Revisiting an Inglorious Past, yet Again...

 

I just want to reflect on the workhouse thing again, as so many questions about class, nationality and status hang in the political air at the moment. But first, I'd like to re-iterate the thoughts and observations of someone interviewed on Radio Four the other day about the newly proposed legislation regarding enforcing the reporting of instances of child abuse, under threat of legal penalty for not so-doing. The interviewee was a qualified and active person working within the childcare system. Their stance was simple, heartfelt and correct in its simplicity. I paraphrase: "We don't need more legislation, as we already operate under a strict code of conduct that is understood and agreed upon by all of us. What we need is more of us. Therein lies the problem." Passing laws is cheap. Acting to actually sort out real-world problems ain't.

But, we've continued to re-elect a governing party so hands-off that they might as well not be there: we would be no better and no worse off if they ceased to exist at all. Returning to the workhouse, as anyone who reads my little scribblings knows, I'm vested historically through my family's story. What made me start - in the old-fashioned sense of the word - today, was the news of the intended use of barges to house asylum-seekers: an image that conjures up prison-hulks and other such horrors. Added into this dystopian mix is the Rwanda thing. I don't think I can usefully add to the debate on what an appalling concept that is, given all that has happened there in the recent past with migrants 'accommodated' in that country.

The workhouse was also 'civilized' society's way of 'dealing' with what it considered to be an intractable problem: not poverty and inequality in and of itself - a reflection and consequence of that very society's norms, mores and modus operandi - but of the poor themselves: the very victims of those institutionalized inequalities. We seem to feel it morally right and somehow normal to treat some members of the human race as inherently inferior: it's right there in the papers now, folks, let alone the annals of history. I'll leave you with some words from a woman campaigner and author, who wrote of her and her friend's experiences posing as vagrants to gain insight into the treatment of people under the workhouse system at the turn of the twentieth century.

"...about twenty of us were sent to the wood-yard. I had asked to see a doctor, I was too ill to work, but was told to go to the yard. I went but did nothing, I could not. I felt I had not the strength of a baby, and had a hard matter to keep on my feet. At about ten o'clock, the labour master came round. At least he was pointed out to me as the labour master, but as I did not see him again all day, I doubted it. Anyhow, he asked me what I was doing; I told him I could do nothing, and wanted to see the doctor. "Doctors are not for the like of such as thou," says he, and that I should have no dinner."

For the truly appalling context that frames this encounter, you really do need to go to the source text: "Glimpses into the Abyss" by Mary Higgs. The horrors that these bloody 'institutions' meted out on the most vulnerable members of an already heinously divided society, couched in 'Christian values' and moral codes of 'decency' and 'charity', really will, and should offend any decent human being who believes in the sanctity of life and the rights of all to live a good and happy life, unfettered by poverty and prejudice. My great-great-grandfather ended his days in one such place, the same year Mary Higgs published her findings: 1906. Appalling.