An Emergency Indeed

Many trends illustrate the decline of the working class, with its considerable intellectual and cultural (not to say political) achievements, into the pathologically non-working class, without any such. But none does so better than the loss of the ability to cook, and even of the desire to eat, food such as might sustain both the body and the brain.

Instead, foul concoctions, to which the word "food" does not properly apply, are consumed as some sort of badge of honour. Children are passed these things through school gates, or permitted to take them in place of school meals, on the grounds that that is what they prefer. What if they preferred vodka, or cigarettes, or heroin? Would we tolerate, and sometimes even encourage, that?

It will take a long time and a very great deal of effort to restore a society properly and worthily continuous with that of the miners' lodge libraries, the brass and silver bands, the pitmen poets and painters, and the late, lamented Labour Party. But that restoration, the basis of which is full employment with proper wages and civilised working conditions, must be done.

And we now see why in the starkest terms: the failure to do so is producing, where once that society flourished and where it must flourish again, a generation of children so ill-fed by parents so unconcerned by that fact, that those children will die before those parents.