Read Online Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini - Free Book Online Page A

empirical reason for thinking there is something in the idea of displacement is that we can recognise when it is genuinely going on. Suggest to someone who really is focusing on work in order to avoid domestic problems that this is the case and, whether they admit it or not, they will probably be stung by the suggestion.
    Displacement complaints are often the result not so much of denial as of following the path of least resistance. Consider the case of school dinners in England and Wales. The issue became a metaphorical hot potato after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made a television programme in which he revealed that most children were eating not much more than literal, fried ones. A generation was being raised on shaped and coated mechanically recovered animal matter with chips.
    Oliver’s exposé was genuinely shaming, but the reaction to it from a large part of the middle-class public was so strong that the suspicion was that the issue had become a lightning rod for something. Or perhaps some things: lightning struck more than once on this occasion.
    The least edifying bolt came from a sector of the public which was basically disgusted by the working class. To put it crudely, many viewers found themselves thinking, ‘No wonder they grow up to be fat, lazy, unemployed hooligans when they’re raised on non-organic filth.’ This claim may seem far-fetched, but in my experience a visceral abhorrence of the proletariat is remarkably common among the English middle classes. They happily use words like ‘oiks’ and ‘chavs’ to describe the poor, white working class, even though they would never dream of saying ‘nigger’ or ‘coon’.
    However, even these people know very well that it is not acceptable to despise someone on the basis of their social class or (lack of) education, and this distaste is something they don’t merely try to disguise but wish they didn’t actually feel. Hence if an opportunity arises to direct all that disgust, not at the poor little urchins themselves but at something else, why not take it?
    Jamie Oliver’s campaign provided just that outlet. All that disdain for the proletariat could be displaced on to schooldinners, which could shoulder the majority of the blame for everything that is wrong with working-class life. Let them eat organic lemon polenta cake, and in the absence of chemical additives they will become less unruly, better able to concentrate, slimmer, more cultured creatures. The dividend is double: not only is the complainant absolved from any prejudice against the working people, but a socially unacceptable hatred is given an apparently moral outlet.
    The furore was also the focus for a second displacement, almost a mirror image of the first. Here the displaced complaint was not against the horribleness of the working class but against the injustice of their plight. Despite over sixty years of the welfare state, with universal healthcare and education, life chances remain stubbornly dictated by accidents of birth.
    Consider, for example, the depressing headings of a PowerPoint presentation to the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit on life chances and social mobility by Stephen Aldridge, now its director: ‘Those at the top and bottom of the income distribution are less likely to move between income groups than those in the middle’; ‘People in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations are at much higher risk of unemployment than those in professional and managerial occupations;’ ‘Deprivation tends to be concentrated in certain geographical areas’; ‘The infant mortality rate and the incidence of childhood mental illness are higher in unskilled and lower-income households’; ‘There has been no narrowing of differences in life-expectancy by social class over the past thirty years’; ‘Households on lower incomes are more likely to be victims of crime – and less able to protect their property from theft.’ The litany goes on. What is shocking is that such