Despite recession and a national debt to rival Greece’s, in Britain today the rich have seldom done better. According to Danny Dorling’s new book Injustice, the wealthiest 1% now snag a higher share of the national income than at any point since the early 1930s. So after thirteen years of a Labour government, the UK has higher levels of inequality than after eighteen years of Conservatives. Add to this the plethora of television that unquestioningly bows to the ideologies and myths created by our flourishing capitalist system and the prospect of change and democracy begins to look very, very bleak.
The latest contender for most offensive piece of capitalist propaganda to grace our screens comes from the genius team who came up with Secret Millionaire and is crudely titled: How the Other Half Live. This show offers a sea of mini-toffs running around in their gated communities saying things like; “I had to ask daddy what poverty was because I didn’t know” – as if a multi-millionaire does. After showing us around their mansions the wealthy families sit and watch the poorer children’s audition tape making “Awww” sounds or correcting their inferior pronunciations. They then write a hefty cheque and speculate as to how the family should spend the money: sitting in a gigantic room on a chaise-longue whilst the kiddies frivol in their indoor swimming pool “self-made millionaire” Scott Russell says “I hope they don’t spend it on something pointless like a plasma TV.” If the family correctly jumps through the capitalist hoops and pay off debts before buying something “stupid”, they get rewarded with more money and usually offered a job in the family business. Finally, the inequality between the families fades and as eight-year-old Iris put it, the chosen ones begin to “feel lucky now, like them”.
New Labour has liberated the billionaires with cuts on corporation and capital gains tax.
The series focuses almost entirely on “self-made millionaires” who apparently clawed their way out of poverty. Of course no explanation is given as to how these people, usually men, earned their millions, presumably because nepotism and exploitation don’t count, but marketing guru David tells us what pushed him to succeed: “I didn’t want to be broke, and I looked at other people who weren’t broke and decided to be like them.” Why hasn’t anyone told Africa it’s that easy? But it’s not the financial schisms between the families that strikes most, it’s the linguistic ones. Little Iris found a friend in ten-year-old Rebecca, who lives in a 38-room mansion in The Cotswold’s, as they shared a common love of animals. Of course Rebecca had horses, pedigree dogs and cats whilst Iris only had a scruffy lurcher, but Iris thought that if Rebecca grew up to own a zoo then; “maybe I could work for her, in the office…or something”, when the interviewer asked her why she wouldn’t be the owner she blushed, grinned and shrugged. Iris, like millions of children across Britain, already knows her place and uses the language of the poor; dreams and aspirations are the pursuit of the wealthy. It seems that she has intuitively picked up on an uncomfortable truth that the creators of this programme would rather ignore: our economic structure is based on continued exploitation both in the UK and abroad and where you are born and who you’re born to really does determine your fate. Social mobility is at an all time low yet those on the other side still teasingly dangle the carrot as if anything is possible; all it takes is a bit of hard work. In another episode, nine-year-old Grant who shares a room with his older brother who suffers from Asperser syndrome said “I think to be rich would be well cool because you could have anything you wanted there and then, but it would be bad because you couldn’t dream of stuff, you could get it the next day and the dream would be over.” The fortunes of the rich are put down to luck and chance and the poverty stricken families watching this show will believe that they are also part of this television lottery and one day the next Bill Gates might knock on their door with a nice surprise. The apparent shock at their massive wealth in the language of the rich and the desire to dream in the voices of the poor point towards the idea that television has firmly earned its position as the opiate of the masses, providing hope to the poor in a world where money is the panacea.
The truth is that modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths, mainly individual material gains, which are accepted as legitimate and desirable for all. The fact that this show doesn’t explore the roots of poverty and the exploitation of the poor by the rich is incomprehensible. It’s like we’ve entered an absurd warp, where people have become blind to the realities of wealth. Instead, it’s the concern of the poor to become as similar to the wealthy as possible in order to gain their capitalist version of equality. Consequently, there are now 700,000 more people living in extreme poverty. So while New Labour has liberated the billionaires with cuts on corporation and capital gains tax the rest of Britain is left in destitution.
This programme has presumably been created with good intentions, at least it draws attention to the financial inequalities in Britain, but the reality is that How the Other Half Live acts in the way most charities do, as Slavoj Žižek puts it: “Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.” It’s long been understood that a society based on the principles of capitalism will eventually destroy itself. At this stage in history, Noam Chomsky says “either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control.” As long as one specialised class is in a position of authority, it’s going to set policies in its own interests. The question is whether this privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power to impose illusions necessary to manipulate the majority so they can remove them from the public arena, as David Cameron says: “Britain is full of entrepreneurs, they just don’t know it yet”. It’s essential that the rest of us see the reality behind the ideologies and myths of capitalism the media blindly propagates and act against this system that continues to indoctrinate our minds.
2 thoughts on “The Fortunate”