Polly, put the kettle on. posted by Richard Seymour

And shut your face. Here's Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian, "Angry Labour voters don't care about social justice" :

Poverty and equality are low on the agenda even on the left. Deep in email debate with angry Labour voters threatening not to vote for the party this time, I find it is the war and terror legislation they care about most, not poverty. Time and again they dismiss social justice as a second-order question. All ideological fervour is expended on liberty, very little on equality.

By way of contrast, "The truth about Blair's Britain — born poor, stay poor" :

A new report by the Centre for Economic Performance has found that Britain has one of the developed world’s lowest levels of “social mobility”. It is much worse here than in the five other European countries studied.

The report found that children from poor backgrounds go to poorly funded schools and are less likely to continue their studies. This dramatically limits children’s ability to find better paid employment. And the expansion of university education in the 1980s and 1990s has benefited the wealthiest far more than the poorest.

The proportion of people from the wealthiest 20 percent getting a degree during that time rose from 20 percent to 47 percent, while from the poorest 20 percent it rose from 6 percent to 9 percent.

The report found that, far from becoming more equal, social mobility has fallen over the last 50 years. Those born in 1970 are more likely to be in the same wealth bracket as their parents than those born in 1958. The report blows apart all of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s talk of extending “opportunity for the many”.

Liberty and equality are not competing issues; especially in Blair's Britain, they are contiguous. ASBOs target the poor, the mentally ill and the disenfranchised, not the shiraz-quaffing whatchamacallems. Those targeted by the 'anti-terror' laws and locked up without charge or trial in Belmarsh are unlikely to be captains of British industry. There is much ado about economic criminals from poor backgrounds and the wrong area, while the enormous fraud and theft that takes place in the City of London each day passes with impugnity. It would be silly to take the latest bit of prolier than thou invective from Ms Toynbee seriously. But then, judging from the letters page, The Guardian has some pretty silly readers (woolly, champers-guzzling, Waitrose-shopping, patio-building Hampstead liberals prone to emotional blackmail, I mean).