The Daily Telegraph was very keen this week to make hay out of the fact that there are apparently 102 criminals who we can’t deport because of the European Convention on Human Rights. This may well be true, although if the Daily Telegraph told me the sun would rise tomorrow, I would want the fact independently verified by a competent astronomer.
I would be much more likely to believe in the Daily Telegraph if it balanced its relentless bashing of the ECHR with some sort of statement to the effect that in any complex area of jurisprudence there are inevitably going to be times when the result of the process is not what you would expect. On both sides of the ledger.
I reckon, for instance, that – given the resources and the budget of the Daily Telegraph – I could probably find at least 102 instances of people who we have deported who we shouldn’t have done, because by doing so we were condemning them potentially to torture and death at the end of their journey.
Such as the Tamil asylum seekers we deported back to Sri Lanka this week despite clear evidence, which it was left to the likes of Channel 4 to publicise, that there was, potentially, genocide committed by government forces against the Tamil Tigers and those allegedly associated with them. One of the Tamils was so concerned about his potential fate that, rather than risk being deported, he tried to hang himself with his prison duvet. A Labour MP who raised the matter in the House of Commons said – quite truthfully in my opinion – that deporting them was akin to “painting targets on their backs”.
I once read somewhere, I can’t remember where, but I daresay it’s verifiable one way or another, that the standard test for the effectiveness of a particular type of toilet was whether or not it was possible to flush a rolled-up copy of The Daily Telegraph down it. If that is true, I would strongly contend that it remains the most useful thing you can do with it.
Saturday 18 June 2011
No dissent, please, we're British
The possibility of being found guilty of thought crimes came another step nearer with David Cameron’s recent pronouncement that he was going to “crack down” on anyone not espousing traditional British values. Bizarrely, this apparently includes getting Ofsted to spy on universities and educational establishments to see if they are being “radicalized”. As the only difference between Ofsted and a plastic surgeon is that the latter tucks up the features, I can’t see this being a riproaring success.
Still, one question haunts me… would that include the “traditional British value” of free speech within the bounds of the law, Mr Cameron?
Still, one question haunts me… would that include the “traditional British value” of free speech within the bounds of the law, Mr Cameron?
Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk
Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?
VAT a Balls-up!
Hot on the heels of the IMF’s “endorsement” of George Osborne’s plans for the economy comes the disastrous May figures for retail sales, and Ed Balls making a speech suggesting that VAT be cut back to 17.5% to jump start sales on the high street.
Clearly, our economic waters are confusing and choppy at the moment.
Buried deep down in the original text of the IMF document (point # 9, in fact) we find:
Risks and uncertainty around this central scenario are significant. Large risks to growth and inflation arise from uncertainties surrounding euro-area sovereign turmoil, the housing market, the size of the output gap, and commodity prices. Indeed, unexpected spikes in commodity prices were a significant factor behind revisions to our 2011 inflation and growth forecasts since the 2010 Article IV consultation. Another risk is uncertainty surrounding the size of fiscal multipliers and the degree to which private demand and net exports will be vibrant enough to pick up the slack from fiscal consolidation. Uncertainties arising from key risks are further compounded by the unusually large disconnect between recent weak GDP outturns and other indicators that are stronger (e.g., rising employment, higher-than-forecast tax revenue, and stronger private sector surveys), making it all the more difficult to ascertain the economy’s near-term direction
Translation? We haven't got a fucking scooby.
My interest had been piqued by this, so I rang up the IMF Press Office. I know, I will be for it when the phone bill comes in, living off bread and scrape, sleeping in the dog kennel and no sex for a month (no change there, then) but it was worth every penny.
I wish I had recorded it.
IMF WOMAN: Media relations, how many I help you?
ME: Hi, I am a freelance writer in the UK and I was thinking of writing something about John Lipsky, following his pronouncement on the UK economy. Am I right in thinking he's now the acting managing director?
IMF WOMAN: That's right
ME: And is he getting the same salary as Mr Strauss-Kahn, I mean, given that he's going the same job?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. Would it be possible for you to put your question in an email to ...
ME: Well, it's a simple enough question, someone must know the answer. Is there a section on the IMF web site where you publish peoples' salary scales?
IMF WOMAN: No.
ME: Is that because it's a secret?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. If you could just send an email to...
ME: So you are saying that you either don't know or you won't tell me what the managing director of the IMF earns?
IMF WOMAN: Yes
ME: Well, I think that tells me all I need to know about your grasp of economics. Goodbye.
My reason for asking is that I suspect, from Mr Lipsky's bio on the IMF web site, that he is not short of a bob or two. Given his current directorships and his previous posts with various fund managers (hang on, weren't they the ones that caused all this...?) I reckon he's probably got the odd "portrait of Madison" in his safe. And good luck to him.
I also suspect, although, unlike Mervyn King, he hasn't been stupid enough to say that he's probably also of the opinion that unemployment in the North of England is a price worth paying etc etc chiz chiz, whatever the quotation was. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's ... probably ... a duck.
I managed to find out, by a bit more research, what Mr Strauss-Kahn was on in 2007 when appointed. A tax free salary of $420,930 pa [source: Bloomberg Economic Weekly] plus benefits.
So, let us assume that Mr Lipsky is on the same, although if he's still working on a 2007 salary scale, I will masticate my headgear.
$420,903 pa is $8094.81 per week, which, at today's exchange rate, is £4913.55 per week. Tax free.
The current rate of Employment Support Allowance in the UK at the lowest level is £65.45 per week.
Obviously Mr Lipsky is very well-qualified to rubber-stamp Osborne’s assault on the poor and the disadvantaged.
True, there has been one glimmer of hope for the benighted fools in Westminster in the news that unemployment is apparently down. The private sector created 88,000 jobs in three months, apparently. Of course, many of these “jobs” will be part time and poorly paid, with little or nothing in the way of security or workers’ rights. And I still adhere to my previous statement that we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, simply because the effect of the Tory cuts dumping people onto the unemployment register hasn’t percolated through to the bottom line yet.
Into all this maelstrom of uncertainty blunders Ed Balls, attacking the government and insisting that the VAT increase be reversed as a matter of urgency. On the face of it, it should be good news that at least the Labour Party has rediscovered its balls (literally and metaphorically) and is making some sort of effort to attack the Tories.
However, as Ann Pettifor points out on the blog “Left Foot Forward”, by accepting that the underlying premise for the debate is simply “cuts” to “pay down the deficit”, and the only point at issue is how quickly and how deeply these should take place, Balls has in fact surrendered much of the battlefield to Cameron from the start. The whole article is worth reading, but these are the salient points:
Balls began his speech by mentioning Labour’s “emphasis on jobs and growth”, but the speech immediately morphed into Labour’s concession to the coalition, that what is needed is “a steady and balanced approach to halve the deficit in four years”. The implication being that cuts must be matched by ‘jobs and growth’. But the highlight of the speech – the soundbite that his spin doctors no doubt intended the media to emphasise – is a call for a cut in VAT “to boost consumer confidence and jump-start the economy”; Cameron flashed back his retort: “slashing taxes”, he argued, would only make the UK’s fiscal deficit worse. And so Balls is trapped: the debate now centres on whether the deficit can be financed by increasing or cutting taxes, in particular VAT. For most people, Cameron has the upper hand.
‘Of course the deficit can only be financed by increased taxes’ is the consensus. Because we have ‘spent beyond our means’, we have to raise taxes, like VAT. “Slashing” VAT – when it is higher VAT returns that are paying down the deficit – is unacceptable to the coalition, to the Treasury, to orthodox economists and to the bulk of the British public. But that’s only because most have been drilled in the propaganda: “the deficit is like a credit card”. We need to pay it down. To do so, we have to mobilise/hoard ‘savings’, i.e. higher taxes, to pay down the ‘credit card’ – but the government’s deficit is not like a credit card. And nor do we need ‘savings’ to pay it down.
The only surefire way of paying down the deficit is not by government cutting the deficit (which I and others have argued it cannot do), but by employment. Put 2.43 million people back to work, and – hey presto! – the deficit will vanish. Get 2.43 million people, including thousands of skilled and unskilled workers, clever and talented student graduates, to address Britain’s very real insecurities in energy, food and health and – hey presto – the deficit will be financed.
How? By the tax revenues that will pour into the Treasury’s coffers, either directly or indirectly – and by the savings that will be made on welfare benefits.
However, keep 2.43 million people unemployed, keep them feeling insecure, with their purses firmly shut, and you can guarantee an ever-rising government deficit (April’s deficit numbers were the highest on record for that month). And 2.43 million unemployed is sure to make British ‘confidence’ fall and the recession deepen.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Clearly, our economic waters are confusing and choppy at the moment.
Buried deep down in the original text of the IMF document (point # 9, in fact) we find:
Risks and uncertainty around this central scenario are significant. Large risks to growth and inflation arise from uncertainties surrounding euro-area sovereign turmoil, the housing market, the size of the output gap, and commodity prices. Indeed, unexpected spikes in commodity prices were a significant factor behind revisions to our 2011 inflation and growth forecasts since the 2010 Article IV consultation. Another risk is uncertainty surrounding the size of fiscal multipliers and the degree to which private demand and net exports will be vibrant enough to pick up the slack from fiscal consolidation. Uncertainties arising from key risks are further compounded by the unusually large disconnect between recent weak GDP outturns and other indicators that are stronger (e.g., rising employment, higher-than-forecast tax revenue, and stronger private sector surveys), making it all the more difficult to ascertain the economy’s near-term direction
Translation? We haven't got a fucking scooby.
My interest had been piqued by this, so I rang up the IMF Press Office. I know, I will be for it when the phone bill comes in, living off bread and scrape, sleeping in the dog kennel and no sex for a month (no change there, then) but it was worth every penny.
I wish I had recorded it.
IMF WOMAN: Media relations, how many I help you?
ME: Hi, I am a freelance writer in the UK and I was thinking of writing something about John Lipsky, following his pronouncement on the UK economy. Am I right in thinking he's now the acting managing director?
IMF WOMAN: That's right
ME: And is he getting the same salary as Mr Strauss-Kahn, I mean, given that he's going the same job?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. Would it be possible for you to put your question in an email to ...
ME: Well, it's a simple enough question, someone must know the answer. Is there a section on the IMF web site where you publish peoples' salary scales?
IMF WOMAN: No.
ME: Is that because it's a secret?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. If you could just send an email to...
ME: So you are saying that you either don't know or you won't tell me what the managing director of the IMF earns?
IMF WOMAN: Yes
ME: Well, I think that tells me all I need to know about your grasp of economics. Goodbye.
My reason for asking is that I suspect, from Mr Lipsky's bio on the IMF web site, that he is not short of a bob or two. Given his current directorships and his previous posts with various fund managers (hang on, weren't they the ones that caused all this...?) I reckon he's probably got the odd "portrait of Madison" in his safe. And good luck to him.
I also suspect, although, unlike Mervyn King, he hasn't been stupid enough to say that he's probably also of the opinion that unemployment in the North of England is a price worth paying etc etc chiz chiz, whatever the quotation was. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's ... probably ... a duck.
I managed to find out, by a bit more research, what Mr Strauss-Kahn was on in 2007 when appointed. A tax free salary of $420,930 pa [source: Bloomberg Economic Weekly] plus benefits.
So, let us assume that Mr Lipsky is on the same, although if he's still working on a 2007 salary scale, I will masticate my headgear.
$420,903 pa is $8094.81 per week, which, at today's exchange rate, is £4913.55 per week. Tax free.
The current rate of Employment Support Allowance in the UK at the lowest level is £65.45 per week.
Obviously Mr Lipsky is very well-qualified to rubber-stamp Osborne’s assault on the poor and the disadvantaged.
True, there has been one glimmer of hope for the benighted fools in Westminster in the news that unemployment is apparently down. The private sector created 88,000 jobs in three months, apparently. Of course, many of these “jobs” will be part time and poorly paid, with little or nothing in the way of security or workers’ rights. And I still adhere to my previous statement that we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, simply because the effect of the Tory cuts dumping people onto the unemployment register hasn’t percolated through to the bottom line yet.
Into all this maelstrom of uncertainty blunders Ed Balls, attacking the government and insisting that the VAT increase be reversed as a matter of urgency. On the face of it, it should be good news that at least the Labour Party has rediscovered its balls (literally and metaphorically) and is making some sort of effort to attack the Tories.
However, as Ann Pettifor points out on the blog “Left Foot Forward”, by accepting that the underlying premise for the debate is simply “cuts” to “pay down the deficit”, and the only point at issue is how quickly and how deeply these should take place, Balls has in fact surrendered much of the battlefield to Cameron from the start. The whole article is worth reading, but these are the salient points:
Balls began his speech by mentioning Labour’s “emphasis on jobs and growth”, but the speech immediately morphed into Labour’s concession to the coalition, that what is needed is “a steady and balanced approach to halve the deficit in four years”. The implication being that cuts must be matched by ‘jobs and growth’. But the highlight of the speech – the soundbite that his spin doctors no doubt intended the media to emphasise – is a call for a cut in VAT “to boost consumer confidence and jump-start the economy”; Cameron flashed back his retort: “slashing taxes”, he argued, would only make the UK’s fiscal deficit worse. And so Balls is trapped: the debate now centres on whether the deficit can be financed by increasing or cutting taxes, in particular VAT. For most people, Cameron has the upper hand.
