Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I wasn't writing about personal responsibility for one's economic situation although probably my views differ from yours on that. People of talent have long been able to rise from low beginnings in British and other democratic societies, from Thomas Cromwell to Donald Trump. People without talent and/or motivation have it done to them. As an aside, without the capitalisation of agriculture we would not have been able to feed our growing population (or, the population would not have grown which would have been hard cheese for the ones who starved).

What I was trying to get across included the idea that greed and acquisitiveness are, in Christian terms, sins. Unfortunately we have a society which to my mind excessively rewards undeserving 'celebs' on the one hand and self-serving grafters on the other.

The catch to remedying this is that for many the answer is that politics can control economics, but tain't so, particularly in our globalised world which is enabled by technology and advances in that won't go away. The experience of the last two and a half centuries is surely that it is actually technology that changes society and the rewards go to individuals with the talent and luck to grasp new technology and implement it, from railway barons to Bill Gates. Then Quaker chocolate moguls are rather the exception but they do show that an entrepreneur can have a Christian conscience.

At CH I sometimes thought I was the only Tory in the school.

Yes, I've probably partly misunderstood your point. But where we differ is apparently about how far government can influence things. Of course technology has to change (Schumpeter's "creative destruction") but can we really let it drive everything before it, willy nilly, in a nineteenth century, laissez faire manner, with people working in sweatshop conditions and living in slums (which some of our generation, particularly the unfortunate Banker Brown, can dimly remember)? Religiously driven philanthropists and indeed businessmen were certainly responsible for some improvements by the end of the nineteenth century, but it seems to me that two things dramatically improved matters in the twentieth. Firstly the founding of a social security and pension scheme by Lloyd George followed by Beveridge's plan after WW2, and secondly the teaching of Keynes who showed that it was possible for government to use fiscal and monetary policy to buffer the wilder swings of an economy. The fact that governments don't always remember his ideas is not of course Keynes's fault. Governments so often tend to govern with the next election in mind.
As far as being the only Tory at CH you would at least have been supporting a genuine one-nation party with a small "c", many of whose cabinet would have been economically to the left of the Blairite Labour party. Did you know that Rab Butler wanted to abolish the public schools in 1944 but was talked out of it by Churchill?

postwarblue wrote:People of talent have long been able to rise from low beginnings in British and other democratic societies, from Thomas Cromwell to Donald Trump..

I agree with you entirely. It is the 5% who see an opportunity and chase it, not accepting the negative advice heaped upon them.
This is supported by ten "laws" which used to be available on the internet starting with "Life is unfair" but it is unfair to everyone. I just wish I had seen that when I was at CH.
Looking back we were being trained to be cannon fodder for the fields of Flanders whilst those at Eton ( I know a few) were trained to be leaders, to expect that they would be obeyed and to enforce that expectation.

People without talent and/or motivation have it done to them..

See my last sentence above

As an aside, without the capitalisation of agriculture we would not have been able to feed our growing population (or, the population would not have grown which would have been hard cheese for the ones who starved).

WWII showed that, using the knowledge available then, no way could we feed our 1939 population to the standard they expected¤¤. Since then the nutritional value of foodstuffs has deteriorated - it takes a dozen year 2000 apples to supply the vitamins and minerals of a single 1945 apple and some of the other official statistics are even worse.. OTOH there are methods of feeding a vegetarian family of four 12 months a year on a plot twenty five feet square (Garden News a few years back) though I admit to my usual scepticism. US ideas on the internet talk of vertical gardens and there is a tall building in Paris with a "green planted" wall!

¤¤ and that "expected" standard is far higher now - people would riot if offered a wartime ration of everything. Don't forget as well that it was Labour who slapped rationing on bread! On top of that the EU has forced us to take farmland out of production so their favourites can get better prices on top of the subsidy they are paid for planting the seeds.

Postings from Brown cause a scramble
To decipher his long-winded ramble.
His scattergun thought
Has the listener caught,
As in a dense thicket of bramble.

Looking back we were being trained to be cannon fodder for the fields of Flanders whilst those at Eton ( I know a few) were trained to be leaders


Junior officers ('leaders') were the group with the highest mortality in WW1, higher than the 'cannon fodder' of the rank and file.

rockfreak wrote:Postings from Brown cause a scramble
To decipher his long-winded ramble.
His scattergun thought
Has the listener caught,
As in a dense thicket of bramble.

