A beautiful essay in the London Review of Books traces the twists and turns of the Robin Hood story over time, to the era of austerity, where "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor" takes on a completely different complexion.
The Robin Hood of the austerity age defends "employed people with property" from the "conceptual rich" — poor people who are said to be living fat on the welfare state, living in homes that the shrinking middle class can't afford, receiving benefits payments while the imperiled middle class work ever-longer hours.
The new Robin Hood is a hereditary millionaire like David Cameron or Donald Trump, who promises to defend the "hard working people" from the "unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats" — all the while refusing to ask how it is that the lives of the people with jobs have become so hard that the lives of people on benefits look good by comparison.
So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously labelled 'poor', who are accused of living in big houses, wallowing in luxury and not needing to work, while those previously considered rich are redesignated as the ones who work terribly hard for fair reward or less, forced to support this new category of poor-who-are-considered-rich. In this version the sheriff of Nottingham runs a ruthless realm of plunder and political correctness, ransacking the homesteads of honest peasants for money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats.
In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He's Jeremy Clarkson. He's Nigel Farage. He's Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He's by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He's in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with 11 children, living in a luxury house on the public purse. He's sabotaging the sheriff of Nottingham's wicked tax-gathering devices – speed cameras and parking meters. He's on talk radio, denouncing inheritance tax. He's winning elections.
Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity
[James Meek/London Review of Books]
(via Naked Capitalism)
