The truth was just as hard to find in the old days as it is now

The Guardian insists that we need truth now more than ever, at a time when we are led to believe that truth has been devalued wholesale. ‘Truth’, what is true, they say, is being destroyed; and that leads to a weakening and potential collapse of our civilisation. 

I am not so sure that there was much truth being spread about in my childhood slums, or in the political world of the late 1940s and the 1950s. That is, if truth means honesty. Certainly the people who employed my parents and their fellow slum dwellers would have been lying about, or should we say hiding, what they paid, which meant you had to live in the cheapest and therefore poorest housing. You couldn’t live a decent and regular life on those kind of wages; and therefore cheap food, cheap rooms, and a cheapened life went with the economy that employed slum dwellers. 

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I don’t know if there would have been much truth around in Great Britain, as it was then called, in relation to its empire, or Commonwealth. An empire presented as a great civilising force yet intent on giving colonial profits to white British people and their companies. Many stockholders would have profited from the robbery of lives that went hand-in-hand with profit seeking. 

The British middle classes and their social betters who ran the show needed lying and cheating and denying, needed to have euphemisms at the ready to explain the paternalistic relationship they had with the working classes they exploited. 

In education about history it was not feasible to describe the founders of modern capitalism as murderers of children and older workers who were consumed in the production of their products. It was just a necessary risk, and if the workers didn’t like it they could always go somewhere else, ran the argument. 

One of the biggest landlords around Paddington and Notting Hill when I was a child was the Church of England. Notoriously they owned many of the brothels around Paddington station, making money from the sex trade to provide roses and other flowers for religious services to the politely denying. Religion has always been good at declaring that we help the weak and the poor with generous handouts but has never questioned the mockery of suffering and pain that hid under the surface of this apparently Christian nation.  

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Politicians could always claim that they were doing everything within their power to get rid of the demeaning world of being working class. Surely the welfare state was revolutionary and would sweep away that exploitative world of need. Through health, work, housing and education it would create a goodly world for all. 

Alas it didn’t work that way. People were stuck in poverty on a grander scale than ever.  

So I never saw any ‘true’ truth in the world of my childhood and teenage years. The truth being the reality that many people live in, in order that some can do better than others. 

But I don’t want to be too tough on those who, presumably innocently, got on with their comfortable lives while the many buttressed that comfort. In fact I am only bringing it up because I think there are too many people suggesting that we have suddenly come into a more ‘truthless’ time, when in fact the old politenesses of hiding reality has simply been kicked around and devalued by a kind of King Kong of politics called Trump. Who in a whirligig of action wants to get what he sees as justice, the truth, for US taxpayers, many of them from the lowest rung of the economic and social ladder. The very people who in the flyover states gave Trump an astonishing mandate. 

When Obama became president he filled his offices with the crème de la crème of the Ivy League universities. He brought those that were comfortable into power. He did not quell the power of Wall Street to stop the exportation of American jobs and local prosperity disappearing in the interests of profits. 

Now the world is suffering, and many of them the poorest, as King Kong tries to dial back the destruction of America’s prosperity on the altar of Chinese growth. He’s serious and will surely make many dents in the world’s existing financial and manufacturing structures. 

But if we are going to describe our current period as the time when the truth got lost in social media, denials, lies and cheating, we have to face up to the fact that we have had centuries of truth’s absence from the world. Buried in hypocrisy, slavery and murder at work, in the name of prosperity for some. 

Yes, we need truth now more than ever, but let’s not deny that actually the truth would be a new addition to the world. We need truth around the environment, around who’s making big bucks out of government contracts, where a good deal is not had by the taxpayer.  

We need truth around so many things, but mostly around our inability to get the kind of leaders who will lead us to the truth. Who will expose the hidden truths and allow us to rise above the lies that pass for truths in our everyday lives. A tough job for all of us. And the US president is reminding us that, since we spent too long without the truth, we obviously didn’t value it.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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