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...)
Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Friday, 6 May 2011
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?
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
You're AV-in a Larf!
I got my polling card yesterday for the AV referendum.
I have followed the recent debate on AV as a voting system, and I have to say it holds all the interest for me of watching a steward rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
When you have a situation where the major political parties all run vacuous, negative campaigns based on slogans only one step away from "don't vote for him, he smells of poo", which is what we were treated to last May, while concealing their true intentions and keeping all the nasty things out of the manifesto until they are safely installed in number 10, it is no wonder that a cynical and apathetic electorate can't decide which of these poltroons they hate the most, and stays away in droves, refusing to become engaged in the political process. Especially as you are likely to find that the party you thought you had voted for has ditched all its promises and is now helping its former opponents to shaft you.
In that scenario, a set of venal, corrupt, self-serving bastards kow-towing to the bankers and the money markets represents the same outcome for most ordinary people, whether it was elected by AV or first past the post. I genuinely fear for the future of democracy in this country unless politicians wake up and start to have the courage to frame policies that will improve the lives of real people and make things better. People will turn from democracy to direct action if the democratic system fails to deliver this, and the result could be anarchy. I have previously said that maybe we do need the homeopathic solution of a few cobbles through the windows of 10 Downing Street to alert our political class to this danger, but after seeing the way the anarchy at Saturday's march played right into the hands of the media and the Tories, a better solution would still be a general strike, to precipitate a new, and hopefully more honest, General Election, where the parties tell us their real intentions.
I have followed the recent debate on AV as a voting system, and I have to say it holds all the interest for me of watching a steward rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
When you have a situation where the major political parties all run vacuous, negative campaigns based on slogans only one step away from "don't vote for him, he smells of poo", which is what we were treated to last May, while concealing their true intentions and keeping all the nasty things out of the manifesto until they are safely installed in number 10, it is no wonder that a cynical and apathetic electorate can't decide which of these poltroons they hate the most, and stays away in droves, refusing to become engaged in the political process. Especially as you are likely to find that the party you thought you had voted for has ditched all its promises and is now helping its former opponents to shaft you.
In that scenario, a set of venal, corrupt, self-serving bastards kow-towing to the bankers and the money markets represents the same outcome for most ordinary people, whether it was elected by AV or first past the post. I genuinely fear for the future of democracy in this country unless politicians wake up and start to have the courage to frame policies that will improve the lives of real people and make things better. People will turn from democracy to direct action if the democratic system fails to deliver this, and the result could be anarchy. I have previously said that maybe we do need the homeopathic solution of a few cobbles through the windows of 10 Downing Street to alert our political class to this danger, but after seeing the way the anarchy at Saturday's march played right into the hands of the media and the Tories, a better solution would still be a general strike, to precipitate a new, and hopefully more honest, General Election, where the parties tell us their real intentions.
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
The Road To Weakened Fear
While I have been stuck in hospital over the summer, I have been struck by a new phenomenon, deliberately engineered by the government, to keep us all cowed and apprehensive. Austerity anxiety.
I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”
Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.
It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.
I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.
The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????
Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".
I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!
How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.
Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-
*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?
Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)
Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?
I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:
When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.
This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.
Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.
"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.
And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.
Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.
Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation
This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.
Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing
The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.
There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.
Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!
The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.
And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.
So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.
Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?
This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.
At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do
Women in the Workplace
This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.
Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.
Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.
I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.
Waged versus Unwaged
The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.
Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.
Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.
One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.
Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.
On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?
The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.
Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?
Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.
It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!
In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.
In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]
Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.
This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.
We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!
I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”
Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.
It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.
I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.
The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????
Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".
I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!
How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.
Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-
*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?
Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)
Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?
I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:
When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.
This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.
Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.
"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.
And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.
Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.
Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation
This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.
Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing
The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.
There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.
Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!
The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.
And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.
So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.
Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?
This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.
At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do
Women in the Workplace
This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.
Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.
Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.
I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.
Waged versus Unwaged
The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.
Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.
Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.
One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.
Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.
On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?
The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.
Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?
Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.
It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!
In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.
In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]
Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.
This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.
We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Just Can't Budge It
Sometimes, for about a nano-second, a tiny bit of me feels sorry for the Literal Dimwits. I mean, they sort of go back to Gladstone, they are sort of a part of history. That's also their problem, though, now. Since Clegg bet the house on vingt et un bleu, and it came up, they don't stand for anything any more.