A shade of pot and kettle, considering your rambling missives to the broadsheets, followed by your massively conceited reposting of them on the politics thread?

michael scuffil wrote:Looking back we were being trained to be cannon fodder for the fields of Flanders whilst those at Eton ( I know a few) were trained to be leaders


Junior officers ('leaders') were the group with the highest mortality in WW1, higher than the 'cannon fodder' of the rank and file.

It didn't help that officers (in the Guards at least) did not take cover until their batman had dug their foxhole. I understand that junior US officers in Vietnam were, from time to time, helped on their way by their own men

postwarblue wrote:Then Quaker chocolate moguls are rather the exception but they do show that an entrepreneur can have a Christian conscience.
.

I wonder if you were thinking about the Bournville estate for Cadbury workers or the Peabody Estates in the East End of London.

If so I suspect that there were far more examples around the country which were only known about locally - rich people who built vilmlages for their estate workers etc. One example in the City: employees were on very low wages and high bonuses based on the partnership earnings. Come the great depression the partnership was losing money so the partners had their employees investigated and gave bonuses out of their own pockets designed that the individual employee would have sufficient to feed and clothe his family and pay normal bills.

I think it's time that Avon had a limerick.

There was an old pilot called Ed,
Who thought he would knock 'em all dead.
They cried: "What a whopper!"
At the sight of his chopper,
And took to their heels and fled.

Just looking back over the points made variously by Post War Blue and Sejintenej about volunteer philanthropy; it's certainly true that some employers were moved or shamed into supplying decent accommodation for their employees in the 19th century but what a pity it's not happening now. Can you imagine Philip Green or Dominic Chappell or Mike Ashley (or even that famous tax exile Richard Branson) building state of the art flats for the workers? In the 70s I used to live in a Peabody type flat in Clerkenwell which was still structurally sound after a century. But the philanthropic impulse came after many decades of protest and resistance: Chartists, the involvement of concerned aristos like Shaftesbury, nonconformist ministers in the North, the shaming novels of Dickens - and then the development of trade unions, friendly societies, the co-operative movement, and of course the gradual development of the Labour party. As the saying goes: "Power is taken, not given".

rockfreak wrote:. But the philanthropic impulse came after many decades of protest and resistance: Chartists, the involvement of concerned aristos like Shaftesbury, nonconformist ministers in the North, the shaming novels of Dickens - and then the development of trade unions, friendly societies, the co-operative movement, and of course the gradual development of the Labour party. As the saying goes: "Power is taken, not given".

I suggest that, just like the foundation of CH, some of that philanthropy came about through religious belief; this was certainly the case o=for Bourneville and, surprisingly, the stockbroker event which I mentioned was just one stemming originally from the exile of the Hugenots from France in the 1500's.
Trades Unions were viewed as a pain in the nether regions so I don't accept that. Friendly socities and the co-operative movement stemmed from the inhabitants of (originally) streets gathering together to help themselves - I remember that from the back streets of Belfast in the 1940's/early 1950's. I can remember a movement where a group would get together to buy in bullk and one still sees that in some places. (I actually accompanied a friend to collect her vegetables from one such group about 2 years ago)

And then of course Dear Maggie took away the kiddies milk, tried to cripple the working class with the Poll Tax and persuaded the council tenants to 'buy and own' with absolutely no intention of building any more rentable social housing. Very philanthropic - NOT !

(In retrospect, maybe this should be on a different thread.)

It's still going on John. In his autobiography Nick Clegg records how, during the Coalition years, he told Cameron and Osborne that we needed to build more affordable housing. Ooh no, they said, you'll just get Labour voters living in them. Then he suggested a property tax at the luxury end of the market to stop oligarchs and the useless international mega-rich from buying up our housing. Ooh no, said the devious duo, these sort of people are among our biggest donors at election time. This is in marked contrast to a previous Conservative housing minister, Harold Macmillan, who, in the 1950s, built more council houses than any housing minister before or since. But of course this was in the days when the Conservative party still had some decent people in it and tried to govern for the majority, rather than for a small coterie of international speculators, greedy directors and shareholders, and tax avoiders.

Rockfreak: why not tell the REAL story. Where a block or an estate is being built it is an absolute requirement within the planning permission that a specified number of units must be "affordable" housing.

Affordable by whom exactly?