A touch of Qatar

On the radio yesterday I heard an intriguing discussion regarding Qatar’s hosting of the world cup in 2022 and why this should not be allowed to go ahead. It largely concerned the hundreds of deaths of ill-treated migrant workers who had no health and safety precautions and lived in conditions that European nations would not allow for animals and how Qatar had bought the cup from Sepp Blatter and his band of merry muggers. The scale of the FIFA extortion racket run by Blatter and his corrupt chums is astonishing but it should come as no surprise when a wealthy nation seeking acceptance comes into contact with a committee only too happy to accept.

The plight of migrant workers is a familiar one: Promised employment they leave their homes in India, Pakistan, Nepal, etc. and travel many miles to a strange land where they are treated as slave labour, doing the jobs the locals won’t do for a pittance, with no security and little in the way of the sort of rights most of us take for granted. No security of employment, no guarantee of income, no healthcare, few facilities and none of the home comforts that even prisoners in western jails enjoy. The human rights lobbies of ‘civilised’ western nations have much to say about all this.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Germany and France we also import workers from poor countries to do the jobs our over-stuffed, over-privileged, unskilled idle consider beneath them. We exploit migrant workers because they will work for so little and endure what we might think of as privations in lifestyles, just because we can. Then we allow them citizenship, whereupon they, rightly, demand the same as we afford to those they displaced. As long as a worker is working, even for minimum wage, you could argue they are contributing. But then we give them tax credits, free healthcare, education and those all-important human rights and unlike in places like Qatar, they never go home.

Apologists for this state of affairs say we have no other choice. Our own people won’t do the work we expect the incomers to tackle. But then, in their turn, the children of those immigrants benefit from education in the way our own underclass doesn’t. They get better jobs and then we have to import yet another wave of low-skilled, low-wage workers to do the dirty jobs. But while high-skilled, highly paid and taxed foreign-born workers are an asset, the vast majority are perpetuating a lie; we simply cannot afford - financially and morally - to pay benefits to those we can’t deport, while allowing a flood of desperate incomers to depress unskilled wages still further, giving our shirkers the excuse that now they can’t even afford to take those jobs.

Sooner or later the net-contributors will be unable to support the takers without the rich-poor gap getting ever wider with the consequent malcontent. If we can’t make everybody happy, why not try a little less carrot and a bit more stick? And as we won’t deny foreign-born labourers their human rights, like Qatar, we need to turn our attention to our own. When I was a kid we looked forward to the harvests; spuds, greens, beet, strawberries. We actively sought out backbreaking work in muddy fields because without specific skills we could still make money by grafting. Earning your first wage should be a triumphant moment however you have come by it. I used to regularly stand in a mob of teenagers, clamouring to be selected to pick up discarded race cards, food wrappers, bottle tops and broken glass, often in the rain, following meetings at Thirsk Racecourse. I never for one moment considered that getting dirty, or bleeding a bit was beneath my dignity.

If brown people can do it, why can't you?

It has to be time to break the cycle and sod dignity anyway; anybody can clean, carry, push, pull and generally grunt their way through menial work. And acquiring the work ethic is the most important skill you can have. A life on benefits can never be seen as an option if you are able to do something, anything, else. And if better paid work is beyond your reach you can always pass on that experience to your kids and urge them to strive for better. I don’t want to make foreign gang-masters rich, neither do I want a low-skilled, race to the bottom economy, but if we want to make work pay we have to stop paying people not to work.

Oh no! It's Owen Again!

I didn't study Politics and Psychobabble at the University of La-de-bleeding-dah, but I didn't need a degree in name-calling to pass through education into gainful employment where I have resided ever since the nineteen seventies. Picking up tools, producing real things, turning a profit and by and large contributing to the economy is an excellent vantage point to observe that the devil does indeed make work for idle hands to do.

At ‘street level’ this means simple benefit fraud, a bit of light theft, casual smuggling, counterfeiting and the cultivation and dealing of illegal substances. Among the alumni of the London School of Busybodies it takes the form of the study and furtherance of cults[sic]. At least it looks like it. Who knows the truth behind The Frankfurt School, Common Purpose, the Bilderberg Group, Demos, The Fabians, et al? One thing’s for sure; wherever the left gather there will be plenty of theoretical politics.

What the Philpott case has revealed is the utter desperation of a policy-free Labour Party and the callow opportunism of its cheerleaders. It is so much easier to rail against success than to achieve it; so much simpler to hate than to cooperate. While the media has naturally focused on the lurid lifestyle of the odious man, outraged rhetoric has been hotting up on… er just one side.

You can’t help but notice how those in the centre ground – there really is no ‘right wing’ in British politics - tend to calmly carry on, accepting the bad news then resuming their best endeavours, doing what they can to reduce the size of the shit pile. George Osborne’s response, after making it clear that Philpott’s crimes were his alone, was to echo what many millions of ordinary people feel – that questions should be raised about this sort of lifestyle.

“Questions should be raised”? From Ed balls’ spluttering hysterical response you might think he’d proposed the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem as, red-faced and foaming with outrage, he denounced the Chancellor’s perfectly reasonable and well considered words as exploiting a tragedy for political gain. It was hilarious – has Ed ever considered a career in pantomime? (Oh yes, he should!)

The left wing press went into overdrive to echo the cry with a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth and gallons of spittle flew across the land as various commentators rolled out their finest faux fury to hurl the same accusation – 'how very dare' the Nasty Tories exploit a tragedy like this? Oh, the irony.

Twitterrati in full flow

Any minute now they’ll get the Boy Wonder, Owen Jones on the telly… and there he is. And there. And there! He stated on Twitter that had the evil government not been so vile he wouldn’t have had to be on telly at all. Had to be? Oh Owen, your hunger for exposure would shame an X-Factor retread!

If anybody is using this event to further political objectives it is surely the opposition who have never grasped that simply saying no and stamping their feet at every single government policy is just silly. Rolling out The Jones to do a Violet Elizabeth Bott to order on the telly box does them no favours whatsoever. Because more and more people are recognising that many of the things they denounce became entrenched during labour’s wasted riding of the no-more-boom-and-bust years.

