A most interesting thing has happened over the last twenty-five years or so. The story of Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor, has been transformed into a conservative anti-tax message, where, instead of the baddies being rich aristocrats and Norman landowners, the targets are now the modern “spongers”, the idle and ineffectual, the long- term unemployed, the immigrants arriving with their hands out for handouts. Tax, it is now proposed should be reduced so that “hard-working families and small businesses” can thrive, and benefits reduced in order to make the work-shy work. This is robbing the “freeloaders” to give to families in employment.

Nowhere in this re-writing of Robin Hood is there a place for the modern baron (read multi- millionaire) being taxed in proportion to his wealth or being prevented from hiding his money in offshore tax havens. It would be easy to close down the tax havens in the Caribbean islands, Jersey, Guernsey et al. The arrival of a hundred marines would do the trick. But that would be reverting to the medieval version of Robin as a champion of the poor.

The conservative narrative ignores the sheer complexity and variety of individual experiences among the poor and unemployed – absent fathers, lousy education, low IQ, domestic violence, the effect of globalisation on manual jobs, psychological problems etc. Epicureans believe that we should collectively be looking after these people, most of whom have no idea how to get out of the traps in which they find themselves. In the cruel, harsh world of conservatism they count for nothing. That is plain wrong.

I understand that Justice Scalia was good company and personally a nice man. One should never speak ill of the recently dead.

However, notwithstanding the eulogies, it is appropriate to comment briefly on his Constitutional views and judgments.

This was the man who believed that corporations are people and should be accorded the same rights as individuals (if this is so why are they not restricted to the same level of electoral donations as individuals?). This is the man who was implicated in the Citizens United case, which opened up the floodgates of dubious and unaccountable money in elections. This has resulted in the very rich, the lobbyists and the corporations subverting democracy and putting the stamp of oligarchy on the whole American political system. This is the man who compared laws banning homosexual behavior to laws prohibiting bestiality — or murder, who compared illegal immigration to bank robbery, and insinuated that black people should be in “slower-track” colleges because that was all they could cope with. Scalia voted with the court majority to end the Florida vote recount in 2000, essentially handing all of Florida’s electoral delegates to George W. Bush and making him President, a straight political move.

Justice Scalia was entitled to his views, but the current over-the-top adulation smacks of hypocrisy. Epicureans, for our part, regard a Constitution as a document designed to be for modern human beings and their needs, one that allows them to live together in security and harmony, a relevant, living document, not a relic of a long-gone age of slaves and transport on horseback.