Polly-minded Twaddle

“[W]hy is the gap between high and low pay so wide and why do we value essential work so poorly?” [1] asks the highly paid and unessential Polly Toynbee. It might well be asked: Why does Ms Toynbee not value her local street-cleaner with an annual donation of nine-tenths of her own large income? Why not?—Because Polly Toynbee is a demagogic blatherer, that’s why!

.....Boldly, however, Ms Toynbee is keen to insinuate hypocrisy on the part of Mr Rupert Murdoch when she tells us that he “can float his personal fortune of £3.9bn in Bermuda, avoiding taxes while his newspapers pontificate about welfare scroungers”, but thereby she evinces only the fundaments of Polly-mindedness: sophistry and wilful stupidity on behalf of the State. For it is evident that while a person such as Mr Murdoch is trying to save his own money from State-kleptomania, those persons on welfare-handouts are taking someone else’s—a different matter entirely.

.....Ms Toynbee can expect to get away with this sort of thing because she can safely assume that the State has crept into the heads of most of her readers, and trampled their minds to simple mush.

.....In his day, Søren Kierkegaard too was much vexed by the envy-stoking and self-regarding demagogy of journalists, and he had this to say on the matter:

[I]f there is any suggestion of shooting people down, then let it be the journalists for the way in which they have used and profited by the simple classes. God knows I am not bloodthirsty . . . but nevertheless, I should be ready to take the responsibility upon me, in God’s name, of giving the order to fire if I could first of all make absolutely and conscientiously sure that there was not a single man standing in front of the rifles, not a single creature, who was not—a journalist. That is said of the class as a whole. [2]

I think this thorough-going measure a little too harsh, however; a couple of salient examples from The Guardian should suffice.

[1] Polly Toynbee, “You are now the pay tsar: speak out and embarrass cowardly politicians” (An Open Letter to Paul Myners), The Guardian, 27th January 2006

[2] Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, Tr. & Ed. A. Dru, (London: Fontana Books, 1958), journal for 1849, pp.163-4.