Polly Toynbee - the gift that keeps on giving

My techno-journalist son often reminds me that journopukes who make a living as commentators have to fill a certain number of column inches per week to pay their mortgages and so forth, therefore it is not surprising that so much of what they write is banal, boiler-plate sludge.

To which I invariably reply that the process prostitutes the gifts of literacy and freedom of expression, and that most commentators might as well set up a programme akin to the Postmodernism Generator (see the notes at the bottom of whatever page it generates for you) with the facility to feed in a dozen or so variables, and hey-presto a suitably predictable article will appear. As Lord Vetinari put it in Terry Pratchett's The Truth:

People like to be told what they already know. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds - telling people that what they think they already know is true.

The perfunctory column in the New Statesman by John Pilger, a transplanted Aussie who made big waves in Brit "progressive" circles once upon a time, is so completely predictable that one has to wonder whether he has developed some "good enough for stupid Brit lefties" text generating programme.

Polly Toynbee has been conservatively described by Boris Johnson as the incarnation of "all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain" and as "the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism".

Yet, despite all her decades of churning out much the same stuff, she still makes an effort to be relevant. Thus her Guardian article today "Tax collection. Now there's a moral crusade for the Tories".

Umm - why was it not for the Labour regime she supported so slavishly, even though "until its last year Labour turned a blind eye to tax havens and other dodges"? A last year, be it noted, during which she and the Guardian edged away from the Titanic of the NuLabour project with mad Captain Brown at the wheel.

But closer examination reveals the same old tropes. Here's a representative paragraph:

The recent cut in teenage pregnancy prevention programmes will add to future spending. [1] Cuts in early mental health treatment will lead to more florid cases arriving in hospital. [2] Cutting home care for the frail will send more into costly care homes. [3] The arts can prove how every £1 the Arts Council spends generates another £2. [4] Everywhere you turn, there are compelling arguments for upfront investment to save money later. [5] But the Treasury is implacable, fingers in ears, sceptical about future savings that have a habit of vanishing into their departments. [6] Myopia is part of Treasury DNA, pessimism about putative paybacks hardwired into its circuit board – now, more than ever. [7]

1. Britain has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the developed world. The programmes in question have failed to reduce it, therefore any sane human being would agree that attention should shift to the incentives that make pregnancy an attractive option to the more dull-witted British teenagers. 
2. What's a "florid" case of mental illness? And, anyway, the mentally ill no longer go to hospitals - the "progressives" closed them, remember? They end up in jail, which is even more expensive.
3. That is a contemptible over-simplification of an extremely complex and hellishly expensive problem that is growing larger every day thanks to the rapidly rising proportion of elderly people. 
4. I can demonstrate that every £1 taken from someone else and given to me generates another £2, but some might think me not the best accountant for my own case.
5. Oh yeah - Labour "investment" versus Tory "cuts". Seems to me we had an election where that argument failed to convince anyone who was not a beneficiary of those "investments".
6. You mean the departments that are supposed to administer those "investments" for the greater good of the general population? 
7. D'you suppose that's because the idea that government could indefinitely mortgage the future to pay for current spending has finally hit the buffers of financial reality?