08 red pepperoct/nov2007

plattitudes

Smartmoney

The rich, as everyone knows, are getting richer. Mindbogglingly richer (see opposite). And as if that wasn’t unfair enough, the bastards are also living longer – a lot longer. Men in the toffs’ borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for example, can now expect to live for 82.2 years, compared with a life expectancy of just 69.9 years in working-class Glasgow. And that’s just the average. The reasons for this seem obvious to most of us. All that money buys you better living conditions, better healthcare, more leisure time, less stress. You’ve got the time and the money and the knowledge to look after yourself properly, less need to turn to the fags and the drink and the drugs to brighten up your day. But we’ve got it all wrong, according to one group of academics, who for obvious reasons are finding increasing favour

among right-wing commentators and the rich themselves. The rich live longer than the rest of us, their research purports to prove, for the same reason that they are richer than the rest of us in the first place. It’s because they are cleverer. We have, among others, Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh and Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware to thank for this insight. According to their longterm research into IQ, there’s a strong correlation between health and wealth and intelligence. Deary, for example, co-authored a 2003 study in Scotland, which found that each onepoint drop in IQ scores corresponded to roughly a one per cent rise in mortality rates. And the pair contributed a paper to the February 2004 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science in which they argued that in general the rich were healthier

because their intelligence made them more ‘health literate’. Now you don’t need a Mensa IQ to understand that there’s some truth in this. Of course the brighter you are, the more likely you are to know how to look after yourself properly. And of course all those fags and that fat and booze are the major cause of so many Glaswegians popping their clogs prematurely in comparison with the Kensington and Chelsea set. But do Deary and Gottfredson and co really think that your average Glaswegians are too unintelligent to understand that the fags are killing them? Or could the fact that they continue smoking possibly be to do with something else?

Pissing offthepublic

There are two scrappy notices taped to the reception window at our local postal sorting office (the second, presumably, is in case you miss the first). They’re both headed ‘Polite Notice’ and tell customers to ‘turn off your mobile phone or MP3 player before coming to the counter or you will not be served’. This is ‘polite’ in the sense that ‘go away’ is a polite version of ‘fuck off’. They’re not over fond of members of the public at our local sorting office and they don’t mind letting the public know it. There’s part of me doesn’t blame them. There’s not much job satisfaction to be had in being on the front line of a public service that - in this part of London at least - doesn’t pay enough to retain staff for long enough to train them on how to deal with the public. And I’ve no doubt that it’s a right pain having to deal with the daily run of disgruntled, fractious or just plain ignorant customers when they’re listening to something

else through their earplugs at the same time. ‘Hi, yeah, I’m in the sorting office. No, I don’t know if they’ve got it - I’ll ask, shall I? Hang on, I can’t hear what he’s saying ...’ But they’ve developed ‘Don’t ask me, I only work here’ into an extreme form of misanthropy at this particular counter. The woman in front of me has come to collect something that she says she needs urgently. Tickets, a passport maybe, I don’t quite catch what she says – I’m just finishing a call on the mobile. It’s obviously something important, though, because she’s close to tears when the man behind the counter tells her it’s not there. ‘But I need it today,’ she pleads. ‘I’ve got a card saying to collect it.’ ‘Not from me,’ the man replies. ‘It says call between eight and 12.’ A shrug: ‘Well it’s not here.’ ‘What shall I do?’ Another shrug: ‘Might be here later.’ ‘Shall I come back later then?’ ‘No point.’ ‘Why?’’We’ll be closed.’ There’s a glint in his eye; it’s clearly the best bit of his day. This is a public service that

the Communications Workers Union is battling to keep public, staffed by public servants who get their kicks from doing their damnedest to alienate their natural supporters. Yes it’s a shit job. Yes they’re undervalued and underpaid. Yes, in a world where our identities are increasingly

determined by what we buy rather than what we do, simple pride and respect at work is going out of the neoliberal window. But why do so many public service workers seem to despise the public? They can’t all be fifth columnists for privatisation. oct/nov2007 red pepper

09

Making thegrade

The connection between ‘intelligence’ and wealth has shown itself again in this year’s exam results. Pupils in fee-paying schools scored four times as many A*grades at GCSE than the average in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, according to figures from the Independent Schools Council (ISC). Clearly it’s because they’re that much cleverer than your average state school pupil, and nothing at all to do with the enhanced educational opportunities that their parents have been able to buy for them.

Fairshares

The rich are certainly smarter than most of us when it comes to one thing - making sure that they get their hands on as big as possible a share of the world’s wealth. In the case of the top 20 US private equity and hedge fund managers, who trousered an average $657.5 million apiece last year according to a recent report in Forbes magazine, they’re about 22,255 times as clever as the average US worker, measured by income. These managers make the typical CEO of a US large company seem positively

impoverished (or stupid) in comparison. They can only manage an average remuneration of $10.8 million a year – a mere 362 times (or thereabouts) as much as the average American worker – and a $10.1 million retirement pot. These latter figures were put together by the US Institute for Policy Studies to coincide with Labor Day, which is marked in September in the US rather than on 1 May to avoid any association with the worldwide labour and socialist movements. Who needs socialism when you’ve got the American Dream? That’s the one in which the top 1 per cent of earners have captured four-fifths of all new income since 1980, by the way, according to economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin.

Overtherainbow

One of the problems with identity politics is that it can blind you to anyone’s suffering but your own. The black US leader Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, bringing together campaigners from a range of different identities and interests, has been one of the more effective movements acting as an antidote to this tendency. Such a disappointment, then, to hear Jackson coming out with the following nonsense in a speech to a black audience during a speaking tour of the UK in August. ‘Britain is investing in Iraqi infrastructure,’ he said unfathomably. ‘There are no unemployed Iraqis. They are building schools and roads and bridges. Why not at home? They are fighting for a proportionate democracy. Why not try that at home?’

Hoola nudes

One of the hottest topics, if that’s the right adjective, in the excellent Camden New Journal this summer has been the plan for what the designers call a ‘changing village’ at the soon-to-berefurbished Kentish Town baths. The idea is that there should be a choice of changing facilities, some private, some single sex and some – heaven forbid – mixed for families and others. There wouldn’t actually be

any public nudity in the shared spaces, but men and women might have to pass each other on their way in and out of the changing cubicles. This proximity is too much for the CNJ letter writers, who have whipped up a storm of protest about peeping toms and paedophiles. The promised refurbishment of the Victorian baths – which played a major part in the Lib Dems and Tories taking control of Camden from Labour in 2006 – is having to

be altered to accommodate the complaints. This is nothing, however, compared to the row over nudity that erupted in Battleboro, Vermont, over the summer. The town, which has long operated a ‘clothing optional’ policy, introduced an emergency anti-nudity ordinance in July after local teenagers took to hanging around street corners and – get this – hoola-hooping in the buff. That could never happen in Camden: nowhere to stash the skunk.

Tonydoesn’tlive hereanymore

Apparently there’s been a steady stream of people asking the police officers on the gates at Downing Street if they can go in and see Tony Blair. The officers concerned are getting a little tired of telling them that he’s resigned and doesn’t live there any more. They’ve even noticed the same people coming back and asking the

same thing – ‘Can I go in and see Tony Blair?’ – over and again. Eventually one officer asked someone about it. ‘Why do you keep coming back? We keep telling you that he’s resigned and he doesn’t live here any more,’ he said. ‘I know,’ came the reply. ‘I just like hearing you say it.’

StevePlatt