Nick Clegg wrote the most fatuous pile of nonsense seen in some time for the Guardian yesterday:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/09/poverty-plus-pound-not-enough
The key claim justifying Coalition policy is not that we can't afford current welfare arrangements, but that 'The welfare system is reinforcing social segregation.'
This is a claim that has been repeated ad nauseum over the last few months, but I haven't heard or read anything that backs up this statement. The fact is that society is segregated, has been segregated and (in all liklihood) will continue to be segregated into those who have the skill and willingness to contribute to the economy and those who do not.
What the Coalition don't acknowledge is that those on the other side of the segregation do not live in the modern world with its services and officials. Rather they live in a world without the possibility of peace of mind, run by men (and I mean men) of the execrable stamp of Jim Devine. The middle classes own councils and utelise them for their own ends.
Meanwhile, the essential services of social mobility such as the railways and universitys are so remote from the 'workless households' that entrance to their precincts immediately identifies them as the other. This is not entirely down to the trappings of poverty such as shabby dress and accent.
It's partly the estranging effect of drugs. We're all on drugs. All of us. Not the one-in-four that shows up in surveys. All of us. The numbers are only marginally less in middle-class households but the system of euphemism is now so sophisticated that the blend is seamless. The over the counter and underground markets for drugs are so vast that they reach every household in our country. Surely then this should be a meeting point between our segregated societies. Why is it not?
This linguistic division is the real segregation in our society. We are all the same, share the same aspirations and pass our time in the same basic patterns but the people in control of the language distort this reality to the point where the underclass (an example of such coinage) are forced into a false identity as dialectical foreigners.
We confine our fellows to the same category as asylum seekers and aliens. I well remember being taught that the language I learned from my parents was not acceptable in my primary school. Why do so many poor kids line up for the X-Factor and pursue courses in media? Because performance of acceptable language is the first lesson they are taught in our schools - they are forbidden to participate until they make it through this hoop. And lo and behold - what has united the popular (and other) figures in our political discourse over the last quarter of a century? Elocution.
His Wikipedia page makes the point that Nick Clegg is multilingual: he speaks English, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. Unfortunately his gift of translation has not given him the insight required to communicate with his own countrymen before condemning them.
