The changing face of paternalism

In my piece about Christmas Benefits, a lady receiving benefits is quoted as saying that if the government gives her money she has a right to spend it as she pleases and should not be criticised for doing so. Evidently there is sufficiently general sympathy with this view of the matter for many people like herself to continue receiving similar forms of support with no detailed enquiry into the use that is made of them. (I am not suggesting detailed enquiries should be being made. Apart from anything else, it would be prohibitively expensive. In principle I agree that if the state gives an individual enough taxpayers’ money for him or her to save out of, that is the individual’s business. The problem is that it is not realistic to go on paying benefits on this scale.)

The attitudes which I have encountered throughout my life, and certainly from the time when I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at 13, have been diametrically opposed to the permissiveness and generosity which is shown to people in the position of the Christmas Benefits lady.

When I was 21, thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no usable qualification, I found that I could get a research grant from Trinity College, Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree, which I hoped would get me back on to an academic career track. Rosalind Heywood at the Society for Psychical Research, presumably not yet in focus on my unacceptable outlook, and thinking of me as of any other impoverished young student, suggested at that early stage that I should apply to the Parapsychology Foundation in New York for supplementary funding, to which she would evidently give her influential support. I remember discussing with W H Salter and Sir George Joy in the office how much I should apply for, and Salter said in a throwaway manner, ‘Americans always give enormous grants. See what you think you really need and apply for twice as much.’

In fact I saved money throughout the period of my postgraduate degree at Oxford (in spite of taking more taxis than other people would have done) by making the most economical arrangements possible, and continuing with the policy which I was already applying to my paltry SPR salary of regarding only half of my income as available for spending.

At various stages during my postgraduate studies, Rosalind became suspicious and tried to force me to give an exhaustive account of how every penny was disposed of. I was not very good at making up an acceptable cover story. I am sure that many students spent a lot more than I did, but I was not in focus on their most expensive activities, and most of what I spent the money on was unacceptable.

Eventually, at the end of the Trinity College grant, it became necessary to obtain funding for the next stage. I did not conceal from my chief supporters, Sir George and Salter, that I had saved a couple of thousand pounds. Both of them, at different times, appeared shocked at my saving money, but the income from my capital was clearly trivial, so Salter, overcoming his horror and dismay, filled in ‘negligible private income’ on application forms for funding.

However, no funding at all could be obtained from any source, and all prospective support broke down. So I was forced to finance myself and any associates without any outside funding, and without being eligible for ‘income support’ since, as I have explained before, I could not apply for ‘social security’ as I was not considered qualified for any job that I could have accepted.

The rigorous withholding of support continued for years, in fact until the present day, and I suppose the idea was that I would be forced to run down my small capital until even that tiny piece of independence was destroyed.

At the end of the seven-year covenant from Cecil King, Lady Hardy (wife of Sir Alister Hardy and sister of the Bursar of Somerville) asked a friend of mine what we were going to do when the King money ended. Would we be leaving the house in the Banbury Road? ‘Well, no,’ my friend said. ‘We will be continuing to live there as before.’ And, my friend said, Lady Hardy’s face dropped unmistakeably, which implies that Lady Hardy was anticipating as a pleasurable experience my being thrown out on the streets without a salary or a roof over my head. Being deprived of this anticipated pleasure was enough of a disappointment for this to show visibly in her expression.

One may contrast this situation with Miss Bookey’s apparent pleasure and enjoyment of my joyful happiness on having the opportunity to get ahead in the Lower Fifth.

At the end of the King money, one might have expected senior academics, enquiring into the position of much younger people attempting to do progressive research in a situation of great difficulty, to be doing so in order to examine ways and means of replacing at least some parts of the vanishing support, so that the aspiring and hard-working young people could carry on.

In fact everyone was always obviously pleased at any misfortune that befell us, and obviously displeased at any disaster we managed to avert.

Miss Bookey, and the Reverend Mother before I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam, clearly represented an attitude that had only been possible to an earlier generation, of being pleased to see an exceptional person deriving benefit from their ability, and being glad to have the opportunity to help them do so.

You could call both attitudes paternalism, in the sense of thinking you know what would be ‘right’ for someone. In one case you think it is right to help them, in the other that it is right to ruin them.

Your name will be up there one day

The following is an extract from a piece which my colleague Dr Charles McCreery has sent to the person who is planning to write a book about his father, the late General Sir Richard McCreery. It gives some background to my post about the sacrifices of sadism, which refers to his father paying his Eton school fees.

