Gary Johns, and beadles of the world unite, it's time to bring back the workhouse ...

(Above: a noble workhouse in Manchester, by name of Crumpsall. For more on Crumpsall, go here).

As usual, the right wing commentariat - I think we can include Gary Johns in that category as he jumped the shark and nuked the Labor fridge long ago - lack vision.

Johns in Left and right converge on welfare reform advocates expanding compulsory income management around the land. No need for useless wastrels and dole bludgers to spend their cash on alcohol, tobacco or gambling products. No, the government should interfere to make sure everyone stays suitably Methodist and on the straight and narrow:

Sure, there were complaints. One client said: "I lost my kids and my house and I'd just got out of prison and I didn't want my money locked up any more." Well, in fact that is taxpayers' money.

Yes, damn you ex-convict chappie, how dare you want to assert control over your life, when the government hands out the cash, and in the same breath urges you to take control of your life ...

... and in the very next breath, takes control of your cash and your life, so setting up a wonderful virtuous circle of control and dependency.

Cheeky ex-convict.

But surely this doesn't go far enough.

Surely it's time to bring back the workhouse (or the poorhouse, call it what you will).

Over the years, the workhouse has been given a severe caning, because of the work of wretches like Jack London, scribbling furiously in The People of the Abyss, about suffering in the East End:

Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity. He has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain. I dare to assert that Ellen Hughes Hunt, defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years' service in the world has earned, with nothing but the horrors of the workhouse before her, was very rational and level-headed when she elected to jump into the canal. And I dare to assert, further, that the jury had done a wiser thing to bring in a verdict charging society with temporary insanity for allowing Ellen Hughes Hunt to be defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years' service in the world had earned.

Temporary insanity! Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of language, under which people with meat in their bellies and whole shirts on their backs shelter themselves, and evade the responsibility of their brothers and sisters, empty of belly and without whole shirts on their backs.(here).

Oh come on Jack, stop being so sentimental, the poor are poor because they're hopeless wastrels, vagrants and ding bats. They need to shape up, or they can ship out, and if they can't shape up, then it's up to socialistic interfering governments to shape them up instead. Or ship them out. Whatever ...

Surely with the rising cost of welfare, and the spendthrift ways of the indigent, hopeless and deranged (poor people are mostly deranged, I'm told), it's time for Australia to introduce a variant on that fine Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Soon enough we'll have dozens of workhouses - the British managed 350 fine institutions by 1839 - and then it went pear shaped because of sentimentalists and do gooders, and the next thing you know these interfering busy bodies came up with the notion of the welfare state, and since then western civilisation has been on the path to utter ruination (more here). Yes, poor people sitting around, indulging in huge feasts and easy living, and all at the taxpayers' expense.

Why I think I'd rather be a dole-bludging black in the outback rather than a mining squillionaire, so rich and wonderful is life on the dole.

Personally I blame Charles Dickens, with his totally erroneous portrait of the caring treatment on offer in workhouses in the nineteenth century. Surely Oliver Twist must be one of the worst examples of the propaganda novel, as if Dickens had some kind of satirical agenda. But consider this - he might have worked in a blacking factory, but the experience turned him into a world famous novelist.

You see! Treating the poor with cruelty or even indifference, or putting them into the hands of indolent bureaucrats is a sure fire way to get them on the move, and amuse the world by telling satirical anecdotes:

Every body knows the story of another experimental philosopher, who had a great theory abut a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he got his won horse down to a straw a day, and would most unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal upon nothing all, if he hadn't died, just four-and twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air.

Dickens of course made great fun of the hapless Bumble the beadle, but he understood the truth of the matter:

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered--the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work.

Shocking, for even then the poor were malfeasants, slurping away on the public teat, having a great time, enjoying the splendours and sumptuous fun to be had in a workhouse.

What to do?

'Oho!' said the board, looking very knowing; 'we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all, in no time.' So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays.

Yes, yes, no time for the indolent bludgers to waste precious cash on matters of personal pleasure. And at the same time, why not regulate other aspects of their lives, to get them on the move:

They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people. (and you can of course get Oliver Twist from Project Gutenberg).

A frightened, tortured and hapless underclass is a good class. Look at how well it works in the United States.

What's most pleasing? Why it's the way libertarians and right wingers take pleasure in picking the wings off flies and tormenting the most vulnerable and urging the government to interfere in every way in their lives, seeming to forget in the same breath their endless columns urging that government should get out of our lives.

Johns handles this contradiction most adroitly. First of all he quotes Amy Wax so and thus:

Wax claims: "The government cannot make people watch less television, talk to their children or read more books. It cannot ordain domestic order, harmony, tranquillity, stability or other conditions conducive to academic success and the development of sound character. Nor can it determine how families structure their interactions and routines or how family resources - including time and money - are expended. Large-scale programs are especially ineffective in changing attitudes and values toward learning, work and marriage."

But Johns the beadle, or perhaps the Gradgrind of modern times, promptly ignores such deviant thoughts. Yep, Skinner is just a bell ringer when it comes to Johns' grand plans for behavioural modification.

There are dangers in treating people as if they cannot care for themselves, but there are dangers in allowing people to spend money on grog, smokes and gambling. Cards may be traded, a black market may arise, but the object is clear: to define what is, and what is not, acceptable behaviour. If not for the immediate recipient, but for those around them and for the children, income management deserves a trial.

Intervening in this generation to have some chance of saving the next is the only means of breaking the cycle of poverty.

Yes in exactly the way the poorhouses of England broke the cycle of poverty in the nineteenth century, and we've been free of poverty ever since, and we're all on the straight and narrow.

I only have one problem with Johns' proposal. The notion that we should all give up grog, smokes, drugs, and gambling, to show the poor how it's done.

I mean, come on, it's my money, and I can piss it against the wall how I like. It's only the poor people who should be made to pay for their poverty and their woeful behaviour. Punish them, punish them daily ...

I keed, I keed. Johns didn't offer to give up a fine burgundy, blessed as such wines are with a little forwardness, fruitiness and forward presumption. No, no, it's only because the poor are inclined to indulge in chateau cardboard that they need to be punished.

That's the way it should be if you put your hand out for a little more gruel - expect it to be sharply caned with six of the best for your outrageous presumption and imposition.

Christian charity of a right wing kind? How oxymoronic are you?

Bring back the poor houses, and remember the best way forward is to stop the poor breeding.

No more sex for them - pornography only gets them interested - and so we must insist in best workhouse style that men and women be separated, families broken up, and children sent off to work in factories so at last we can compete with Chinese labour costs.

It's sad, but it's the only way to break the cycle of poverty ...

Why just as Bob Hawke once famously promised, as soon as all this is enacted, no child in this country will live in poverty ...

Oh was that by 1990? Never mind, let's just keep punishing the poor because ... well, because it's fun ...

(Below: strict segregation, and watch that demand for pornography decline).