Criss-crossing the wealthy shires of flooded Southern England go the media, with tearful presenters comforting the normally comfortable about damp sofas and ruined record collections.
While one has sympathy for the young first time buyers and screwed over tenants abandoned to their fate in overpriced shoe boxes built on flood plains – the whole media circus leaves more than a taste of raw sewage in the mouth.
When discomfort and inconvenience arrive in the shires, the BBC knows that people who really matter live there and radio cars are scrambled quickly.
A stream of mildly outraged homeowners have whined endlessly about the paucity of government protection. Rugged individualism and hatred of the disadvantaged have vanished. A bow wave of sudden interest in big government and socialist style solidarities has emerged to blink in unaccustomed sunlight – ‘why wasn’t society there to protect us?’ they demand to know in various ways.
It seems there is nothing like a little bit of hardship to make some people remember why society matters and why no flooded house is an island, however much they might currently resemble one.
David Cameron has re-discovered some long abandoned words too like ‘community’ and ‘pull together’ – suddenly we are the big society again. For the embattled victims of insurance claims and ruined storage heaters money will flow like a fast flowing river, ‘money is no object’ he cried and trucks of soldiers were ordered to drive around in the floods to show just how much we all care.
“It’s like the third world” cried one incredulous damp person whose toilet had stopped working and it is surely at this point that only the most blinkered of observers can avoid this obvious question – why do the sodden matter more than the hungry?
Click on this link and scroll through the 1,080 food banks now open up and down the land for people so desperate and so poor that they must fill in forms and beg for vouchers for three days of emergency food. A million people will visit food banks this year – that’s more than ten Wembley stadiums full of people going hungry in Britain today – isn’t that rather more third world than flooding alongside rivers which can surely happen anywhere?
Where are the BBC radio cars and the shocked reporters poking through cupboards with no food in, houses with no heat on and indeed people with no homes at all?
How is it that we can be ‘a rich nation’ and that ‘money is no object’ when it comes to bailing out damp homeowners with insurances and bank accounts to buffer them – but we maintain a callous indifference, even an outright hostility, to anyone unfortunate enough to need social security?
Scroll through this list of the callous, random and unjust sanctions that led to withdrawals of basic support from vulnerable desperate people and the contrast between our empathy for the poor and the comfortably off is starkly illuminated.
But what is the determining factor in modern Britain that seems to parcel out unlimited ‘money no object’ support for some but punishments and scorn for others – the answer is clear, MONEY.
If you have money and agency in British society today then you matter and no amount of extra support will be deemed unsustainable or in need of scrutiny. If you don’t have money and you are unemployed, on poverty wages, disabled or sick – then you will receive not empathy but opprobrium, destitution will be a constant threat as the social security net is summarily withdrawn.
The response of the media and the political establishment to the flooding only goes to show the extent to which whole sections of British society have been marginalised, demonised and abandoned.
The hypocrisy and moral vacuity of the media is sickening, for the few deemed worthy and seen plodding around in waders in the shires, there is endless interest and countless opportunities for them to bemoan their lot – for the millions of people whose hardship, fear and destitution will not simply disappear with the winter rains there is nothing.
Flooding doesn’t selectively target the upper/middle classes and for those who now have flooding to add to their other struggles I have empathy of course.
But many (most?) of the flood victims are routinely quite comfortable and have only recently been reacquainted with hardship. That they are now angrily demanding help and support comes as no surprise, for many of them have a curious double standard about entitlement that drains what little sympathy I feel for them.
Perhaps a few more weeks of rain might do the souls of some in this nation the world of good and help them to rediscover their empathy and compassion for other people’s suffering.
Please share this article if you are as sickened as I am by the double standards of the media and this coalition government – while the politicians have fallen over themselves to visit flood victims – I haven’t yet seen any visit a food bank.
The rapid rise of food banks and the spiteful, frivolous benefits sanctions which leave people with no means of support is really quite shocking. Any government which deliberately starves its own people has lost all moral authority to govern.
Food, shelter, warmth and clothing ought to be unassailable human rights. If for argument’s sake we accept that a system of incentives and sanctions is necessary (and not just a malicious attack on the disadvantaged which most often is all that it is), even so it cannot ever be right to take away the minumum income required for a person to be fed, clothed and housed.
Sometimes whole families are forced to suffer as a result of some contemptible decision to cut benefits with no good reason.
yep its the north verses south the north will pay by more sanctions put in place and kids will suffer the ill fate of the government this money is a work of a very corrupt government .yep it was already set aside for the welfare of the south not the north pple try up north to make ends meet every day but lose with a snotty nosed clown in powered mad jobs saying y sanctioned because there’s not a reasonable job search been done how laughable that is when there is no jobs ha now I suppose that they will down south will get there own northern slave to mop up for dole money lmao I do feel sorry for what mother nature has done but there again if you type in MAPPA On the internet pple might have a different view. But what can I say its not the only weather machine that does this its in a few countries . what’s next we were all warned about the flood s years ago now the time is to act and think ,basically the north needs the south and the south needs the north so we should now start to band together and work as one and help the flood victims by now offering up our services and giving up our sofas or beds to sleep on at this time of crisis and charge Cameron sofa tax lol
Very well put. Particularly with reference to the selective blindness of the media towards the prevalent, non-seasonal specific, daily distress amongst victims of government social security cuts. Clearly the media is run by those with neither the ability nor inclination to identify emotionally or psychologically with victims other than those of their own social class image.
The support the hard-pressed are calling out for in the flooded shires of the south right now is precisely the kind of financial and services help that the safety net of a social security system is meant to provide. They will get it in spades because they will be seen by government and media as deserving by virtue of a temporary climatic catastrophe. In contrast, the unemployed, underemployed, disabled, poor or homeless will continue to be seen as permanent victims of their own fate, an undeserving, fiscal burden.
The “welfare” of the flood victims, the financial and social “benefits” they will receive are suddenly seen as imperatives to be promptly and enthusiastically met. But of course totally different from those of their poorer counterparts!