A message for Vince

I hear Vince Cable reckons that, if the Lib Dems have anything to do with it, a future government must both increase taxes and borrow more. Why? So they can engage in more of the fiscally intemperate nonsense that caused us to be in the shit we’re in already. Lib Dems; Labour in lambs' clothing and just as dangerous - never forget the Fabians' famous emblem. 

Remember Gordon Brown’s “Are you claiming all you’re ‘entitled’ to?” public service announcements a decade ago? I do; I remember being utterly astounded that any government could be so blatant as to offer such a transparent bribe in return for power. And all paid for by those who could never bring themselves to vote Labour; that’s practically genius in political terms. Or is it? Short term electoral popularity at the cost of the whole ship; free drinks and canapés as cruise liner Great Britain turns turtle and sinks without trace.

It’s called freeloading, living off the efforts of others. ‘Tax Credits’? That sounds like getting some of your tax back, but many people get tax credits far in excess of what they earnestly believe they pay in. Add to that Child Benefit and Housing Benefit and a per-capita share of the cost of the state and it turns out the majority – yes the VAST majority – of working families are net recipients. I’ll say that again – the majority of working people will NEVER pay into the system more than a fraction of what they take out.

So who does pay? Who would Vince punish more for the crime of being a net contributor? Last year I worked out you’d have to earn at least £30k as a single individual, claim no benefits and pay every penny due in tax to just make up your ‘share’. You’d also have to have no kids and never get ill, pay top-whack road tax and never use any public services, otherwise the balance tips back into debit. I think I was way out; it’s got to be more like £50k before you owe the state nothing and start to make a net contribution. (And this does not include a single state worker - the tax-take from public service employees is a fiction as every penny paid to them has already been taken from others.) 

£50k per annum does not make you rich in the UK, but you can live like a king in many parts of the world on that sort of money. Anybody with the wherewithal to earn a half-decent level of salary will pretty soon begin to feel aggrieved when Vince’s sheriff’s men come a-knocking. Those at the top of the earnings league already have the choice and will only pay what they are comfortable with. Some have already chosen to depart these shores; those lower down the scale, the fifty-kickers will pretty soon realise the price for patriotism is too high to pay.

But still Vince would speed them in making that decision. Soak the rich? Eat the rich? Why not just send them into exile? But before you adopt that jaw-jutting, heroic, 'man of the people' pose, Vince, just remember a few little, inconsequential things. Without the rich there would be no welfare. There would be no NHS. There would be no state. Make the rich pay more? The rich pay your salary and that of the Queen; the rich already pay for everything.

Labouring on...

Well, I’ve been working almost all of the weekend so I’ve missed a great deal of news but even here, in the throne room, Twitter gives me the occasional bitter glimpse of the world outside. I say glimpse, perhaps gimp would be more appropriate, because the Labour gimps [non-partisan comment – they ARE gimps] have been whipping themselves up into a right old froth ever since the Philpott trial.

Like rabbits, they are; myxomatosic, pink-eyed bunnies, pinned in the glaring headlights of the belated realisation that – whouda thunk it – ordinary working people have an opinion on benefits as well. And their idea of the Welfare State ISN’T the system we’ve got. Yes, even people who haven’t been born into privileged lifestyles and gone on to Oxbridge to study Socio-economo-make-trouble-ology or Fuckitupistics or taken a Masters in Machiavellian Misanthropy, going on to work in Daddy’s constituency office as an expenses fiddle can see that a system which allows some perfectly able, yet economically worthless people to not only survive, but to thrive without work is a nonsense.

Labour’s response, having methodically used every trick in the book to absolutely not, I repeat not, use Philpott for cheap shoddy political point-scoring is to cobble together for the first time in three years a little bit of policy. I don’t know what Demos has been doing, cooped up in its little old thinky-tanky there, but this load of old cobblers is hardly the work of the greatest minds the opposition can muster is it? I mean, even a thicky like me can see it’s just a hollow, opportunistic and belated leap onto a  bandwagon that’s been gathering pace for a couple of decades.

Labour are planning to somehow link welfare pay-outs to personal historical contributions. How can that EVER work? The biggest payers-in are absolutely the least likely to ever need to take anything out - in so many ways Socialism literally robs the rich to pay the poor. And the obverse, of course, is that those most in need of welfare are the least likely to ever make significant contributions. And what about young people in precarious employment?

“Aha!” say Labour, “but we have a plan!” Is it a cunning plan, I ask?

“At the heart of Labour's plan is the reinstatement of full employment as a government objective.”

And where, pray would these jobs come from?

“…they would be offered a real job with appropriate training funded by the taxing of bankers' bonuses and restructuring pension tax relief for the wealthiest.”