And at the next election, unless they are VERY stupid (always a possibility) Labour are going to be shouting from the rooftops, VOTE CLEGG, GET CAMERON! and even those not taken in my that must, perforce, wonder what exactly they would get if they ever voted Lib Dem again. I'll give you a clue, it's wearing a poke, it's covered in mud, and it likes haycorns. Voting Liberal Democrat is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Either Clegg hasn't realised that he's been so comprehensively shafted by Cameron (who is still wandering around with the slightly glazed air of someone who can't quite believe it ISN'T all a dream and he ISN'T going to wake up any moment in the shower with Sue-Ellen) or he has realised and, slut that he is, with his political knickers metaphorically round his ankles, he just doesn't care. Because 20 seconds of power is so worth sacrificing 150 years of principles for.
He's seriously underestimated this Forgemasters thing though. Not only is it a PR disaster akin to crapping on your own doorstep then treading in it, in Sheffield, but people in the Lib Dims at large are starting to ask, "hang on, if our glorious leader couldn't stop the Evil Tories cancelling a LOAN (not even a subsidy or a grant, a LOAN) to innovate manufacturing technology in a city for which he is one of the MPs, what exactly, apart from being the convenient whipping boys and patsies for announcing the Tory cuts, are we GETTING from this coalition?"
The rot, as far as the Tories/Mini-Tories are concerned, starts there. That is the only good news, as I confidently expect that by this time next year, dynamiting hospitals will be on the agenda and we will all be queueing in the street to catch loaves of bread thrown off army lorries. We just have to hope the rubber wheels fall off quickly, before they can do too much damage to the recovery, to British industry, and to jobs.
Seventy years ago, if you had a policy of blowing up Britain's infrastructure and deliberately wrecking its economy, you would have been tried as a traitor, stood up against a wall, and shot. How (sadly) times have changed.
The run-up to this budget has deployed the classic black propaganda technique of making people think it was going to be worse than it actually is. Although it is worse than it seems, when you look at it in more detail, the real damage to the economy will come as some of its key measures start to kick in, in the autumn, and in the new year, assuming the coalition lasts that long.
Before the election, the Liberal Dimwits opposed any increase in VAT, calling it a Tory tax bombshell. Osborne “failed to rule out” a rise in VAT, which told us all we needed to know really. And now the Liberals have helped the Tories achieve it, because of course there are some things which are so much more important than having principles.
So, in the autumn spending review, and in the departmental budget cuts of 25%, there is going to be a steep rise in the unemployment figures. The more so, when you factor in the effect of local government redundancies as well, as councils, unable to raise council tax, shed jobs instead, to cut costs. All of these people thrown out of work in the public sector will end up on the dole, drawing benefits, instead of earning money, paying taxes and putting spending power into the economy to drive the private sector revival. That revival is now in peril, as a result.
This budget is a victory for the small-minded, short-termist bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” in the public sector; arrogant, ignorant people who talk as if mixing cement was in some way more worthwhile than balancing the overtime budget of a busy social work department, or emptying bins, or educating children. People who think the amount of income tax you pay should dictate your say in society. These people still just don’t get it, they think that it’s possible to separate the public and the private sectors, that somehow they aren’t both part of the same economy. That you can somehow decimate one, without damaging the other.
But let’s just assume for a moment that this wacky idea has validity. Are ALL of these suddenly unemployed public sector workers going to get jobs in the private sector then? Where are these jobs? Where ARE they? And by putting VAT up to 20% in the new year, adding to inflation, transport costs, and depressing retail sales, how is any of THAT going to create or sustain a private sector revival?
Housing benefit is to be capped, so anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work will now be squeezed in that area as well. The medical test qualifications for disability benefit are going to be extended and accelerated, again as a sop to those in the Tory camp who believe the concepts of “the sturdy beggar” and “the undeserving poor”, the sort of people David Cameron now refers to as benefit scroungers (now that he is showing his true colours). As if rotting on benefits, because of a complete lack of hope, prospects and opportunity, to the point where it becomes inured in your culture, is some kind of career decision! I also find myself wondering, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis on whether the COST of all this additional medical testing will outweigh any savings to be made? Because this government has a habit of talking tough, but being equally profligate and stupid in its own way as Labour was. After announcing the bonfire of the Quangos, we’ve now got a new Quango for budgetary responsibility, and a couple of Quangos to monitor international aid, and now presumably there’s going to have to be a body of some description to organise this medical testing, unless it’s going to be outsourced, and who knows what expense? And of course we can always find taxpayer money to give to whirly-eyed fundamentalists or yummy mummies who want to set up their own school because they think they can do it better than the teachers.