‘Of course the deficit can only be financed by increased taxes’ is the consensus. Because we have ‘spent beyond our means’, we have to raise taxes, like VAT. “Slashing” VAT – when it is higher VAT returns that are paying down the deficit – is unacceptable to the coalition, to the Treasury, to orthodox economists and to the bulk of the British public. But that’s only because most have been drilled in the propaganda: “the deficit is like a credit card”. We need to pay it down. To do so, we have to mobilise/hoard ‘savings’, i.e. higher taxes, to pay down the ‘credit card’ – but the government’s deficit is not like a credit card. And nor do we need ‘savings’ to pay it down.
The only surefire way of paying down the deficit is not by government cutting the deficit (which I and others have argued it cannot do), but by employment. Put 2.43 million people back to work, and – hey presto! – the deficit will vanish. Get 2.43 million people, including thousands of skilled and unskilled workers, clever and talented student graduates, to address Britain’s very real insecurities in energy, food and health and – hey presto – the deficit will be financed.
How? By the tax revenues that will pour into the Treasury’s coffers, either directly or indirectly – and by the savings that will be made on welfare benefits.
However, keep 2.43 million people unemployed, keep them feeling insecure, with their purses firmly shut, and you can guarantee an ever-rising government deficit (April’s deficit numbers were the highest on record for that month). And 2.43 million unemployed is sure to make British ‘confidence’ fall and the recession deepen.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
For what it's worth (or "Rabid Davies Raves Again")
Another cog in the machinery of the relentless Tory onslaught on the ill and the disabled clicked into place this week, in the unlikely form of Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, who suggested that because “disabled” people are “worth less” to an employer, they should have to work for less than the minimum wage, at least until they have “proved themselves” in order to level up the playing field, because apparently this is how things should work in the “real world”.
I've just had a look at this geezer's declarations on the register of members' interests and I see he declares (inter alia) that he earned:
£600 for writing article for Mail on Sunday. Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 29 November 2010)
I make that £300 per hour. Tell you what, I think a slightly more stupid MP could have done that for £250 per hour. If they could have found one. Such a level of part-time income (which I am assuming he declared and paid tax on) says to me that his familiarity with the difficulties faced by people already on the minimum wage may be er... less than nodding. He also claimed (2008/09)£23,886 for staying away from his main home, and a further £11,878 for travelling to and fro.
But yes, I mean, good idea, Davies old chap: why *not* put everyone on performance related pay, and only pay them pro rata according to their productivity and usefulness to the Tory master plan. After all, it sits quite nicely with their *existing* policy on the deserving and undeserving poor... and it's another step down the road to British Air plc, where your oxygen supply is regulated according to how little they can get away with giving you to breathe, and British Families plc, where your mum invoices you for cooking your breakfast. We've already got “thought crimes” and "cracking down" on people who don't espouse "traditional British values" (one of which I thought was freedom of speech, but hey, that's just me). We've already got "work til you drop" if you are lucky enough to still have a job. Why not go the whole hog. After all, it’s much easier to pick up litter in a wheelchair, you don’t have so far to bend!
The only *problem* with a completely unregulated market that only pays people according to what they are "worth" to an employer, instead of treating people with equaity and dignity, is that - if you are looking for “usefulness” and “productivity”, for instance - many of our MPs are among the most useless part- timers, wastrels and oxygen thieves. Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams.
Actually, thinking about it...I can write articles, I am in a wheelchair, so by his argument, *I* could write it instead of him, for say, oooh £500 a pop - just until I have "proved myself", you understand.
I think I might ring them up. After all, the repetitive xenophobic claptrap that fills the pages of the Maily Dail could *probably* be randomly generated by a program*, and it's got to be better than having him wittering on about his opposition to gays and his views in favour of smoking.
I'm gonna spend the weekend looking for a monkey and a typewriter - subcontacting, outsourcing, it's the Tory way, folks. Sorry Mr MP, you've just been downsized and replaced by a chimp on a Remington. For the benefit of Mr Davies, and other hard-of-thinking heartless bastards, I am not knocking the NHS here, they saved my life, it's what happens after you fall off the end of the system that could be better.
This time last year, I was a director of two companies, one of which I owned. I had worked continuously from 1976 to 2010, paid into the system, paid corporation tax in the good years when we were making money. Latterly, since a spat with Barclays bank in 2005/2006, the company I actually owned has had to divert any spare cash to paying those corporate leeches, so I have not been taking drawings from it. But that was OK, while I still had the other directorship, because I was doing well enough to cover the Barclays money out of that if need be. And come 2012, we would be free of them at last.
Bang! Life shook me a seven. July 2010, rushed into hospital for an emergency operation and came out on 7th December in a wheelchair as one of “the disabled”. Will probably never walk again, apparently. In the meantime, I (or rather my post, har har…) has been made redundant, leaving me as the sole director of a company that owes a lot of money under personal guarantee to Barclays Bank, oh, and of course the Halifax still want their £402.66 a month for the mortgage as well.
Yes, I do qualify for benefits, specifically DLA and ESA. The DLA is meant to be for coping with "disability" and motability and stuff like that, but to be honest, it's much more use to us at the moment in its raw form as "money" that can be exchanged for "food" at the "shops".
As for ESA, that has to be levered out of the DWP with a crowbar, because they have a habit of paying it a month or so in arrears or when they get round to it, presumably because it helps the government's cash flow to keep us on tenterhooks about whether or not we're going to be able to hold out for another month.
The council has just decided, after six months of dithering, that because we have too many "assets" (aka millstones) they *won't* after all be building a ramp to help me get in and out of my own house, so in effect, unless I prevail on someone to heave me down the temporary ramps like a sack of spuds, I am confined to two rooms. People in jail have more quality of life and freedom of movement.
I've also found out, during the course of my stay in hospital, that the underlying cause of my previous mobility issues, which didn't actually prevent me from leading an active and useful life up to that point, was facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, which is progressive, and incurable. but, as the physio so cheerfully advised me, at my age (56), "something else will probably finish you off first".
Now, the thing is, life can do this to any of us. It would be a good thing if it happened to Philip Davies for instance. If he carries on smoking, it probably will. I have been doing a bit more research on Mr Davies. He is also a supporter of a movement called Interlibertarians, in fact they paid over £1000 for him to attend their conference last year, according to the register of members' interests. I have had a look on their web site, and they appear to be some sort of global alliance of scary, right wing whirly-eyed fundamentalists.
A lot of their web site is in Italian, and I don't speak fascist, so I am struggling a bit, but they have links to the Ausralian Liberal Party for instance, which believes that the disabled should work for "negative income tax", ie there should be no benefits structure at all, and that the gaps in such provision should be filled by a patchwork of "friends, family, private care and charities" - welcome back to Victorian Britain. I suppose as a last resort there is always the Workhouse. So this is the sort of people we are up against here.
People who think that just because you are "disabled" you are "worth" less to an employer and who think that your "worth" as a person, a human being, is the same as your "earning potential".
Well, Mr Davies, I am more than just a tick in a millionaire's ledger, thank you very much, I utterly reject your doctrinaire reduction of my "worth" to a calculation of what I can earn versus what the state provides for people who are unfortunate enough to be ill, and it is the attitude of you and people like you that means I have now applied for over 100 jobs and none of them wants a 56 year old hairbag in a wheelchair, because, thanks to the efforts of Mr Davies and those like him, people only see the wheelchair. His solution is that I accept the situation and agree to be treated as a second-class citizen.
My solution is that he goes and sticks his head in a dead bear's bottom. Except that he'd probably want to put the dead bear on expenses.
I've just had a look at this geezer's declarations on the register of members' interests and I see he declares (inter alia) that he earned:
£600 for writing article for Mail on Sunday. Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 29 November 2010)
I make that £300 per hour. Tell you what, I think a slightly more stupid MP could have done that for £250 per hour. If they could have found one. Such a level of part-time income (which I am assuming he declared and paid tax on) says to me that his familiarity with the difficulties faced by people already on the minimum wage may be er... less than nodding. He also claimed (2008/09)£23,886 for staying away from his main home, and a further £11,878 for travelling to and fro.
But yes, I mean, good idea, Davies old chap: why *not* put everyone on performance related pay, and only pay them pro rata according to their productivity and usefulness to the Tory master plan. After all, it sits quite nicely with their *existing* policy on the deserving and undeserving poor... and it's another step down the road to British Air plc, where your oxygen supply is regulated according to how little they can get away with giving you to breathe, and British Families plc, where your mum invoices you for cooking your breakfast. We've already got “thought crimes” and "cracking down" on people who don't espouse "traditional British values" (one of which I thought was freedom of speech, but hey, that's just me). We've already got "work til you drop" if you are lucky enough to still have a job. Why not go the whole hog. After all, it’s much easier to pick up litter in a wheelchair, you don’t have so far to bend!
The only *problem* with a completely unregulated market that only pays people according to what they are "worth" to an employer, instead of treating people with equaity and dignity, is that - if you are looking for “usefulness” and “productivity”, for instance - many of our MPs are among the most useless part- timers, wastrels and oxygen thieves. Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams.
Actually, thinking about it...I can write articles, I am in a wheelchair, so by his argument, *I* could write it instead of him, for say, oooh £500 a pop - just until I have "proved myself", you understand.
I think I might ring them up. After all, the repetitive xenophobic claptrap that fills the pages of the Maily Dail could *probably* be randomly generated by a program*, and it's got to be better than having him wittering on about his opposition to gays and his views in favour of smoking.
I'm gonna spend the weekend looking for a monkey and a typewriter - subcontacting, outsourcing, it's the Tory way, folks. Sorry Mr MP, you've just been downsized and replaced by a chimp on a Remington. For the benefit of Mr Davies, and other hard-of-thinking heartless bastards, I am not knocking the NHS here, they saved my life, it's what happens after you fall off the end of the system that could be better.
This time last year, I was a director of two companies, one of which I owned. I had worked continuously from 1976 to 2010, paid into the system, paid corporation tax in the good years when we were making money. Latterly, since a spat with Barclays bank in 2005/2006, the company I actually owned has had to divert any spare cash to paying those corporate leeches, so I have not been taking drawings from it. But that was OK, while I still had the other directorship, because I was doing well enough to cover the Barclays money out of that if need be. And come 2012, we would be free of them at last.
Bang! Life shook me a seven. July 2010, rushed into hospital for an emergency operation and came out on 7th December in a wheelchair as one of “the disabled”. Will probably never walk again, apparently. In the meantime, I (or rather my post, har har…) has been made redundant, leaving me as the sole director of a company that owes a lot of money under personal guarantee to Barclays Bank, oh, and of course the Halifax still want their £402.66 a month for the mortgage as well.
Yes, I do qualify for benefits, specifically DLA and ESA. The DLA is meant to be for coping with "disability" and motability and stuff like that, but to be honest, it's much more use to us at the moment in its raw form as "money" that can be exchanged for "food" at the "shops".
As for ESA, that has to be levered out of the DWP with a crowbar, because they have a habit of paying it a month or so in arrears or when they get round to it, presumably because it helps the government's cash flow to keep us on tenterhooks about whether or not we're going to be able to hold out for another month.
The council has just decided, after six months of dithering, that because we have too many "assets" (aka millstones) they *won't* after all be building a ramp to help me get in and out of my own house, so in effect, unless I prevail on someone to heave me down the temporary ramps like a sack of spuds, I am confined to two rooms. People in jail have more quality of life and freedom of movement.
I've also found out, during the course of my stay in hospital, that the underlying cause of my previous mobility issues, which didn't actually prevent me from leading an active and useful life up to that point, was facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, which is progressive, and incurable. but, as the physio so cheerfully advised me, at my age (56), "something else will probably finish you off first".
Now, the thing is, life can do this to any of us. It would be a good thing if it happened to Philip Davies for instance. If he carries on smoking, it probably will. I have been doing a bit more research on Mr Davies. He is also a supporter of a movement called Interlibertarians, in fact they paid over £1000 for him to attend their conference last year, according to the register of members' interests. I have had a look on their web site, and they appear to be some sort of global alliance of scary, right wing whirly-eyed fundamentalists.
A lot of their web site is in Italian, and I don't speak fascist, so I am struggling a bit, but they have links to the Ausralian Liberal Party for instance, which believes that the disabled should work for "negative income tax", ie there should be no benefits structure at all, and that the gaps in such provision should be filled by a patchwork of "friends, family, private care and charities" - welcome back to Victorian Britain. I suppose as a last resort there is always the Workhouse. So this is the sort of people we are up against here.
People who think that just because you are "disabled" you are "worth" less to an employer and who think that your "worth" as a person, a human being, is the same as your "earning potential".
Well, Mr Davies, I am more than just a tick in a millionaire's ledger, thank you very much, I utterly reject your doctrinaire reduction of my "worth" to a calculation of what I can earn versus what the state provides for people who are unfortunate enough to be ill, and it is the attitude of you and people like you that means I have now applied for over 100 jobs and none of them wants a 56 year old hairbag in a wheelchair, because, thanks to the efforts of Mr Davies and those like him, people only see the wheelchair. His solution is that I accept the situation and agree to be treated as a second-class citizen.
My solution is that he goes and sticks his head in a dead bear's bottom. Except that he'd probably want to put the dead bear on expenses.
Saturday 11 June 2011
Turbulent Priest!
As far as I can see, the Archbishop is spot on.