Oh, I see, so you still fail to grasp the nature and inter-relatedness of earnings, taxation, the economy at large and the sheer folly of employing ever more people directly by the state, then? Oh and guaranteeing jobs in return for welfare? Isn’t that, did I miss something… weren’t you virulently opposed to workfare?

Labour's entire budget solution

In another brave attempt to absolutely not distort statistics to make a cheap, shoddy political capital Ed Balls added, "The whole country will today see whose side this Conservative-led government is really on and who is paying the price for their total economic failure." claiming that as a result of the changes working families will be up to £4,000 worse off, while millionaires receive average tax cuts of £100,000.

Listen Ballsy old fella, any “millionaire” receiving tax reductions anywhere near that figure is clearly not taking full advantage of the many perfectly legal tax avoidance vehicles that you and Brown were quite happy to allow. Once again, Labour’s answers are scribbled on the back of a fag packet and once again they rely entirely on the fruits of the magic money tree.


PS: As the late, truly great, sainted Margaret Thatcher remarked, "The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money." Goodbye Mrs T, the world will never see your like again.

Another Brick - how bad was that?

In the late nineteenth century, Britain was still the world’s dominant power. A wealthy country, it recognised the drawback in having an uneducated population so in a series of acts beginning in 1870 it introduced state education, gradually compelling all children to attend school from 5 to 10 years of age.

It was quite normal for children to work to help support the family and very tempting for parents to keep them thus employed so the new law was enforced by Attendance Officers and the child catcher was born!  The school leaving age was raised to 11 in 1893 and to 12 in 1899. Rab Butler’s reforms raised this to 15, from 1947.

What brought about this train of thought about? On my rambles yesterday I came across the old Upper Wortley Board School built by the Leeds School Board in 1876. Later in the day I learned that my elderly neighbours had attended that same school and in a good old gossip-over-the-garden-fence we fell to discussing the good old days.

That red brick edifice is much like my first school. A grand school, a sturdy school. A school built to last, to do a worthy job for the good of all.  The smell of polish and piss and the sound of a headmaster fully engaged with his primary task, patrolling the corridors and maintaining standards. Children busily engaged in actually learning their lessons and dreaming of the day they could get out and get a job. A school fit for the engine of the world.

By 1918, when the school leaving age was 14, all men over 21 were allowed to vote (women over 30 – they had to wait another ten years for electoral equality) So, the average working man could have been gainfully employed for at least seven years before exercising an opinion on how he and everybody else was to be governed. Universal suffrage was a hard-won privilege and a vote was not something to be given lightly. From a platform of real-life experience they passed onto their children the surety that getting a good education would give them a better start in adult life.

Soon, all children will be compelled to remain in full-time education until the age of eighteen, yet there is a clamour for voting rights to granted at sixteen. For every parent who drools over their brood and extolls their virtuosity and wisdom there is an employer desperate to get a decent day’s work out of them, such is their sense of rights, unbalanced by any sense of responsibility. You would let these mere children vote? You would have to be mad to believe this makes any sense.

Because the dreams of old are long gone and the old, low-grade jobs for a school-leaving population (in so many ways less well equipped to do them now) are taken by economic migrants. The emphasis on teaching creativity and freedom and individuality consigns them to a life unlived. Unfit for unskilled work, unable to cope with higher education we are breeding a rabble of entitlement-obsessed, overgrown babies.

If you want to see how education is failing the young you need look no further than the school that has replace Upper Wortley. A school fit for what, exactly? Who in the world will proudly call that their alma mater?

Here’s an extract from Dan Hannan’s Telegraph blog from yesterday;

“The argument for the welfare reforms is altogether more prosaic. We have been spending more and more money without any noticeable impact on either poverty or inequality. Under the last Labour government, the welfare budget rose by an almost unbelievable 60 per cent during an economic boom. Yet the gap between rich and poor widened. Why? Partly because the benefits system deterred some people from getting onto the first rung of the employment ladder. Throughout the Blair and Brown years, 900,000 working-age Britons were permanently economically inactive while 200,000 foreigners a year walked gratefully into jobs as waiters, receptionists, cab drivers, farm workers and cleaners.”

The same argument applies in education – for all the billions of extra resources poured in the only noticeable impact has been a steady downward trend in the attainment and ability of what should be the primary source of our workforce. Just as the answer to welfare spending cannot be more welfare, the answer to poor education cannot be more poor education.

So let’s ditch progressive education and get back to the slate and the times tables. If you’re not academic – and most aren’t - leave school at fifteen and wash dishes, sweep roads, flip burgers or whatever you need to do to earn a crust and learn how the world around you actually functions. Until you can appreciate the worth of work, any work, you have no right to rely on the taxed incomes of those who do the dirty jobs to keep you idle and in false hope.

