Big Society: RIP

On the 13^th February 2013, on the Andrew Marr Show, the final death blow was administered to the Big Society by God’s emissary on earth, The Department of Work And Pensions minister Ian Duncan Smith. He threw a massive hissy fit because his Forced Labour Scheme, in which people are used as unpaid labour to fatten the bottom lines of millionaire companies, had been declared unlawful.

A geology graduate had been carrying out volunteer work in the community, in much the way I’m sure Cameron had hoped for in the Big Society, when the failed politician and Catholic zealot Duncan Smith decreed from on high that the humble geology graduate must cease her nefarious activities. She could no longer carry out her unpaid activities, enriching her local community whilst working for an institution that provided knowledge and education. No! Instead, she must go unto the realm of Poundland and fatten their bottom line, increase their margins and doeth their shelf stacking.

Presumably, because we live in a land of full employment, there is nobody available to be employed and paid a wage for a fair days work anymore so these desperate businesses must trawl the charity shops and soup kitchens for employees.

Duncan Smith, the failed Tory leader, has a commonality with several high ranking members of the Nazi party. Hitler ( refused admission to The Academy Of Fine Arts in Vienna because of his 'unfitness to be a painter'), , Himmler(  inferiority complex for not seeing action in WWI and was a weak and sickly person) Heydrich ( dismissed from the German Navy for 'conduct unbecoming of an officer), Goebals ( failed writer, club foot and far from the Aryan ideal) . They all seemed to turn their unreconciled anger on vulnerable members of the community with a zeal that made the Inquisition look like a bunch of wimps and when they were challenged they also flew into rages of fury.

 I don’t know why, but I expect Duncan Smith will get the Solution, finally.

  

Tory Ideologue Triumphs Over The Economy.

As the government embarks on mass evictions of the poor and socially cleansing some of the richer parts of London and the Home Counties, there are many private landlords rubbing their hands with glee.

With the introduction of the bedroom tax and welfare cap, many former tenants of social housing will have to take up tenancies in the private sector, where rents are higher by as much as 40%  thus pushing up the welfare bill even higher ,as Housing Benefit or ‘Landlord Benefit’, as it should really be called ,will still have to be claimed.

Other side effects of this nasty ideologue will be families split up, children uprooted, increased homelessness and lives destroyed. I appreciate it is inappropriate for people to receive excessive amounts in benefits, but if the Tory’s had any economic competence then perhaps before implementing their unpleasant policy they could have taken steps to regulate the rental market, so the taxpayer didn’t end up footing an ever ballooning bill for what is an incredibly stupid and ill thought out policy, based on hate for a section of the community they have no understanding of whatsoever.

Boom!

The Universal Credit time bomb is set to go off in approximately 6-8 months. You read it here first. Cover your eyes and ears as the multi million pound system self destructs under the weight of claimants attempting to access it online. Be wary of people screaming into phones, as they try to sort out their housing, jobseekers, income support, disability or child, benefits with someone called Keith, who is in a benefit processing centre in Sunderland or Merthyr Tydfill. Be prepared to comfort the elderly and explain to them what the ‘interweb is, and that it’s all done by computer now, All those friendly council officials you used to deal with at the town council offices and who knew where Smeathorpe was, have been sacked.

 And finally listen and laugh at the excuses that pour out of the mouths of the detached and uncaring Tory’s as they wonder why out loud, why if somebody hasn't received their benefits, then why can’t mummy or daddy help them out?

Falling Jobless Figures, a Tanking Economy and An Increase In Borrowing.

5 Reasons for falling jobless figures and rising costs and borrowings.

• People are declaring themselves as self-employed and signing off Jobseekers Allowance. Unfortunately as their revenue stream is so small, due to a lack of spending in the economy, they claim Working Tax Credits to supplement their income, therefore increasing the Welfare bill.
• People are employed on zero contracts and work on a 'when needed' basis. As above, they need to supplement their income with Working Tax credits with the same result.
• People that require Full time jobs have to take part time low paid jobs and fall back on welfare to supplement their income.
• Wages are suppressed and do not provide a living wage forcing people to top up thier income with benefits.
• Private 'back to work' companies are encouraging jobseekers to go self employed which enables the companies to claim commission whilst increasing the welfare bill. 