The DWP’s figure for fraudulent DLA claims is about 0.05%, whereas the government are expecting something like a 20% reduction in claims as a result. That disparity can only mean that a lot of people currently eligible for, and deserving of, DLA, will no longer get it. And the net result might be to make it impossible for them to continue to work, and to pay taxes.
And of course, the Tories and their stooges think that all these people can be got off benefits and into jobs in the private sector. Again, where ARE these jobs going to be created? Where are these jobs? Quite how “bipping” people off benefits and not giving them any alternative employment counts as “protecting the vulnerable” is lost on me.
The Tories seem to think that cutting corporation tax will make rapacious international capitalists and entrepreneurs re-invest the savings, in employing more people in the UK, especially with the prospect of not having to pay NI. They won’t, they will just pocket it with a self-satisfied “kerching”, into a nice little offshore account in Belize. Just like, when the housing boom was in full swing, all those Tory politicians protested so loudly at the time that the housing bubble was unsustainable and all their chums in the city were getting usustainably rich and filling their unsustainable boots.
Fact is, if there was political will, there is the resource and the necessary plan to provide affordable housing for all in this country and to wipe out homelessness and reduce the pressure on the existing social housing stock.
Trouble is, we are NOW stuck with an unelected government which thinks it has a mandate to dynamite disused public buildings instead of converting them into social housing, because George Osborne got the idea from some redneck seal-clubber over a beer and a whaleburger in Tokyo.
It is, of course, the same old same old from the Tories, and no doubt those who have had their compassion bypassed at birth will be chortling about it and engaging in the usual triumphalism. I am surprised, though, that the Liberals haven’t had sleepless nights and considered suicide. Usually people who rat and re-rat that much suffer dreadfully from remorse and guilt. At least if they retain a spark of humanity. They have immense mental problems and guilt, because the gulf between their own innate compassion and the contradiction of their actions drives them over the edge. I can only observe that in the case of Clegg, Alexander and Cable, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving, bunch of people. The disused lift shaft awaits.
The standard Tory line is that there was no alternative, and that the finances inherited from Labour were a shambles. Labour had many faults, but nevertheless, there was another way. There still is another way. One which continues to attempt to grow the economy, while protecting the services which we all use and the benefits on which so many depend. And if the markets and the ratings agencies don’t like it, well, they can bloody well invade. They weren’t that good at picking winners when the bankers (who have got off far too lightly in this budget, but again that is only what you would expect from the Tories) were buying imaginary derivatives with non-existent money.
But the only way we will get this quickly, is if the coalition implodes. The only glimmer of light at the moment is that there are some Liberal Dimwits who are waking up to exactly how far Clegg has sold them down the river. Let’s hope they start rowing back upstream, and soon. Let’s hope they rediscover that they used to have a conscience, and that when they said they went into politics to make a difference, it wasn’t by dynamiting hospitals.
Back in the days of Thatcher, I used to have a foam rubber stress "brick" that I could throw at the television (in place of a real one, which would have been rather expensive in televisions)
Watching Osborne on telly just now, I think I may need to go and find it up in the attic.
"You shouldn't have to go off to work in the morning and see your neighbour's blinds drawn down as they spend their life on unemployment benefit"
Apart from the fact that you probably wouldn't have to do it for long, because this budget will soon result in BOTH houses with the blinds drawn down and the occupants on the dole, let's just unpick the thinking behind that statement.
How nasty, small-minded and divisive. Words calculated to appeal like a dog-whistle to those who harbour inbuilt prejudice towards the unemployed. What a gross over-simplification of the many and complex reasons for lack of opportunity, poverty and deprivation.
How *deliberately* calculated to appeal to the "there's too many of them over here with their benefits and their plasma TVs" brigade. People who have never known, or have forgotten, what economic deprivation is and who caused it (in South Yorkshire, it was the Tories)
And without offering any solution, either. So they are going to stop the benefit of the guy with his blinds down all day. What's he going to do? Get a job in the blind factory? I don't think they are hiring, right now.
Anyone who has the sheer gall and effrontery to utter such an evil, twisted, divisive message and then in the next breath to claim that we are all in this together really DOES deserve to be struck by lightning, and soon.
To those who say if we don’t do this, we will be punished by the markets,
I am sorry to say I disagree. Disregarding the fact that I think these people have no moral authority to dictate how we run our country anyway, and very little skill and judgement in financial rating anyway, at least from the evidence of their past performance, would the down-grading of the UK's rating, assuming it happened, lead to an immediate closure of any "money tap" - I don't believe it would. I believe it would make it more difficult, but not impossible, to get out of this mess.