So I have a challenge for Owen – the biggest foot-stamper out there. Iain Duncan Smith has worked tirelessly to understand the problems of Britain’s society at large and through the Centre for Social Justice has made positive steps to bring about change for the good of all. How about, instead of ranting about £53 a week challenges, you actually listen – I mean really listen – to what he has to say and divert some of your time away from your own media career to work with him?

Borrowed time, Owen?

Your time in the sun may be short-lived and there are only so many times you can say “demonise” and pass it off as original thought. If you truly want to improve more than just your bank balance then swallow your Marxist pride, shake the man’s hand and roll up your sleeves.

The Last UK Budget... Ever

It's budget day so I'm going to keep this short. The Chancellor leaked to me the contents of his desperate plans to keep his job save the country and I feel that despite Hugh Grant's storm troops it is my duty to divulge them to you. Here goes.

We're broke; deal with it.

That's pretty much it.

Oh, you want detail? You sure you can handle it? Okay then, I'll give you a few highlights.

For years you whining, inadequate leeches have suckled at the teat of our glorious, benevolent government as it has slaved away tirelessly on your behalf. No more. That's it. They've had enough. So this is how it's going to be.

Families:
Despite every benevolent measure of past decades you bastards continue to have families free, gratis and for nothing, expecting the state to care and to pick up the tab. No more. Child Benefit is being abolished - it's long overdue - from now on you will need an annual paid licence for your progeny, working on a sliding scale. £5k per year for the first child, £10k per year for the second and if you want a third you will have to adopt one of them 'Asylums' at your own expense.

Health:
None of you can decide how to pay for the NHS so, fuck it. It's abolished. You brought this on yourself. I hope you're all happy now. I'd stock up on paracetemol if I were you.

Defence:
What's the point? I mean, really? We're doing what the old USSR did and letting the troops take their armaments home with them in lieu of pay. We can see no downsides to that -see how well some of those fellas did?

Transport:
All infrastructure projects are to be cancelled forthwith. We're all in Europe now, so if it's good enough for Bulgaria it's good enough for everybody. Besides, donkeys make both good pack animals and a delicious, nutritious stew.

Tax and Welfare:
Well, you won't believe the amount of shit we get over this. One lot moaning about welfare, another lot moaning about tax. So we tried to put all of you on both, but some of you wouldn't work and some of you wouldn't pay the tax, so fuck the lot of you. From April the government will neither levy tax nor distribute benefits. No income tax, no VAT, no Housing, no DLA, no JSA... Sort it out between yourselves. We can't see how you could do it any worse.

Banking:
See Cyprus

And that's about it. The borders are open, the planet is fucked, we're running out of everything... it's every man for himself.

Citizens celebrating with a glorious firework display

(The budget announcement will be broadcast from Bermuda.)

The Owenisation of the Shirking Classes

We had a good thing going, once we’d worked it all out proper, like. See, since at least the Seventies there’s been a general decline in the heavy, dirty jobs that us plebs are good at – the unions didn’t really help, if we’re honest. At the same time we had the cold war and the rise of the weedy, speccy socialist intellectual. Teachers who had never fought in the real war and well-to-do, arty types on the telly started telling us we deserved better and all that, you know, like education and stuff? At first we fell for it and tried harder to get qualifications but, man, that was well-harsh, you know?

But at the same time we noticed that even though the country was broke, nobody let you starve. In fact, if you’d got kids you were sometimes better off on the Old King Cole than in a crappy job. Of course, there was the stigma of being a loafer and all that, not pulling your weight, but the Labour boffins had a plan for that as well. Soon, it was considered socially acceptable – even, you know, normal, to make a living just by having kids. Okay, you had to duck and dive a bit, you know, make sure you didn’t get cornered into a paternity test and everything, but on the whole it was okay. 

I mean, we’re not stupid, innit? You do the sums: do you work hard at school, so you can work hard at life so you can buy a house and then worry about paying the mortgage and the school fees and higher rate taxes and all that, or do you just sprog up, get a council house for life, sit back and cruise. I see ‘em, the clever kids I was at school with – they’re just as fat and unhealthy as me, but man, the stress on their faces, you know? 

Okay, so they started calling us Chavs. Fair enough, we know what we are; we’re a legitimate social class now – there’s people got PhDs on the back of studying the likes of us, like they was that David Attenborough or Dian Fossey or whatever. They’re happy, we’re happy – everybody’s happy and the bennies keep on coming... 

Then along comes Owen fucking Jones. 

At first we thought he was on his paper round, but then he keeps asking all these questions, right? Turns out he was writing a book, egged on by his mum I expect. Probably after a doctorate or summit, we thought, but no. He’s only gone and blown the whole shebang. “Chavs”, he called it, “The Demonisation of the Working Class”. Is he having a laff? We int worked since before he was bloody born and damned proud of it we are an’ all. 

But no, like the Mother Teresa of Manchester he starts meddling where he’s not wanted. He’s not one of us – he thinks he is, but he’s not – and he starts getting all high and mighty about it all, blabbing to the New Statesman and The Guardian and The Independent and wotnot and he’s on that BBC Question time every fringing other week, shooting his mouth off about how we’re maligned and bloody ‘demonised’. That word is doing my head in – every fucker uses it now about fucking everything. 

Oh he means well – he thinks he’s a bloody crusader but, honestly, all he’s done is alerted yer actual working class and got them all wound up and angry. But it’s too late now isn’t it, Owen? Because not content with writing books about us and turning us into hate figures your lot only went and stirred up the grafters who paid for it all as well; letting in anybody who wanted to work for fuck-all and keeping the wages down. Why did you do that? 

So now, thanks to you and your bloody mum – that Tolly Poynbee bird – and all your Labour mates, nobody can manage without bennies, even if they are working. And they’ve just sussed out that bennies have been going up for the last five years, while working wages have been going down. I tell you it don’t take a sociologist to see it’s going to end in tears. We weren’t fucking ‘vulnerable’ until you started banging on about it. We were doing fine. 

Equalitee - Labour Stylee!

So cheers, bloody lefties; thanks a bunch. With the cost of living going up and up, bedroom tax coming in, workfare projects... the writing’s on the wall. If it gets any worse for us, we might have to up sticks and take our benefits to Bulgaria.

Owen Moans

Well today - delicious irony - Owen "The boy wonder" Jones is having a pop at the Labour opposition and Ed Balls' latest attempt to rephrase Tory plans as his own.

