Money Will Ruin Everything

Southampton City Centre

"We have more or less come to believe that our culture is a support system for commerce, whereas it should be the other way round". Words of wisdom, indeed, which I wrote down as soon as I read them. That's it, isn't it, in a nutshell? "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" [1]. Pretty much everything that has gone wrong since the late 1970s is summarised in that one elegant sentence, I'd say. It's not by anyone famous, though, just something left as a comment on another photography-oriented blog (Photos and Stuff) by a guy who comments as (and may indeed be called) Robert Roaldi. But then, as any blogger will attest, the comments are often what make blogging worth the trouble.

This change in values has been particularly noticeable in higher education, and I've remarked on it numerous times in this blog. Here's a good example from 2010. Now, while there was plenty wrong with the old idea of a university as a sort of finishing school for a ruling elite – even when enlarged, post-1945, to include the top ten percent of the ability range (at least, as measured in exam-passes) – the new idea that a university is a credential factory for certifying nearly fifty percent of the population as "workplace ready" is a comparative disaster, especially when tied to commerce-oriented notions like "value for money", "market competition", and the rest of it. "Look, Vice-Chancellor, there are next to no jobs for Egyptologists, and no research grants to be had from Big Egyptology, so why the hell are we running a course in it? Especially when the postgraduate courses in Advanced PowerPoint Presentation are so desperate for more teaching space..." But the same story has been repeated across the public sector, with devastating results: theatres, libraries, museums, and galleries – not to mention fundamental public services like social work, hospitals, general practice surgeries, and the police – have all been forced to justify their existence in service to a "price of everything, value of nothing" regime.

One arena in which even the more unobservant members of the general public must surely have noticed this corruption by commerce is sport. Once upon a time in Britain, many sports teams, up to and including national level, would have comprised two distinct categories of member: "gentlemen" and "players". In other words, there were the amateurs of private means, able to live the "Corinthian" ideal – as still (sort of) embodied by the Olympics – and then there were the professionals: talented players, usually working-class men paid a wage for their services, or sometimes given "boot money" (not to be confused with Zoot Money).  No-one would want to return to that. Professionalised sport (if you're into sport, which I'm not) is doubtless a Good Thing; and no-one would want, either, to revive absurdities like the cap imposed on professional footballers' earnings until the 1960s. But: the relationship between sport and commerce is now completely out of balance, with star players earning ludicrous amounts of money simply because, at the top level, things like TV rights, sponsorship, and merchandise have been leveraged so hard that the money machine is now wedged permanently open, and cash simply cascades into the more popular sports, bringing with it the inevitable greed and corrupt inversion of values.

Consider the English Premier League in football. Could the fact that fewer than a quarter of regular Premier League players are eligible to play for England – because of the luring of the most talented players from every corner of the world by those huge salaries – possibly have anything to do with the national team's poor performance, internationally? Not to mention the all too predictable failure of that fountain of cash to trickle down below the top league, never mind down to grassroots level, where native talent must learn which end of the pitch is which. Everyone knows this is true, yet, as noted above, because culture (very broadly defined) has come to act as a support system for commerce, when it should be the other way round, all anyone can do is shrug, as if the generation of huge cash flows in a single direction was nature's way of acknowledging the essential virtue of one course of action over another. We have been sold – and bought – the idea that markets are nature at work.

But what may work for elite sport or retail is a disaster for public services. There's no money to be made in providing school dinners or probation services or cleaning hospitals, except by reducing standards and staffing and salaries to unacceptable levels, so the government strategy of outsourcing such essentials to the lowest bidder among private, profit-making concerns was bound to backfire, sooner or later. The financial collapse of all-purpose government contractors like Carillion and Interserve is therefore hardly a surprise, neither is the stripping of contracts such as the Medway Secure Training Centre (in effect a children's prison) or more recently Birmingham's Winson Green Prison from that other outsourcing giant, G4S, because of too few, too poorly-trained, and too-often ill-disciplined and abusive staff.

If there's any up-side to Brexit, it's that we have had a chance to sit back and think: what kind of country, what kind of culture, do we really want to be? The alarming thing is that the answer that seems to be emerging is: we don't have a fucking clue. Or, worse, we don't fucking care. Perhaps we've become so used to outsourcing our problem-solving to the lowest bidder, that – like those idiotic cheats who buy all their college assignments from an essay bank and still feel entitled to a First – we've never really thought about it, because we've foolishly confused ends and means. I may not be able to get a doctor's appointment this week, but at least my tax bill is really low! My job may depend on EU membership, but I've had enough of being pushed around by Brussels! I don't trust our politicians, but I want them to take back control! I don't like immigrants, but I'm never going to do any of that dirty, low-paid work, thanks very much!

Or perhaps we never did give it that much thought, anyway – apart from that one shining moment in 1945 – and, like the idle great-grandchildren of some Victorian magnate, have merely been living off the financial and cultural capital of the trust fund of Empire. Which, it seems – now that we've finally got around to reading that letter from the trustees that's been sitting unopened on the national sideboard for the past couple of decades – may actually have run out some time ago.

William Draper monument, Bristol

1. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism ("True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd"). Same source as "A little learning is a dangerous thing" and a dozen other pithy sayings that have entered the language. Thus Pope's Essay is "what oft was thought" in action. Is there a word for something which embodies the very qualities it advocates? "Popery" is certainly not it...