' and 'social' services compulsorily funded by us all, reign; and as all faces are forced to turn towards the State and away from one another, isolation is consoled by pornography and licence.


We cannot think of the damage only to ourselves. Think of what we can give our children, and how little it is when we think of what our parents and theirs, gave to us.

The In and Out

The Constitution of the European Union, or to be more precise, the Treaty for a European Constitution seems unstoppable. What is under discussion now is what alteration is tolerable to the member states who have deposited the ratified Treaty with the Italian government, or are about to do so, their ratification procedures being almost complete.

In a speech to the European parliament in Strasbourg Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy, and sometime President of the European Commission thus with intimate knowledge of the workings of the European Union, laid it out.

The five central tenets of: the reinforcing of a European Union foreign policy in combination with the appointment of a European Union Foreign Minister; the election of a fixed President of the Commission; the installation of qualified majority voting; the streamlining of decision taking on the basis of the tri-partite decisional structures; and the creation of a juridical identity for the European Union, stand.

For a man of such notable mildness of manner and speech it was surprising to read his words and agree with La Repubblica’s description of them as like whip lashes. Until now the Eurosceptic member states, led by the United Kingdom and Poland, had not felt the iron beneath the velvet; what is apparent now is that there is a worked out policy for dealing with attempts to divert the European Union from further developing towards its goal of a federalised Union with power devolved to the lowest possible level under democratic governance, and with a unified monetary, fiscal and economic stance supported by a common foreign policy.

Mr Sarkozy has ruled out a referendum in France for the ratification of the Treaty; further, he has underlined Mr Prodi’s stance in calling for much greater levels of fiscal and economic integration among those member states that are within the Eurozone. At the moment the United Kingdom has observer status at Eurozone meetings; that could easily be withdrawn. A courtesy proffered in the expectation of future membership begins to be burdensome when Brown’s silly tests are understood as determination to stay out at all costs. While Britain and Denmark have especially negotiated opt-outs from joining the Euro, and which appear to have been mis-used, certainly by Brown, - no other member state has, despite Poland’s weird intention to hold a referendum on the demise of the zloty .

Refusal to accede to the euro is a clear indicator that there is a two-speed Union; the peripheral UK, Poland, Denmark etc. ,under the Treaty voting system, will find themselves back not in some present day version of a European free trade area facing the Common Market, but in Europe as it is today, excluded from the central engine house of the European Union and its decisions.

Many in the United Kingdom will welcome this, and not regret the weakening of the forces tearing apart the union of the United Kingdom. Others might prefer to withdraw altogether, and reinforce our links with the Commonwealth.

But the European policy of the last 10 years pursued by the Labour party’s Executive, to prevent the growth of a federal Europe, is in tatters.