Looking back at the last election, both major parties, and the Literal Dimwits, led vacuous, negative campaigns, more concerned with damage limitation and not dropping any major bollocks than with any vision for our country's future, or policies aimed at making things better for us all, despite the dire straits of the near-collapse of the world economy caused by the banks playing roulette with our money...
So instead of policies we got, in effect "don't vote for him, he smells of poo". That, and the unpredictable impact of the television debates, where Clegg came across as young, telegenic, and appealing to a large number of first-time voters who didn't know any better, plus of course Broon dropping the said bollock in the form of bigotgate, produced a result where no one party had a really clear mandate for their policies, such as they were. In fact, the election result was really the population saying, fairly unenthusiastically, "a plague on all your houses".
We then had a weekend of horse trading where the spectre of "what the markets would do on Monday" and the Greek economy (remember that?) was used as a goad to prod the various participants into a coalition of the unwilling.
Since then, the Toriess have pressed ahead with an agenda (previously hidden)of demonising people on welfare, the disabled and the unemployed, while inflicting savage cuts on public services, either directly or at one remove via reduced council grants, and have potentially stalled the economy and are planning to put yet more people on the dole to keep the likes of the IMF happy. The "Big Society" is supposed to pick up the pieces, of course, but it's a steaming pile of doodoos, and was only ever a device to cover up the cuts. Do one thing, while claiming to do the exact opposite, is how Cameron operates.
The Literal Dimwits, whose role seems to be to hand round the hobnobs at cabinet and act as apologists-cum-targets whenever there is something particularly nasty to announce, have proven to be the weakest link, and are left ... with nothing.
Plus, somehow we now seem to be at war with Libya, and Cameron is about to embark on a root-and-branch reform of the NHS which nobody wants, nobody voted for, is going to cost squillions, and will leave the NHS in a worse mess than it was.
In these circumstances, I think anyone has the right to question this government's "mandate" I've been questioning it since day 1, and pointing out to all the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who used to bang on about Brown being an unelected leader, that this government has just as little legitimacy, or probably even less.
It's a great shame that the official opposition is so weak feeble and generally useless, that it is left to the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, to point out the logical and moral weaknesses of the policies now being implemented by the Tories, and their effect on the many vulnerable people (economically, physically, socially, mentally) in society at whom they are targeted.
If Rowan Williams keeps this up, I might have to start going to Church again!
Looking back at the last election, both major parties, and the Literal Dimwits, led vacuous, negative campaigns, more concerned with damage limitation and not dropping any major bollocks than with any vision for our country's future, or policies aimed at making things better for us all, despite the dire straits of the near-collapse of the world economy caused by the banks playing roulette with our money...
So instead of policies we got, in effect "don't vote for him, he smells of poo". That, and the unpredictable impact of the television debates, where Clegg came across as young, telegenic, and appealing to a large number of first-time voters who didn't know any better, plus of course Broon dropping the said bollock in the form of bigotgate, produced a result where no one party had a really clear mandate for their policies, such as they were. In fact, the election result was really the population saying, fairly unenthusiastically, "a plague on all your houses".
We then had a weekend of horse trading where the spectre of "what the markets would do on Monday" and the Greek economy (remember that?) was used as a goad to prod the various participants into a coalition of the unwilling.
Since then, the Toriess have pressed ahead with an agenda (previously hidden)of demonising people on welfare, the disabled and the unemployed, while inflicting savage cuts on public services, either directly or at one remove via reduced council grants, and have potentially stalled the economy and are planning to put yet more people on the dole to keep the likes of the IMF happy. The "Big Society" is supposed to pick up the pieces, of course, but it's a steaming pile of doodoos, and was only ever a device to cover up the cuts. Do one thing, while claiming to do the exact opposite, is how Cameron operates.
The Literal Dimwits, whose role seems to be to hand round the hobnobs at cabinet and act as apologists-cum-targets whenever there is something particularly nasty to announce, have proven to be the weakest link, and are left ... with nothing.
Plus, somehow we now seem to be at war with Libya, and Cameron is about to embark on a root-and-branch reform of the NHS which nobody wants, nobody voted for, is going to cost squillions, and will leave the NHS in a worse mess than it was.
In these circumstances, I think anyone has the right to question this government's "mandate" I've been questioning it since day 1, and pointing out to all the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who used to bang on about Brown being an unelected leader, that this government has just as little legitimacy, or probably even less.
It's a great shame that the official opposition is so weak feeble and generally useless, that it is left to the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, to point out the logical and moral weaknesses of the policies now being implemented by the Tories, and their effect on the many vulnerable people (economically, physically, socially, mentally) in society at whom they are targeted.
If Rowan Williams keeps this up, I might have to start going to Church again!
Friday 6 May 2011
Sheffield "Steal"
Well, Nick Clegg will certainly be crying into his Depeche Mode this morning, and he deserves to be.
The nerve of these people who bang on about Broon having been an unelected leader, when we have this Junta of Boobies "in charge"!
Yes, the Lib Dems have been shafted all ways up, and should have seen it coming, but Clegg was so desperate for power last May he'd have sold his own granny into white slavery for a chance to hand round the hobnobs at Cabinet. Well, tough. I said it would make Balaclava look like a walk in the park. Nobody will ever trust them again. True, Clegg may well have said at the last GE that he would bargain with the largest minority party, but he forgot to add "and I will slavishly prop them up and take the flak for them while they embark on an ideologically driven slash and burn attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society..."
The acid test of how long he has left will be when someone senior in the party like Ashdown or similar says "Nick Clegg has my full confidence". Whenever the words "full confidence" are used in that context, the subject of them is usually gone by the weekend.
General strike or general election. Or both. Soon. With real policies please, to help real people, and if the markets don't like it, let them invade. US Gilts hardly wobbled anyway when Standard and Poors (who were so good at spotting the credit crunch coming...) downgraded them.
Oh, and PLEASE, Labour, wake up to the fact that you have elected the WRONG Miliband, Gromit, and put it right.
Caroline Flint for Prime Minister... va va voom. That'd get the country growing again (well, bits of it...)
The nerve of these people who bang on about Broon having been an unelected leader, when we have this Junta of Boobies "in charge"!
Yes, the Lib Dems have been shafted all ways up, and should have seen it coming, but Clegg was so desperate for power last May he'd have sold his own granny into white slavery for a chance to hand round the hobnobs at Cabinet. Well, tough. I said it would make Balaclava look like a walk in the park. Nobody will ever trust them again. True, Clegg may well have said at the last GE that he would bargain with the largest minority party, but he forgot to add "and I will slavishly prop them up and take the flak for them while they embark on an ideologically driven slash and burn attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society..."
The acid test of how long he has left will be when someone senior in the party like Ashdown or similar says "Nick Clegg has my full confidence". Whenever the words "full confidence" are used in that context, the subject of them is usually gone by the weekend.
General strike or general election. Or both. Soon. With real policies please, to help real people, and if the markets don't like it, let them invade. US Gilts hardly wobbled anyway when Standard and Poors (who were so good at spotting the credit crunch coming...) downgraded them.
Oh, and PLEASE, Labour, wake up to the fact that you have elected the WRONG Miliband, Gromit, and put it right.
Caroline Flint for Prime Minister... va va voom. That'd get the country growing again (well, bits of it...)
Bin Laden Bin In?
Well said, Rowan Williams, for speaking out on Osama Bin Laden. No doubt you will receive reams of hate mail from the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph religiously over their cornflakes, but you were quite right.
Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.
When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.
And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?
Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.
When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.
And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?
Saturday 30 April 2011
57 Reasons not to be Cheerful, one, two, three...
Any large public event is always a balance between freedom of expression and movement, safety, and civil liberty. The “Rile Widding” was no exception. Except it was – it marked a new watershed in the shifting of the balance away from freedom and towards outright repression. I have already remarked that there seems to be a disparity between Brian Haw camping in Parliament Square (not allowed) and thousands of people camping out in The Mall (allowed) and this double standard is indicative of the sneaky, insidious way in which major public events are used to undermine civil liberties. Presumably if Boris Johnson wants to prosecute the people who broke the law on Thursday night in the Mall, he has plenty of CCTV and TV footage to allow him to identify the offenders. I await his next action with interest.
These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.
Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.
OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.
Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.
To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?
Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.
This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.
Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.
OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?
Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".
“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.
Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.
So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?
Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds
Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?
More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.
Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.
Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.
These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?
There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".
These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.
As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.
Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.
And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.
Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.
So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.
These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.
Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.
OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.
Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.
To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?
Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.
This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.
Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.
OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?
Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".
“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.
Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.
So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?
Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds
Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?
More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.
Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.
Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.
These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?
There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".
These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.
As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.
Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.
And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.
Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.
So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.
The Undeserving Power
I have seen and heard quite a few pronouncements on benefits from the Tories over the last year, but David Cameron’s latest “photo-opportunity” asking workers on the BBC News blatantly, outright, if they were happy with the fact that there are apparently 80,000 people on incapacity benefit because of drugs, alcohol, or obesity, takes the biscuit. The nasty implication was, of course, that these people are still continuing this lifestyle on benefits, and being funded in this excess by the hard-working taxpayer. In reality, it is more likely that these people are struggling to cope with the effects of previous addiction, in a landscape where the very programs and funding that might be able to help them are being cut left, right and centre – by the Tories!
We’re a long way from “we’re all in this together.” But then, so is he. His NHS reforms have been savaged, and the previously docile lickspittles in the Literal Dimwits are having trouble keeping the lid on their section of the pressure cooker, as their leadership seems to have finally woken up to the slaughter awaiting them in the local elections, plus there’s the factor of the AV referendum adding extra strain on an already strained relationship. He has very little to cheer about at the moment (which is probably why they seized on the 0.5% growth in GDP over the last quarter – in reality, flatlining, when offset against the previous quarter’s fall – and trumpeted it like it was the Second Coming).
I’ve never seen a more disgracefully, deliberately divisive speech from someone who would do well to remember that the Prime Minister of this country is the Prime Minister of all of us, and he should be doing his best to unite the whole country, even those of us who would rather cut our own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than ever vote for him. But Cameron isn’t interested in me, except as someone whose disability benefits he can possibly cut. He’s talking over my head, to white van man, the man in the pub, to bigot Britain, to the people who support the BNP and the EDL, who think there are “too many scroungers, too many people on benefits, and too many foreigners”.
“We’re all in this together” has been ditched, apparently, in favour of the resurrection of the Victorian idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. In Cameron’s Tory Bullingdon Club world, the idea of a universal entitlement to benefits under a welfare state is anathema. You should earn your benefits, dear boy, preferably by picking oakum in the Workhouse. He’s preaching the same baseless, anecdotal shit that you can hear from any pub bore at closing time in any working class boozer – and around quite a few middle class dinner tables as well. Or you can pay good money and read it in regurgitated form in The Daily Mail. “ A man in the pub told me once that he had a bloke in the back of his taxi who said there are thousands of them claiming benefits that they aren’t entitled to, they’re all immigrants, over here taking our jobs, etc. etc.”
It more or less writes itself, which is why being a Daily Mail journalist in these heady days must be such a cushy number under this regime. All of the statistics on which these speeches and photo opportunities are based are at best, suspect, and at worse, misleading, cooked-up and completely bogus. The figure of 80,000 people which Cameron used, for instance, for people claiming benefits who are victims of drugs, alcohol or obesity, is actually based on a “snapshot” of the figures, according to the original DWP press release.
In other words, they have taken a small chunk of data, analysed it, then extrapolated the results to see what figure they could come up with if all of the remaining data followed the same pattern, and the answer is 80,000. Suddenly, that figure is enshrined in fact as if it was some kind of innate truth.
They followed the Cameron speech with another similar exercise, a story that “75% of incapacity benefit claimants are fit for work”. What actually happened, when you look into the figures behind the headlines, was that, of just over one million applicants over a given period of time, 39% were found to be “fit for work” but then 40% of this 39% actually appealed against these decisions – and won! [Not that there is any work, but that’s a separate gripe, let’s not get sidetracked here.] So the story didn’t go on to say that, because of that appeal, in fact, the real figure that were “fit for work” was nearer 19.5% of the whole sample, not 39% at all. A further 36% (the other bit of the spurious “75%”) gave up their applications uncompleted, and never bothered to pursue them. The implication from the ghastly Tories is that this is because they’d been rumbled and didn’t bother to go on because they knew the game was up and abandoned the claim, quitting while they were ahead.
Having had first hand experience of the convoluted process and the harassed and unhelpful DWP staff who administer ESA, I can imagine a more likely reason for this, easily. Although I am a “newbie” to the world of disability and benefits, I am a reasonably literate, educated, and fairly articulate person, able to fight my own corner, and even then I have struggled against the overwhelming torrent of forms, questionnaires, and bloody stupid fatuous standard letters asking the same old shit over and over again. It’s no wonder that people abandon their claims. Perfectly legitimate claims, I shouldn’t wonder. The system is set up with precisely that aim. To baffle you with bullshit until you snap and say “oh, sod it!” These mythical people that the man in the pub tells you about, the thousands of them that allegedly defraud the taxpayer of £1000s, must do it as a full-time job, and even then, they’d need a secretary and an accountant, just to keep track of all the paperwork!