Well, Owen, as it was your lot who got us here in the first place with unrestricted immigration driving down real wages and 'progressive' education driving down standards and welfare handouts liberally scattered to all and sundry to try to hide the truth, is it any wonder we now need some hard medicine to treat the British Disease? 

Of course OJ wasn't around in the 1970s to see the origin of that particular phrase, but I bet he'll be around for a few years more, dashing around on his white charger with his self-ordained defender of the downtrodden banner, sewn by his mum, striking fear into the hearts of baby-eating Tories and Labour politicians alike.

Don't you just love it when they turn on their own? I'm patiently waiting for the day in the the not-too-distant, dumbed-down future where Owen Jones' brand of schoolboy socialism is rated as searing political insight and he has become the epitome of the venerated grand old man of letters to a generation of lost souls... then one day he loses his rag at their indolence and helplessness and refers to a waiter or a barman as a workshy pleb. I live for that day. :o)

Writers' Block

One of the nice things about blogging almost daily is that it’s harder to run out of material than you might think; something always turns up. I’ve been awake since 0400 today. I just couldn’t sleep for fear I had hurt the delicate bloom that is Leftieconomist David Blanchflower. Or, to put it another way, what a great start to the New Year – blocked by another high profile Leftie twonk!

Our little spat – I’m pretty sure he started the spitting – was over a difference in opinion as to what constituted a deserving welfare recipient, with DB happy to toe the party line “From each according to his ability to work his bollocks off  – to each according to his greed.” (I’m pretty sure I’ve got that right) while I prefer to observe the reality that some people will happily sponge off others until they’re stopped.

How can you defend the cost of benefits when headlines like “Benefits rising twice as fast as salaries” appear on such a regular basis? Naturally a sensitive soul like Danny (as he likes to be known on Twitter) will attack the source but it simply cannot be that everything the Daily Mail publishes is intended as a hate piece against the noble Chavs of which Owen Jones speaks so highly (Oh yeah, he’s blocked me too.) in the same way that even The Guardian occasionally publishes something that is less than oleaginous about wind power.

In my experience ‘The Left’ are quick to block. Free speech for all, they say, while rarely extending the privilege to those whose opinions don’t accord with their world view. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, so I can fully understand the urge and I have blocked a couple of snarling Rottweilers myself, but people like Blanchflower need to win over people like me, otherwise the discussion goes nowhere and blocking is hardly the most effective tactic if he actually welcomes debate.

Just because my actual experience of real people doesn’t match his academic musings doesn’t make my viewpoint any less valid. If he wants to give a voice to those who would live off the state then he must also pay heed to those of us who pay for the state – especially when he himself has pulled off the confidence trick of making a more than decent living by presenting himself as an expert. Much like Owen Jones and ‘Doctor’ Eoin Clarke (Of course he's blocked me!) these experts are effectively talking heads for hire, expounding their views – for fees – but rarely being held accountable for their inaccuracies. Accountable in any meaningful way that is – right or wrong, they still seem to pocket the cash.

Strings of qualifications and public appointments eventually assume their own tenuous credibility but it’s a dodgy expert who actually believes his own publicity and shamans and charlatans abound in the world of money; public or private. You’d think an occasional brush with reality would be welcomed. But financial experts are very much like ultra long range weather forecasters, predicting the outcome for decades ahead when they can’t tell you what next Tuesday will be like. Hang on, let me have a go: it’s going to be wet and cold in winter 2023, then dryer and warmer in the summer. Prove me wrong.

An economist doing what he does best.

So, grow up all you economists and admit you’re only guessing – or do the lefty thing and block away, just like Billy Bragg. Yup, that’s right, blocked by Bragg. I’m gutted.

Choice Cuts

I spent yesterday deep-cleaning the carpets in my house. The one recently vacated by the verminous tenants. I say verminous for indeed there was evidence of rodent infestation among the debris. Further intelligence from neighbours, the old lady in the corner shop and 'accidentally' opened correspondence reveals a tale of recreational drug abuse, children in trouble, others taken into care and lives lived in their entirety on the largesse of the state.

And despite that a large part of the population want to believe these people have no choice, the simple fact of the matter is that there is always a choice of sorts. You and I choose to go to work, pay our taxes and then choose how we spend what's left over. This means doing without some of the things we'd like in order that we can have more of the things we need. It means limiting our family size, our discretionary spending and our leisure in terms of both time and content.

We can choose to buy and cook and eat sensible food or pig out on ready-made obesity bombs and then complain about the consequences. We can realise that there is already way too much stuff to watch on Freeview and forego the Sky subscription, or we can bow to peer pressure and put two fricking satellite dishes and a cable feed into MY house, drill holes everywhere and mount boxes on MY skirting boards. We can decide to lead a clean and decent life and look after our kids, or we can invite in a succession of dodgy men and spend our days smoking dope in front of TV day and night. (None of this is conjecture. I learned a lot yesterday.)

My brother has recently started working as an electrician for a company which maintains local authority and housing association property. He has a list of tales that would make a tax-payers blood curdle. Whole legions of unemployable scum who scoff at the choices of decent people because when you're deemed 'vulnerable' (for which read: thick, lazy, degenerate, immoral, worthless bottom feeders leeching off the social funding intended for the genuinely needy) your choices never seem to involve consequences.

For instance, pay-as-you-go meters were installed for energy because of former unpaid bills, I learned. The choice there then, between paying your way or buying more skunk. I found the electricity meter to be over £50 into emergency credit, but when I called British gas they simply arranged for that to be erased. They have no doubt learned that there is no point in pursuing such people for payment so they simply pass the cost onto the rest of us, who choose to actually pay our bills.

There's always a choice, but isn't it interesting how the choices of decent working people are different from the choices of those we pay to maintain in their 'vulnerable' little lives. Oh yes, when the state picks up the tab for everything your choices are very easy indeed. (By the way, I am fully aware there are perfectly decent people struggling to get by and raise decent kids on pitifully low incomes. Those people are not who I'm writing about here - but they all know families like this.)

So... Don't civilise your children, that's what school is for. Don't bother cleaning, if it gets dirty enough they'll send in a clean-up crew. Don't worry about rent, council tax, Sky subscriptions, paying bills or fines; when you run out of credit just plead poverty and 'vulnerability' and somebody else will pick up the tab. Don't look after your health, that's what the NHS is for, innit? Oh and don't worry one bit about the shape of your daughter's fanny; the NHS will sort that out too.

