The BBC headed an article this morning, ‘Problem families scheme working’. It’s a broadly interpretable word is working. You can have a Working Party, for instance, which can nearly always be identified as utterly dysfunctional after just a few minutes in its presence. Every other Council in the UK has employed an identity consultant to write a line for them that begins ‘Working for…’, but you know perfectly well they’re working against most citizens. ‘Working for a living’ can mean anything from creating 10,000 new useful jobs a year to sitting in an office trying to look busy whenever the Boss walks past.
But nowhere is the word working more Orwellian than when a political spin doctor makes an announcement to the media. Thus the BBC’s story began, ‘The government said that, as of December 2012, local authorities had identified some 62,000 of the most problematic families and were already helping more than 23,000 of them.’ It just didn’t tell us how they were being helped. Or indeed if the help was ‘working’. And how they’d measure effectiveness.
But there was reassurance from the world’s widest boy, Eric Pickles (above Left): ”The Troubled Families programme is on track, changing families for the better and reducing their impact on the communities around them,” asserted the Local Government Secretary. It transpires that in this context, ‘making contact with problem families’ is the rough translation of On Track. Changing Families for the Better is a little previous, and Reducing their Social Impact is meaningless in the absence of any evidence.
Perhaps faced with a lot of staring, unmoved faces at the press conference, Eric added, “This programme is getting to grips with some of the hardest-to-help families in the country and, in doing so, will help bring down the costs they incur to the taxpayer and the damage they do to communities.”
Note how the politician switches tenses there, after Getting to Grips (trans: Carrying out Actions) to the will help bring down costs claim. Purely Eric’s opinion, of course. Not based on, well, anything actually.
I tell a lie: the BBC notes that Payments have been made to councils for turning around the lives of 1,675 families. Right, so not 62,000 of them. And not 23,000 of them either. And it has already cost money. And we have no results. And the criteria are a mystery. So that’s what the article’s about: something is happening on the Problem Families issue, nothing clear as yet.
Very little is as it seems or sounds any more, but the speed with which innocence can become guilt is rapidly turning into a key feature of criminality. Speed of course was the thing that caused Chris Huhne to pervert Justice, and presumably lust was what caused ‘Sex shame Cardinal Keith O’Brien’ to try and pervert the sexuality of three of his priests. He was entirely innocent of all charges until the weekend, but then he wasn’t.
In the same vein, David Cameron has been vowing them in the media over the last four days. He’s been out there a-vowin’ an’ a-pledgin’ that there will be No lurch to the Right in the Conservative Party following last week’s Eastleigh pasting. Except that several papers lead this morning with ‘Tories vow: we’ll scrap human rights act’, Foreign Secretary William Hague is calling for an end to “benefit tourism”, and the word is that George Osborne may bow to pressure from Conservative MPs to cut taxes in this week’s Budget. I don’t have a problem with any of these policies if properly enacted, but I do have an issue with them demonstrating a lurch to the Left. All these stories have appeared before; the reason they’re being run up the flaky-paint flagpole now is, I would’ve thought, obvious: there will be lurching in a direction up to but not including Forwards or Leftwards.
But at least some things seem never to change. It seems that, in research, one in seven women has admitted binning their Significant Other’s old clothes without telling him. Is this significant? Well at least it’s an improvement on cutting all the clothes up, but in terms of Otherly Significant behaviour, probably not: with my first wife, I used to stuff a note in jacket top-pockets saying “I am opposed to obligatory euthanasia”. The fascinating new twist in the tale, however, is that these same purging girlies themselves have 16 items they never wear. Nurr-nurr-ne-nurr-nur.
I was until recently a Significant Other, but now I’ve reverted to insignificance. I was up and running this morning, and vowing to get grips with this issue, to ensure a certainty of working to stay on track towards a rekindling of significance with and to others. I shall be working hand in hand with persons of a female gender in this regard, and already a plan has been formulated to work out more and maintain the weight loss. ‘Significant Other scheme working,’ says Slog.
Last night at The Slog: Why DIY and ingenuity are strangers to each other
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