So, at next week’s local elections, which is, in truth, what this was all about, had Cameron been honest enough to admit it, you have a choice. You can believe and swallow this hokum perpetrated by the Tories as part of their “divide-and-rule” tactics, if you really believe there are “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and “sturdy beggars”, go ahead and vote for him. If you think, however, that those who are ill through the effects of drugs, alcohol, and poor diet are just as deserving of universal benefits on medical grounds as the rest of us, in a civilised society, and that dividing people into deserving and undeserving poor on the basis of lifestyle “choices” is the thin end of an evil wedge (what about smokers, for instance? Cameron kept quiet about them because smokers might be highly represented amongst the white van man target group) then vote the bastards out, and give them the kicking they so richly deserve. It’s not all of us together, it’s us and them, and it always has been, because that’s their choice, that’s the way they want it, whatever they say otherwise.
We’re a long way from “we’re all in this together.” But then, so is he. His NHS reforms have been savaged, and the previously docile lickspittles in the Literal Dimwits are having trouble keeping the lid on their section of the pressure cooker, as their leadership seems to have finally woken up to the slaughter awaiting them in the local elections, plus there’s the factor of the AV referendum adding extra strain on an already strained relationship. He has very little to cheer about at the moment (which is probably why they seized on the 0.5% growth in GDP over the last quarter – in reality, flatlining, when offset against the previous quarter’s fall – and trumpeted it like it was the Second Coming).
I’ve never seen a more disgracefully, deliberately divisive speech from someone who would do well to remember that the Prime Minister of this country is the Prime Minister of all of us, and he should be doing his best to unite the whole country, even those of us who would rather cut our own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than ever vote for him. But Cameron isn’t interested in me, except as someone whose disability benefits he can possibly cut. He’s talking over my head, to white van man, the man in the pub, to bigot Britain, to the people who support the BNP and the EDL, who think there are “too many scroungers, too many people on benefits, and too many foreigners”.
“We’re all in this together” has been ditched, apparently, in favour of the resurrection of the Victorian idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. In Cameron’s Tory Bullingdon Club world, the idea of a universal entitlement to benefits under a welfare state is anathema. You should earn your benefits, dear boy, preferably by picking oakum in the Workhouse. He’s preaching the same baseless, anecdotal shit that you can hear from any pub bore at closing time in any working class boozer – and around quite a few middle class dinner tables as well. Or you can pay good money and read it in regurgitated form in The Daily Mail. “ A man in the pub told me once that he had a bloke in the back of his taxi who said there are thousands of them claiming benefits that they aren’t entitled to, they’re all immigrants, over here taking our jobs, etc. etc.”
It more or less writes itself, which is why being a Daily Mail journalist in these heady days must be such a cushy number under this regime. All of the statistics on which these speeches and photo opportunities are based are at best, suspect, and at worse, misleading, cooked-up and completely bogus. The figure of 80,000 people which Cameron used, for instance, for people claiming benefits who are victims of drugs, alcohol or obesity, is actually based on a “snapshot” of the figures, according to the original DWP press release.
In other words, they have taken a small chunk of data, analysed it, then extrapolated the results to see what figure they could come up with if all of the remaining data followed the same pattern, and the answer is 80,000. Suddenly, that figure is enshrined in fact as if it was some kind of innate truth.
They followed the Cameron speech with another similar exercise, a story that “75% of incapacity benefit claimants are fit for work”. What actually happened, when you look into the figures behind the headlines, was that, of just over one million applicants over a given period of time, 39% were found to be “fit for work” but then 40% of this 39% actually appealed against these decisions – and won! [Not that there is any work, but that’s a separate gripe, let’s not get sidetracked here.] So the story didn’t go on to say that, because of that appeal, in fact, the real figure that were “fit for work” was nearer 19.5% of the whole sample, not 39% at all. A further 36% (the other bit of the spurious “75%”) gave up their applications uncompleted, and never bothered to pursue them. The implication from the ghastly Tories is that this is because they’d been rumbled and didn’t bother to go on because they knew the game was up and abandoned the claim, quitting while they were ahead.
Having had first hand experience of the convoluted process and the harassed and unhelpful DWP staff who administer ESA, I can imagine a more likely reason for this, easily. Although I am a “newbie” to the world of disability and benefits, I am a reasonably literate, educated, and fairly articulate person, able to fight my own corner, and even then I have struggled against the overwhelming torrent of forms, questionnaires, and bloody stupid fatuous standard letters asking the same old shit over and over again. It’s no wonder that people abandon their claims. Perfectly legitimate claims, I shouldn’t wonder. The system is set up with precisely that aim. To baffle you with bullshit until you snap and say “oh, sod it!” These mythical people that the man in the pub tells you about, the thousands of them that allegedly defraud the taxpayer of £1000s, must do it as a full-time job, and even then, they’d need a secretary and an accountant, just to keep track of all the paperwork!
So, at next week’s local elections, which is, in truth, what this was all about, had Cameron been honest enough to admit it, you have a choice. You can believe and swallow this hokum perpetrated by the Tories as part of their “divide-and-rule” tactics, if you really believe there are “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and “sturdy beggars”, go ahead and vote for him. If you think, however, that those who are ill through the effects of drugs, alcohol, and poor diet are just as deserving of universal benefits on medical grounds as the rest of us, in a civilised society, and that dividing people into deserving and undeserving poor on the basis of lifestyle “choices” is the thin end of an evil wedge (what about smokers, for instance? Cameron kept quiet about them because smokers might be highly represented amongst the white van man target group) then vote the bastards out, and give them the kicking they so richly deserve. It’s not all of us together, it’s us and them, and it always has been, because that’s their choice, that’s the way they want it, whatever they say otherwise.
Sunday 24 April 2011
Privates on Parade
David Cam-Moron thinks PARLIAMENT should decide on privacy law, not judges. Great idea. While we're at it, let's put Count Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank.
Wednesday 20 April 2011
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
I was going to write a long, passionately argued piece deconstructing Cam-moron's recent playing of the race card in his immigration speech, but to be honest, what he was trying to do is so transparent, it's hardly worth the effort of smashing. There is, as always, a subtext with these speeches. I know exactly what he was trying to do, politicians of all parties do it when they are cornered like a rat.
He can see that his party is going to get a well-deserved kicking in the May elections. So he reaches for his dog whistle, looks out over the heads of the benighted fools he knows will still vote for him anyway, and gives a good long toot in the general direction of the British National Party and the English Defence League.
White immigration is good, brown immigration is bad, is what he was trying to say but couldn't in so many words. And why don't they all learn English and integrate (because er, most of them do. I notice he wasn't quick to castigate Tesco when they started to have aisles of Polish food, labelled in Polish!)
Meanwhile, Mr Ed the talking horse, has admitted that Labour may have made one or two mistakes in the way they presented and monitored immigration (such as sucking up the to the middle classes in key marginals for a decade, while your traditional heartlands were recruited en masse by the BNP, you mean, yes, that would be one of the many mistakes...)
Of course, this has been seized on by the Tory press and regurgitated as "Labour: We Were Wrong On Immigration".
It reminds me of that old adage that you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.
Any politician who says that they can do anything about this issue while we are still members of the EU Political Unity Project, is just that. A big, fat, howling, pants-on-fire, liar. I wish they would get a grip and deal with it properly, instead of leaving it to UKIP, who couldn't run a village fete, let alone extricate us from the clutches of Mrs Merton and President Teacozy.
And furthermore: the argument always focuses on the "shortage" of resources - why does nobody ever ask why there is a shortage of schools, hospitals and affordable housing? What did I pay all those taxes for? To fire missiles at Libya?
He can see that his party is going to get a well-deserved kicking in the May elections. So he reaches for his dog whistle, looks out over the heads of the benighted fools he knows will still vote for him anyway, and gives a good long toot in the general direction of the British National Party and the English Defence League.
White immigration is good, brown immigration is bad, is what he was trying to say but couldn't in so many words. And why don't they all learn English and integrate (because er, most of them do. I notice he wasn't quick to castigate Tesco when they started to have aisles of Polish food, labelled in Polish!)
Meanwhile, Mr Ed the talking horse, has admitted that Labour may have made one or two mistakes in the way they presented and monitored immigration (such as sucking up the to the middle classes in key marginals for a decade, while your traditional heartlands were recruited en masse by the BNP, you mean, yes, that would be one of the many mistakes...)
Of course, this has been seized on by the Tory press and regurgitated as "Labour: We Were Wrong On Immigration".
It reminds me of that old adage that you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.
Any politician who says that they can do anything about this issue while we are still members of the EU Political Unity Project, is just that. A big, fat, howling, pants-on-fire, liar. I wish they would get a grip and deal with it properly, instead of leaving it to UKIP, who couldn't run a village fete, let alone extricate us from the clutches of Mrs Merton and President Teacozy.
And furthermore: the argument always focuses on the "shortage" of resources - why does nobody ever ask why there is a shortage of schools, hospitals and affordable housing? What did I pay all those taxes for? To fire missiles at Libya?
Alles Ist In Ordnung!
A big public ceremony is approaching. Suddenly, in the days before, hundreds of extra police appear, apparently from nowhere. In the days leading up to the event, the streets are cleared of protestors, vagrants rough sleepers and homeless people, the manholes are searched, the surveillance cameras checked, the shadowy men in shadowy bunkers do their comms checks in front of gigantic screens, firearms are issued with orders to shoot to kill if necessary, and known troublemakers are rounded up and arrested.
China? Iran? Saudi Arabia? the USSR at the height of the Cold War? Hitler's Germany?
No, this is once-Great Britain, 29th April 2011.
In a previous blog about the sinister way that major public events such as the Royal Wedding and the London Olympics were being used to further curtail civil liberties and crack down on the most disadvantaged victims of Tory cuts, I wrote:
Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)
And, true to form, the BBC reported last night that the security forces and police were considering "pre-emptive arrests" of known activists, on the day of the Royal Wedding, to prevent them "causing trouble" - accompanied of course by footage of Black Bloc smashing the window of a branch of Santander [and is there anyone who seriously thinks the cost of that window won't go straight back on next year's bank charges?]
So, we have really come to this. You can be pre emptively arrested, sans trial, judge jury or charge, detained and denied your liberty, because you might cause trouble on the day of the Royal Wedding. Given that there are going to be 5000 police lining the route, I think they have probably got the security overkill well and truly buttoned up anyway, but what do I know eh?
The real danger, the real acid test, the thin end of the proverbial wedge, is whether, once a docile population have got used to the idea, this sort of thing will just become the norm, long after the last Olympian has left Walthamstow.
China? Iran? Saudi Arabia? the USSR at the height of the Cold War? Hitler's Germany?
No, this is once-Great Britain, 29th April 2011.
In a previous blog about the sinister way that major public events such as the Royal Wedding and the London Olympics were being used to further curtail civil liberties and crack down on the most disadvantaged victims of Tory cuts, I wrote:
Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)
And, true to form, the BBC reported last night that the security forces and police were considering "pre-emptive arrests" of known activists, on the day of the Royal Wedding, to prevent them "causing trouble" - accompanied of course by footage of Black Bloc smashing the window of a branch of Santander [and is there anyone who seriously thinks the cost of that window won't go straight back on next year's bank charges?]
So, we have really come to this. You can be pre emptively arrested, sans trial, judge jury or charge, detained and denied your liberty, because you might cause trouble on the day of the Royal Wedding. Given that there are going to be 5000 police lining the route, I think they have probably got the security overkill well and truly buttoned up anyway, but what do I know eh?
The real danger, the real acid test, the thin end of the proverbial wedge, is whether, once a docile population have got used to the idea, this sort of thing will just become the norm, long after the last Olympian has left Walthamstow.
Friday 15 April 2011
Local Cuts for Local People
Eric Pickles is Satan. Or the Antichrist. Or possibly both, if that’s theologically possible. After seeing his performance on Newsnight the other night, I was only surprised that Gavin Essler didn’t start projectile vomiting, or that his head didn’t swivel through 360 degrees. It used to be only Michael Howard out of the Tory top brass that had a whiff of sulphur about him, but this is no longer the case. Roll over Beelzebub, tell Baphomet the news.
Pickles was being grilled on “localism”, which is Tory-speak for “you’re on your own, chum”, as the savage cuts to local government budgets, disproportionately targeted so the heaviest ones fall on the poorest authorities (a point made in the programme) are now starting to bite across the country.
Much of the interview, sadly, focused on “transparency”, which in the Pickles world involves publishing details of expenditure, regardless of any extra cost incurred in so doing. Even more sadly, Pickles was able to deflect the main thrusts of any attempts to call him to account, by focusing in turn on an error in the research, which led Essler to assert that the Department for Communities was only listing expenditure over £25,000 on its own web site, while expecting councils to list all items over £500. It emerged in the course of the debate that the DCLG is now also employing the £500 yardstick. [Actually, there is some interesting stuff on that web site, which repays further study, and I think I will have a closer look, and come back later to report my findings.]
Anyway, this is how localism works. You cut the rate support grant to the councils, taking care to make sure that the leafy suburbs (where the Tory voters live) “friendly” councils (such as the odious regime in Westminster) and key marginal targets are all protected, leaving the brunt to fall on the most deprived areas (coincidentally, many of them traditional Labour heartlands).
Then you meddle, selectively, as follows: when the council, faced with a decision which involves having to make drastic savings, cuts frontline services, and these cuts are unpopular, you make sure (if you are Eric Pickles) to blame the council for the cuts, as if the sudden, dramatic cut in income was nothing at all to do with you. When the council (quite rightly and sensibly) refuses to spend scarce resources on the extra cost of putting the items of their individual expenditure over £500 online, you criticise them for a lack of transparency. [So far, only Nottingham, out of all the councils, has had the cojones to do this. Shame on all the others.]