All over the world, people get up and do what they have to do to survive. Indira, the kid in the picture below,  is seven years old and has worked at the local granite quarry since she was three. She works five or six hours a day and then helps her mother with household chores. She also attends school, which is 30 minutes' walk away. (You can read more in James Mollison's photo essay here.)

David Cameron is away today, supposedly negotiating the EU budget. Good luck, Dave, but when you get back have a good hard think about where previous governments choices have led us. And then think about the choices you need to make, with or without Europe. And when you've done that, give Iain Duncan Smith a slap on the back and tell him to cut, cut, cut...

I'm a nonentity, get me out of here!

She woke, cold and shivering in the dark and lay still amid the jungle noises. A nearby rustling warned her of rats and she shuddered, remembering the last meal - a bush tucker trial of insects and noisome animal parts that made her gag. She couldn't eat it and nothing else was on offer. All she could do now was avoid the rodents and wait for dawn when they could all breakfast on cold porridge and stale tea.

The jungle was hard on her, but not as hard as life had been getting back in the UK. She'd spoken out about privilege and gained a little support, but more often the press, which had at first hit out at austerity measures, now sided with the establishment against her. But what had she done to deserve this?

They said it was Australia, but as they had encountered nobody other than their keepers, it could be anywhere on Earth. Well, anywhere 'jungly'. She settled back into an uneasy sleep and dreamed of waking up in her own bed, in her own house back in England. At least, she reasoned, they would all be rooting for her back home... she drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

Daylight dawned and with it new hope. It was a television show after all, although they had done a remarkable job of hiding the cameras and microphones. And now she thought of it, weren't Ant & Dec supposed to be here? And how come she'd never heard of any of the other so-called celebrities? For the first time, suspicion mingled with the fear she'd felt since arriving here. In fact,,, how had she arrived here?

It was suddenly very, very quiet.

Trusssst in me!

Back in Britain the nation watches, enthralled, as Jeremy Kyle's guests and audience are gassed to sleep, loaded onto trucks and delivered to Heathrow Airport. As the live action unfolds, a sum of money appears on-screen. For the first few days the figure will be in red, as it clocks up the cost of the operation, but over the coming weeks of the twenty-four-seven show it will go into the green as the total money saved is displayed.

In voice-over, Simon Cowell unveils his plans to eventually include the long-term idle, the welfare-driven baby machines, violent, unrehabilitated criminals, students attending ant-cuts demonstrations when they should be in lectures and all the other lying, cheating, drug-addled, alcohol-soaked, uneducated slackers and ship them out to a rat-infested, mosquito-plagued tropical hell hole. These jungle 'contestants' are never coming back.

Nadine Dorries should thank her lucky stars.



(When Channel Four takes up this format, I want the dosh in Swiss Francs, please.)

At the end of our Teather?

Over the weekend a former minister condemned Government plans to cap household benefits at £500-a-week as 'immoral'. Sour-faced Libdem, Sarah Teather, accused the government of seeking to 'gain popularity at the expense of children's lives', claiming it as a purely political ploy to pit one class against another, or some such whining drivel. Ah, that would be the popular political ploy of bringing the ickle children into your argument, would it?

“But what about the child?” is the policy discussion equivalent of Godwin’s Law. As soon as you mention the little fascist, you have lost the argument just as surely as if you’d said “Hitler”. The kids are collateral damage in the war between granting freedom to individuals and then restricting what individuals will do to demonstrate that they don’t deserve such freedom. The children are not relevant here. They’re really not.

What is relevant is the whole way our society is structured. Some people work long hours in demanding jobs for little monetary reward. Some earn colossal salaries by dint of specialist knowledge. A lucky few inherit their living. But most of us would hope to be able to earn a living wage for a fair sacrifice of our time and talents; anybody objecting to that would surely find it hard to argue a realistic and reasonable alternative. By our joint endeavours and by our contributions to the communal pot we should be able to also help those less fortunate and run our society fairly with a bit put by for a rainy day.

Of course, there will always be a small number who will take what they want without regard for the rightful owners’ losses, but those people are called criminals and we generally frown on them, censure them, penalise them and ultimately lock them up. Depriving somebody of their hard-earned possessions is considered wrong from almost any perspective and rightly so.

I would have left it there, except, on Petrie Hosken’s show on LBC973 on Sunday afternoon, there were callers who argued that Ms Teather was right and that it was, indeed, ‘immoral’ to consider limiting the amount of unearned benefit a family could claim to a level higher than a majority of ordinary, full-time workers could ever dream of earning. What? Has the country gone stark, staring mad? (Don’t answer, it was rhetorical; of course it has. The UK lost its plot many years ago.)

But what we should be getting mad about isn't the idea of a benefit cap – there HAS to be a limit - but that such a high ceiling of benefits are being paid not to those who have fallen on hard times, not to those who need a helping hand to get back to work, but in the main to the least employable in society; those who could never command more than the minimum wage and yet have been allowed to breed uncontrolled an entire class of citizen who in turn will never work.

What’s to do? Well, I reckon two birds, one stone. Teather says we are at risk of demonising them; I say criminalise them. As many of them have subsisted all their lives on benefits – always taking and never contributing, never considering the losses of their victims, the tax-payers, they can be considered by any objective measure as thieves. And as a large part of the cost of their upkeep is housing way beyond their worth, we can redress all the wrongs by bringing back the work house.

Sorry love, the foie gras is off. Damned cuts!

Work for your keep, support your interned community, reclaim the council houses for key worker accommodation. Don’t pay, won’t pay? Welcome to Don’t work, don’t eat. Seriously you guys, you should make me King now!

It's ALL about the money - ker-ching, ker-ching

While everybody is banging on about the living wage it’s convenient to forget that money is an abstract, constructed by man in order to trade. It’s also probably the closest thing we've got to an accurate measure of exactly what somebody is worth – morally fair or not - to the society in which they live.

We each accrue what we are able, by whatever means we have at our disposal. So, if increasing numbers of people who go out to work are unable to live within their means it can only mean that our society does not value their labours. Let’s look at a few numbers… (Where’s Carol Vorderman when you need her?) 