I started to read when I was three. By the age of five I was reading Biggles books, of which there were a large number in the house. When I was four and my sister was six we acquired a governess, Miss Gigg. At first she gave us lessons separately, on account of the age difference (my sister is a year and nine months older than I). However, it soon became apparent that I was able to keep up with my sister academically, and the governess gave us lessons together.

In this context it may be relevant to mention that I was told that the whole of my sister’s boarding school (St. Mary’s, Wantage) was once given an IQ test, and that my sister came top.

When I was sent to boarding school at the age of nine, I came top of the introductory class and my colleague Celia Green remembers me telling her soon after we met (in 1963) that the lady who took this class, Miss Wright, on one occasion looked at a list of boys who had won scholarships to public schools in the past and said, ‘Your name will be up there one day’.

However, my parents gave me to understand that the reason for my apparent exceptionality was that I had had a governess from the age of four. They then colluded with the headmaster to prevent me from taking a scholarship to Eton.

As one of Dr Green’s aphorisms points out, ‘It is very easy to make someone into a failure; you have only to prevent them from being a success.’

The Food of the Gods

The following text is from the last page and a half of H G Wells’s The Food of the Gods. When I was twelve I regarded this as the most inspiring passage of prose I had ever come across. I still find it expresses something I can feel identified with.

‘It is not that we would oust the little people from the world,’ he said, ‘in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves.’

‘We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves, for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the life of the World ... Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass – to still greater lives.’

‘This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place ... We fight not for ourselves but for growth – growth that goes on for ever. Tomorrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light!’

‘Greater’, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, ‘greater, my Brothers! And then – still greater. To grow and again – to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing. Till the earth is no more than a footstool. Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread ...’ He swung his arm heavenward: – ‘There!’

His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised against the sky.

For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into the starry deeps, mail-clad, young and strong, resolute and still. Then the light had passed and he was no more than a great black outline against the starry sky – a great black outline that threatened with one mighty gesture the firmament of heaven and all its multitude of stars.

The state’s infidelity

copy of a letter to an academic

Apart from means-testing the pensions, i.e. depriving Charles and me together of about £4,000 per annum, maybe more – which we would have been getting if the means-testing had not been introduced – the pensions due to Christine and Fabian have been delayed by a total of 9 years, thus depriving us of at least £50,000 (9 x present pension as reduced by means-testing) which the government should have paid to us if pension qualifying ages had not been retrospectively changed.

Thus the means-testing and change in qualifying ages together have deprived Fabian and Christine of at least £70,000 which they were due to be paid on reaching their former qualifying ages, both being fully paid up, or very nearly so, in terms of qualifying years (i.e. years in which requisite contributions have been made).

This income would not have been adequate to set up a satisfactory residential college with at least one research department, but the future loss of it is a serious drag on our continuing attempts to make progress towards the start of our 40-year adult academic careers.

Benefits Christmas

The Daily Mail has an article about a mother with four children, living on benefits, who is planning to spend a large sum on giving the children a good Christmas.

Benefits Christmas: Single mother Eloise spends £3000 to give her four children EVERYTHING they want for Christmas. And guess what? You're paying for it.

... she’s not a member of your average working family. She’s on benefits, meaning that effectively it’s your money which is paying for her children’s Christmas - Xboxes and all. Moreover, as far as Eloise is concerned, it’s all entirely fair - in fact, the merest hint of a raised eyebrow at her circumstances is enough to make her see red. ‘It makes me furious when people criticise how I choose to spend my money,’ she says. ‘Taxpayers seem to feel that they have the right to tell people on benefits how to spend their money,’ she adds. ‘They don’t - the government decides what people like me are entitled to, not the taxpayer. If it’s offered to us, then of course we’re going to take it and we shouldn’t be criticised for doing so. Frankly, I believe it’s my right to do what I want this Christmas with the benefits I deserve. ’

The Daily Mail journalist points out that ‘it’s your money’ (i.e. taxpayers’ money) ‘which is paying for her children’s Christmas’.

Working out what she receives in ‘handouts’ per year, the journalist makes it come to £21,528. That includes free school meals, but does not include the free ‘education’ and medical ‘health service’ which is accessible to all, including those who are contributing to the cost of it by paying taxes.

Including the cost of free ‘education’ for four children and free ‘health care’ for five people might, perhaps, double the figure representing how much it is costing taxpayers to support this family. It is scarcely surprising that the country is bankrupt.

It is a fact of genetics that if conditions arise which favour the survival of life forms (plants or animals) with certain characteristics, a subgroup of the species soon arises which is increasingly well adapted to the favourable conditions and increasingly numerous. For example, subgroups of various birds have developed which are adapted to deriving their support from bird-tables supplied by human beings, probably becoming in the process less well adapted to supporting themselves in other ways.