The economy this country needs is one that provides sustainable full time employment that pays a living wage. Releasing people from the burden of having to, reluctantly, fall back on the state. Until that is achieved the rich will get richer and the poor will get much poorer.

The Common Agricultural Policy: A Slush Fund For The Rich.

Some of the richest landowners in this country are in receipt of millions in benefits(Tax payer funded benefits) via the Common Agricultural Policy while honest hardworking and struggling farmers suffer.

Although the government refuses to allow the full figures to be published  ( I wonder why!, Cameron is always bleating on about transparency when it suits him and the government has lobbied against a cap of £250,000),some of those in receipt of millions are:

The Queen.
The Duke of Westminster.
Prince Charles.
The Duke of Marlborough.
1 in 5 Tory MP's, including Wildlife minister, Benyon (£211,000), His Englefield Estate has been in receipt of over 2 million euros.

All in this together. I don't think so.

IVF And Right Wing Didactism. Check definition

With the recommendation that the age of recipients suitable for fertility treatment should be raised, as summer follows spring, so comes the migration of didactive reactionaries, invariably people who already have children, from beneath rocks and floorboards around the land towards the nearest radio phone-in. They generally put forward an opposing view that centre’s on the premise that it’s nature way of controlling the population, that it’s not a right to have children and medicine should not be used to overcome obstacles supposedly put there by a mightier being.

As we have created a society where young people find it financially impossible to buy a house or start a family before they reach their mid thirties, then surely it is society’s responsibility to facilitate the opportunity that previous generations have been able to enjoy at an earlier age. 

People who decide that it is not financially viable to start a family in their twenties and decide to wait until they can afford to care for a child, should be applauded, not stigmatised. 

Elder parents are normally more financially stable, find the trials of parenthood easier to deal with, because they are more experienced in life, and so the child or children will hopefully experience a more fulfilling upbringing, leading hopefully, to better adjusted adults.

I personally would not impose any upper age limit. When IVF is being considered, the first step should be to take a blood sample, which can be used to establish the biologically health of the prospective recipient of the treatment. If the test shows that a 45 yr old is biologically suitable to receive IVF then I see no reason why they shouldn’t receive it.

On a more basic and obvious point, I’m sure the people who oppose IVF on the grounds we shouldn’t intervene, medically, with nature, would not consider it acceptable to deny a child suffering from leukaemia, medical assistance or, if they suffered a heart attack, insist nobody dials 999 because they preferred to let nature take its course.

 If that’s the case then we may as well tear down all the hospitals and close down all the cancer charities.

I bet the IVF haters vote Tory.  Tee Hee

The Stupidity of Libertarianism.

Of the many political ideologues that blight this world, Libertarianism has got to be one of the stupidest. The definition of a Libertarian is someone who wants to live by their own rules and expects others to live by those same rules, regardless. It’s really Fascism for the smug chattering metropolitan classes, who like to spend the weekends in the country, probably slaughtering defenceless game birds.

Joke

A boy visits his Granpa, who is watching football on the TV. He sits next to him and notices a bowl of hazlenuts on a table in front of him. He helps himself to them while he continues to watch the football.Before he knows it, he has eaten all the nuts.He turns to his Granpa.
'Sorry Granpa, I've eaten all your nuts'
His granpa turns to him, smiles, and says. ' That's all right son, once I've sucked all the chocolate off I normally throw them away.'

Osborne, HS2 And A Massive Stink of……….?

The proposed new HS2 needs a track as ‘straight as a die’ to achieve its maximum speed of 225 mph, yet when the track reaches the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s constituency of Tatton, which is full of mansions owned by the extremely rich, the track takes a massive curving dogleg that manages to avoid the moneyed lands of rich footballers, bankers and property speculators in Osborne’s constituency. The detour will add an extra £500 million to the cost of this massive political vanity project. Osborne claims he has not been lobbying to divert the line.

I’ll just file that claim along with his claims of reducing borrowing, creating growth and that the allegations were untrue about drug taking, his acquaintance with a dominatrix and the reason that Osborne was so keen to get Cameron to employ Former News Of The World Editor Andy Coulson was payback for Coulson running a spoiler article in order to bury the story about the drug and dominatrix allegations.

Beef Found In lasagna Shock.