The proposed living wage, outside London, is calculated at £7.45 per hour, presumably based on a 37.5 hour EU working time directive week. That’s a little over £14,500 per year. Take off Income Tax and National Insurance and you’re left with around £11,500 or £220 a week. You’re not worth a whole lot, are you? And after a rise in wages pushes up the price of goods – because it’s the economy, stupid – you’ll be worth even less. 

Contrast that with a family of non-workers having their benefits ‘ruthlessly’ capped by the Nasty, Nasty Tories at a mere £26,500 or £500 a week. So, let me get this straight… in effect the Labour party are opposing any reduction in benefits received while pushing for workers to survive on less than half the proposed reduced benefit ceiling? 

And then of course, a disproportionate amount of government spending goes to stopping some welfare-dependent families from eating their own kids, succumbing to various addictions, spreading disease and making the whole country look untidy. No wonder they think working is a mug’s game. It doesn't seem to make sense, does it? But then, nothing does in Socialism. 

And when all the social spending doesn't work – and it rarely seems to – we take them off benefits and bang them up in jail. Well, if it costs £47,000 a year to keep a man in prison that means they accrue some £900 a week of national wealth merely to keep them off the streets. Crime don't pay? 

Following, so far? A quick summary then, of your net worth to the country as it stands: 

• Honest worker = £220 p.w.
• Unemployable layabout = £500 p.w.
• Nasty thieving bastard = £900 p.w.

It seems pretty clear to me that this is arse-about-face and it has to change. LESS should be spent on the non-productive and the unwanted. Prison should be hard and cheap – lock ‘em up & make ‘em work to survive. Benefits should be bloody difficult to come by unless you’re genuinely needy. And work should pay enough to live a reasonable life. Who can possibly argue that this isn't how it should be?

I've got my eye on you... one false move...

But there’s no way we’re going to be able to get to that position with a population fast approaching 70 million. So, unless anybody has a better answer than my oft-proposed cull, I’ll be away to ready the snipers.

Pee-nuts, myths and legends

There's a popular urban myth that 'scientists' have analysed bowls of peanuts provided for patrons in pubs and discovered traces of urine or faeces from, variously, ten, a dozen, twenty, or as many as a hundred different people. Such 'facts' are accepted as truths almost without question because they sound vaguely plausible. Well this one is bollocks on so many counts. Firstly, what kinds of 'scientist' would mount such a study and who would pay for it? Secondly, if it had actually been done, why the alarming discrepancy with the numbers? And thirdly, a cursory understanding of bio-chemistry would tell you that nothing conclusive could be revealed by any such study.

This made up inconsequential titbit is probably the brainchild of somebody with a bee in their bonnet about blokes not washing their hands. (As if any such story would really have any effect; there's no limit to the crap blokes will swallow!) It's a fable, not a fact.

If you hit somebody over the head with a cosh, a chair, a piece of lead pipe or a handy rock you may well kill them. If you sock somebody in the jaw you are just as likely to break bones in your hand as their mandibular bits. (It's one of the reasons boxers wear gloves.) The least likely outcome is that you render them harmlessly unconscious just long enough for you to make your escape. But the latter possibility is a regularly used cipher, a handy code used in movies and thriller novels, suspending reality and allowing the plot to progress. Don't try it at home, kids.

We grow up with tales of ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. We are also calmed by once-upon-a-times and all's well that ends well. But eventually most of us grow up and begin to grasp that the only reality is cause and effect and cold, hard economics. And so to the politics...

The lovely J M Barrie-like stories of the happy ever after welfare state, where everybody is nice and kind and we all care about each other and nobody ever has to suffer indignity or ignominy or hardship or pain or poverty is really a Grimm's tale of trolls and goats and wolves and dark, dark woods. Politicians want to tell you the first without accepting the second; who would vote for pain? (At least in this matter religion, the flimsiest of fictions, pulls no punches with its 'vale of tears'.)

We all learn by our mistakes. We've all made promises we couldn't keep and we learn two strategies to cope with this; either only make promises you know you can fulfill or, far more successfully, don't make unfulfillable promises.

Growing up is hard for everybody. Leaving behind the fantasies and facing the facts is no easy mission, but it's the only honourable way out of childhood and into a life well-lived. While we do have plenty of fully-formed adults among us we still have a far too highly infantilised population; a population who still hide under the bedclothes to avoid facing the monsters. Deliberately, or misguidedly allowing voters to believe in unsustainable fictions has lead us to a world where some people never question where their living comes from and expect the world to provide.

But I sense the tide changing. The budget is straining the seams of the nation's purse. We have no choice but to pay our way. For those who already do, this is a common sense. For those who never have, it's time to lose the jim-jams and get out of bed. As the welfare burdens weighs ever heavier on the shoulders of the nation's wide-awake, grown up tax payers, we have less and less tolerance for those who think we pissed in their peanuts.

(If you want a great example of a fairy tale - read this illuminating story about the best Prime Minister we've had since the war.)

(If you want another one, how about the great EU jobs myth?)

The Shitty Circle of Life

So, an interesting evening yesterday as the Twitteratti gathered to reaffirm their allegiances.

I work for a living. I always have and sometimes I'd rather not, but if I don't work I don't eat. Plus, the good old Protestant work ethic keeps my nose to the grindstone. It's how it is. One day I'd like to retire - at the moment that's looking increasingly unlikely. And unless I win the lottery I may will end my days doing increasingly menial work to subsidise a meagre pension.

I can turn my hand to pretty much anything. I can read and write and count, sometimes without even moving my lips. I can cook and clean and sew and fix things up; a wall, some shelves, a kitchen... I could easily self-build a house. I have even managed the allegedly impossible Ikea assembly methodology. A Jack of all trades and master of some. I'm not 'fortunate' I have striven throughout my life to acquire skills and knowledge and fully expect to keep on striving.

I loathe those who do nothing. Those whose existence is catered for by the rest of us. Those who no more need to get up on a Monday as on a Sunday. Those who, having a 'bad day' can simply stay in bed and shut out the world. They can pity themselves as much as they like, but if they're in the system it IS piss-easy living on benefits. We workers cannot just coast along - a life on welfare includes an abundance of one luxury we will never be able to afford; time.