Again, I think this is a matter of perspective. It's not surprising that having weathered the international banking crisis of 2008 when the whole of the financial sector was teetering on the brink of sliding off Canary Wharf and into the river, the nation's finances are in poor shape. But we've always had a National Debt, since the days of Walpole. And look what a mess we were in after the second World War, when basically we were in hock to the US up to our eyeballs. The difference then is that we had politicians of skill courage and vision, who in the teeth of that, established the Welfare State.
I am also becoming very skeptical about this analogy with Greece. It's trotted out regularly to explain the Damascene conversion of Clegg and Cable to the Tory hard line - the story being that, somehow, over the weekend of the coalition cabal, they also carved out the time to receive a detailed briefing on Greek economic matters and realised how bad it was. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? Greece doesn't have control over its own economy, because it made the misguided decision to join the Euro, and now it's in the same position we were in on Black Wednesday, of having to take medicine that is not appropriate for it, because when it comes to the Euro, one size fits all, for good or ill. We are not, thank God, stuck with the Euro and all its problems and we do have control over our own interest rates, should that be necessary.
I have said enough on here before now about how stupid Labour were, wasting money on things like illegal wars and ID cards, and I have seen at first hand on a smaller scale how profligate government was. I also contend that at the end of the day, this lot are probably wasting just as much money in their own way, they are just wasting it on different things (unecessary new Quangos, re branding the DCSF, etc)
I have no objection to the principle of adjustment in the abstract, but I do, strongly and bitterly, resent the idea that the poorest and weakest must adjust the most, that this needs to be done with unseemly haste just to placate "the markets" - which even if this were true, then begs the question "Who Governs Britain" and once again I question this assumption that the recovery will still happen despite mass unemployment approaching three million, job losses, bankruptcies, reposessions, people being forced off benefits on the premise of non existent private sector jobs, VAT increases and the risk of high inflation.
If there were five jobs for every applicant, instead of the other way round, then George Osborne might have a point. He would still be a smarmy little squit whose face I would never tire of punching, but he might have a point. But it IS five applicants to every job, and it's going to get worse.
WHERE ARE THE JOBS?????
I often hear the phrase, when benefits are being discussed
“Those who choose not to work”
It’s an interesting concept. We're back to sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor here again. I contend that, given the chance and the opportunity, anyone and everyone wants to work, but that generations of people have been beaten down by lack of motivation, lack of opportunity, and lack of any idea how to go about it. Usually in areas of former heavy industry, where there is very little "choice" involved because there ARE NO JOBS.
I take issue with the word "choosing". But I do agree that those unfortunate enough not to be able to find work should be financially supported by a state benefit system, yes: I believe it's what sets us apart as a civilised society. Or one of the things anyway. Housing Benefit has been fuelled by the housing boom which was created by unsustainable offers of credit from irresponsible banks to people who didn't know what they were getting into, encouraged by lax regulation all around and - let us not forget - not one Tory voice was ever raised to object to this because their pals in the City were all busy filling their boots, thank you very much.
I am a little bit unclear about what people are supposed to do though, if there's no point in them applying for jobs and they "choose" not to work, and they don't get any benefits, I guess it comes down to .... oooh, a couple of days on their grouse moor for those with private incomes, and the rest ... er ... begging, I guess.
People who advocate this sort of thing do, however, make a point about the Labour market which is generally overlooked, which is the need to re-think what we have got along the lines of socially useful companies run at a profit by and for the public good. It is called Social Enterprise. This is a viable "third way" that would solve many of the problems and get people away from this "public versus private sector" class war which Osborne seems hell-bent on encouraging. I doubt, however, that he has ever heard of it.
And finally, today, we have had the most breathtaking example of doublespeak of this whole government so far, when they talk of "Revitalising Retirement"* by making old people work even longer! I feel really revitalised!
*In the same way as you could revitalise child care by sending them up chimneys (Oh, hang on, that's in NEXT year's budget)
How long, I ask, can these charlatans, this unelected government with no mandate to wreck our economy, be allowed to continue causing this damage without being challenged?
The only sane response to this budget, I think, is that of Quellcrist Falconer in the Harlan’s World novels by Richard. K. Morgan. I couldn’t put it any better. George Orwell couldn’t put it any better.
J B Priestley and S P B Mais couldn’t put it any better. So here it is.