Funny stuff, transparency. Pickles seems to be remarkably opaque when it comes to admitting transparently that the transparent reason for these councils up and down the country being forced to cut to the bone and beyond, is, er, Eric Pickles. And localism, that’s a funny concept, too. It only works when the local decisions are exactly those which central government would have made and approved of. Central government in the form of, er, Eric Pickles. Any spending decisions taken at local level which don’t accord with the Tory plan for “slash and burn” are dismissed as “irresponsible”.
Of course, the Pickles plan is for the massive deficiencies his cuts will cause in councils to be picked up by the Big Society, for free, and for the massive job cuts in the public sector to be mopped up by the private sector. Neither of which is going to happen. Like all Faustian pacts, it has a sting in its tail. And possibly the horns of a dilemma.
Pickles was being grilled on “localism”, which is Tory-speak for “you’re on your own, chum”, as the savage cuts to local government budgets, disproportionately targeted so the heaviest ones fall on the poorest authorities (a point made in the programme) are now starting to bite across the country.
Much of the interview, sadly, focused on “transparency”, which in the Pickles world involves publishing details of expenditure, regardless of any extra cost incurred in so doing. Even more sadly, Pickles was able to deflect the main thrusts of any attempts to call him to account, by focusing in turn on an error in the research, which led Essler to assert that the Department for Communities was only listing expenditure over £25,000 on its own web site, while expecting councils to list all items over £500. It emerged in the course of the debate that the DCLG is now also employing the £500 yardstick. [Actually, there is some interesting stuff on that web site, which repays further study, and I think I will have a closer look, and come back later to report my findings.]
Anyway, this is how localism works. You cut the rate support grant to the councils, taking care to make sure that the leafy suburbs (where the Tory voters live) “friendly” councils (such as the odious regime in Westminster) and key marginal targets are all protected, leaving the brunt to fall on the most deprived areas (coincidentally, many of them traditional Labour heartlands).
Then you meddle, selectively, as follows: when the council, faced with a decision which involves having to make drastic savings, cuts frontline services, and these cuts are unpopular, you make sure (if you are Eric Pickles) to blame the council for the cuts, as if the sudden, dramatic cut in income was nothing at all to do with you. When the council (quite rightly and sensibly) refuses to spend scarce resources on the extra cost of putting the items of their individual expenditure over £500 online, you criticise them for a lack of transparency. [So far, only Nottingham, out of all the councils, has had the cojones to do this. Shame on all the others.]
Funny stuff, transparency. Pickles seems to be remarkably opaque when it comes to admitting transparently that the transparent reason for these councils up and down the country being forced to cut to the bone and beyond, is, er, Eric Pickles. And localism, that’s a funny concept, too. It only works when the local decisions are exactly those which central government would have made and approved of. Central government in the form of, er, Eric Pickles. Any spending decisions taken at local level which don’t accord with the Tory plan for “slash and burn” are dismissed as “irresponsible”.
Of course, the Pickles plan is for the massive deficiencies his cuts will cause in councils to be picked up by the Big Society, for free, and for the massive job cuts in the public sector to be mopped up by the private sector. Neither of which is going to happen. Like all Faustian pacts, it has a sting in its tail. And possibly the horns of a dilemma.
Wednesday 6 April 2011
Second Opinion
David Cameron is going to "pause for reflection" in his ill-judged reform of the NHS. What a pity he didn't pause for reflection before he even started, as he could have saved the money wasted on this project so far. In fact, the more I see of Mr Cameron, the more I wish his parents had paused for reflection.
In fact, I strongly suspect that the reflection, if any, during this period will be more concerned about how the Tories and mini-tories can sell this deeply flawed crock of shite to a) the Liberal Dimwits at large, who have already showed a marked inclination to defenestrate Clegg over this at their Spring conference b) the House of Lords, who are queueing up to amend it with a chain saw and c)a skeptical public, who are being told that we have no money, and yet see us firing rockets costing £800,000 at Libya and giving £650 million to Pakistan, and are starting to ask "what is this reorganisation of the NHS costing?
In his glossy, smarmy, airbrushed election posters this time last year, Cameron said "We can't go on like this - I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS". If the cost of this reorganisation is coming from existing NHS budgets, then that is a de facto cut. And if the cost is coming from elsewhere, then I can think of a thousand better uses for extra money for the NHS than a reorganisation that nobody wants. Apart from David Cameron of course, to whom it is a shibboleth almost as sacred as "The Big Society".
In fact, I strongly suspect that the reflection, if any, during this period will be more concerned about how the Tories and mini-tories can sell this deeply flawed crock of shite to a) the Liberal Dimwits at large, who have already showed a marked inclination to defenestrate Clegg over this at their Spring conference b) the House of Lords, who are queueing up to amend it with a chain saw and c)a skeptical public, who are being told that we have no money, and yet see us firing rockets costing £800,000 at Libya and giving £650 million to Pakistan, and are starting to ask "what is this reorganisation of the NHS costing?
In his glossy, smarmy, airbrushed election posters this time last year, Cameron said "We can't go on like this - I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS". If the cost of this reorganisation is coming from existing NHS budgets, then that is a de facto cut. And if the cost is coming from elsewhere, then I can think of a thousand better uses for extra money for the NHS than a reorganisation that nobody wants. Apart from David Cameron of course, to whom it is a shibboleth almost as sacred as "The Big Society".
Easy Git
Oliver Let-Wind has apparently been letting wind again. This time it was out of his mouth rather than his arse, but since he frequently talks out of both of them, any confusion is understandable.
Apparently, and up to the time of writing, he has not denied this, in an argument with Boris Johnson over airport development, he said that he didn't want to see any more families from Sheffield taking cheap holidays.
Notwithstanding that this was a private comment, my first thought, when I heard that this was in the context of an argument, was that it was a pity it didn't escalate and come to blows.
As it is, it shows up the Tory mindset brilliantly. We don't want these oiks having holidays, not people from Sheffield, no, they should work for free as interns, send their children up chimneys, and be bloody well grateful that we're only cutting some of their libraries, schools, police, and refuse collections, and not all of them. We've already got Sir Digby Jones, of CBI fame, suggesting that unemployed people should volunteer and work for nothing, the Tories love this sort of thing. Cut the benefits, starve them into non-existent jobs, or leave them in the gutter to starve. Pardon me, but is this 1811, or 1911 all of a sudden? Only, I thought it was 2011, that's all.
Welcome to the mind of the Tories. Work for nothing, get on your bike, and don't expect a holiday! If it wasn't for the fact that there are no jobs anyway, and many people now won't be able to afford holidays, cheap or otherwise, it would be laughable. As it is, it's a pathetic insult to the low paid and the unemployed.
It's also an insult, of course, to the people of Sheffield, and Clegg has apparently told Let-Wind to watch his mouth - ha ha ha hardy ha. If Clegg couldn't stop the Tories cancelling a loan (a loan, not a grant) to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency, I hardly think Let-Wind is going to be quaking in his boots at anything Clegg says, especially as he probably thinks that everyone in Sheffield says "eee bah goom", keeps whippets in the bath, and wears a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on their head.
Personally, I think all the people of Sheffield should take a holiday in Let-Wind's garden. And shit in his fishpond, except I don't believe in cruelty to fish, and he'd only put the cost of cleaning it out on his expenses and charge it back to us.
Apparently, and up to the time of writing, he has not denied this, in an argument with Boris Johnson over airport development, he said that he didn't want to see any more families from Sheffield taking cheap holidays.
Notwithstanding that this was a private comment, my first thought, when I heard that this was in the context of an argument, was that it was a pity it didn't escalate and come to blows.
As it is, it shows up the Tory mindset brilliantly. We don't want these oiks having holidays, not people from Sheffield, no, they should work for free as interns, send their children up chimneys, and be bloody well grateful that we're only cutting some of their libraries, schools, police, and refuse collections, and not all of them. We've already got Sir Digby Jones, of CBI fame, suggesting that unemployed people should volunteer and work for nothing, the Tories love this sort of thing. Cut the benefits, starve them into non-existent jobs, or leave them in the gutter to starve. Pardon me, but is this 1811, or 1911 all of a sudden? Only, I thought it was 2011, that's all.
Welcome to the mind of the Tories. Work for nothing, get on your bike, and don't expect a holiday! If it wasn't for the fact that there are no jobs anyway, and many people now won't be able to afford holidays, cheap or otherwise, it would be laughable. As it is, it's a pathetic insult to the low paid and the unemployed.
It's also an insult, of course, to the people of Sheffield, and Clegg has apparently told Let-Wind to watch his mouth - ha ha ha hardy ha. If Clegg couldn't stop the Tories cancelling a loan (a loan, not a grant) to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency, I hardly think Let-Wind is going to be quaking in his boots at anything Clegg says, especially as he probably thinks that everyone in Sheffield says "eee bah goom", keeps whippets in the bath, and wears a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on their head.
Personally, I think all the people of Sheffield should take a holiday in Let-Wind's garden. And shit in his fishpond, except I don't believe in cruelty to fish, and he'd only put the cost of cleaning it out on his expenses and charge it back to us.
Tuesday 29 March 2011
The Streets of London
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I am definitely seeing signs of a concerted effort to "clean up" London in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. I don't mean sweeping up the rubbish, I mean a concerted effort to crack down on various freedoms and protests, and a further targeting of the disadvantaged, all as part of the process of packaging London for the (increasingly desperate, given Osborne's mishandling of the economy) sales, business, and tourism boom which is what the Olympics is all about these days.
Westminster Council is trying to banish the homeless by banning people from feeding them.
Boris Johnson (aided and abetted again by Westminster Council) is going through the courts to try and get rid of Brian Haw and his anti-war protest in Parliament Square.
There have been various reports on Indymedia about eastern European vagrants in the East End being rounded up and deported back to their country of origin. The UK is allowed to do this to homeless foreign nationals provided they are going back to a hostel or similar in their own country, and apparently the deportation often happens, but the hostel at the other end doesn't.
Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)
We know already of course, that finding massive numbers of police from the secret deep freeze underneath Scotland Yard where they keep them in cryogenic suspension until there is a foreign tyrant who wants his goon squad to be able to run through London with the Olympic flag, or there's a miners' strike or something, is never a problem for the government. It's only when you are being robbed, mugged or raped that there is rarely a bobby on the beat.
I could be wrong. Maybe it is too early to discern a pattern emerging. But I will be watching this.
Westminster Council is trying to banish the homeless by banning people from feeding them.
Boris Johnson (aided and abetted again by Westminster Council) is going through the courts to try and get rid of Brian Haw and his anti-war protest in Parliament Square.
There have been various reports on Indymedia about eastern European vagrants in the East End being rounded up and deported back to their country of origin. The UK is allowed to do this to homeless foreign nationals provided they are going back to a hostel or similar in their own country, and apparently the deportation often happens, but the hostel at the other end doesn't.
Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)
We know already of course, that finding massive numbers of police from the secret deep freeze underneath Scotland Yard where they keep them in cryogenic suspension until there is a foreign tyrant who wants his goon squad to be able to run through London with the Olympic flag, or there's a miners' strike or something, is never a problem for the government. It's only when you are being robbed, mugged or raped that there is rarely a bobby on the beat.
I could be wrong. Maybe it is too early to discern a pattern emerging. But I will be watching this.
You're AV-in a Larf!
I got my polling card yesterday for the AV referendum.
I have followed the recent debate on AV as a voting system, and I have to say it holds all the interest for me of watching a steward rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
When you have a situation where the major political parties all run vacuous, negative campaigns based on slogans only one step away from "don't vote for him, he smells of poo", which is what we were treated to last May, while concealing their true intentions and keeping all the nasty things out of the manifesto until they are safely installed in number 10, it is no wonder that a cynical and apathetic electorate can't decide which of these poltroons they hate the most, and stays away in droves, refusing to become engaged in the political process. Especially as you are likely to find that the party you thought you had voted for has ditched all its promises and is now helping its former opponents to shaft you.
In that scenario, a set of venal, corrupt, self-serving bastards kow-towing to the bankers and the money markets represents the same outcome for most ordinary people, whether it was elected by AV or first past the post. I genuinely fear for the future of democracy in this country unless politicians wake up and start to have the courage to frame policies that will improve the lives of real people and make things better. People will turn from democracy to direct action if the democratic system fails to deliver this, and the result could be anarchy. I have previously said that maybe we do need the homeopathic solution of a few cobbles through the windows of 10 Downing Street to alert our political class to this danger, but after seeing the way the anarchy at Saturday's march played right into the hands of the media and the Tories, a better solution would still be a general strike, to precipitate a new, and hopefully more honest, General Election, where the parties tell us their real intentions.
I have followed the recent debate on AV as a voting system, and I have to say it holds all the interest for me of watching a steward rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
When you have a situation where the major political parties all run vacuous, negative campaigns based on slogans only one step away from "don't vote for him, he smells of poo", which is what we were treated to last May, while concealing their true intentions and keeping all the nasty things out of the manifesto until they are safely installed in number 10, it is no wonder that a cynical and apathetic electorate can't decide which of these poltroons they hate the most, and stays away in droves, refusing to become engaged in the political process. Especially as you are likely to find that the party you thought you had voted for has ditched all its promises and is now helping its former opponents to shaft you.