In pursuit of a reliable income,I had to move in 2008. I spent the thick end of £20k making my little house safe and warm and clean and new, knowing it would need to be just so to rent to the private sector. I'm no Rackman; I have to rent down here and on balance it costs me considerably more each month than I receive. But that's the economy, which I fully accept.

After proposing just one, wholly unacceptable tenant, the letting agent mislaid my details, didn't market the property and some weeks after the move the house was still empty. I accepted the entreaty of my former neighbour who loved what I'd done to the place and let it out to her. She paid the rent and yes, she was in receipt of Housing Benefit. She looked after the place and three years on, when she found a council house, she proposed her sister to take over mine.

I didn't set out to be 'social landlord'. I don't have a string of shitty little sub-standard slums to exploit migrant workers and cynically extort from the public purse. I made no money whatsoever from the deal and in fact over four years I am out of pocket, even taking into consideration the partial coverage of my mortgage liabilities during that time. If I could have sold I would.

So why should I tolerate the taunts of the pissant little commie wanker who last night revealed the true extent of his blind hatred for anybody with a job who doesn't want to support a welfare economy? His argument? That is was hypocritical of me to slag off welfare dependees while simultaneously accepting the socialist shilling in the form of Housing Benefit. Bollocks.

How many workers despise the people they work for, while accepting their wages? How many taxi drivers are repulsed by the objectionable, drunken scum they depend on for their Friday night's takings? Should every hard-working business owner, shop keeper, doctor and bin man refuse to deal with 'clients' who don't directly earn their income, or with whose preferences they differ? I rented out my home because i couldn't afford to run two houses. They [sometimes] paid rent; it was a business arrangement that allowed me to continue paying taxes.

How they earn that rent is an entirely separate issue and I reserve the right, without hypocrisy, to find welfare dependency objectionable and many of its recipients sub-human scum. The state in which MY home was left gives me no cause to change my mind or alter my principles.

Back in control

Well, hard on the heels of the "Oh, my God! Really?" news that thick unsocialised scum spawn yet more thick unsocialised scum (under a system known, ironically, as Socialism) comes a long-awaited official recognition of another obvious correlation. Ian Duncan Smith has been hinting about it for years and using delicately phrased language to express those hints but now he's more or less said it outright in terms that even bottom feeding Labour voters can grasp.

"the current payment of benefits is supporting “dysfunctional behaviour” and for some families “the notion of taking a job is a mug’s game”" (Click the link and read it for yourself)

Good news. Does this signal a new confidence in the Conservative Party? It's about time they ditched the Limp Demics and said what needs to be said. Population Control. That's the solution - don't breed what we can't feed. Herds of wildebeest grow in number when the grazing's good and shrink, by attrition when it isn't. Populations of all kinds depend for survival on availability of resources and parasites cannot live without a host. I'm fed up of being part of that host population and you should be too.

I hain't a Helk... I'm a Gnu" [link]

But IDS should go a step further and move towards a wholesale reduction in benefits across the board. It is unconscionably stupid that a family paying tax should receive benefits paid from that same tax. It is outrageous that successive governments have invented benefits that hide the truth and take unemployable people off the jobless statistics. We should call a spade a spade, ya dig?

A reduced and stable population with the right attitudes and skills would steadily push up employment rates, which would steadily increase wages and a reduced state would decrease necessary taxation. It should be possible to have kids - if you must (sigh) - on a single full-time wage, but if you have other desires you'll have to make hard choices.

In 1957 Harold Macmillan said "You've never had it so good." He must be spinning in his grave.

Mock the Weak

Lots of propaganda skirmishes joined over the last few days, but who do you believe? They say you can’t hypnotise somebody who doesn’t want to go under and it is much the same with persuasion; entrenched views are harder to shift than shit on a blanket. 

Some cultures need to be mocked out of existence - far left, far right, faddish and marginal movements and any religion intolerant enough to create people like Azhar Ahmed. But should this have ever got to court? Far better, surely, to let him say his stuff, point out his gullibility and ignorance, then point and laugh from your loftier vantage point… the British way. George Galloway was on LBC talking about freedom of speech and the limiting of such rights. But, George, where do you set those limits? 

A survey on attitudes to welfare reveals that those in work are feeling the strain of paying for those out of work, but at the same time there is an upwelling of feeling against the Atos witch-hunts, with plenty of stories of deplorable treatment at their assessment centres. Who do you believe? It wouldn't be the first time that special interest groups had rallied their supporters to flood the newspapers and radio phone-ins with sob stories. In life as in warfare we appear to have arrived at a point where no casualties are acceptable and to say otherwise is denounced as cruel. 

Talking of war, I was alerted recently to an apparently pernicious EU plot to brainwash tender young minds into becoming Euro-sheep. 

And so it goes. We are bombarded daily with a cacophony of propaganda from all the party machines with varying degrees of atrocity being forecast as the result of dissent. This is (sadly) a good thing because few people will be dissuaded from their chosen course and the UK will remain a mishmash of diverse opinion. It’s also (sadly) disastrous, because few people will be dissuaded from their chosen course, etc. 

How I long for the fictional good old days of the nineteen-sixties when, as amply demonstrated in psychological cold-war claptrap such as The Avengers (Diana Rigg could persuade me of anything!) whole audiences could be hypnotised and programmed by watching spinning discs and a tone sent over the phone could scramble an assassin before you could say 'Manchurian'. 

Whatever she said...

So, what ‘truth’ would you go for? Time to grow up, Britain and accept the cold reality that there is no free ride in life, that there is no magic sky pixie and that we each must triumph by our own endeavours. After all, even Ed Miliband appears to have embraced the notion that this doesn’t necessarily make you evil. 

Or do you want to carry on believing there is a limitless pot to satisfy every need, that every life has equal possibilities, that every soul is sacred and that we will all live happily ever after in a fluffy, happy wonderland?

Fact or fairy story; you choose.

The Taxman's Lament

“It's the same the whole world over, It's the poor what gets the blame…”

Yes you, you stupid poor people. You’ve screwed everything up what with your ‘needs’ and your ‘human rights’ and your ‘fairness’ and your simple base human nature.

Council houses weren’t good enough for you, so we sold them to you for a knock-down price. But then you wanted to parade around in your chavvy BMWs, so we let you over-mortgage to the point where you managed to break the housing market. You wanted cheap package holidays so we invaded Benidorm, which you then contrived to turn into a sort of sunny open prison.

