Polly's just found out that most of us don't care
Polly Toynbee is outraged by her latest discovery - the British people aren't up to having her guidance. We're just not good enough for her - no doubt the calls for another people will be along soon enough.
The more precise complaints are about big business. Pay for CEOs is too high, according to Our Poll, tax dodging too high and all that. Labour has excellent policies on these matters, so she says, the Tories don't. And yet, and yet, we don't vote for Labour and their policies?
The answer being, as she says:
Good, say I! Class war! riposted the Mail. But when Trickett averred, “People have had enough of the elite pinching wealth from the pockets of working people,” the trouble is that they haven’t really, or not enough of them.
Truly we are not worthy of such a visionary.
For what is happening here is that we are in fact a democracy. Not a system where what happens is determined by the enlightened in the elite. Instead, we hoi polloi have our say about what is important to us. And the basic point is that we just don't care about these things. Or don't care enough to live up to Polly's vision of the Good Society.
But then that is the point of our being a democracy, isn't it? That we don't have visions of the Good Society imposed upon us but get to choose for ourselves?
No wonder she's disappointed in us.