Oh and you don’t get to vote until you’ve reached 21. And passed an old eleven-plus exam.

Opportunity Nix

I'm no fan of Michael - Tarzan - Heseltine. I hate his juvenile hair, for a start and I particularly hate his clearly self-interest driven stance on Europe. And of course there is the small matter of his utterly treacherous plotting against the most effective peacetime Prime Minister of the last hundred years. But on BBC’s Question Time last night he said what few politicians have dared to say out loud, plainly and simply, in a decade or more.

Essentially what he said was this: It cannot be right - NOBODY could think it right - that somebody in full-time work, making responsible spending decisions and living within their means is unable to give their family the same standard of living as a family living entirely on welfare. It cannot be right for anybody to defend the supposed ‘rights’ of any able-bodied person to live entirely off the labours of others. 

There are more ways of making a living than having a job, but for centuries the model was that the husband worked and the wife ran the household and children contributed when they were able. We built an EMPIRE on that model. But somewhere in the twentieth century we managed to lose our self-confidence and kow-tow to the diktats of the equality agenda. We destroyed the sanctity of marriage, promoted wanton procreation and blame-free profligacy and allowed anybody to borrow their way into debt without shame. Are you happy now, Socialism? 

But it’s so much worse than it looks. Defendants of the dole-dependent claim that a lack of ‘suitable’ jobs, a lack of qualifications and being born into aspiration-free communities is to blame. They say that, just as it is the government’s role to feed and house and clothe them, it is the government’s role to make their lives more fulfilling. It’s an impossible task because at the heart of it all is the notion that it is up to somebody else to give you everything. 

You’re out of work and you are poorly educated? Educate yourself; the knowledge of the entire planet is on the free Internet access you have. Not a good learner? Then are you artistic? Prove it by creating something. Do you have a skill you could be practising? Can you do stand up? Could you write a book? Set up an e-commerce web site? Do voluntary work? Do… ANYTHING? 

Because if self-improvement is beyond you there are plenty of jobs out there that merely require your lumpen corporeal entity to show up and do as it is told. Cleaning, crop-picking, packing, stacking, driving, digging, gardening; all the low-level jobs being done by recent immigrants should first be filled by out-of-work Brits. Beneath you? How fucking DARE you? What else have you done with your life? 

And the real insult to working tax payers, those who have made the effort to get off their backsides and earn their place in the world? Not only are they being taxed into a life of bone-weary drudgery, they also pay a massive opportunity cost in loss of liberty to indulge in their dreams. They would love the time to hone a skill, indulge in a hobby, write a book, improve the community, set up a business… So while you piss away your worthless time on this planet, the people who pay for you deny themselves the opportunity to maybe, just maybe, do something wonderful. 

Woah there... I didn't say 

I was actually going to DO anything! 

Has Britain got the guts to tell the truth and turn the tide? Has the government got the nerve to tackle the lazy, ignorant lard-arsed elephant in the Benefit Office? Will Her Majesty’s Opposition have the balls to admit they were wrong about everything, roll up their sleeves and help out to save this country? The jury is out – given the outcome of the Vicky Pryce trial, they may be some time.

Driving Reform

A young woman has been jailed for three and a half years for causing a fatal accident by texting while driving. So wedded (or should that be 'welded'?) to her phone is she that she arrived at court clutching at it as if it were a lifeline; a shame such a thing was denied her elderly victim. After a five-year ban (Will that ban run concurrently with her incarceration?) she will be required to take an extended driving test before regaining her licence.

This isn't isolated news; accidents are caused every day by people imagining the law doesn't apply to them and general standards of driving are as diabolical as ever. Many delude themselves into believing they can multi-task, without factoring in that driving is already a multi-tasking operation. It requires physical coordination, good observation, mental acuity, judgement and a wee bit of second-sight.

I'm constantly dismayed by drivers under official driving school instruction failing to indicate, creeping over the white line at lights, speeding and more than once - yes! - using a handset while in motion. Mind you, I see lone Police drivers committing all the same offences far too frequently. And as for the general road use, I like to play guess what happens next as I watch meandering drivers finally select a lane, or watch a vehicle drift onto a slip road and then belatedly apply indicators as if to say "Look what I just did!"

You can play the same game with pedestrians too, albeit on a longer time scale: That middle-aged bloke waddling along in trackie bottoms and untied trainers is going to visit a Gregg's any time in the next half hour. The scruffy kid in the school sweatshirt will be a smoker by the time he's twelve. That wiry youth? Soon-to-be smackhead. And his mate? ASBO Ranger. The plumpish, barely teenage girl 'wiv a a'ichood'? Mother within two years.