You wanted your expanding multitude of idle thick kids to do well, so we dumbed down the curriculum, inflated the grades and pretended they were all university material, yet those who do find work ended up in ‘retail’ (shops assistant) or ‘catering’ (McDonald’s). You didn’t want to do the dirty jobs so we opened up the borders and let the rest of the world in to do it instead. You wanted ‘cheap’ and your yearnings fuelled globalisation.

See what democracy did? You demanded choice – now look what you’ve gone and done with it, you stupid, stupid, poor people, you. It’s all your fault.

It’s the silly season, what with the footie coming back and the end of the summer holidays, the autumn storms approaching and the MPs returning to Westminster on Monday. Now is the time for that peculiar form of political prestidigitation, which exchanges lovely new money for old and conjures new imperial clothes from fresh air.

“It's the rich what gets the pleasure…”

There are no more poor people to tax – they’re all on benefits now - and no more palatable general taxes to raise, so the only thing left is to tax pleasure. With that in mind I commend my autumn budget to the house:

Let’s tax fun – it’s all we’ve got left and it will have the delicious trickle-down effect of spreading the warm glow of schadenfreude throughout the land. So, from now on you’ll be taxed on every smile, laugh, grin, chuckle, fumble, tickle, giggle, guffaw and gurn you engage in, be it at home, on the bus or at the dentist – a laughing gas tax, if you will.

You don't deserve me, you really don't - here I am bailing you out yet again! What’s that, Mr Clegg, how will I levy said tax? I’m the ideas man here mate, I imagine whatever mechanism you dreamed up for your wealth tax would probably work fine, you twonk.

Oh fuck it... let’s all of us just give up, hand over every penny and work for the state - it's where we're headed anyway.

                                              

“Ain't it all a fucking shame?"

Wrong to work?

Hmm, I happened upon an interesting discussion yesterday in which a lawyer was arguing with a benefit recipient about the relative merits of their respective endeavours. The lawyer pontificated about the apparent lifestyle choice of the supposed scrounger and its validity, resting on the principle ‘wrong to work’.

The benefit recipient, quite rightly asked what (if anything) positive came from the lawyer's work. The lawyer lost the argument (soundly, it appeared to me) when the only response mustered was 'achieving equality for clients'. This was countered with the accusation that, as an intangible benefit, equality didn’t count as value.

Then, naturally, the labels started flying, starting with something like commie, which resulted in the lazy and obvious retaliation of fascist, swiftly followed by Tory, red, chav, scum, toff and all the usual suspects and before you could say ‘giro’ the whole argument was a busted flush.

If the validity of somebody's existence lies in the sum of 'worth' they provide to the world, it could very easily be argued that lawyers, as a ‘species’, contribute very much to the deficit. In fact the best paid lawyers are generally retained by those whose own actions are highly questionable – that’s antimoral leverage in action. It is no accident that many US politicians and presidents have practised law, a trend becoming ever more popular over here.

So, stalemate? I don't believe in rewarding idleness - how could any rational thinker? But I actually quite like the idea of 'wrong to work' in a sense - it is often said that if you find a job you love you never have to work again. And if more people were happy there would be less need for bloody lawyers in the first place!

I understand and support the idea of a financial safety net – instant evictions and suchlike would only create yet more work for lawyers, after all – but any such system will always be open to exploitation by the unscrupulous. We’ve seen it happen time and time again.

But, rich or poor, fit or lame, the concept of earning a living still applies. If you earn your place by graft or talent or by the largesse of those around you it shouldn’t matter until you are perceived as taking the piss. This applies as much to tax-avoiders being ostentatious as it does to those fraudulently ‘on the sick’. Nobody should get a free ride (although you should be allowed to coast in the slipstream from time to time).

Self-sufficiency is a laudable aim and moral self-sufficiency is a grand idea, except for the huge lack of self-awareness that man displays, but unless you want to cut yourself off completely it can rarely work. Bartering a few eggs or an occasional sack of spuds is hardly likely to fund a Sky subscription. For that you need money.

And there’s your problem, right there. Even if you reset everything and money became merely an intermediary currency, it would take no time at all for human avarice to re-establish, then accelerate, the wealth gap. In a grown-up world, I guess you just have to accept that and choose which course of living makes you least unhappy.

Is it so wrong to work? (Comments below)

It don't add up!

Hmmm, The Daily Mail headlines the tale of the unemployed accountant. I'm not sure why they felt the need to highlight his plight, or why this story had any merit over and above the thousands of similar tales of financial woe. Or, more pertinently, why anybody would really care; he is an accountant, after all.

According to the article: "...the Timpsons drove two cars [and] enjoyed two foreign holidays a year [and] an affluent life in their four bedroom semi-detached house which they bought 12 years ago for £300,000 [and] felt so financially comfortable they remortgaged their property and took out a £50,000 loan in a bid to build their dream home on a plot of land they bought nearby in 2005..."

‘You assume as an accountant you will always be needed ..."

You would also assume, as an accountant, that he'd understand the fickle nature of money and instead of living high on the hog, would have salted away as much as possible for when times got difficult. Surely, he would never have advised employers or clients to borrow and spend like there was no tomorrow? Silly me - that's exactly what 'leverage' was. The buy-to-let market was all about borrow and spend... and hope.

For years small businesmen have been so terrified of finances and running foul of the taxman that they have paid the hourly rate for a qualified accountant, only to have a junior back-office clerk add up two columns of figures, subtract one from the other and fill in an online tax return. It was only a matter of time before some would wake up and realise an accountant was an unnecessary , non-deductible luxury they could no longer justify

If I and many like me watched in incredulous horror as the thrift model was overtaken by the ever accelerating credit economy and wondered just when that bloated, wobbly bubble was going to burst, surely an accountant should have been much more informed and wary - especially with his own money.

Interesting that this story appears on the same day as Exchequer Secretary David Gauke's rash condemnation that those who both paid and accepted cash-in-hand were just as bad as the bankers. Shame about the today's Daily Telegraph lead story that the cash economy is neither wrong nor immoral. Early polling suggests 75% of the readers also support that view. (Why aren't the government spin doctors stamping heavily on these almost daily ill-thought-out leaks?)

