Looking for a rainbow

For the second time in four years, those spoilsports at UNICEF have published a report suggesting that children in the UK are among the unhappiest in the developed world. (BBC story on the report can be found here). According to UNICEF, British parents are so busy trying to make money that they have no time to spend with their kids. To make up for that, they ply them with toys and gadgets to keep them quiet. The report makes unflattering comparisons between the way children are raised in the UK and the way things are done in Sweden and Spain.

Rather surprisingly, The Times (behind the paywall) takes editorial exception to this. It chides UNICEF on the illogical grounds that at least children are not being sent down the mines any more, which is nothing whatever to so with the point that UNICEF is trying to make. The agency's criticisms are notionally about children -- that is, after all, its remit -- but are really an indictment of the way that British society, and British capitalism, have evolved over the span of about a generation or so.

Think about it this way. According to UNICEF, large numbers of parents in the UK are much more interested in their careers than in their children. While they're out pursuing wealth and promotion, the kids are acquiring their moral codes from one another, or worse, from those nice folks you meet in "Grand Theft Auto". It makes the summer's rioting and looting just a bit easier to understand.

How did the UK get this way, and in particular, how did it get out of step with other wealthy countries? Who better to help us figure this out than the lugubrious Middlesbrough bluesman, Chris Rea? In 1989 Chris released an album called "The Road to Hell". (He promoted the album, with minimal success, all across the United States. When he appeared on the David Letterman late night show, Letterman memorably held up the album cover and said with a grimace, "I think this is his Christmas album".)

Anyway, the album is an odd mixture of paeans to America (songs like "Texas" and "Daytona") and thoroughly mournful ditties about the state of the UK after a decade of Thatcherism. In the title song, for example, Chris is driving in search of work when he has a vision of his late mother:

"I said Mama, I've come to the valley of the rich, myself to sell".
She said "Son, this is the road to hell".

And in "Looking for a rainbow", another song about people having to uproot themselves and go in search of wealth, he sings:

"Yeah we're Maggie's little children, and we're looking for Maggie's farm".

Maggie left the political scene many years ago, but the atavistic impulses she unleashed -- greed, selfishness -- haunt us still. If you don't want to take UNICEF's word for it, or Chris Rea's, or mine, there's always St Paul's First Letter to Timothy: "Radix malorum est cupiditas" -- "the love of money is the root of all evil". Or you could just ask a kid near you.