I bought a lasagna yesterday and I thought there was something a bit strange about it, so I took it to be tested. Guess what they found in it........ Beef! Yeah that's right. Bloody beef. Not a shred of horse. I was disgusted! I said to the shop girl, when I took it back,  if my lasagna isn't full of a once cherished and cared for family pet that the owner, probably a vacuous fifteen year old who has just discovered make up and boys, and is now bored of the pony she once dreamed of as a little girl. If that little chestnut mare hasn't been rammed into a stinking truck with a bunch of other bewildered, dread filled, once loved pets, deprived of food and water, and driven hundreds of miles before being poked with an electric prod, kicked, punched and driven into an abattoir that's air is thick with the feted smell of blood, gristle and fear, it's floor covered in excrement, urine and offal. If that terror stricken and confused little pony hasn't been brutally slaughtered by some slow eyed, slack jawed, dim witted uncaring malcontent, who probably sports a massive erection, as he gleefully goes about his business of killing beautiful, graceful, intelligent and sentient beings for a living.

Well, I said to the shop girl. I want my bluddy money back! I know what's right yer know!

Do You?

Farmers, Landowners and Europe.

Often when driving through the countryside I see signs urging people to vote UKIP or promoting the idea of pulling Britain out of Europe. I’m confused. Why is it that the most rabid eurosceptics are landowners or farmers, who are currently receiving thousands of pounds in subsidies (benefits) from Europe via The Common Agricultural Policy?

Do they seriously think that, if Britain pulls out of Europe, the British taxpayer is going to allow them to continue to live a life on benefits by continuing to shovel thousands of pounds in subsidies (benefits) in their direction?

I’m afraid the days of leaving a rusty old piece of farm machinery in a hedgerow and getting thousands of pounds in free money in return, so you can buy the wife a new 4x4, or buy some more carbofuran to poison raptors with, will be over. I’m afraid the days of making boots from old tractor tyres and marrying your sister will be back, my inbred bucolic friends. After all the Common Agricultural Policy is nothing more than a slush fund for landowning dukes, earls,princes and Tory MP's.

Childcare.

The government is keen for childcare assistants to achieve qualifications in English and Mathematics. It’s the same approach that has been taken with nurses and we have seen where that has left us. Some nurses now seem to think it’s beneath them to carry out the more mundane duties expected of them, like changing soiled sheets or feeding patients.

I can understand the need to improve mathematical skills in childcare assistants if part of the nursery curriculum was the story of the little bear and the quadratic equations or how the wheels on the bus go round and round because mass is converted into energy, but other than that I would have thought the most important skill a childcare assistant would need when looking after six toddlers, under the age of three, is the ability to count up to six. Any other skills are superfluous to the task in hand, methinks.

Polish (the language, not the stuff you use to makes things shiny).

Apparently Polish is now are second language. I haven’t got a problem with that, although I do find it a rather arrogant language, as it seems to think it can exist without the need for vowels. In fact I will go further and say it is openly vowelist.

What does concern me though is an attitude I have noticed in some immigrants who have settled down and made a life in this country. They have come to this country to take advantage of the opportunities which, presumably, were denied to them in the own country, but once they have achieved their, again presumably ,better life, some start piping up and begin to criticise our welfare and health  systems, as well as our liberal democracy and  values. The suggestion, it would seem, is that they would prefer it if their new country was more like their old one. The solution is simple. If you’re not happy with the way we live our lives then perhaps you would like to return from whence you came.

Statements made about immigrants.

“ what they earn is sent back to their home country”

They pay taxes, consume food, buy clothing and fuel, pay for goods and services. Yes they save, but so do the British. It’s not a crime. The Polish return £1.3bn to Poland. The French send back £1.4bn to France. You don’t hear people complaining about French migrants.

“ They do jobs the British can’t be bothered to do”.

Prior to freedom of movement and mass migration I don’t remember cabbages and turnips rotting in the fields because farmers couldn’t find anybody to pick them. I think you’ll find the real problems are gang masters, farmers and landowners using the availability of migrant labour as an opportunity to suppress wages. Some farmers provide a rusting caravan as bed and board and deduct it from the wages of workers, reducing their outgoings. If they employed British workers they would have to pay minimum wage at least because British workers would not need bed and board provided, thus increasing the farmers outgoings. They would have to wave goodbye to the new 4x4 they had their eyes on.

Middle East and North Africa. I’m Confused.