In that scenario, a set of venal, corrupt, self-serving bastards kow-towing to the bankers and the money markets represents the same outcome for most ordinary people, whether it was elected by AV or first past the post. I genuinely fear for the future of democracy in this country unless politicians wake up and start to have the courage to frame policies that will improve the lives of real people and make things better. People will turn from democracy to direct action if the democratic system fails to deliver this, and the result could be anarchy. I have previously said that maybe we do need the homeopathic solution of a few cobbles through the windows of 10 Downing Street to alert our political class to this danger, but after seeing the way the anarchy at Saturday's march played right into the hands of the media and the Tories, a better solution would still be a general strike, to precipitate a new, and hopefully more honest, General Election, where the parties tell us their real intentions.
Hick-ery, Dick-ery, Bloc.
On Saturday, 26 March, half a million people marched through London to show their opposition to the savage, ideological cuts being imposed by the Tories, held up by Clegg and his band of merry men, (whose idea of a Robin Hood tax seems also to be to rob from the poor and give to the rich, while in the background, Caroline Spelman puts Sherwood Forest on e-bay).
People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".
Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.
And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".
It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.
The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.
I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.
It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.
Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.
What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.
What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.
Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.
Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves
Says it all, really.
People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".
Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.
And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".
It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.
The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.
I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.
It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.
Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.
What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.
What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.
Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.
Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves
Says it all, really.
Emergency, War 10!
The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.
No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.
Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!
Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!
This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.
Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.
Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.
No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.
Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!
Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!
This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.
Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.
Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.
Gadaffi! Duck!
Colonel Gadaffi (is it Gadaffi or Gaddafi? It looks wrong both ways) may not be clinically insane, as some cohorts of our media wish to portray him, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at times, he didn't feel more than a tad schizophrenic, particularly on the subject of whether or not he is a legitimate target for the Western military air strikes that are currently pounding Libya. The answer seems to change day by day, and to depend on who it is you are talking to. Sometimes, it changes by the hour.
The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.
Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?
The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.
Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?
Sunday 20 March 2011
Doing a Dubya on Libya
So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.
My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.
Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.
Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.
It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?
No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.
What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.
We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.
I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.
But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.
Not in my name.
My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.
Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.
Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.
It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?
No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.
What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.
We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.
I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.
But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.
Not in my name.
Sunday 13 March 2011
The Bye-Bye By Election
It has taken me a while to get down to posting about the Barnsley Bye Election, and specifically about the Liberal Dimwits coming sixth, just above the Monster Raving Loonies. In fact, had Wing Commander Boakes stood, he would probably have beaten them as well, and he is currently deceased.
It would have been a major cataclysm if Labour had lost. They could put up a donkey in a red rosette in Barnsley Central and it would get in. In fact, when you look at some of the Labour councillors on Barnsley MBC, I think they probably have. Whatever their origin, Barnsley Met, as a council, is bone from the neck up. They once sent a poll tax bill to my cat.
Many people outside Barnsley thought that Labour might struggle because of the previous incumbent, Eric Illsley's troubles over his expenses. However, many people inside Barnsley, and they are the ones with the votes after all, core Labour voters, felt that Illsley had been made an example of, and that others had got away with far worse and not been castigated in any way.
In Oldham and Saddleworth, the Lib Dims were stronger to start with and were aided by a strategic lack of campaigning by the Tories. But in Barnsley, there was nowhere to hide. I'm not going to add to the vast mountain of analysis, I just wanted to put down this marker to the effect that the predicted electoral disaster for the Lentil Munchers will indeed come to pass, if these results continue, and, it would seem, soonerrather than later, from the reports emerging from the Liberal Spring Conference in Sheffield about Clegg being humiliated by his own membership over NHS reform. Now let's see him try and square that with the Tories.
Sadly for the Literal Dimwits, however, even if they gave Clegg the Mussolini treatment from a lamp post in Barker's Pool this very afternoon, it would be too late to save them. As the late, great, Bay City Rollers once put it, in another context, "Bye-Bye Baby, Baby Bye Bye..."
It would have been a major cataclysm if Labour had lost. They could put up a donkey in a red rosette in Barnsley Central and it would get in. In fact, when you look at some of the Labour councillors on Barnsley MBC, I think they probably have. Whatever their origin, Barnsley Met, as a council, is bone from the neck up. They once sent a poll tax bill to my cat.
Many people outside Barnsley thought that Labour might struggle because of the previous incumbent, Eric Illsley's troubles over his expenses. However, many people inside Barnsley, and they are the ones with the votes after all, core Labour voters, felt that Illsley had been made an example of, and that others had got away with far worse and not been castigated in any way.
In Oldham and Saddleworth, the Lib Dims were stronger to start with and were aided by a strategic lack of campaigning by the Tories. But in Barnsley, there was nowhere to hide. I'm not going to add to the vast mountain of analysis, I just wanted to put down this marker to the effect that the predicted electoral disaster for the Lentil Munchers will indeed come to pass, if these results continue, and, it would seem, soonerrather than later, from the reports emerging from the Liberal Spring Conference in Sheffield about Clegg being humiliated by his own membership over NHS reform. Now let's see him try and square that with the Tories.
Sadly for the Literal Dimwits, however, even if they gave Clegg the Mussolini treatment from a lamp post in Barker's Pool this very afternoon, it would be too late to save them. As the late, great, Bay City Rollers once put it, in another context, "Bye-Bye Baby, Baby Bye Bye..."
A Rose By Any Other Name
I thought I heard a report during the week that Sir Fred Goodwin had taken out an injunction to stop people referring to him as a "banker".
OK, fair enough. I can appreciate it's a nasty word, and nobody would like to be referred to in those terms.
We need to find something more appropriate for these people, something more politically correct.
How about "septic wart on the bloated arse of capitalism"?
Yep, that does it for me.
OK, fair enough. I can appreciate it's a nasty word, and nobody would like to be referred to in those terms.
We need to find something more appropriate for these people, something more politically correct.
How about "septic wart on the bloated arse of capitalism"?
Yep, that does it for me.
A Mess of "Potage"
I stood amazed, during the week, at the proposal by Westminster Council to ban the “soup run” to homeless people in their area. Of course, on one level, we should not be surprised at a bunch of self-serving, fat burghers and Pharisees have concocted such an idea. They have “form” in that respect, after all. Was it not Westminster Council that banned the run in their hallowed precincts at Christmas the other year? Unbelievably, on that occasion, it was supported by the editor of “The Big Issue” and I wrote to him and told him he was an idiot. He never replied. Perhaps he already knew.
To the councillors of Westminster, it would seem that the homeless are a sort of wilful and tiresome irritation, so obsessed with the taste of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato that they are willing to leave their homes and their jobs, hitch-hike to London, and sleep rough in a doorway in Covent Garden just for a sniff of the stuff. It is an indicator of just how far those set in authority over us take us for mugs, that this kind of bollocks is actually served up as some sort of justification for the ban.
The truth, I suspect, lies nearer to the fact that rich people who live in Westminster don’t like seeing poor and homeless people as they go about their daily social round. It grates on the residual node of what used to be their shame gene, before they had it surgically removed. It reminds them of the fundamental injustice of their continued existence, compared to the people in our society who are really struggling. Johann Hari, writing tellingly about this in The Independent, points to the distant view of Canary Wharf and all its glittering towers, from the perspective of the homeless who “live” – or rather, exist – in Covent Garden.
Anyway, I have written to the Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asking her what she intends to do about the homeless, because you can’t ban them from existing. Now that no one will feed them, will they be left, in some cases no doubt, to starve in the gutter? I await the reply (if any) with interest. Because, as it says in my Bible, if they cared to look, “the poor are always with us”.
And if you could make horrible nasty things vanish just by banning them, someone would have banned Westminster Council a long time ago.
To the councillors of Westminster, it would seem that the homeless are a sort of wilful and tiresome irritation, so obsessed with the taste of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato that they are willing to leave their homes and their jobs, hitch-hike to London, and sleep rough in a doorway in Covent Garden just for a sniff of the stuff. It is an indicator of just how far those set in authority over us take us for mugs, that this kind of bollocks is actually served up as some sort of justification for the ban.
The truth, I suspect, lies nearer to the fact that rich people who live in Westminster don’t like seeing poor and homeless people as they go about their daily social round. It grates on the residual node of what used to be their shame gene, before they had it surgically removed. It reminds them of the fundamental injustice of their continued existence, compared to the people in our society who are really struggling. Johann Hari, writing tellingly about this in The Independent, points to the distant view of Canary Wharf and all its glittering towers, from the perspective of the homeless who “live” – or rather, exist – in Covent Garden.
Anyway, I have written to the Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asking her what she intends to do about the homeless, because you can’t ban them from existing. Now that no one will feed them, will they be left, in some cases no doubt, to starve in the gutter? I await the reply (if any) with interest. Because, as it says in my Bible, if they cared to look, “the poor are always with us”.
And if you could make horrible nasty things vanish just by banning them, someone would have banned Westminster Council a long time ago.
Testing Times II
Last November there was a threat by the EU to backtrack on the pledge to ban the selling of animal-tested products in Europe, which is due to come in force in 2013. Thanks to the efforts of people such as Uncaged in publicising the attempted U turn, there has been enough of a public outcry to at least make the EU think again, though I wouldn’t trust those bastards at the EU to run me a bath, let alone do anything so important as implementing an EU wide ban on animal tested products
But just as one threat is potentially deflected, another has reared its ugly head. The prospect that British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since the days of Queen Victoria.
A separate EU law, this time governing how all animal experimentation across Europe will be regulated, has been finalised, Now, each member country has to update their own domestic legislation to make it consistent with the new European Law. As with all EU directives, if implemented here, it could have a mixed effect, and may, in some cases, even make things worse. Up til now, the UK government has pledged that it will keep our domestic legislation stricter than the EU requires, but it now emerges that the government is preparing to rip up the rules that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.
Because time is short, and I want to get this up on the blog quickly, I am doing a straight cut and paste from Uncaged’s site:
Government threatens to cut protection for animals in laboratories
British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since Queen Victoria’s day
A new EU Directive (2010/63/EU) to govern animal experimentation across Europe was finalised last autumn. Now, each country has to update their own laws so they are consistent with the new European Directive. In some areas this could reduce animal suffering in British laboratories, but in other ways it may make things worse.
Up until now, the UK Government has assured Parliament and the public that they will keep any British rules that are stricter than the EU Directive. However, we have discovered that the Government is now prepared to rip up measures that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.
In other words, the Government is prepared to sacrifice British sovereignty and the lives of innocent animals to serve the interests of big business. This could have terrible consequences:
• More primates could be imprisoned and killed in research for trivial conditions such as baldness, hangovers, mild allergies or the common cold.
• Secret proposals to conduct chemical poisoning tests on dogs would be approved without public knowledge.
• The Government could start allowing researchers to inflict excruciating injuries on animals such as head trauma, burns or infected fractures without pain relief.
• Abandoned and stray cats and dogs could end up in vivisection labs once again, over a 100 years after the practice was banned in Britain. This could open the door to companion animals being stolen by animal dealers and sold to labs.
• It will be easier for researchers to repeatedly starve, mutilate, stress, poison and give cancer to the same individual animal.
• The Government could give the animal testing industry carte blanche to abuse animals with impunity, free from independent oversight.
• Animal research establishments will no longer have to even consider whether the pain they inflict on animals is justified by the expected test results.
The impact of these changes would be devastating – more pain, more suffering, more distress and more killing. Human health will also suffer as there will be even less incentive for researchers to replace crude animal tests with more effective and reliable non-animal methods.
The Government is hoping to push these appalling measures through by exploiting a loophole which allows them to change UK laws without Parliamentary scrutiny.
This is a major battle which will affect the fate of animals and medical research for years to come. Please stand up for animals at this pivotal time.
But just as one threat is potentially deflected, another has reared its ugly head. The prospect that British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since the days of Queen Victoria.
A separate EU law, this time governing how all animal experimentation across Europe will be regulated, has been finalised, Now, each member country has to update their own domestic legislation to make it consistent with the new European Law. As with all EU directives, if implemented here, it could have a mixed effect, and may, in some cases, even make things worse. Up til now, the UK government has pledged that it will keep our domestic legislation stricter than the EU requires, but it now emerges that the government is preparing to rip up the rules that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.
Because time is short, and I want to get this up on the blog quickly, I am doing a straight cut and paste from Uncaged’s site:
Government threatens to cut protection for animals in laboratories
British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since Queen Victoria’s day
A new EU Directive (2010/63/EU) to govern animal experimentation across Europe was finalised last autumn. Now, each country has to update their own laws so they are consistent with the new European Directive. In some areas this could reduce animal suffering in British laboratories, but in other ways it may make things worse.
Up until now, the UK Government has assured Parliament and the public that they will keep any British rules that are stricter than the EU Directive. However, we have discovered that the Government is now prepared to rip up measures that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.
In other words, the Government is prepared to sacrifice British sovereignty and the lives of innocent animals to serve the interests of big business. This could have terrible consequences:
• More primates could be imprisoned and killed in research for trivial conditions such as baldness, hangovers, mild allergies or the common cold.
• Secret proposals to conduct chemical poisoning tests on dogs would be approved without public knowledge.
