ALL REALITY TELEVISION is about class and money, whether it’s Jamie Oliver trying to swing a bit of pasta pomodoro past the dinner ladies, Trinny and Susannah teaching people how to scrub up nice or wannabe stars of screen and business warbling their way past one of those mean panels with the power to make them rich.
The most blatant of all is Wife Swap. In each programme a “nice” middle-class woman goes to live in a hovel with a family from hell, who swear and live in filth and, ooh, don’t ask before they can get down from the table. The uptight middle-class woman, let’s call her Emma, always ends up admitting that perhaps she could relax a little more while her oik counterpart, Courtney shall we say, who has moved into Emma’s home for a week, concedes that perhaps she could tidy up a bit more around the house.
What the TV producers know is that class — or cash — is still the dividing line that runs through Britain today. And although they choose to caricature both Emma and Courtney, it is poorer families, portrayed as at best stupid at worst wilfully irresponsible, who always come off worst.
It’s so much easier to pillory the poor, and they don’t answer back. They’re just not part of the conversation. The same temptation confronts politicians and all sorts of other public authorities today: whether to stick it to Courtney.
Almost ten years after Labour was elected, nothing about the poor has been resolved. Senior Labour ministers are riven with uncertainty about where to target policy next: the tax credits system has left behind a significant tranche of people, the bottom 15 per cent, who were never in work at all, and whose parents may not have been in work before them, and have not been helped at all by tax credits and New Deals.
Yet taxpayers, they think, have pretty much reached the limit of what they are prepared to offer; if Labour largesse hasn’t worked yet, then Courtney and her on-off partner Gaz must just be lazy and not worth trying to help any more.
David Cameron, who thinks that “we’ve all got mortgages”, isn’t going to be much use to them. Iain Duncan Smith, who heads the Conservatives’ social justice commission, has identified Courtney but it isn’t clear whether he thinks society should attract her and Gaz with carrots or beat them with sticks. While ministers are spitting tacks at child poverty campaigners for even flirting with the Conservatives, they also admit to uncertainty about how to reach Courtney without a big stick and not much carrot. Courtney is going to find it harder and harder to find people who will stick up for her.
Look at the story this week of a poor mother who, abandoned by her partner while suffering from post-natal depression, killed her four-month-old son weeks later. Two and a half years Danielle Wails has spent on remand and the media can barely disguise its disgust at the fact that she isn’t to be locked away any longer.
The police claimed she had “never shown any real grief or remorse”, a statement at stark odds with the crushing misery on Ms Wails’s face as she attended her son’s funeral. A social worker weighed in with, “we would like to be inside people’s homes 24/7, or inside their heads, but we can’t always do that”. Well, is it any wonder that with that attitude families in trouble are reluctant to allow them inside the door? They never leave.
And the boy’s father, Danielle’s partner, Robert Gallon? The one who walked out as she got sicker and sicker? He is widely quoted declaring: “There is no justice in it. I could hunt her down and kill her . . . She should have got life.” It should have been his face plastered all over the papers. But it’s Danielle whom the authorities all condemn.
Politicians are still obsessed by locking people up: tougher sentences, prison ships, John Reid. Ann Widdecombe was on the radio yesterday bemoaning that we don’t lock away more children. We lock up more of them than anywhere else in Western Europe. Yet when the Government tried two weeks ago to downgrade the fearlessly independent Prisons Inspectorate that does such a good job of showing exactly why Britain’s overcrowded jails never give a young criminal any chance of rehabilitation, it was opposition in the House of Lords, led by the former Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, that defeated it.
Look, now, who is speaking up for bright but poor children lacking the chance of a leg up through a decent education. Last week Martin Stephen, High Master of St Paul’s independent boys school no less, said that he wants to set up an endowment fund to enable him to admit children on merit, regardless of the wealth of their family. The Government pours all its hope and money instead into City academies, fingers crossed, clinging to the wreckage of a non-selective ideology that has destroyed the chances for a generation of bright young kids and allowed wealthier parents to select for themselves the better state schools. I know who I think is offering poorer kids the better shot.
You have to look carefully to detect the champions of the Courtneys. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is one. It was condemned roundly last week when it announced that it wouldn’t offer an ineffectual and expensive cancer drug, Velcade, on the NHS. As the patient groups offered up a sorry parade of bone-marrow cancer victims, the Tory health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, promised that a Conservative government would authorise prescription of Velcade — just as Mr Cameron has suggested the NHS should make available every new drug that comes on to the market. This is a crazy and dangerous policy that would bankrupt and destroy the NHS; the NICE might not sound very nice, but it is protecting universal free health care for everybody.
The social and political rhetoric, like that set-up on Wife Swap, can be so easy and so pat. But if you have the misfortune to be Courtney or Danielle, it can really pack a punch.