So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal
And at the next election, unless they are VERY stupid (always a possibility) Labour are going to be shouting from the rooftops, VOTE CLEGG, GET CAMERON! and even those not taken in my that must, perforce, wonder what exactly they would get if they ever voted Lib Dem again. I'll give you a clue, it's wearing a poke, it's covered in mud, and it likes haycorns. Voting Liberal Democrat is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Either Clegg hasn't realised that he's been so comprehensively shafted by Cameron (who is still wandering around with the slightly glazed air of someone who can't quite believe it ISN'T all a dream and he ISN'T going to wake up any moment in the shower with Sue-Ellen) or he has realised and, slut that he is, with his political knickers metaphorically round his ankles, he just doesn't care. Because 20 seconds of power is so worth sacrificing 150 years of principles for.
He's seriously underestimated this Forgemasters thing though. Not only is it a PR disaster akin to crapping on your own doorstep then treading in it, in Sheffield, but people in the Lib Dims at large are starting to ask, "hang on, if our glorious leader couldn't stop the Evil Tories cancelling a LOAN (not even a subsidy or a grant, a LOAN) to innovate manufacturing technology in a city for which he is one of the MPs, what exactly, apart from being the convenient whipping boys and patsies for announcing the Tory cuts, are we GETTING from this coalition?"
The rot, as far as the Tories/Mini-Tories are concerned, starts there. That is the only good news, as I confidently expect that by this time next year, dynamiting hospitals will be on the agenda and we will all be queueing in the street to catch loaves of bread thrown off army lorries. We just have to hope the rubber wheels fall off quickly, before they can do too much damage to the recovery, to British industry, and to jobs.
Seventy years ago, if you had a policy of blowing up Britain's infrastructure and deliberately wrecking its economy, you would have been tried as a traitor, stood up against a wall, and shot. How (sadly) times have changed.
The run-up to this budget has deployed the classic black propaganda technique of making people think it was going to be worse than it actually is. Although it is worse than it seems, when you look at it in more detail, the real damage to the economy will come as some of its key measures start to kick in, in the autumn, and in the new year, assuming the coalition lasts that long.
Before the election, the Liberal Dimwits opposed any increase in VAT, calling it a Tory tax bombshell. Osborne “failed to rule out” a rise in VAT, which told us all we needed to know really. And now the Liberals have helped the Tories achieve it, because of course there are some things which are so much more important than having principles.
So, in the autumn spending review, and in the departmental budget cuts of 25%, there is going to be a steep rise in the unemployment figures. The more so, when you factor in the effect of local government redundancies as well, as councils, unable to raise council tax, shed jobs instead, to cut costs. All of these people thrown out of work in the public sector will end up on the dole, drawing benefits, instead of earning money, paying taxes and putting spending power into the economy to drive the private sector revival. That revival is now in peril, as a result.
This budget is a victory for the small-minded, short-termist bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” in the public sector; arrogant, ignorant people who talk as if mixing cement was in some way more worthwhile than balancing the overtime budget of a busy social work department, or emptying bins, or educating children. People who think the amount of income tax you pay should dictate your say in society. These people still just don’t get it, they think that it’s possible to separate the public and the private sectors, that somehow they aren’t both part of the same economy. That you can somehow decimate one, without damaging the other.
But let’s just assume for a moment that this wacky idea has validity. Are ALL of these suddenly unemployed public sector workers going to get jobs in the private sector then? Where are these jobs? Where ARE they? And by putting VAT up to 20% in the new year, adding to inflation, transport costs, and depressing retail sales, how is any of THAT going to create or sustain a private sector revival?
Housing benefit is to be capped, so anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work will now be squeezed in that area as well. The medical test qualifications for disability benefit are going to be extended and accelerated, again as a sop to those in the Tory camp who believe the concepts of “the sturdy beggar” and “the undeserving poor”, the sort of people David Cameron now refers to as benefit scroungers (now that he is showing his true colours). As if rotting on benefits, because of a complete lack of hope, prospects and opportunity, to the point where it becomes inured in your culture, is some kind of career decision! I also find myself wondering, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis on whether the COST of all this additional medical testing will outweigh any savings to be made? Because this government has a habit of talking tough, but being equally profligate and stupid in its own way as Labour was. After announcing the bonfire of the Quangos, we’ve now got a new Quango for budgetary responsibility, and a couple of Quangos to monitor international aid, and now presumably there’s going to have to be a body of some description to organise this medical testing, unless it’s going to be outsourced, and who knows what expense? And of course we can always find taxpayer money to give to whirly-eyed fundamentalists or yummy mummies who want to set up their own school because they think they can do it better than the teachers.
The DWP’s figure for fraudulent DLA claims is about 0.05%, whereas the government are expecting something like a 20% reduction in claims as a result. That disparity can only mean that a lot of people currently eligible for, and deserving of, DLA, will no longer get it. And the net result might be to make it impossible for them to continue to work, and to pay taxes.