The root cause? Human greed, plain and simple. The possibility of getting something for nothing, or more for less, is a prospect that raises a gleam in the eye of humans rich and poor, big and small, the world over. As for tax avoidance, surely it is one of the principle aims of accountancy? Public servants, private businesses, charities and individuals have always been advised, nay encouraged, to avoid paying more tax than they had to. (SIPPS, ISAs Gift Aid to charity, etc)

Pugh cartoon from the Daily Mail

Our society runs on, promotes and excuses greed at all levels. Consumerism is pure greed. Saving is healthy, responsible greed. Addiction is greed, profiteering is greed. false accounting is greed, market-fixing is greed. Theft is greed and even murder is often motivated by greed. It's there, at the heart of the drive for human survival and advancement. Like it or not, greed gets you out of bed in the morning.

Now, if I put my other fist in there?

In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko said "Greed is good". He was wrong, it's much, much simpler than that, Greed is human.

So, now it's agreed we're greedy fuckers, can we shift the debate back, not to who is to blame (all of us) but how we're going to fix it?

The problem with families

I see the experts have been at it again with this report into criminality in so-called 'feckless families'. You have to love an expert; they pour millions of pounds and years of research time into discovering what most of us have known all along.

Over the years experts have revealed some 'startling' correlations:

• Children educated at grammar schools go to better universities.
• People who work harder usually earn more money.
• If you pay more in benefits than for work, people will choose benefits.
• Flooding a region with immigrants increases racist attitudes.
• The bigger the government the greater the cluster-fuck
• The European Onion[sic] - see above. And now,
• Problem families are, ahem, 'a problem'

The 1942 Beveridge Report identified five "Giant Evils" in society. (How much better if that had been 'Five Giant Elvises'?) These were named as squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. And Louise Casey's £448million, three-year study has discovered what the neighbors would have told her in minutes - the five giant evils have proved to be more resilient than all the misguided efforts to eradicate them.

Charles Darwin posited the principle of natural selection, in which nature favours the survival of those mutations most suited to exploit their environment. In this case the environment is the welfare state and it seems the fittest mutations are the very same incestuous, abusive, criminal scum themselves. Many of nature's most successful species are parasites, which not only manufacture more copies of themselves, but do it at a faster rate than anything else. (Is this starting to sound familiar yet?)

For years governments have engaged in sticking plaster policies - treating the symptoms, not the disease - in the hope that the ailment might clear up on its own. (Or sometimes in the certain knowledge that they'd only be in the job for a couple more years, so sod it.) But after decades of increasingly expensive treatments it's clear the cancer has spread. 

The only way to get rid of many parasites is to destroy the host and even the Labour Party experts are now catching onto the fact that society as a whole is no longer willing to foot the bill. But the host has grown too big and, as the Eagles once said, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast."

Maybe not. But isn't it about time we starved the fucker to death?

Feeling the Benefit

Well, I appear to have come back from holiday to a shitstorm of stuff going on and it's going to take a few days to get my head around it all. I'm assuming that Greece is still being dragged along in chains behind its European gaoler and that the economies of Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and Ireland are teetering on the brink and that we still have six days to save the doomed Euro (dear god, let it die).

I see that the Leveson business (what IS that about, really?) continues apace and that Tony Blair now seems to be in charge, so I've ordered a Kevlar jacket for when the next war starts. The government appears to be cack-handedly not doing the things it said it would do and the opposition, as ever, have sprouted the wings of innocent cherubim and continue to fool large chunks of the lumpen proletariat by simply lying about their culpability in all that is wrong with this country.

Which brings me to this outrageous benefits saga, the only news article I've really had a chance to read today and for that I offer thanks to a stray Tweeter who broadcast it early this morning.

An impoverished family in Breadline Britain 2012

Go on, click the link and have a quick look. The headlines say it all. Late last night I finished reading "Our Culture, What's Left Of It", by Theodore Dalrymple in which he discusses at erudite length the progressive infantilisation of an increasingly ill-educated populace and the abrogation of personal responsibility. Mr D waxes lyrical indeed on society's ills and I thoroughly recommend his book to anybody wanting a stimulating and learned reading of the situation.

But, not possessing Theodore's deft touch with the pen, I offer the blunter appraisal that this 'news' story pretty much sums up what a crock of shit Socialism is. Is this what we've come to? To openly play the system that is sinking this nation and not give a toss? Are we so far down the rocky road that it is no shame to openly boast about stealing from the state?

And when I say 'state' I mean, of course, you and me - the dwindling number of fools who work to pay for it all.

Average Joe le Taxi

Have a look next time you go to a supermarket. There will be an unending procession of social retards loading up trolleys full of loot into waiting taxis. Go into any branch of Argos and it will be chock-full of Labour's beloved welfare chimps, gurning over the trashy jewellery and electronics. And hard by even the lowliest sink estate will be a succession of knock-off booze and cigarette outlets... and a tattoo parlour. Taxis? I'm hopping mad about that - what's wrong with the bus and a bit of leg work?

All of that costs money and none of it can even remotely be justified as subsistence. Who's paying for it? Come on, who? I'll tell you who - not them as benefits from it, that's for sure. What really pisses me off (and it pisses you off too, unless you're dole scum, in which case, congratulations on reading this far) is that people who work have to make hard choices. If you want to smoke 20 legal cigarettes a day, you have to find about £2500 a year. That's a bloody good family holiday, a car upgrade every couple of years, a new bathroom or lots of electronic toys you're going to sacrifice on the altar of your filthy habit. Which is, of course, why many fewer workers smoke than non-workers.

But taxis? Yes, I'm still furious about that.

According to this report, David Cameron believes that working people can now rest assured that they will be better off in future than those who spend their life on benefits. “We’ve stood up against the abuse that left taxpayers footing the bills for people on £30,000 or even £50,000 a year in benefits,” he said. “It’s a fair principle - a family out of work on benefits shouldn’t be paid more than the average family in work.”

But that's still way wide of the mark. The majority of working families earn far less than the average, so the chances are the abuses will continue, because nobody has the guts to do what's morally right. And you know why? This is why: People are too stupid for democracy to work.

Halle-bloody-lujah! I've been banging this drum all my life. When the hard decisions need to be made, our mediocre leaders dare not make them and pander instead to the wishes of a dumb and dumber electorate too dim to realise how lucky they are.

I take it back about the taxis - they're too thick to be allowed to roam free.