One of the few benefits of recession is that it reminds very rich people that money can disappear – usually only other people's – and so can be used as well as hoarded. American billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are pledging to donate half their fortunes to philanthropic projects, while on a smaller scale the London Evening Standard has launched a "£1 million plea for the dispossessed" to alleviate poverty in the capital.
The paper, bought by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev last year and edited by the former Tatler editor Geordie Greig, is seeking donations from individuals and businesses to create a fund that will be matched by the government's Grassroots Grants programme (perhaps showing that the Big Society won't get anywhere without a hand from big government).
The campaign grew out of a series of reports on "The dispossessed" earlier this year. Some worthwhile reporting has taken place under its banner, such as an interview with an East End GP who described seeing patients with TB and being told by another that what he really needed was not a social worker, but "a social worker's wages".
"The Evening Standard will shine a light on their plight," claims the paper; and it's almost impossible to imagine the true nature and extent of dispossession unless the voices of the people who experience it are heard. That's what makes The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London such important and necessary books. But Orwell would have choked on his bread and marge to read of this campaign, which reeks of sentimentality and not the clearly articulated, yet restrained, anger of good reportage.
There are some parallels between Lebedev's purchase of the Standard and Robert Maxwell's of the Daily Mirror in the summer of 1984, in the middle of the miners' strike. I remember it well: I was eight, and the Mirror was "our paper". To my dad, especially, Maxwell spelled bad news for popular journalism and, by extension, for the working class, who were about to be diddled yet again by forces beyond their control.
Prior to the takeover, the Mirror's coverage of the miners' strike and the Thatcher government showed a deep awareness of, and connection with, working-class life as it was lived. In the January before the takeover Neil Kinnock had written a week's worth of columns discussing the effects of government policy on employment, public services, health, women, and crime. A report in spring – titled "Death of a valley" – painted a bleak, but defiant, picture of Maerdy in south Wales, whose miners were the last to return to work when the strike ended in March 1985.
Within weeks of Maxwell's arrival, the paper, perhaps fearful of readers' strike fatigue, created a good-news story: the Mirror children's gala for miners' families, held in Blackpool and paid for by readers' donations and Maxwell's own funds. An aeroplane flew over the beach proclaiming "Daily Mirror Welcomes Miners' Kids to Blackpool".
A few months later, still mid-strike, the first Mirror bingo millionaire was announced. The winner, Maude Barrett, was rechristened "Our Maudie" and her life story told over several front pages by the paper's agony aunt, Marje Proops. I remember thinking, even as a child: "But this isn't news. This isn't about what's happening."
What the pre-Maxwell Mirror had done was to talk to its readers as equals of its writers, and not as essentially cynical people who could not be expected to care about others' misfortunes unless these were dressed in soppy language. I have a strong sense of the Mirror, in our household at least, talking to us and helping us talk to each other. However glib and populist it could be – and we recognised it for being so – it provided important reference points for changes and trends we could see taking place.
There's an obvious irony in the fact that a newspaper owned by a billionaire oligarch can, in effect, subsidise journalism about people who earn under £7 an hour. The existence of widespread poverty needs to be written about as often as possible – but to dress that writing up as a "campaign", and to imply that the effects of inequality can be ameliorated through private munificence, rather handily avoids addressing how that poverty came to persist in the first place.
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