And of course, the Tories and their stooges think that all these people can be got off benefits and into jobs in the private sector. Again, where ARE these jobs going to be created? Where are these jobs? Quite how “bipping” people off benefits and not giving them any alternative employment counts as “protecting the vulnerable” is lost on me.
The Tories seem to think that cutting corporation tax will make rapacious international capitalists and entrepreneurs re-invest the savings, in employing more people in the UK, especially with the prospect of not having to pay NI. They won’t, they will just pocket it with a self-satisfied “kerching”, into a nice little offshore account in Belize. Just like, when the housing boom was in full swing, all those Tory politicians protested so loudly at the time that the housing bubble was unsustainable and all their chums in the city were getting usustainably rich and filling their unsustainable boots.
Fact is, if there was political will, there is the resource and the necessary plan to provide affordable housing for all in this country and to wipe out homelessness and reduce the pressure on the existing social housing stock.
Trouble is, we are NOW stuck with an unelected government which thinks it has a mandate to dynamite disused public buildings instead of converting them into social housing, because George Osborne got the idea from some redneck seal-clubber over a beer and a whaleburger in Tokyo.
It is, of course, the same old same old from the Tories, and no doubt those who have had their compassion bypassed at birth will be chortling about it and engaging in the usual triumphalism. I am surprised, though, that the Liberals haven’t had sleepless nights and considered suicide. Usually people who rat and re-rat that much suffer dreadfully from remorse and guilt. At least if they retain a spark of humanity. They have immense mental problems and guilt, because the gulf between their own innate compassion and the contradiction of their actions drives them over the edge. I can only observe that in the case of Clegg, Alexander and Cable, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving, bunch of people. The disused lift shaft awaits.
The standard Tory line is that there was no alternative, and that the finances inherited from Labour were a shambles. Labour had many faults, but nevertheless, there was another way. There still is another way. One which continues to attempt to grow the economy, while protecting the services which we all use and the benefits on which so many depend. And if the markets and the ratings agencies don’t like it, well, they can bloody well invade. They weren’t that good at picking winners when the bankers (who have got off far too lightly in this budget, but again that is only what you would expect from the Tories) were buying imaginary derivatives with non-existent money.
But the only way we will get this quickly, is if the coalition implodes. The only glimmer of light at the moment is that there are some Liberal Dimwits who are waking up to exactly how far Clegg has sold them down the river. Let’s hope they start rowing back upstream, and soon. Let’s hope they rediscover that they used to have a conscience, and that when they said they went into politics to make a difference, it wasn’t by dynamiting hospitals.
Back in the days of Thatcher, I used to have a foam rubber stress "brick" that I could throw at the television (in place of a real one, which would have been rather expensive in televisions)
Watching Osborne on telly just now, I think I may need to go and find it up in the attic.
"You shouldn't have to go off to work in the morning and see your neighbour's blinds drawn down as they spend their life on unemployment benefit"
Apart from the fact that you probably wouldn't have to do it for long, because this budget will soon result in BOTH houses with the blinds drawn down and the occupants on the dole, let's just unpick the thinking behind that statement.
How nasty, small-minded and divisive. Words calculated to appeal like a dog-whistle to those who harbour inbuilt prejudice towards the unemployed. What a gross over-simplification of the many and complex reasons for lack of opportunity, poverty and deprivation.
How *deliberately* calculated to appeal to the "there's too many of them over here with their benefits and their plasma TVs" brigade. People who have never known, or have forgotten, what economic deprivation is and who caused it (in South Yorkshire, it was the Tories)
And without offering any solution, either. So they are going to stop the benefit of the guy with his blinds down all day. What's he going to do? Get a job in the blind factory? I don't think they are hiring, right now.
Anyone who has the sheer gall and effrontery to utter such an evil, twisted, divisive message and then in the next breath to claim that we are all in this together really DOES deserve to be struck by lightning, and soon.
To those who say if we don’t do this, we will be punished by the markets,
I am sorry to say I disagree. Disregarding the fact that I think these people have no moral authority to dictate how we run our country anyway, and very little skill and judgement in financial rating anyway, at least from the evidence of their past performance, would the down-grading of the UK's rating, assuming it happened, lead to an immediate closure of any "money tap" - I don't believe it would. I believe it would make it more difficult, but not impossible, to get out of this mess.