• The Government could start allowing researchers to inflict excruciating injuries on animals such as head trauma, burns or infected fractures without pain relief.
• Abandoned and stray cats and dogs could end up in vivisection labs once again, over a 100 years after the practice was banned in Britain. This could open the door to companion animals being stolen by animal dealers and sold to labs.
• It will be easier for researchers to repeatedly starve, mutilate, stress, poison and give cancer to the same individual animal.
• The Government could give the animal testing industry carte blanche to abuse animals with impunity, free from independent oversight.
• Animal research establishments will no longer have to even consider whether the pain they inflict on animals is justified by the expected test results.
The impact of these changes would be devastating – more pain, more suffering, more distress and more killing. Human health will also suffer as there will be even less incentive for researchers to replace crude animal tests with more effective and reliable non-animal methods.
The Government is hoping to push these appalling measures through by exploiting a loophole which allows them to change UK laws without Parliamentary scrutiny.
This is a major battle which will affect the fate of animals and medical research for years to come. Please stand up for animals at this pivotal time.
Saturday 19 February 2011
Forest Dump
I actually signed the online petition to save England’s forests from being flogged off to the highest bidder. In common, it would seem with half a million or so others. The Tories and the mini-Tories got a nasty shock. Unfortunately for them, they ran smack into an organised articulate middle class protest fuelled by Twitter, Facebook and other online resources against a simple, easy-to-grasp and plainly gaga idea. They should think themselves lucky: if this was Egypt, they would now be on the next jet to Sharm El Sheikh.
As it stands, satisfying though it was to see Caroline Spelman having to eat a huge helping of Humble Pie garnished with a jus of manure at the despatch box, and Cameron trying to pretend all along that it was just some kind of extended consultation exercise, this is no time for false complacency. I signed the petition because, like Ewan MacColl’s “Manchester Rambler”, I believe that “no man has the right to own mountains, any more than the deep ocean bed”. But this doesn’t mean, as some people have suggested, that I prefer trees to people. I prefer some trees to some people. I signed because I could see that the government was making a complete horlicks of it, failing even to consult Dame Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust, for God’s sake, and it was an open goal which I was quite happy to help tap in.
But we shouldn’t forget, as I said in the mordant note I sent in reply to the self-congratulatory smug email I received from 38 Degrees, thanking me for my support, that although the trees may be a bit safer (for now) we still have to inflict similar pain on the ConDims over the NHS, benefits cuts, unemployment, the homeless, and the economy.
Then, and only then, there might be some room for congratulation. In the meantime, there is work to be done. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.
As it stands, satisfying though it was to see Caroline Spelman having to eat a huge helping of Humble Pie garnished with a jus of manure at the despatch box, and Cameron trying to pretend all along that it was just some kind of extended consultation exercise, this is no time for false complacency. I signed the petition because, like Ewan MacColl’s “Manchester Rambler”, I believe that “no man has the right to own mountains, any more than the deep ocean bed”. But this doesn’t mean, as some people have suggested, that I prefer trees to people. I prefer some trees to some people. I signed because I could see that the government was making a complete horlicks of it, failing even to consult Dame Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust, for God’s sake, and it was an open goal which I was quite happy to help tap in.
But we shouldn’t forget, as I said in the mordant note I sent in reply to the self-congratulatory smug email I received from 38 Degrees, thanking me for my support, that although the trees may be a bit safer (for now) we still have to inflict similar pain on the ConDims over the NHS, benefits cuts, unemployment, the homeless, and the economy.
Then, and only then, there might be some room for congratulation. In the meantime, there is work to be done. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.
Daily Fail
The Daily Mail has been at it again. If I was a fully paid up member of the tin foil hat brigade, instead of merely an occasional camp-follower, I might actually believe there was some conspiracy, some link, some hidden, arcane purpose behind the way these articles appear, with the regularity of the first cuckoo in Spring – and in many cases, “cuckoo” is such an appropriate word – just as the government, in the person of Irritable Bowel Smith, is limbering up to have another go at imposing swingeing cuts on people who receive benefits.
But, to give them credit, the Daily Heil has form in this area. They have “previous”. They have been at it for years. In the Daily Mail’s world view, our precious British way of life is under constant attack from unscrupulous foreigners, many of them maybe a bit “brownish”, who creep unnoticed through the Channel Tunnel at night, just for the fun of filling in an ESA form at Folkestone JobCentre Plus. “One-legged Muslim Latvian roofer asylum seeker took my cat swimming in the nude, says Vicar’s wife.” Making up headlines from the Daily Mail. We’ve all done it, for fun. The Daily Mail, however, has people who do it and get paid for it!
Take this headline from 11th February: “Nearly 2 MILLION on sickness benefits for years are fit to work!” Goodness me, you think. How can this be? Yet when you actually read the article, you discover that it is, in fact, the Daily Mail’s own projection of what they THINK the figure might be, if the results of two individual trials of benefit reviews which have been going on in Burnley and Aberdeen are rolled out nation-wide. If.
To be fair, this time around, the Mail does actually say, buried half way down the article: “If the total proportion of invalid claims matches the results from the two trial reassessments, it would mean almost 1.8 million people were receiving benefits despite being able to work.” Yes, it would, very true. And if my Auntie had balls, she would be my Uncle. So what?
The Mail then goes on to reference a previous article in similar vein where it did exactly the same trick, and I posted about it at the time (though not on here) “Last year it emerged that three-quarters of new applicants for sickness benefit were also declared invalid.”. What this carefully-recycled piece of DWP press release doesn’t say in this article, though, is that that “three-quarters” was ALSO three quarters of an initial assessment, not three-quarters of all claimants. Though in both cases the Mail obviously regards it as a slam-dunk that the ratio will be maintained, whereas in fact as I understand it, the early assessment of these cases does initially throw up a high proportion of abandoned claims, some of which were actually made by people suffering with short-term conditions that then cleared up. So they stopped claiming!
But, of course, to the Daily Wail, that’s not a story. It’s almost as much a non-story as “Moderate Muslim condemns hate crime extremist Imam”.
Meanwhile, the readers of the Daily Mail, like the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript in TS Eliot’s poem, continue to sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, drowsily dreaming of a sepia-tinted England, with spinsters cycling to Matins and cricket on the green, and nary a black-faced benefits claimant or a one-legged Latvian roofer to be seen. Gawd bless yer, Miss Marple, that’s another mystery solved. Order is returned to the peaceful village of Tiglets Frisby. Richard Littlejohn is in his heaven, and all’s right with the right-wing loonies. Oh to be in Mail-land, where the church clock stands at ten to three, and there is always honey for tea. For those that can afford it.
But, to give them credit, the Daily Heil has form in this area. They have “previous”. They have been at it for years. In the Daily Mail’s world view, our precious British way of life is under constant attack from unscrupulous foreigners, many of them maybe a bit “brownish”, who creep unnoticed through the Channel Tunnel at night, just for the fun of filling in an ESA form at Folkestone JobCentre Plus. “One-legged Muslim Latvian roofer asylum seeker took my cat swimming in the nude, says Vicar’s wife.” Making up headlines from the Daily Mail. We’ve all done it, for fun. The Daily Mail, however, has people who do it and get paid for it!
Take this headline from 11th February: “Nearly 2 MILLION on sickness benefits for years are fit to work!” Goodness me, you think. How can this be? Yet when you actually read the article, you discover that it is, in fact, the Daily Mail’s own projection of what they THINK the figure might be, if the results of two individual trials of benefit reviews which have been going on in Burnley and Aberdeen are rolled out nation-wide. If.
To be fair, this time around, the Mail does actually say, buried half way down the article: “If the total proportion of invalid claims matches the results from the two trial reassessments, it would mean almost 1.8 million people were receiving benefits despite being able to work.” Yes, it would, very true. And if my Auntie had balls, she would be my Uncle. So what?
The Mail then goes on to reference a previous article in similar vein where it did exactly the same trick, and I posted about it at the time (though not on here) “Last year it emerged that three-quarters of new applicants for sickness benefit were also declared invalid.”. What this carefully-recycled piece of DWP press release doesn’t say in this article, though, is that that “three-quarters” was ALSO three quarters of an initial assessment, not three-quarters of all claimants. Though in both cases the Mail obviously regards it as a slam-dunk that the ratio will be maintained, whereas in fact as I understand it, the early assessment of these cases does initially throw up a high proportion of abandoned claims, some of which were actually made by people suffering with short-term conditions that then cleared up. So they stopped claiming!
But, of course, to the Daily Wail, that’s not a story. It’s almost as much a non-story as “Moderate Muslim condemns hate crime extremist Imam”.
Meanwhile, the readers of the Daily Mail, like the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript in TS Eliot’s poem, continue to sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, drowsily dreaming of a sepia-tinted England, with spinsters cycling to Matins and cricket on the green, and nary a black-faced benefits claimant or a one-legged Latvian roofer to be seen. Gawd bless yer, Miss Marple, that’s another mystery solved. Order is returned to the peaceful village of Tiglets Frisby. Richard Littlejohn is in his heaven, and all’s right with the right-wing loonies. Oh to be in Mail-land, where the church clock stands at ten to three, and there is always honey for tea. For those that can afford it.
Monbiot Man
George Monbiot seems to have stirred up something of a hornets’ nest amongst tax lawyers and apologists for the Tories and Mini-Tories with his recent Guardian article about the proposals to change the way in which the UK taxes overseas profits of companies registered here. When it gets to the stage where people are blogging back atcha and calling you “Moonbat”, while simultaneously trying to suggest it’s no big deal, really, this tends to suggest to me that you’ve hit a nerve.
I don’t read The Guardian, and have absolutely no brief for Monbiot - the only letter I ever wrote him remains resolutely unanswered to this day - and I was only alerted to the piece by a tweet on Twitter that was re-tweeted by someone I don’t even follow, so I could well have missed it. As it was, I had to read Monbiot’s article a few times for the implications of it to sink in, but I freely admit that, as someone who failed O Level Maths, numeracy is not my strong point (or perhaps I should say, as Jack Straw did when having his collar felt over his expenses, “accountancy is not my strong suit”.)
Opinion seems divided over whether Monbiot has a point, or whether he is simply over-egging the pudding for effect. All kudos to him, I guess, at least for even bothering to read the adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009! Personally, I glaze over faster than a lump of pork in cranberry jelly just thinking about it. Others have argued that it is just the UK bringing its method of taxing the profits of overseas subsidiaries in line with the rest of the EU. [I have remarked before that it never ceases to amaze me how we always have to harmonize with the rest of the EU, rather than them harmonizing with us, but let that pass for now.]
The net effect of the proposed changes will be to hand big businesses, multi nationals who can more than afford to shoulder the burden of their fair share of getting us out of this mess, a £100M tax break, just at the time when the Government is telling us we are all in it together. Clearly, some of us are “in it” more than others. Some of us are in it up to our necks and sinking fast, while others are allowed to skip gaily over the piles of ordure that lie in wait for the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled and the unemployed, and continue merrily on their way.
And that is really the point behind all of this. What these companies are doing, aided and abetted by HMRC, may well be legal. But that doesn’t make it moral, it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right that libraries and swimming pools and community centres are closing left right and centre while for the bastards in stripey suits, it’s still “trebles all round”.
Any moral government, any government that even purported to care about the people of this country, would not be looking to add yet more loopholes to a taxation system that already resembles a moth-fancier’s string vest. They would be saying “these people can afford it, so proportionately, they should give more than a bloke on ESA in a tenement in Newcastle”.
This is what UK Uncut, with its excellent campaigns to blackguard and shame the tax avoiders into paying something more like a fair share, are all about, and more power to their collective elbow. I wish they were in Parliament, in opposition, right now, instead of the feeble and supine Labour Party.
But, whether Monbiot is wholly right or wholly wrong, or – as I suspect – somewhere in between, but definitely onto something, I suppose it comes as no surprise to find that the Tories are doing something divisive, unfair, and beneficial to big business. Something that was in no-one's manifesto, either, come to that. I do, however, remain amazed at how long the Liberal Dimwits will continue to allow themselves to be bitch-slapped by Cameron and Osborne. Talk about an abusive relationship!
Unfortunately for them, at the next election, whenever it comes, the electorate won’t believe they simply “walked into a door again.” They won’t believe anything the LibDims say. Vote Lib Dim, get Tory. Once bitten, twice shy, Lib Dims, bye bye.
I don’t read The Guardian, and have absolutely no brief for Monbiot - the only letter I ever wrote him remains resolutely unanswered to this day - and I was only alerted to the piece by a tweet on Twitter that was re-tweeted by someone I don’t even follow, so I could well have missed it. As it was, I had to read Monbiot’s article a few times for the implications of it to sink in, but I freely admit that, as someone who failed O Level Maths, numeracy is not my strong point (or perhaps I should say, as Jack Straw did when having his collar felt over his expenses, “accountancy is not my strong suit”.)
Opinion seems divided over whether Monbiot has a point, or whether he is simply over-egging the pudding for effect. All kudos to him, I guess, at least for even bothering to read the adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009! Personally, I glaze over faster than a lump of pork in cranberry jelly just thinking about it. Others have argued that it is just the UK bringing its method of taxing the profits of overseas subsidiaries in line with the rest of the EU. [I have remarked before that it never ceases to amaze me how we always have to harmonize with the rest of the EU, rather than them harmonizing with us, but let that pass for now.]
