Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Making the tough choices

A recent survey shows that the voters of the UK are not persuaded of the need for cuts in spending – at least, not in the services on which they rely; prisoners, smokers, fat people – well yes, they deserve to suffer the pain.

The voters do not much like tax rises either, although the survey found that if forced, people are more willing to accept rises in the taxes they do not pay every day - business taxes or inheritance tax - than in the ones for which they do see the bill - council tax, income tax or fuel duty.

A century ago it was the prospect of higher taxes on the rich & landed proposed in Lloyd George’s People’s Budget which was causing the furore.

Winston Churchill fought back, in a speech to the City Liberal Club: “There is the woeful wail of the wealthy wastrel, the dismal dirge of the dilapidated duke, & the hard case of the substantial citizen, who is angry at having to pay his share.”

Then he turned his guns on the real enemy, Mr Rudyard Kipling “who is astonished when he is asked to contribute to all the Dreadnoughts for which he has yelled. The great poet of reality, when confronted with any issue so concrete as the arrival of the tax collector, can find no words to express his opinion except words which predict the headlong surrender of the country to any invader, however small.”

Churchill’s ire had been raised by the ‘harsh gibberish’ of Kipling’s poem The City of Brass, first published in The Morning Post, June 28, 1909.


They said: “Who has hate in his soul? Who has envied his neighbour?
Let him arise and control both that man and his labour.”
They said: “Who is eaten by sloth? Whose unthrift has destroyed him?
He shall levy a tribute from all because none have employed him.”
They said: “Who hath toiled, who hath striven, and gathered possession?
Let him be spoiled. He hath given full proof of transgression.”


The eaters of other men’s bread, the exempted from hardship,
The excusers of impotence fled, abdicating their wardship,
For the hate they had taught through the State brought the State no defender,
And it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!


For Kipling, the Liberals had “given to numbers the Name of the Wisdom unerring,” & this abandonment of wise virtues & leadership could bring only disaster – a view which he thought found confirmation in the industrial unrest which soon followed.

As he wrote to a friend in August 1911, in the wake of the Tonypandy riots & when facing the prospect of being stranded in Folkestone by the first national railway general strike on return from France with his family:

“Re-read my City of Brass & see if there aren’t a few quotations now fairly apposite which were considered extreme & pessimistic when the verses appeared. Seriously, the whole thing is set out there in black & white: but even I did not guess it would come so soon.”

For now the consensus seems to be that we are through the worst of the credit crunch & the recession is ending. Almost no political commentator seems to believe that the election will bring anything but a Cameron government. I am not so convinced.

Yes, people are badly rattled & Gordon Brown seems simply incapable of providing the mass audience with the reassurance that it needs. But people are also disillusioned, let us hope not terminally, with our present political system & there are no voices saying – Well they may be Tories, but at least they will … (as for example Mrs Thatcher was promising to get the council-as-landlord off people’s backs in 1979). There may be a further wave of recession or depression to come – though maybe not till after the election. Either way, I would not completely rule out (the disaster) of another Labour government.

But can you imagine a politician feeling the need to attack a poet from a political platform today?

And we still have not completed the reform of the House of Lords begun by Lloyd George in the wake of that budget a century ago.



Old joke

Do you like Kipling?
I don't know - I've never kippled
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