Carnival Of The Polly-Kicking again

I have of late, though wherefore I know not, lost all my opportunities to fisk the egregious and irritating Polly Toynbee, whose column today carries the usual coronary-inducing melange of bigotry, contradiction, jealousy and plain stupidity. Luckily, the poor, little Greek boy has had no such constraints and rips her into tiny little pieces—in a tone of furious reasonableness—and then kicks her in the cunt for good measure.

With the Swedish voters having chucked out her beloved Social Democrats, and the vultures already stripping the last morsels of rotting flesh from the Blair presidency, Polly is having to draw up a whole new playbook from scratch. She is in what football managers call a "transitional period"; messy, disjointed and casting about for new formations and new ideas. So, like an embattled boss falling back on the age-old tactic of pumping long balls up the park, Polly returns to what she knows best; bashing the middle classes. Except this time, it's the "hysteria" over the surveillance society that is her target. And in doing so, she employs all the rhetorical brilliance that has made her one of Britain's most respected opinion-formers typically lazy argumentative style, and slapdash approach to the facts, that have made her a figure of fun for all right-thinking people.

Go and read the whole meticulous and painfully cutting dissection; it's one of the finest posts ever written.

Meanwhile, Timmy has a much briefer poke at her pie.

Those nasty private sector people already have access to too much information about us. But the State can obviously be trusted with vastly more about us.

The State more trustworthy than companies? Not quite the lesson I would take from the 20th century, no.

Quite true.

Naturally, Factchecking Pollyanna takes on Polly's more idiotic statements; a valuable resource as always.

Social mobility has come to a halt, crushed by this new era of mega-greed.

Social mobility has come to a halt? Even the much reported upon paper by Blanden, Gregg and Machin, called "Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America" (headlines included: 'UK low in social mobility league, says charity' in the Guardian) showed that for men born in the 1970's, if their father's income was in the bottom quartile, they stood a 37% chance of also having income in the bottom quartile (see table 1 in their paper; pdf link here).

Now, for complete social mobility, that could be 25%, but to say that you have a better than 3 in 5 chance of escaping bottom-quartile incomes is not social mobility "come to a halt".

There are, inevitably, other points of ignorance, but since social mobility is one of Polly's bugbears it is good to have a reference showing here bigoted and wrong.

Still, reviewing all of this stuff has reminded your humble Devil of exactly how awful Polly is and how she really deserves to be savagely kicked to death. But since he is delaying the return to Edinburgh by another day, your humble Devil (who has stuff to do today) will be girding up his loins to take on Polly's Friday contribution instead…