Again, I think this is a matter of perspective. It's not surprising that having weathered the international banking crisis of 2008 when the whole of the financial sector was teetering on the brink of sliding off Canary Wharf and into the river, the nation's finances are in poor shape. But we've always had a National Debt, since the days of Walpole. And look what a mess we were in after the second World War, when basically we were in hock to the US up to our eyeballs. The difference then is that we had politicians of skill courage and vision, who in the teeth of that, established the Welfare State.
I am also becoming very skeptical about this analogy with Greece. It's trotted out regularly to explain the Damascene conversion of Clegg and Cable to the Tory hard line - the story being that, somehow, over the weekend of the coalition cabal, they also carved out the time to receive a detailed briefing on Greek economic matters and realised how bad it was. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? Greece doesn't have control over its own economy, because it made the misguided decision to join the Euro, and now it's in the same position we were in on Black Wednesday, of having to take medicine that is not appropriate for it, because when it comes to the Euro, one size fits all, for good or ill. We are not, thank God, stuck with the Euro and all its problems and we do have control over our own interest rates, should that be necessary.
I have said enough on here before now about how stupid Labour were, wasting money on things like illegal wars and ID cards, and I have seen at first hand on a smaller scale how profligate government was. I also contend that at the end of the day, this lot are probably wasting just as much money in their own way, they are just wasting it on different things (unecessary new Quangos, re branding the DCSF, etc)
I have no objection to the principle of adjustment in the abstract, but I do, strongly and bitterly, resent the idea that the poorest and weakest must adjust the most, that this needs to be done with unseemly haste just to placate "the markets" - which even if this were true, then begs the question "Who Governs Britain" and once again I question this assumption that the recovery will still happen despite mass unemployment approaching three million, job losses, bankruptcies, reposessions, people being forced off benefits on the premise of non existent private sector jobs, VAT increases and the risk of high inflation.
If there were five jobs for every applicant, instead of the other way round, then George Osborne might have a point. He would still be a smarmy little squit whose face I would never tire of punching, but he might have a point. But it IS five applicants to every job, and it's going to get worse.
WHERE ARE THE JOBS?????
I often hear the phrase, when benefits are being discussed
“Those who choose not to work”
It’s an interesting concept. We're back to sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor here again. I contend that, given the chance and the opportunity, anyone and everyone wants to work, but that generations of people have been beaten down by lack of motivation, lack of opportunity, and lack of any idea how to go about it. Usually in areas of former heavy industry, where there is very little "choice" involved because there ARE NO JOBS.
I take issue with the word "choosing". But I do agree that those unfortunate enough not to be able to find work should be financially supported by a state benefit system, yes: I believe it's what sets us apart as a civilised society. Or one of the things anyway. Housing Benefit has been fuelled by the housing boom which was created by unsustainable offers of credit from irresponsible banks to people who didn't know what they were getting into, encouraged by lax regulation all around and - let us not forget - not one Tory voice was ever raised to object to this because their pals in the City were all busy filling their boots, thank you very much.
I am a little bit unclear about what people are supposed to do though, if there's no point in them applying for jobs and they "choose" not to work, and they don't get any benefits, I guess it comes down to .... oooh, a couple of days on their grouse moor for those with private incomes, and the rest ... er ... begging, I guess.
People who advocate this sort of thing do, however, make a point about the Labour market which is generally overlooked, which is the need to re-think what we have got along the lines of socially useful companies run at a profit by and for the public good. It is called Social Enterprise. This is a viable "third way" that would solve many of the problems and get people away from this "public versus private sector" class war which Osborne seems hell-bent on encouraging. I doubt, however, that he has ever heard of it.
And finally, today, we have had the most breathtaking example of doublespeak of this whole government so far, when they talk of "Revitalising Retirement"* by making old people work even longer! I feel really revitalised!
*In the same way as you could revitalise child care by sending them up chimneys (Oh, hang on, that's in NEXT year's budget)
How long, I ask, can these charlatans, this unelected government with no mandate to wreck our economy, be allowed to continue causing this damage without being challenged?
The only sane response to this budget, I think, is that of Quellcrist Falconer in the Harlan’s World novels by Richard. K. Morgan. I couldn’t put it any better. George Orwell couldn’t put it any better.
J B Priestley and S P B Mais couldn’t put it any better. So here it is.
So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal
Sunday, 11 April 2010
Boycott the Election!
“Future” and “Change” are two words we hear bandied about a lot by people who would like us to vote for them in this election. But I have looked at their ideas of future and of change, and they are bogus, empty and counterfeit. They can be weighed, and found wanting. They are as a sounding brass, or tinkling cymbals. Because they have neither faith, hope, nor charity.
