"something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society.Well, I demur.
The “kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society” is a euphemism for conformist cucumber-up-the-arse respectability. As is the implicit injunction to “do the right thing”. Who says what “the right thing” is or defines the "decent society"? Prissy focus-group Daily Mail readers? Labour politicians? The Church of England? The imam of the local mosque? It's none of his business. This is soundbite politics at its most cretinous, and the worst sort of communitarian populism. Tell him to get lost.
1 comment:
"The “kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society” is a euphemism for conformist cucumber-up-the-arse respectability."
Do you have children, Paul ? That seems a very youthful (aka immature) attitude.
Norman Dennis' :
"Because of its moral judgementalism, the respectable working class was one of the few groups of the poor and deprived to whom the reforming intelligentsia of non-working-class origin did not—and does not—extend its tolerance. One of the ways in which this anomaly was explained away by the reforming intelligentsia was to characterize respectable English working-class values as ‘bourgeois’. They were not really working-class values at all but had been foisted upon them — as if working people had never possessed the wit to discover for themselves through their own experience that there was a great deal to be said, especially in their circumstances, for thrift, prudence, foresight, dependability, and self-improvement. To the extent that these virtues also benefited capitalists, turning the working man into his own slavedriver, and his diligent wife into an unpaid adjunct keeping him well ‘serviced’ for his exploiters, that was unfortunate.
But the respectable working man still thought that he was badly advised by his economic betters in the intellectual vanguard when he was exhorted to cut off his proletarian nose to spite bourgeois faces."
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