There's a man lives down the road from me, he's psychotic, a paranoid sufferer from a schizophreniform disorder. How I know is this, that whenever I walk past his flat, his road-facing ground-floor window is pasted over with imprecations against a universe he knows is conspiring against him. How dare they use my words against me rails the one I saw on Sunday evening. In the pit of despair myself (a cat had gone missing - at least that adventure in human existence had a happy ending) for the first time I stopped and read, fully, this man's public account of his fantasy. He was complaining about a freesheet from the council which, to his tortured psyche, appeared to be mocking his fears about the world. Common enough among the mentally ill, this delusion.
Now. Why did this memory come to mind when the email from Esteemed Editor arrived in my inbox on Monday morning, as it did in those of all Centre-Right contributors: please write about what good shall come from ending Labour's period in government. Not sure why I thought of my disturbed Hackney neighbour at first, so I probed at it, poked it with my tongue like you do a shoogly tooth, because it certainly was the first image which floated into view, and it's stayed with me 48 hours now, locked up in this dump of a hotel outside Heathrow. In the pool this evening I kept wondering about my neighbour's life, and it's only 14 metres long this pool, so that was 120 lengths required, and I had the place to myself, which is both bliss and torture for a swimmer: a lot of tick-tocking for a captured mind. Tick-tock. Captured minds. A good enough subtitle to the ten rotten years of this rotten government.
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So you start with an idea and you build a system to operationalise that idea: anyone can see you need a machine to make the idea a reality, to furnish it with a corporeality, so that the idea can become flesh, can become a plastic simulacrum of flesh at least, can take hold, can deliver the New Jerusalem. One idea is We Will Abolish Child Poverty and to meet this estimable objective you build a machine, you give it a friendly-like name, like, like, Sure Start, and as with all machines, it takes inputs - children - and gives outputs - the abolition of child poverty. Only the thing is, with machines, that you need engineers to look after them. And by the nature of their task, it's not impossible, in fact it's highly probable, in fact it's a certainty, that the engineers will soon enough professionalise their work, that the smooth operation of their machine will take on a greater importance to them than any of the actual inputs to it. Boxes have to be checked (there's an analogy here with another recent systems failure of such horror I can't bear to think about it). Failures are within tolerance limits. Another input will be along in a minute anyway.
The funny thing is, the view from the swimming pool is, that it looks almost as though that it's the machine which is controlling the engineers, and not the other way round. I must be delusional, but it seems both as though the actual children, the real children (as opposed to the idea of the children), seem incidental, and that the machine is growing in size. And look! Who guards the guards, you rightly ask, and of course, cohorts of inspectors are required, not to ensure that the children are being cured of their childhood poverty, but that the engineers are stoking the fires of the machine appropriately. What about the childhood poverty then? you ask. An inspector calls: Oh, cured, all cured. You say: But I can see worsening outcomes everywhere I look, and they're like, You fool, don't you understand that by moving a tiny fraction of the population from one side of an arbitrarily defined percentile of the income distribution to another, we've cured poverty? Move along please.
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Or take tax credits and their operationalisation as a cure to family poverty.
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Or take fatherhood. We're all familiar with machines that become obsolete. In the beginning was reproduction via male-female pair-bonding (were I religious I'd be able to describe this more prettily): an organic machine. If there's one thing that Labour detests it's anything organic. How much better to design a machine for reproduction, since not everyone who is XX may fall in love and pair-bond with someone who is XY; why should that deny her access to a child? Isn't it discriminatory to deny such citizens access to 'children of their own'? Why should they have to pair-bond at all? Yes, yes, this means that male children in particular face a probable outcome significantly worse than previously pertained, but not all of them, and remember, there are more along in a minute. On average the outputs of the new reproduction machine may not suffer outcomes significantly worse than those that pertained for previous outputs. You remember those outputs - you may be one yourself - children who grew up with fathers who loved them. Wondrous is the certainty of the machine which decrees such a childhood to be optional! Move along please.
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So I did, I move along, I don't knock on this man's door, and I certainly don't reach out and touch him when I pass him in the street. Touch. How many people do you walk past in the day whose faces are crying out to you: Please touch me. I don't always respond with a word or a smile. Now, I do not blame Labour for my failures of love: these are my sins of omission, and mine alone. Lovelessness and loneliness are increasing though: I wonder why. I do not even blame Labour (only) for the collapse in proper institutions of care for the mentally ill; though they've had ten years to do something about it, and enough money pumped into the health service to reckon that some sort of ammelioration wouldn't have been a pipe dream. I retain as a pipe dream that a Conservative government will realise that bolstering the provision of decent psychiatric care forms one of the foundations to the architecture of the un-Broken Society, but I'm not sure I have that much optimism left in me.
I do dare to hope this. I'm not anti-machine, not even man-made ones. We need them, to regulate our interactions. But it's usually better when they're organic, and small, and local, and not controlled by people who never have to answer to the humans they serve. It's always vital that the humans control the machine, and not the other way around. I dare to hope that the Conservatives will deliver that, and will dismantle the most egregious anti-human manifestations of the utopian dream-makers. My neighbour is not the only ghost lost in the workings of a malfunctioning system: it's just more obvious with him, compared to the rest of us. This is the real dividing line in politics: are you on the side of the humans, or the machine?
