C_J
Some people believe that the best way to make poor people less poor is to give them money. I believe that while it might be the fastest way, it’s not the best way. The best way isn’t to give a man a fish, it’s to give a man a rod and teach him to fish. Right?
This rests on the assumption that wealth is always ‘earnt’. A large proportion of wealth in the UK is inherited wealth (passed down by a previous generation). Another significant attribute of wealth is property wealth, and for many at the apex of it, they got to that position by buying houses in the 70s/80s propelled by a housing market that has grown exponentially. The Baby Boomer generation that grew up post WW2 benefited from a job market that was crying out for a workforce (because of the number of people that lost their lives in the war) and were able to afford houses that grew in value over the years and were lucky enough to have generous pensions, many at the time had final salary pensions. Naturally it wasn’t all plain sailing but if you compare that to the challenges of today, it really doesn’t match up.
The inherent flaw in the Tory ideology is the assumption that “I have everything I had because I worked bloody hard for it” discounting the myriad of factors that led to that and only seeing it through the lens of what “I achieved”, when in fact it really isn’t accurate.
This tends to give Tories the viewpoint that anyone who isn’t wealthy can’t have worked as hard as I did. It also makes it easier to justify corruption, greed and cronyism because “of course I deserve it”. There are many people who worked hard (and harder than those who would claim to have done the most) all of their lives but still weren’t lucky enough to accumulate wealth, but Tories tend to think that they must be skivers, benefit scum or feckless alcohol/drug addicts if they haven’t achieved the pinnacle of what they could have been as compared to their wealth. To paraphrase football analogy that I heard James O’Brien say: "They’re born with 3 balls in the back of the net and go through life thinking that they scored a hattrick. Of course there are people who did come from nothing worked very hard and accumulated fortunes that way. It is just that it is not the full picture and is not the rule.
A recent example is the cost of living crisis that prompted a raft of Tories to claim that it was entirely possible to cook meals with a budget that consists of pennies. They used the same “give a man a fish…” argument that you did. I forget the name of the MP that got quite a lot of criticism but he set out to prove you could cook a meal on however many pence a day oblivious to the fact that he was able to hire an industrial kitchen and a professional chef to prepare it.
Many MPs were asked if they could survive on x pence a day, demurring to answer, and some said “I don’t have to because I have worked hard for my money”, taking you back to the root of the problem.
