THE term we use today is Political Correctness but there is an older and more accurate term intolerance. We have been redefining intolerance in recent years, and appointing new priests and new bishops to write its theology and enforce its rules.
The new intolerance is not Catholic, but is strictly secular, and is as opposed to anybody asking questions which challenge its dogmas as the hierarchy of old. The guardians of this new intolerance would call themselves liberal only their response to questions which challenge their vital principles is liberal in the extreme.
Of course, they cannot ban questions they do not like but they can label the attitude, the motives and intellectual bases of those who ask the questions in such a way as to make it a brave person even to contemplate asking such questions. The language of the morally superior, right on social democrat is used to categorise those who ask about the Emperor's clothes and woe betide anybody who falls foul of that linguistic crozier.
Only a political masochist wants to be called a reactionary few people in Ireland relish being called a Thatcherite the term "monetarist" is so vaguely understood, and so imbued with implicit villainy, that it too stands as a mighty weapon of the intolerant social democrat. Those are the more sophisticated bully words which will induce a reflex defensive pose. There are the more obviously crude terms, like "bourgeois and "smug", and "fat cat", about people who challenge central assumptions.
Known scandal So people didn't ask uncomfortable questions about the scandal that virtually anybody who has ever employed a builder has known about for years. We have, by indolence and political cowardice, allowed the black economy to grow to the point where it is probably larger than our milk industry. But even to hint that huge numbers of people were doing the double was to invite the right on belts of the super cool social democratic crozier one was instantly condemned for being Thatcherite, reactionary, anti working class, bourgeois, smug, monetarist even though the observation is one which 10 minutes' conversation with anyone who runs a corner shop or a small building firm will confirm is the absolute truth.
Nobody says the majority of people claiming they are working but it is, and has for a long time been, indisputable that tens of thousands of people claiming the dole were doing the double. Only cowardice prevented us from saying this was so the lynch mob, with its intellectually vapid but morally coercive thesaurus of epithets, kept us silent.
We all of us paid more taxes to funnel more and more money into that alternative universe, the black economy, which not merely grew fat from the social welfare it was able to extract from us, it was also able to exist at another level of felony. The people on the double not merely take money but in addition, they do not pay tax or PRSI either.
70,000 doing the double That is to say, these people are holding down jobs at the expense of the lawful unemployed and are thereby withholding the tax the lawfully employed would pay if they had those jobs. So the figures which have been bandied around in the past week about how much money the Department of Finance is losing through the black economy, are probably wildly conservative. It, as seems possible, over 70,000 people are doing the double and it could be far more then those people are also holding down at least 70,000 jobs which make no contribution to this State.
This is clearly preposterous and outrageous. What has the response been to this scandal? Virtually non existent. There were a few disapproving tuttuts, but generally, few politicians spoke out strongly, with the exception of Michael McDowell. Nobody wanted to be pilloried with the right on accusations of being ant working class, anti-poor, Thatcherite, monetarist, bourgeois.
Bernie Malone babbled about keeping a sense of balance, and urged us not to lose a sense of proportion, precisely in a way we might expect from someone who banquets in MEPland. She even thought the losses were dwarfed by white collar crime and other financial scandals. I ado hope her PAYE constituents whose incomes are being plundered to pay for the black economy remember her sentiments when it comes to voting time.
Proinsias De Rossa blamed skinflint employers, as if employers were the ones signing on and were then working though to a degree, he has a point. Many publicans only give casual work to people on the dole. Conversely, the expectations created by the dole plus means that newsagents, for example, find it extremely difficult to get lawful staff to work weekdays and late hours without having to pay them uneconomic wages.
True evil of black economy This is where the true evils of the black economy become apparent, in the expectations of the unemployed and on the actual cost of labour.
Unattractive jobs such as those which involve unsocial hours in a shop cannot be paid lawfully at the rate which the State subsidised black economy can manage. No business can pay the equivalent, and survive.
Yet who are the real victims of the black economy? They are not people like myself, with a good income nor are they the professional classes who constantly re devise tax avoidance schemes. The real victims are the honest lowly paid, who work horrible hours for low pay because, in an economy as undeveloped as ours, some jobs will always pay poorly. There is no alternative to that. It is sad, but we cannot invent antigravity laws which will lift the economy into an orbit in which every body is well paid.
Instead of facing reality, and tackling abuse, we have preferred the comfort and safety of the pious consensus which deals with unemployment solely as a matter of victim hood, which it certainly is for some. Illiberal liberalism prevented us asking if the issue was more than merely victim hood. Now we know. Next question have we the political will to do anything about it?