The travesty of liberal Christmas - from Ebenezer Scrooge to Simon Thompson

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article ... n-thompson

Despite being possibly the most popular Christmas story after Jesus's birthday, the political logic of A Christmas Carol — that poverty is not justified punishment for indolence — still escapes Britain's bosses, writes KEITH FLETT


A TALE AGAINST THE RICH: Charles Dicken's most famous work in its first edition, 1843
CHARLES DICKENS wrote A Christmas Carol at remarkable speed, and it was published on December 19 1843. It had already sold 5,000 copies before Christmas Day that year — in a decade that was known as the Hungry Forties. The similarities with modern “foodbank Britain” are striking.

In Dickens’s book, Ebenezer Scrooge runs a financial business off Cornhill in the heart of the City of London, and the author takes us to his counting house on Christmas Eve.

Scrooge is in one office and across the way is his clerk Bob Cratchit. The office is barely heated, Scrooge being frugal in most things.

Scrooge comes across people collecting for the poor and asks them why this was necessary given that workhouses existed.

The charitable collector tells Scrooge of the workhouse that “many can’t go there, and many would rather die” — to which Scrooge responds: “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge only reluctantly allows Cratchit “the whole day” off on Christmas Day, before retiring to his nearby lodgings, after dining at a City hostelry.

While A Christmas Carol was a best-seller, it was not universally acclaimed. Liberal economists, these days known as neoliberals, complained that while it was all very well making sure that the Cratchits got a Christmas dinner, there was a finite supply of turkeys and plum puddings. It sounds like a Tory Brexit Christmas.

If they got these items then someone else would not; surely it should be up to the market to determine how these things work — that was the view of liberal ideologists in the 1840s.

Dickens was telling a Christmas story, but he was also making a political point. He was attacking an economic and political system that saw a society defined by rich and poor where the wealthy rightly did better than others.

If we look at 2022 we can see any number of Scrooges at work. One example is Simon Thompson, chief executive of Royal Mail.

Thompson wants to turn Royal Mail into a parcels business, where it faces any number of competitors, and move it away from delivering our post. Nobody else does that: Royal Mail has a unique advantage in that area — and it has a legal service obligation to every British address to back it up.

Dickens never suggested that Scrooge was bad at business. Scrooge no doubt, before the visitation of the Christmas ghosts, would have argued frugality was the key to keeping his business going — keeping heating and staffing costs under tight control being central to it.

Thompson, on the other hand, shows no signs of being any good at business, but is eager to copy all the worst aspects of Scrooge.

The CWU has reported that in some cases managers are refusing to authorise pay for workers who have to take time off because they are unwell. Here we find a direct echo of the Scrooge mentality: he is annoyed that he has to pay Cratchit for a whole day — Christmas Day — when he would not be working.

His response, again familiar from the Royal Mail, is that Cratchit had better make sure he attended work early on Boxing Day, no doubt to catch up with work that should have been done the day before.

That also is an echo of Thompson’s frequent, if changing, demands that posties alter their working patterns to suit the demands and profit requirements of the moment.

The answer to the Scrooges and the Thompsons of this world is to unionise and face down their liberal market schemes.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian — follow him on Twitter @kmflett.