Last night, one of my Twitter followers (Hi Jacqui!) made much the same sweeping generalisation about Tories as I do about those on the left. Fair enough, but all my examples in the last paragraph would probably swing to Labour who have successfully managed to portray themselves as the caring party despite years of their policies contributing to many of our modern-day failings. You see, lots of poorly educated people are incapable of making good long-term life choices without guidance. New Labour's persistence in trying to pretend otherwise and please everybody, has created an unprecedented reliance on state help.

Is it fair that fat people are allowed to be labelled disabled? Is it fair that naughty kids are regularly diagnosed with ADHD? Is it fair that we are expected to bow down to bizarre notions of equality, respect and diversity when some undeserving recipients of that social largesse will use it to plunder our dwindling reserves of human kindness? Misguided social policies have worsened the divides and I believe it's time to firmly redress the balance.

Jacqui said that the only thing Tories care about is money; that's what Labour have preached for years. But Conservatives actually believe in fairness and decency and above all, independence from state handouts. If they believe in money it's in allowing you to keep as much of what you earn as possible and do with it what you wish, not robbing you of it to pay for social engineering. It's people who lust for money, as cross-party expenses fiddling and fraudulent activities throughout the social spectrum shows on a daily basis. Tax avoidance, banks miss-selling insurance, counterfeiting and smuggling, benefit scams; these are not partisan, they're human.

So, here's my plan for both driving and social reform. You fuck up, you pay the penalty. Then you take a test to re-enter society as either a driver, a worker, a parent, etc...

For instance. ASBO? Work camp; cleaning up your shit, righting your wrongs and at the end of it you have to be assessed as fit by a panel of all those whose lives you made a misery. Second offence, bollocks off. Third offence, exiled to Rockall. (I want the death penalty but some of you are too weak to go with me on this.)

Pregnant at fourteen? Two-year forced internship on after-school hospital ward work at the end of which if you can pass a written and practical assessment you can have your sprog back if you still want it. At least you''ll know both how to care for it and the medical consequences of ill-considered actions. You'll also have an insight into the shit other people wade through to keep you on your feet.

Accidents cause people

Accidents are always caused by people but we should consider how many people are caused by accidents. Practice safe texts and don't use your mobile when you're mobile. Have a happy and safe weekend, people. I'll be watching you. Always watching you...

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?

Ain't you got homes to go to?

Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Hot on the heels of his condemnation of Jimmy Carr's tax affairs (somehow commentable-upon where Philip Green's were not) Shiny Dave floats a raft of ideas for welfare reform. And predictably enough the shrill notes of righteous ('lefteous'?) indignation echo across Twitter like banshee wails for the dead. Not content with the ever-rising social tariff the flag-wavers for totalitarian statism will rest at nothing until the entire country is yoked to the despotic wheel of welfare.

David Cameron has a tricky budget to balance. He wants people to pay more tax, but he also needs people to claim fewer benefits. Only a fool could believe the two are not linked in a desperate spiral of positive feedback. In the boom years the high tax take was spent bribing ever more families to become reproductive rather than simply productive. Labour's time in office has seen the rise and rise of procreation as an industry and a not unprofitable one at that. Under the socialist creed, sacrifice and endeavour have been punished by ever-increasing tolls, while the cult of idle individualism has been feted and rewarded.

It simply cannot last forever. If Jimmy Carr has paid 1% tax on £3m, he has at least paid £30,000 into the system while almost certainly taking very little out - I am pretty sure he doesn't rely on subsidised housing, public transport or hospital services. In the same period an idle household has been granted the same amount in welfare payments, plus they will have liberally helped themselves to schooling, medical care and anything else going without any thought other than that it is their due.

Choosing welfare dependency over work is as much an abuse of the system as tax avoidance - in fact it's worse. The tax avoider is intelligently - if slightly immorally - using the wealth he has earned to buy himself the expertise to avoid the penalties levied on those who do well. It is outrageous to demand that those who take virtually nothing from the system pay an even higher percentage of their income, so that those without the wit or wisdom to earn their daily bread can continue in their infantile state of dependency.

So we should welcome the fact that we have a Prime Minister at least willing to acknowledge the formerly unsayable - that some people simply do not deserve the free ride they've had for the last thirty years (the Conservative Party has been just as guilty of appeasement of the masses as Labour) and that it has to end. But it's all just empty words because the part of the population that contributes the least is growing the fastest and the part that provides all the funding is shrinking.

Those who can are getting the hell out, one way or another and as always it's the backbone of our society - ordinary working people - who are taking the strain. How many more straws can this particular strained backbone take?