There is no reason to suppose that the situation can be remedied by offering those living on benefits inducements to work. The only possible solution is to scrap the Welfare State altogether, including state education and medicine.

That is, it is the only solution that could possibly work; but I am not supposing that there is any possibility of its being implemented by a democratically elected government.

Brief analyses such as these should be being expanded into research papers, but this is unlikely to happen unless Oxford Forum is supported.

The right and wrong kinds of inspiration

Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail wrote recently about the Inspirational Women of the Year awards. (Nobody had nominated me.) Typically, the nominees had suffered a severe setback in life, such as major physical injury, but continued to live with apparent enthusiasm, setting up a charity to provide help and counselling to people with similar injuries.

‘It does require putting your own moans last’, Bel Mooney said. ‘They identify a need and just go for it. As Katie Piper said, “You can look to the left and to the right and see people with far worse problems.”’

Clearly someone who responds to a bad situation in their own life by trying to ameliorate it, as I did, is taking their own ‘moans’ seriously and hence cannot qualify for approval or admiration, although they appear to qualify for unlimited opposition.

My colleague Charles McCreery’s mother, Lady McCreery, was well aware of what made women qualify for being regarded as ‘inspirational’. She went every year to the lunches at which these awards were made, being a close acquaintance of the Marchioness of Lothian, who ran them for some years, having started them.

When Charles brought her to meet me, soon after I first met him, Lady McCreery took an instant dislike to me. Of course, it is quite possible that she had already gathered from other statusful people that I was persona non grata. On the face of it, it might appear that I was not doing anything very different from what had been done by acceptable people regarded as ‘inspirational’, in responding to adversity in my own life by setting up an independent academic institution for research in previously neglected areas.

Lady McCreery told Charles that she had got me taped at once. I was, she said, ‘patronising, offhand and humourless’.

Far from wishing to bring my efforts to the attention of the Marchioness of Lothian and other supporters of inspirational women, she proceeded to stop at nothing to thwart my efforts.

Social outsiders, their parents and their siblings

I have known some other people who suffered, as I did myself, the consequences of living in a society that is hostile to individuality, especially that of the exceptionally able. In such a society the ‘educational’ system is geared to deprive the able of opportunity and to turn their families against them, unless, as very often happens, they (the individuals) can be turned against their families, blaming them for ‘pushing’ them, and they become dropouts.

Parents may not realise that society has become different from what it was before its transformation by the ‘Welfare State’, and that it is now necessary for them to protect their children from the destructiveness of teachers and of the ‘educational’ system in general (as well as from doctors, social workers, etc).

Other members of a person’s family, as well as the parents, are likely to be turned against them. Any sign of being ‘got down’, or feeling bad about the position into which they have been forced by the system, is taken as a sign of ‘having problems’, which is supposed to imply a need for ‘help’ (i.e. interference) as there cannot possibly be any objective cause of difficulties. This enables the person's siblings, or others, who may be jealous of their real (if maltreated and suppressed) ability, to stick the knife in.

If the opportunities with which the educational system has left them are ultimately too unsuitable, so that they are driven to attempting to do something under their own auspices instead of within the system, they are regarded as not needing help since that is not a ‘proper’ job or way of life.

Of course this is much to the advantage of any sibling, who will get larger shares of any handouts from which their outlawed brother or sister is now excluded.

Socialism and slavery

So many things turn up, and so fundamental, that I should be writing about and am prevented from doing; but this is just the downfall of civilisation, and it is meant to destroy people like me.

So just a brief note. I recently saw something on the French television about the cholera in Haiti, said to be so virulent a strain that it will be years before Haiti is free from it. I did not follow this exactly; some of the woman commentators speak very clearly, but this was not one of them. But the gist of it certainly was as follows: people whose ancestors had been slaves were so angry about the past history of the island, and about the social inequalities which persisted, supposedly as a result of it, that they had been putting cholera into the water systems so that it would spread to all parts of the island.

This would be in revenge (revanche) for the slavery (esclavage). It sounded as if they were just helping the epidemic along, rather than having started it in the first place.

So this is what the modern ideology has brought Haiti to, as a supposed improvement on its former state. There will evidently be a larger proportion of people who fancy having power over other people as doctors, and a fair percentage of the population will continue to lose their freedom to the disease, whether or not they ever recover from it, and whether or not they do so without falling into the hands of the medical profession. There will be many more doctors, one supposes, than there ever were landowners with slaves working for them. And it is not likely that anyone will acquire any freedom to do more than keep themselves physically alive and contribute (by taxation) to the support of the doctors and nurses, and their slaves.

