I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day.
Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter.
Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can’t really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers.
The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:
The IPL has become a bit of a welfare state for them.
You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are “wrong”. After all, if that’s the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it?
Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn’t have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions.
The argument that state welfare corrupts – physically, mentally and morally – is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven’t been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don’t forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants.
And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think.
Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle’s casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences.
I love how Brian finds an excuse to write about this sport and drive non-fans nuts. A bit of a stretch this time, methinks!
I wasn’t trying to be snarky just then, by the way. Interesting comment. The welfare state-is-causing-bad-things meme is spreading.
I must disagree, Jonathan. I am not a cricket fan. Cricket for me is, like gardening, something that I am very happy that other people find pleasure in doing, something, even, that has a vague aura of if not virtue then at least agreeableness about it, and something that has pretty results that I like to see around. Colourful flowerbeds and cricket on our village green – how lovely. Just don’t ask me to explain the workings of either.
Yet I get exactly what Brian means. Yes, yes, that change in attitude is happening, and how else would it show up other than in such snippets in a conversation where people are striving to fill the time and so end up saying any damn thing that comes into their heads, the point being it HAS come into their heads.
What I actually came here to comment on was this:
So do I think. I think further that, while one can conceive of the level of mass immigration being the same in a scenario with no state welfare to speak of, one cannot conceive of the motivations of the immigrants being the same.
It is sad to compare the rioting descendants of earlier immigrants with their hardworking grandparents, who came here before welfare had changed the nature of the ‘pull’ bringing many immigrants to Britain.
I hadn’t seen your second comment when I wrote mine, Jonathan.
That Britain has suffered great cultural corruption over the last 60 years is obvious. Some of it is certainly due to the pernicious effects of the welfare state, but much is not.
A few years ago, British football supporters (or, as an American like me would write, soccer fans) were infamous for violent thuggery. But only a few of the thugs were of welfare-class origins. Most were emplioyed working-class or middle-class. They were thugs by choice – because their moral culture was rotten.
Throughout the 20th century, “progressive”, “libieral”, or “left” activists campaigned for “sexual liberation”. This began as a rebellion against traditional repression and prudery, but it has transformed into acceptance, even enthusiasm for promiscuity, pornography, “transgressive sexuality”. Expecting the police to stop homosexuals from copulating in public toilets or behind the bushes in parks is “homophobic”. Bastardy has become so commonplace as to go unremarked. The welfare system has facilitated some of this, but the main root is the intellectuals, often esconced in unversities, pontificating against the oppression of traditional family structure and “heteronormativity”.
Such academic froth has little direct effect on the general public, but it affects the mass culture through the creators of film and television, through the attitudes of schoolteachers (all university-trained).
Drugs contribute too. Again, the welfare state facilitated, but the fashion for dope emanated from from the “social left”. Remeber “turn on, tune in, drop out”?
Let us not forget the sustained campaign against traditional standards of dress, language, and decorum.
How does all this relate to the recent riots? And immigration?
I am halfway round the world, so all this is based on reports, some of them filtered through the blogosphere – though the “official” reports also seem to be filtered in other ways. However…
AIUI, the initial wave of rioters were young black males of West Indian background, largely from fatherless welfare-supported households. Their riotousness had three roots: a background culture prone (in comparison to British culture) to violence and irresponsibility; the welfare system which enabled irresponsibility; and the “kultursmog” from the Left which glorifies irresponsibility and criminal violence “against the System”. Immigration and welfare thus had a lot to do with it.
But this initial wave was joined by thousands of white youths, many from prosperous middle-class households, many full of that “kultursmog”, who went out to smash and loot because they saw they could get away with it.
Which is to say that neither immigration nor welfare was involved for them.
Also, AFAICT, there was little participation in these riots by south Asian Moslem youths, who are often part of other problems. (If I am wrong on this, please correct me. I don’t expect any accurate information on this from “established” news sources.) Indeed, one of the better-known incidents of the riots was the spontaneous resistance of Turkish and Kurdish immigrant shopkeepers.
(incidentally, I mentioned the relative tendencies of British and West Indian black cultures to violence and irresponsibility. It is perhaps worth noting that in the U.S., blacks of West Indian background are in general better educated, more prosperous, and less criminal then blacks of mainland American background…)