We support the Syrian rebels, which include elements of Al Quaida, but we don’t support the Malian rebels. We supported the Libyan rebels and we supported the Egyptian dictatorship of Mubarek. We didn’t support The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt until the Arab spring and now we do. We support the tyrant king in Bahrain, whose troops are shooting people who are protesting for greater democracy, and whose secret police arrest female doctors who have treated the injured, and then rape and torture them. We support the ferocious dictatorship of Saudi Arabia who is supplying the king of Bahrain with troops and guns to kill its citizens. We also support The State of Israel (it’s the only democracy in the Middle East you know) while it persecutes the Palestinians and steals their lands. We obviously don’t support the Palestinians in their quest for their own sovereign state or we wouldn’t put up with Israeli settlers invading and stealing land and the Israeli Defence Force brutalising and persecuting Palestinians.

They say if a politician is in difficulties at the home then the best thing to distract the sheeple at home is a foreign war, where they can look all ambassadorial, as they swan around another country telling people how keen they are on freedom and democracy, although I doubt if the topic is high on the agenda when you are welcoming a Saudi prince or the King of Bahrain to 10 Downing Street.

What would be nice would be if we could be more Scandinavian in our approach to foreign affairs. If we could throw of the tired old relic of colonialism and accept that we are no longer a major player in the world and that all we are, in reality, is a ‘useful idiot’ for the USA and Israel, as we aid them in achieving their military objectives in the Middle East and beyond.

 Instead we could spend all those tax pounds we use to prosecute wars in foreign lands in our own country. Then maybe the fifth richest country in the world wouldn’t need so many food banks.

Song lyrics.

‘Tonight there’s going to be a jail break,

Somewhere in the town.’

 Jail break by Thin Lizzy.

I’m no expert, but I bet it’ll be at the jail.

The Great Government Work Programme Scam.

This is how it works.

 A person is placed with an employment company on the Back to Work programme. The company receives a small initial payment. An advisor tries to persuade the person that self employment is a good idea, even though the person has no business ideas, no suitable skills or no genuine possible opportunity to generate an income. The advisor suggests baking cakes, ironing or maybe selling things on e-bay and tells the person that by going self employed they can claim up to 30hrs in Working Tax Credits which will be more than they receive on Jobseekers Allowance, that they will probably have to work no more than 10 hours a week, and they will no longer have to sign on every two weeks at the Jobcentre.

The person signs off and declares themselves self employed.

The Company receives a whacking great commission and the advisor gets to ring a bell and receive a bonus.

The newly self employed person struggles along without any support, fails to maintain any proof of income or work patterns and is eventually told by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that they have been fraudulently claiming benefits and that they are required to pay back thousands of pounds.

 Meanwhile, in Westminster, Tory’s boast about there being more new business start-ups than ever and that the number of people claiming JSA has dropped.

 In the real world, people cannot understand how jobless figures are supposedly dropping, but the economy continues to plummet and borrowing continues to rise.

As the newly self employed person is now receiving more in Working Tax Credits than they did when receiving Jobseekers Allowance the welfare bill continues to rise.

Cameron, Osborne and the Tory’s continue to bang on about how high the welfare bill is, but lie through omission by failing to point out that 90% of the welfare bill is actually paid to pensioners in the form of pensions and pension credits, Child benefit, people with severe disabilities and to people claiming Working Tax Credits and that Jobseekers Allowance and Housing Benefit form a very small percentage of the welfare bill.

The general public are too stupid to work the facts out for themselves and in the same way Germans enjoyed persecuting Jews, the British Public also enjoy persecuting vulnerable members of society who cannot fight back. It gives them a sense of power that is otherwise missing from their sad, pathetic and mundane, pointless lives.

The end results are more Tory’s lies about a failing economy and jobless figures, company’s involved in the Workfare Programme receiving millions in tax payers money ,becoming very rich and funneling some of the money back into Conservative party coffers in the form of donations while the nation becomes poorer, lives are destroyed, and people who are genuinely trying to run their own business are stigmatised because of corrupt practices being utilised in the implementation of Workfare Programmes and politicians.

There you have it. Businesses and politicians colluding to feather their own nests, they distort the truth and lie at the expense of you and me.

Take a step back. Look at the politicians currently involved in running this country. Close your eyes and try to imagine what type of world you think they are creating for your grandchildren.

Are you scared at what you see, you should be. Or don’t you really care.

I think I already know the answer.

Mugs!