Is this not an epitome of what socialism is aimed at?

Can retrospective legislation ever be ‘fair’?

Herewith some brief notes on some of the issues which arise in connection with recent terrible proposals concerning pensioners. I could and should be able to write much more about this and to get it published; only lack of financial support prevents me from doing this. People coming to work here on a voluntary basis would to some extent enable us to do more.

In the Daily Mail of 17 November there is an article about how governments etc. are letting down pensioners by providing them with no way of getting an income out of their savings.

The author of this article suggests that pensioners might be allowed to invest in special bonds paying a ‘decent’ rate of interest, but that the investment should be limited to a maximum of £20,000, so that ‘wealthy’ pensioners would not be able to benefit unfairly by getting an income which they did not really ‘need’. As usual, ‘need’ is defined in a way which implies that no one receiving more than about the level of income support can possibly be in ‘need’ of more.

Of course, most people with some capital must have suffered from the credit crunch, as the powers-that-be wanted them to do, since we know that the aim of modern society is to prevent those who have above average ability from acquiring any freedom of action to go with it.

In another article in the same issue of the Mail, about how pensioners can ‘sensibly’ get more income from their savings, investing in ordinary shares is described as ‘dangerous’. However, it is a lot less so if you have realistic information about what you are doing.

Over the years, we have invited many people to come and live near us so that they could do some work for us on a voluntary or paid basis, and also get the benefit of the information which we receive and discuss, which is relevant to investment and other financial matters.

* * *

The Pensions Minister Steve Webb, defending the raising of the age at which state pensions will be payable, especially for women, has argued that everyone was living longer, so it was ‘only fair’ that they should start to receive their pensions at a later age. This, however, presumes on the modern view of pensions as a ‘contract between the generations’. Originally people were supposed to be paying, with their contributions, for the income that they would eventually receive, which would be paid out of the income of a fund to which they had contributed. In such a situation, of course, the fund would go on being there even after any particular person had stopped drawing from it, for the benefit of future pensioners, and it would be constantly amplified by the contributions of those who did not live long enough to draw on it at all.

In fact, this fund never existed; see the book The Great Pensions Swindle previously referred to. Nevertheless, people were paying contributions into a supposed scheme which had undertaken to produce a pension bearing some relationship to the cost of living, or to the average wage, at a certain definite age, and this was something which people took into account in deciding whether to pay contributions into this scheme or not.

If it was wished to change the age at which pensions would be paid out, on old-fashioned principles it would be necessary to start a completely new scheme which only applied to people who started paying contributions after the new scheme had started. Retrospective legislation, or retrospective change in legislation, is unprincipled, but this is an idea that has been lost sight of.

Ros Altmann, the Director General of Saga, the association for over-50s, has criticised the postponement of the pension age, especially for women, not on the grounds that it is (in effect) retrospective legislation, but because the changes are too rapid and do not give those who are approaching retirement age ‘enough time’ to think about how they can arrange their affairs to compensate for the change.

One might think that an association of people over 50 would have old-fashioned enough ideas to stand up for principles, such as the principle against retrospective legislation. However, the majority of those who are over 50 now have spent most of their lives under the auspices of the modern ideology. In order to have been born before the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, a person would need to be over 65.

Open letter to a former associate – an Oxford classics graduate

We were sorry when you went away. You know we had a high opinion of your abilities and you were a tremendous asset. Since you left things have gradually got better in certain ways (not because of your having left, of course), and we regretted that, having been with us for so long through many difficult years, you left before we could provide you with even the advantages with which we are now able to provide people.

Building up in so antagonistic a society has been very slow and painful, and above all we find it extremely difficult to get people to work here for any length of time. We have to pay what seems to us quite a high hourly rate for any work we do get, and I always regret it when we pay people who are nothing to do with us, when we would prefer to think that we were helping to improve the position of someone who might be permanent.

If you were to move to Cuddesdon I think we could help you to become increasingly prosperous financially, and we are always aiming to help people here to become property owners. When I remember the sorts of things which you did when you were here before, and appeared not to mind doing too much, I think that any of these things would be extremely valuable to us now, and they are particularly difficult to get people to do, as everyone nowadays seems to be thinking in terms of pretentious and ostensibly highly skilled things, which they are not in fact good at.

We remember that you are a car driver and that could be very useful.

I hope you will consider coming. We would try to make things as good as possible for you if you did. Also please mention us when you are talking to anybody else. I think there are a lot of people these days struggling to get by on pensions, benefits, or otherwise, who could supplement their income fairly painlessly by coming to live nearby and doing a few hours a day of regular work (or more hours, up to full time, if they wanted to).