More on the middle class…

While we await a result from the byelection, apologies, but I cast my eye over John Waters column during a quiet moment this week. Though on a complete tangent here’s a funny thing. A week or two back I was looking at the Columnists list on the IT website and whose name was missing from that august body? If I said the first name started with a J and the second ended in an s… would that help? It’s there now, though whether that is convenient or not I leave to others to determine.

Anyhow, Waters is contemplating Cyprus.


A friend describes the situation in terms of what he calls “wagon theory”. Once upon a time, economies were measured by the productive energies of their workers. Inside the wagon were the old or otherwise incapacitated, whom the strong and able-bodied wagon-pullers had no objection to carrying as passengers. But the pseudo-boom facilitated by privately generated money and cheap credit enabled politicians to build careers and ideological empires by offering free carriage in the wagon to anyone who agreed to tick the relevant box on the voting paper.

Unsurprisingly, we ended up with far more passengers in the wagon than workers pulling it. In addition to the old-age pensioners and invalided, there were all kinds of welfare recipients whose expectations and entitlements would not long before have been considered the stuff of fantasy. There were the personnel of NGOs, quangos and semi-State behemoths. There were the paper-pushing battalions of the nanny state and the regiments of public pests – health and safety regulators, tax inspectors, traffic wardens, clampers, snooping TV licence inspectors and talentless TV anchorpersons – who, contributing nothing to the common good, imposed invisible levels of unnecessary stress upon the wagon-pullers while whipping them to their early graves.

That’s an highly entertaining, albeit more than borderline offensive, analysis. Entertaining because he neglects a couple of inconvenient facts. Unemployment throughout the 1990s and 2000s went to essentially historic lows – as close to what is considered full employment economically as it is possible to find. That doesn’t suggest wagon-jumping, anything but. In relation to semi-state’s etc I find that an unlikely proposition. Demographic changes saw increases, sharp increases, in populations, but given how vague his proposition is it’s difficult to apply any serious logic to his argument.

As to ‘traffic wardens’, etc, this is the rhetoric of the Daily Mail’s small ‘l’ libertarianism – enough said.

By the way, I think he should take his ‘friend’ aside and put them right as to the treatment of the old and ‘otherwise incapacitated’ across centuries, quite recent ones too, and he’d find that panglossian analysis to be a crock.

But what I find interesting is that for all his rhetoric about the universality of his religious views – at least as they apply to the Irish people, he’s remarkably quick to come up with a list of people who for him are in some way lacking. Look at that list again, there’s the unemployed and others ‘welfare recipients’, ‘personnel of…’, ‘nanny state…public pests’ (that’d be much of the state sector) and so on. There’s the obligatory lash at the media, though not one notices the print media. And then there’s the ‘wagon-pullers’ with whom all virtue resides.

That may be to his mind a silent majority, but to many of us, perhaps most, it appears a rather small slice of the population of this state – even were we to accept the idea on his terms.

In a way it’s a perfect complement to the Martha Kearns piece on the ‘middle class’ from last week’, but whereas Kearns at least had the good sense to acknowledge that there are many many who toil or don’t whose position is much much worse off than the ‘middle class’ Waters can’t even bring himself to admit that.

Of course consider the nature of the candidates presented by the larger parties at the byelection and wonder at how – given the way the system is stacked towards those supposed ‘wagon-pullers’ – that any progress has been made at all.
Telling.