Hard times revisited
For three impressive London women born in Bangladesh there were cheering results in the UK election. Labour's Rushanara Ali held her seat. Tulip Siddiq, taking over from retiring MP Glenda Jackson, increased Labour's majority in her constituency, and Rupa Huq overturned a Conservative majority in hers. London voters generally proved resistant to threats of economic chaos should the Conservatives lose. Elsewhere the results were so dismal I retreated into nineteenth century fiction. Picking up a Dickens novel, long neglected on my bookshelf, I was soon lost in the imaginary industrial city of Coketown.
Having read Hard Times as a teenager, all I remembered about it was Grandgrind's school, in which education is reduced to the memorising of facts, and any reference to imagination or feeling is forbidden. It's not surprising that, being a schoolboy myself, this was the part that stuck in my mind.
On this fresh reading, I discovered that the book is as much about disparities in wealth and the desperate conditions of working people as about education. Dickens nails the self-justifying cant of wealthy people who see poverty as a sign of moral weakness. This probably went over my head first time. But perhaps the satire strikes more sharply now that this way of thinking has come back into fashion.
It's easier to impose a policy of austerity, for example, if you think that welfare is morally corrupting and destroys the capacity for self-reliance. There's a young man in Hard Times called Bitzer, a model pupil in Grandgrind's school who grows up to be a model employee in Bounderby's Bank. Having sent his widowed mother to the workhouse (the last refuge of the destitute), Bitzer "allowed her half a pound of tea a year, which was weak in him," Dickens tells us, "because all gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient."
Dickens recognises the tendency in those who benefit from the free market to value the lives of others only in economic terms. Long before globalization, he shows corporate leaders threatening to close down if governments make any attempt to regulate their activities, whether to increase the safety of employees or to reduce environmental pollution. As for unions, Mrs Sparsit, who has been born into privilege, is shocked that the business owners don't organise more ruthlessly against them: "Being united themselves," she argues, "they ought one and all to set their faces against employing any man who is united with any other man."
I should have known better than to seek escape in Dickens. At the personal level his stories often involve fantasies of restorative justice, in which victims of oppression are finally rewarded for their virtue, but his sense of how society works is firmly rooted in reality and is as pertinent now as it ever was. Returning to the real world, I'm looking forward to seeing how Rushanara Ali, Tulip Siddiq and Rupa Huq perform as members of the opposition and hope they all get a chance to contribute to a Labour government in 2020.