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Tom Paine Festival -
Polly Toynbee talk
To celebrate the Tom Paine Festival the Tom Paine Project
have arranged a series of lunchtime lectures around the theme
of ‘liberty’ by influential thinkers of our time.
First up is Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist and voice
of the small ‘l’ liberal left in the UK, who is
giving a lecture with the provocative title ‘Why we
need less liberty and more equality.’ “I’m
not against liberty,” says Toynbee, “but it annoys
me that so many people spend so much time complaining over
issues like ID cards which are minor infringements of our
liberty. Meanwhile gross inequalities in our society are getting
worse and worse: there is soaraway poverty at the bottom and
soaraway greed at the top. The liberty of the poor is fantastically
more curtailed by their poverty than it would be by the introduction
of an ID card. Meanwhile there is disproportionate discord
about that issue by people who should be putting their attention
to more relevant issues. There is something a more than a
little decadent about such class blindness.”
“The gap between the bottom and the middle and the top
are growing bigger and bigger,” she continues. The government
have very little chance of achieving the targets they have
set on child poverty. Rawls said that he didn’t think
much of liberty if all it meant was freedom for the rich to
dine at the Ritz. The liberty of the rich to earn as much
as they want isn’t a liberty.” AL |