What they are really saying to us is “please be stupid enough to vote us in on a pretext, so we can have five years of power.” Five more years of the same, even if someone different gets in.
None of them has any vision. None of them has any ideas. The best they can come up with is “vote for me because I am not him”, leavened with a few veiled references calculated to appeal to deep seated prejudices and entrenched positions (of all sorts) and in some cases, garnished with xenophobia.
What a choice lies before us in this election! What a choice!
I am reminded of that old 1960’s pacifist slogan “Supposing they gave a war, and no-one came?”
I find myself thinking “Supposing they gave an election, and no one came?” And a dangerous idea has begun to form in my mind. In the past, I have always dragged myself out and voted, because of the respect I have for the democratic tradition, and for the people who died so that I would be able to live under a free democracy and not, for instance, a Nazi dictatorship.
But respect has to be earned. And it should be mutual. It is quite clear that the political classes, of all colours, have no respect whatsoever for the people who put them there. No sense of thanks, no sense of obligation.
So, I am wondering if, in the absence of anyone who can carry our great country forward, in the absence of anyone with the necessary bravery to say THIS must be done, and the will to carry it through, whatever the media thinks, then maybe we should just either boycott the election altogether, or write across our ballot papers “think again!” None of the above.
In some circumstances, not voting, or refusing to vote, can be a deeply political act, provided it is done for the right reasons.
Of course, even if many millions of people did either spoil their ballot papers or boycott the election, there would still be a result. There would still be a government. But it could hardly claim, as governments have done in the past, to have a mandate of any description. If we boycotted them properly, they would be hamstrung from day one. They would have to go away and think again. Think of some better ideas, and come back to present them at a REAL election.
They would have to go away and re-think the ideas of “future” and “change” until they came up with something that WAS radically different.
Something fundamental. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, and socialism has never been allowed to fill the gap. We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.
A massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who do turn out, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, are limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They need to go away, and think again.
Think of how they could change the landscape for the people of Britain.
Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit.
It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.
And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.
Don’t do it for your sake. Don’t do it for my sake. Do it for the sake of those who will be the victims of this election, otherwise. Do it for all of us, Do it for Britain, for the people who are crying out for a change from the same old same old… Do it for their sake.
Do it for their sake. Do it for God’s sake, and for God’s sake, do it on May 6th!
What they are really saying to us is “please be stupid enough to vote us in on a pretext, so we can have five years of power.” Five more years of the same, even if someone different gets in.
None of them has any vision. None of them has any ideas. The best they can come up with is “vote for me because I am not him”, leavened with a few veiled references calculated to appeal to deep seated prejudices and entrenched positions (of all sorts) and in some cases, garnished with xenophobia.
What a choice lies before us in this election! What a choice!
I am reminded of that old 1960’s pacifist slogan “Supposing they gave a war, and no-one came?”
I find myself thinking “Supposing they gave an election, and no one came?” And a dangerous idea has begun to form in my mind. In the past, I have always dragged myself out and voted, because of the respect I have for the democratic tradition, and for the people who died so that I would be able to live under a free democracy and not, for instance, a Nazi dictatorship.
But respect has to be earned. And it should be mutual. It is quite clear that the political classes, of all colours, have no respect whatsoever for the people who put them there. No sense of thanks, no sense of obligation.
So, I am wondering if, in the absence of anyone who can carry our great country forward, in the absence of anyone with the necessary bravery to say THIS must be done, and the will to carry it through, whatever the media thinks, then maybe we should just either boycott the election altogether, or write across our ballot papers “think again!” None of the above.
In some circumstances, not voting, or refusing to vote, can be a deeply political act, provided it is done for the right reasons.
Of course, even if many millions of people did either spoil their ballot papers or boycott the election, there would still be a result. There would still be a government. But it could hardly claim, as governments have done in the past, to have a mandate of any description. If we boycotted them properly, they would be hamstrung from day one. They would have to go away and think again. Think of some better ideas, and come back to present them at a REAL election.
They would have to go away and re-think the ideas of “future” and “change” until they came up with something that WAS radically different.
Something fundamental. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, and socialism has never been allowed to fill the gap. We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.
A massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who do turn out, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, are limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They need to go away, and think again.
Think of how they could change the landscape for the people of Britain.
Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit.
It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.
And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.
Don’t do it for your sake. Don’t do it for my sake. Do it for the sake of those who will be the victims of this election, otherwise. Do it for all of us, Do it for Britain, for the people who are crying out for a change from the same old same old… Do it for their sake.
Do it for their sake. Do it for God’s sake, and for God’s sake, do it on May 6th!
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