Laurie Penny, Spending Cuts and Attempted Suicide

As part on my ongoing habit of being late on just about everything, I see that Laurie Penny is indulging in a jaw-dropping bit of hysteria (that manages to be in pretty bad taste at the same time):

It's 2am, and I'm sitting under a strip light in the emergency unit of my local hospital, waiting for the doctors to finish attending to a young friend of mine who attempted to end her life tonight. When the paramedics arrived, they told us she wasn't the first - for many Londoners, it seems, something about the news or the weather today gave the impression that a crisis point has been reached.

Timmy nicely fillets her assertions here, while DK turns in an excellent piece of splenetic rage against her here. But I'd just like to throw into the maelstrom my own thoughts on young Laurie's work.

First up, she's being pretty fucking assumptive. She doesn't specify why her friend tried to end her life (and in fairness, I don't want to know and nor should she tell us) and she clearly doesn't (and can't) know why other Londoners (all we know is that there is more than one) have attempted to end their lives either. It hardly seems surprising, though, that in a city the size of London that a certain number of people would try to end their lives each day. What would be surprising, though, is if they were doing it (as is strongly implied by Penny's article) because of the Comprehensive Spending Review. In fact, that would be fucking staggering - particularly if they were trying to commit said act over Labour's failure to counter the CSR to Penny's liking.

Given we don't know the motives of those who attempted to end their lives on that evening, I d0 have to say that it is pretty offensive - and an example of rather odious cheap political point scoring - for Penny to link those personal, troubled acts with the particular partisan argument she wishes to make. It is the sort of thing you see The Daily Mail doing all the time (albeit not normally from a leftist perspective) and, as most normal people know, aping that hate rag is not the way for any journalist to go.

But I don't think that Penny is stupid, even given the crass and offensive paragraph reproduced above. She can write well, knows how to frame an article, get the reader bought in to what she's saying and how to structure an argument (no matter how easily the logic of said argument can be refuted). She isn't dumb. Her big problem, rather, is that she is almost hopelessly naive. She is a living embodiment of the Entitlement Culture, and she lives in this strange bubble where the whole country should conform to her own, statist outlook on life. She's a idealist through and through. Don't get me wrong, I'm an idealist too - but it is mixed with both pragmatism and a healthy dose of cynicism. I know governments and political parties will do things of which I do not approve - however, I don't then link my disappointment in them to the attempted suicides of people I've never met.

It's tempting to round this post off with a terse phrase like "grow up", but I don't think that is what Penny actually needs to do. She needs to get a grip on reality, and the nasty world that is politics. The world isn't suddenly going to become compliant with what she wants and feels she is entitled to. Practical reality will always constrain what she demands. And in the case of spending cuts the practical reality is starkly simple - there's no money left, and all the parties (including Labour, deep down) know that cuts have to be made if the state is going to stay afloat.