working-class shirkers and scum

Posted by celticman on Thu, 19 Dec 2013

70% of British television producers, polled in 2006, at the Edinburgh Television Festival thought that Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard was an accurate reflection of working- class youth. This was the shocking statistic that helped to introduce the Radio Times  Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture in 2013. There’s no need to re-iterate that shows such as Jeremy Kyle, Skint and Shameless helped shape the political narrative of withdrawing from the welfare state and benefit cuts being seen as being hard but fair. Poor people’s lives are only visible entertainment when they are doing something wrong.

I’m reading Wendy Lower’s (2013)  Hitler’s Furies German Women in The Nazi Killing Fields.   Sometimes historical parallels come from the strangest of places. Compare, for example, the experience of  British television producers and  the Minsk entertainer Brigette Erdman  in 1942.

'German women who were taken aback by the presence of Jews in the East believed that they had not seen an actual Jew before, when in fact many had had daily contact with Jewish people while growing up in Germany'.

 

And this is a copy of a letter the daughter of the Nazi district chief of Warthengau  wrote to her fiance describing her visit to Lodz ghetto:

'It’s really fantastic.  A whole city district totally sealed off by a barbed-wire fence...You mostly just see riff-raff loafing about...You know, one really can’t have any sympathy for these people. I think that they feel very different from us and therefore don’t feel this humiliation and everything'.

 

I’m sure the ‘riff raff’ on the Jeremy Kyle show and those ‘loafing about’ on Council estates aren’t really like us. FADE OUT.  

Comments

Submitted by Steve on

Of course we need a social safety net. British pragmatism has really gone haywire. Just do what works. Sometimes, Britain and America have taken up Nazi tactics in their treatments of the ghettos because that's what works. It's a very cruel method of dealing with problems that should be handled more delicately. Also, the British and the Dutch were the ones who colonized South Africa and created apartheid. Can you believe apartheid happened in the 20th century? Blacks couldn't even drink beer. They had to make their own. You could argue that conditions were worse than slavery.

At the same time, we should watch out for what the rest of the world does. Germans and their Neo-Nazism to the far right. Europe and its new Anti-Semitism. 

 

Submitted by celticman on

I'm not sure anyone should be drinking beer Steve, especially me, but what the hell, you only live once. Rich people get richer and poor people get poorer. Obviosly poor people are to blame for poverty and rich people for wealth creation. That's the kind of thinking that made George Bush president and David Cameron Prime Minister. Caricatured images of the hook-nosed Jew are being replaced by Vicky Pollard's and Catherine Tate's school girls with attitude that know how to screw and screw the system to their advantage. How poor is that? 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

I find Vicky Pollard entertaining but this is a man impersonating an imaginary girl. How can she be real and accurate? (yeh but noo)    

And benefit cuts are not funny at all. It's all completely ass over tip. Everyone I know who is working (myself included I am now on my hands and knees early in the morning getting popcorn out of the awkward corners behind the cinema seats with a brush and pan - thankfully not full time and I get free movie tickets) is expected to do our work and extra and the unemployed are getting hammered harder and harder. How about the 'powers that be' trialling a 4 day working week as the norm for those of us who want to earn a little more than the dole and work full-time (I don't)? It would lead to less unemployment and also to more chillax time for full-time workers. Why do we all have to work anyway when the country doesn't need all hands to the plough to keep it going?. Can it not be a choice? Why does voluntary work not count as 'real work' in the eyes of the government? What about creative work which gives voice to difficult topics and make people who read it and who have experience of those topics themselves feel less isolated - perhaps this should be valued as it is certainly a useful contribution to society.

 

Hey have a good Christmas up in Dalmuir - all 12 days of it! All the best Elsie

Submitted by celticman on

thanks Elsie, hope you have a great Xmas too (although I must admit to being more of a wanting to hide away from all that Xmassss stuff).