Horsemeat

Much too late, I came across what may have been the best joke of the horsemeat-as-beef scandal.  Q: what sort of cheese goes in a Findus burger?  A: mascarpone.  Geddit?  Mask-a-pony.  Tee, hee...

Seriously, though, I wasn't too shocked at the idea that I might have eaten a morsel of horse in beef by accident.  I was slightly more worried by the argument that anyone who is prepared to sell horse as beef may not be keeping to more important hygiene rules with the utmost rigour either.  What shocked me most in comments on the news reports was the proportion of people who said, 'well, what do you expect for a pound?'  Or implied that anyone who would buy meat so cheap shouldn't complain if what they got wasn't what it said it was.  Giles Coren of The Times was a prime culprit here.  People should buy properly sourced meat from a decent butcher, he said, if they wanted to be confident of its quality.

Huh.  People with money to spare have always been able to insist on the best anyway.  If their butcher cheats them they can go to a better butcher, and the old one will feel the loss of their custom.  No one feels the loss of the custom of the poorest.  It was precisely for their sake that the Trade Descriptions Act was necessary.  For people who don't have any choice.  Whether any firm can afford to sell four beef quarter-pounders for a quid is neither here nor there.  If it says it's beef it ought to be beef, end of story.

What is happening to sympathy for the poor?  Once it used to be normal, now it's assumed everyone who's poor is a scrounger.  And that's true, in the sense that no one in low-paid work can survive without tax credits and benefit top-ups, rather than employers being expected to pay them a living wage.  The old working class has split.  Some, perhaps most, have moved up into the middle class, but the rest seem to be worse off than ever.  Middle-class professionals compare the British poor unfavourably to energetic Eastern European migrants, not seeming to realise that the Eastern Europeans we see here are self-selecting, the young, bright and enterprising.  What if you aren't gifted with such youth, energy and enterprise?  Do you belong on the scrap-heap?  'The British just don't know what work is any more,' says a pillar of the local establishment, a comfortable retired professional who has never know what it's like to have to get up at five o'clock on a winter morning, with a sore throat and a bad back, to work digging up a road all day.

Sometimes I worry that we're going backwards to the 1920s: as Siegfried Sassoon wrote of his well-heeled friends:

'Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?
Leisure?  They'd only spend it in a bar!
Standard of life?  You'll never teach them Greek,
Or make them more contented than they are!
That's how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike,
And that's the reason why I shout and splutter,
And that's the reason why I'd almost like
To see them hawking matches in the gutter.'