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.
Showing posts with label Wankers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wankers. Show all posts
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?
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.
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...)
Saturday, 30 April 2011
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.
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, 13 March 2011
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.
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.
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