Between the Lines: Currie and chips

Perhaps, on the basis that if the government will not last forever it might as well go by suicide, Margaret Thatcher gave a ministerial post to the unacceptable face of medievalism, Edwina Currie. No sooner was Currie installed behind her new desk than she was throwing out insults to the impoverished of the North about how their bad health conditions were all down to too much booze, too many fags and excessive amounts of fast-food. (Evidently nobody has told Currie that capitalists investing in those products are among the biggest donators of funds to the Tory party). World In Action (ITV Monday. 6 October. 8.30pm) set out to go for the Edwinian jugular, which in her case meant sticking a microphone in front of her and letting her show her extensive capacity for insensitive stupidity. Currie’s final comment that (paraphrased) if workers spend their money on unhealthy food and drink it will be their own fault if they die early is just the sort of talk which puts the lie to the myth of “caring capitalism”. But the programme’s method of trying to demonstrate that workers in the North are more poor than the luckier ones in the South was misleading and can only create further confusion about how to rid society of poverty.The evidence used was a comparison between some of the poorest areas of Newcastle and a poor district in South East London. It was shown that workers tend to die earlier in the first area and that this is due to an inescapable cycle of poverty which is especially prevalent in the North. Even if this is so (and there are numerous parts of the so-called prosperous South East which are ghettoes of extreme deprivation), what conclusion would it lead to? Put more money into health care in the North? Reformists may argue for this, but within capitalism this may simply create new, worse problems for areas from which the NHS funding will be taken.

Ironically, one of the reasons for particular problems in the NHS in London is precisely a result of a central government policy to divert London NHS funding to other areas. Like the documentaries which seek to demonstrate that the real poverty is in the Third World, this programme serves only to fragment the analysis of poverty and to miss the point that deprived workers in Africa or Newcastle or Surrey are impoverished because it is profitable to let them be. That point was never made to Edwina Currie, thus allowing her to skate around the real issues, albeit on ice so thin that one hoped she was wearing her thermal underwear.