Funny how it’s the most off-the-cuff remarks that can sometimes be the most revealing.
I just took a quick look at BBC politics correspondent Nick Robinson’s blog, where he said something about the data loss scandal that sheds a light on his own bourgeois concerns:
UPDATE, 12:30 PM: It is indeed, as I mentioned above, data loss on a huge scale. I understand that the data of over a million people has been lost by HMRC. It relates, I’m told, to benefit claimants, and not the income tax system or tax credits
Shorter Robinson: “That’s all right then, it’s just scroungers. No worries, we middle-class journos people aren’t affected.”
Hah. He was soon disabused of that notion.
But it raises an interesting point: there are clear class differences in the treatment of the victims of financial and data scandals.
Compare the treatment given to Northern Rock shareholders: Northern Rock was promised a virtually uinlmited amount of taxpayers’ money to keep it afloat (and with it thousands of nmiddle class savers and mortgagees) to the lack of assistance given to the Farepack Christmas Club savers when that company was made insolvent and thousands of poor people lost all their meagre Christmas savings.
Compare it also to the murky scandal of the failed money transfer business in which thousands of British Asians lost enormous amounts of money that they trustingly wired home to their families in the subcontinent and which never arrived. Millions are still misssing.
(Yes there is a difference in scale and in subject matter: but all of these scandals were enabled by sloppy information management.)
The poor people who make up the majority of the victims of the latter two affairs, unlike the Northern Rock savers, had no Treasury protection: they’ll be lucky to get 5 pence in the pound of their money back, if anything at all. Not for them the unlimited guarantee given by Chancellor Alistair Darling to keep the likes of Nick Robinson and his fellow Pooters cosily confortable in countless suburbian villas countrywide.
No, they’re poor, they don’t matter. Ditto with the treasury data scandal – when it’s only claimants affected, it’s an irrelevance.
The attitude displayed by Robinson is incredibly common amongst the media and a commentariat as well as government – as long as something bad happens only to poor people, it doesn’t really happen.
But as with that well-known aphorism about a liberal being a conservative who’s been arrested, something as big as this latest Treasury scandal, which affects 7 million families of all income levels from rich to poor, might make the complacent middlle classes wake up, get off their well-fed rumps and finally get shut of this pisspoor excuse for a government.
Maybe if the Nick Robinsons of this world are forced to personally deal with the sloppily built, managed and policed edifice of data collection and electronic transfer that the government and the banks, in unholy alliance with accountants, PFI consultants and IT companies (sucking up taxpayers’ money in sweetheart deals all the way), have constructed, like poor people have to every day, they’ll wake up.
Maybe it’ll take something as serious as this to make the complacent media bourgeoisie realise that they are as vulnerable to government and financial data mishandling, fraud, incompetence and theft as anyone else, rich or poor, no matter how secure their Heals’ sofas and 4 by 4’s in the drive make them feel.
Maybe monkeys might fly out of my butt.