The net effect of the proposed changes will be to hand big businesses, multi nationals who can more than afford to shoulder the burden of their fair share of getting us out of this mess, a £100M tax break, just at the time when the Government is telling us we are all in it together. Clearly, some of us are “in it” more than others. Some of us are in it up to our necks and sinking fast, while others are allowed to skip gaily over the piles of ordure that lie in wait for the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled and the unemployed, and continue merrily on their way.
And that is really the point behind all of this. What these companies are doing, aided and abetted by HMRC, may well be legal. But that doesn’t make it moral, it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right that libraries and swimming pools and community centres are closing left right and centre while for the bastards in stripey suits, it’s still “trebles all round”.
Any moral government, any government that even purported to care about the people of this country, would not be looking to add yet more loopholes to a taxation system that already resembles a moth-fancier’s string vest. They would be saying “these people can afford it, so proportionately, they should give more than a bloke on ESA in a tenement in Newcastle”.
This is what UK Uncut, with its excellent campaigns to blackguard and shame the tax avoiders into paying something more like a fair share, are all about, and more power to their collective elbow. I wish they were in Parliament, in opposition, right now, instead of the feeble and supine Labour Party.
But, whether Monbiot is wholly right or wholly wrong, or – as I suspect – somewhere in between, but definitely onto something, I suppose it comes as no surprise to find that the Tories are doing something divisive, unfair, and beneficial to big business. Something that was in no-one's manifesto, either, come to that. I do, however, remain amazed at how long the Liberal Dimwits will continue to allow themselves to be bitch-slapped by Cameron and Osborne. Talk about an abusive relationship!
Unfortunately for them, at the next election, whenever it comes, the electorate won’t believe they simply “walked into a door again.” They won’t believe anything the LibDims say. Vote Lib Dim, get Tory. Once bitten, twice shy, Lib Dims, bye bye.
Tuesday 8 February 2011
Small is Beautiful, Big is Better, but Both is best of all
The thing is, we did use to have the Big Society, well, sort of. I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in East Hull, our community did look out for each other and - yes, cliche or not - you could always leave your door open and neighbours were always popping round for a cuppa.
In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.
Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.
I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.
There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.
If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.
So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.
It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!
I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.
In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.
Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.
I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.
There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.
If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.
So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.
It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!
I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.
Friday 4 February 2011
Pass the Parcel
One thing which was obvious from the start, when the Tories and the Lib Dims agreed their pact made in hell with all the bonhomie of Von Ribbentrop and Stalin breaking out the celebratory vodka, was that the amount of money given to councils by central government was going to be decimated.
The Tories hate the public service ethos, they would much prefer everything to be privatised for the benefit of shareholders and their rich toffee-nosed friends in the City. They hoped of course that “The Big Society” would step in and make good some of the deficit, so that if, for instance, your council couldn’t afford to empty your bin any more, a possee of well-meaning citizens and charities could do it instead. The cuts, however, are damaging the income of charities as well – who has the wherewithal to donate to charity when their own job is under threat?
Now that The Big Society isn’t happening, a reasonable person might expect contrition and a re-think, but the Tories and their catamites are pressing on regardless into the valley of death. Their chief cheerleaders in this divide and rule programme of starving the councils of cash and then blaming them when they are unable to provide essential services are Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps at the Department of Communities. [A misnomer if ever there was one. Department for Dismantling Communities would be a more apposite title, these days]
Pickles operates on precisely the opposite principle to his more famous namesake, Wilfred, who was known for his catchphrase “Give ‘Em the Money, Mabel”. The Tories like to trot him out as their equivalent of John Prescott, but in fact he has fewer appealing attributes and even less charisma and life-experience, having risen in obscurity from the ranks of Bradford Council. Despite the fundamental dishonesty of a policy which denies councils the money to carry out essential services and then blames them for not emptying the bins, Pickles is at least straightforward about what he does.
Grant Shapps was in the news recently for holding up the “fact” that Manchester City Council had a “Twitter Tsar” on their payroll, at vast expense, naturally. When the story was investigated further, however, it was discovered that the “Twitter Tsar” was, in fact, the person who ran the Council’s web sites, and that “tweeting” was merely a small part of what his job entailed.
One of the most damaging aspects of this slash and burn approach to local authority funding by the Department of Communities has of course been its impact on the homeless and other vulnerable people who depend on Council social care.
We’ve seen this happen particularly in Nottingham, recently, where Framework, a local charity working to alleviate the problems of homelessness and deprivation, have been forced to the brink of legal action over budget cuts emanating from central government
Andrew Redfern, Chief Executive of Framework, said:
“We have served ‘letters prior to action’ (the first stage of a judicial review) on the department for Communities and Local Government and Nottingham City Council. There is a deadline for them to respond and we hope this may help them to resolve the issue.
“Framework serves homeless and vulnerable people, including those with mental health, substance and alcohol problems, older and younger people, people with learning disabilities and women fleeing domestic violence. We have a duty to defend the thousands of people who will lose their support and may become homeless because of the cuts. Whatever the outcome of this legal action I hope it will shine a light on the ludicrous nature of the situation.
“In the Comprehensive Spending Review the government announced a reduction in the national SP budget of only 12% in real terms over four years. The actual amount of cash available for the programme next year is barely 1% below the figure for the current year, yet it transpires that Nottingham City Council is proposing a cut of 45% (from £22.37m to £12.93m a reduction of £9.4m) based on its interpretation of the local government settlement. It will ameliorate this with an extra £2m for one year only.
“The department for Communities and Local Government disputes the city council’s figures stating that Nottingham’s SP allocation has been reduced by no more than 11.3%. The department has not yet given a precise figure.
“The argument between central and local government leaves us perplexed. The confusion about the settlement is causing chaos. The city council has issued de-commissioning notices for many of its SP-funded services from the end of March 2011 and reduced contract values on the others to £1 per annum. In view of this we have had no choice but to give notice to over 200 staff working directly with vulnerable people in the city.
“We are receiving more and more enquiries from service-users and concerned members of the public asking what will happen in April.
“The proposed cuts will have a devastating impact on the city. Levels of rough sleeping, crime, anti-social behaviour, ill-health, unemployment and poverty will all increase.
“We have to do whatever we can to stop the cuts. Our decision to seek a judicial review is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” added Mr Redfern.
Councillor John Collins, the leader of Nottingham City Council, has written an open letter to Grant Shapps pointing out the errors in his calculations of the amount by which the Support Grant has been cut. Not that this has made any difference. He may as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge.
The fact is that Grant Shapps doesn’t need the effects of his actions pointing out to him. He knows already what the effects are, and if he doesn’t, then he has (still) plenty of civil servants who can explain it to him. It's not a regrettable mistake, it's a deliberate strategy.
Once again, it is past midnight as I sit here, scribing out these words by the combined light of a low-energy light bulb in the standard lamp and the glow of the remaining coals through the window of the stove.
I can hear the wind buffeting the trees in the garden making them thrash about as if in pain, and I can hear the rain, sounding for all the world like handfuls of gravel being flung against the windows of the conservatory.
In olden days, of course, this sort of weather would be the backdrop for a secret lover arriving at your window in the middle of the night. In a poem by Keats for example, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. These days, we’re not so romantic, and every time I hear the rain driving against the conservatory, I think of those forced to be out there in the night, stuck out in the rain with no choice and nowhere to go.
And I think of those who voted for the Tories and the Liberal Dimwits at the last election, and I wonder if they are happy with this outcome? Happy that people are sleeping out in the perishing cold and the rain?
Is Grant Shapps happy with the results of his actions? Is David Cameron, as he goes back home for the weekend to his second home in his constituency, paid for by us, or to Chequers, with its hundreds of bedrooms, paid for by us?
And again I ask, if you are NOT happy with the outcome, why do you allow it to continue?
For the rest of us, the streets are full of cobbles and there are many, many windows in Whitehall. Given that the official opposition is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, what we need is an opposition to the opposition. What we need is an indefinite general strike against the cuts until the government gives in, and calls a general election!
The Tories hate the public service ethos, they would much prefer everything to be privatised for the benefit of shareholders and their rich toffee-nosed friends in the City. They hoped of course that “The Big Society” would step in and make good some of the deficit, so that if, for instance, your council couldn’t afford to empty your bin any more, a possee of well-meaning citizens and charities could do it instead. The cuts, however, are damaging the income of charities as well – who has the wherewithal to donate to charity when their own job is under threat?
Now that The Big Society isn’t happening, a reasonable person might expect contrition and a re-think, but the Tories and their catamites are pressing on regardless into the valley of death. Their chief cheerleaders in this divide and rule programme of starving the councils of cash and then blaming them when they are unable to provide essential services are Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps at the Department of Communities. [A misnomer if ever there was one. Department for Dismantling Communities would be a more apposite title, these days]
Pickles operates on precisely the opposite principle to his more famous namesake, Wilfred, who was known for his catchphrase “Give ‘Em the Money, Mabel”. The Tories like to trot him out as their equivalent of John Prescott, but in fact he has fewer appealing attributes and even less charisma and life-experience, having risen in obscurity from the ranks of Bradford Council. Despite the fundamental dishonesty of a policy which denies councils the money to carry out essential services and then blames them for not emptying the bins, Pickles is at least straightforward about what he does.
Grant Shapps was in the news recently for holding up the “fact” that Manchester City Council had a “Twitter Tsar” on their payroll, at vast expense, naturally. When the story was investigated further, however, it was discovered that the “Twitter Tsar” was, in fact, the person who ran the Council’s web sites, and that “tweeting” was merely a small part of what his job entailed.
One of the most damaging aspects of this slash and burn approach to local authority funding by the Department of Communities has of course been its impact on the homeless and other vulnerable people who depend on Council social care.
We’ve seen this happen particularly in Nottingham, recently, where Framework, a local charity working to alleviate the problems of homelessness and deprivation, have been forced to the brink of legal action over budget cuts emanating from central government
Andrew Redfern, Chief Executive of Framework, said:
“We have served ‘letters prior to action’ (the first stage of a judicial review) on the department for Communities and Local Government and Nottingham City Council. There is a deadline for them to respond and we hope this may help them to resolve the issue.
“Framework serves homeless and vulnerable people, including those with mental health, substance and alcohol problems, older and younger people, people with learning disabilities and women fleeing domestic violence. We have a duty to defend the thousands of people who will lose their support and may become homeless because of the cuts. Whatever the outcome of this legal action I hope it will shine a light on the ludicrous nature of the situation.
“In the Comprehensive Spending Review the government announced a reduction in the national SP budget of only 12% in real terms over four years. The actual amount of cash available for the programme next year is barely 1% below the figure for the current year, yet it transpires that Nottingham City Council is proposing a cut of 45% (from £22.37m to £12.93m a reduction of £9.4m) based on its interpretation of the local government settlement. It will ameliorate this with an extra £2m for one year only.
“The department for Communities and Local Government disputes the city council’s figures stating that Nottingham’s SP allocation has been reduced by no more than 11.3%. The department has not yet given a precise figure.
“The argument between central and local government leaves us perplexed. The confusion about the settlement is causing chaos. The city council has issued de-commissioning notices for many of its SP-funded services from the end of March 2011 and reduced contract values on the others to £1 per annum. In view of this we have had no choice but to give notice to over 200 staff working directly with vulnerable people in the city.
“We are receiving more and more enquiries from service-users and concerned members of the public asking what will happen in April.
“The proposed cuts will have a devastating impact on the city. Levels of rough sleeping, crime, anti-social behaviour, ill-health, unemployment and poverty will all increase.
“We have to do whatever we can to stop the cuts. Our decision to seek a judicial review is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” added Mr Redfern.
Councillor John Collins, the leader of Nottingham City Council, has written an open letter to Grant Shapps pointing out the errors in his calculations of the amount by which the Support Grant has been cut. Not that this has made any difference. He may as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge.
The fact is that Grant Shapps doesn’t need the effects of his actions pointing out to him. He knows already what the effects are, and if he doesn’t, then he has (still) plenty of civil servants who can explain it to him. It's not a regrettable mistake, it's a deliberate strategy.
Once again, it is past midnight as I sit here, scribing out these words by the combined light of a low-energy light bulb in the standard lamp and the glow of the remaining coals through the window of the stove.
I can hear the wind buffeting the trees in the garden making them thrash about as if in pain, and I can hear the rain, sounding for all the world like handfuls of gravel being flung against the windows of the conservatory.
In olden days, of course, this sort of weather would be the backdrop for a secret lover arriving at your window in the middle of the night. In a poem by Keats for example, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. These days, we’re not so romantic, and every time I hear the rain driving against the conservatory, I think of those forced to be out there in the night, stuck out in the rain with no choice and nowhere to go.
And I think of those who voted for the Tories and the Liberal Dimwits at the last election, and I wonder if they are happy with this outcome? Happy that people are sleeping out in the perishing cold and the rain?
Is Grant Shapps happy with the results of his actions? Is David Cameron, as he goes back home for the weekend to his second home in his constituency, paid for by us, or to Chequers, with its hundreds of bedrooms, paid for by us?
And again I ask, if you are NOT happy with the outcome, why do you allow it to continue?
For the rest of us, the streets are full of cobbles and there are many, many windows in Whitehall. Given that the official opposition is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, what we need is an opposition to the opposition. What we need is an indefinite general strike against the cuts until the government gives in, and calls a general election!
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