They limp among us.

Apparently, I am a hateful man. A vicious, evil, nasty product of an unfeeling, uncaring political ideology. That’s right. The Labour Party made me what I am. I grew up watching them do their craven best to accede to the demands of their greedy, self-serving Union paymasters and I would have watched a lot more of it had the power not been cut, night after night. From a naturally Labour voting family my first ever vote went blue for the simple reason that I had obstinately refused the tribal imperative and instead opted for making up my own mind.

I’ve done it ever since. Not that I can’t be swayed by argument and far from being actually (as opposed to ideologically) selfish, those who know me know I generally put my own needs second to doing a good job or helping those in need of what limited talents I may possess. I’ve always worked longer hours than I’ve been paid for and I frequently give up my supposedly free time to do things from which I don’t personally gain. Or, as I like to sum it up, I’m a bit of a mug, really

Whatever it makes me I’d rather thrive in a successful country than vote for a policy which might merely line my personal pocket. Mind you, that’s partly because I don’t pretend to have insider knowledge or sooth-saying powers, so I have no idea what is around the next corner. Accepting a narrow argument or voting on a single principle seems to me to be doomed to failure, or at the very least, ridicule. I think that’s reasonable.

Which is why I’m a tad miffed that I was harangued a bit last week for refusing to accept that, apparently, one fifths of the British population is disabled. The conversation – on Twitter, naturally (I have no friends in real life) – went something like this.

@Them 1 in six people in Britain are disabled, although only 17% were born with their disability.

@Me Bollocks. And by the way 17% IS 1 in six.

@Them You uncaring bastard. Here’s a link to a charity website which PROVES it www. blahblahblah.co.uk

The site actually states the 17% born disabled figure but also claims that almost one in five people are disabled. When I dispute this I get a mild toothless gumming for being a heartless bastard and then we just drift apart; Twitter is like that. But it reaffirms my belief in humanity; that humans are pretty gullible and believe any old guff, particularly if it casts them in a good light. In this case a caring, nurturing, we-must-never-cut-benefits light.

But stop and think about it for a moment. Really? One in five? Is it genuinely just me or would there have to be entire cities fully populated only by the disabled for that to be true? One in five? I live in a pretty downtrodden area and I’d say the true figure is probably more like one in a hundred. And that’s only if you count many of the aches and pains of old age. So what in the world of what-can-I-claim is going on?

Where does ‘not as able as some others’ become actually disabled? Is being a bit deaf a disability, or is it really a condition to be got on with and overcome? If you get fitted with a hearing aid that restores your hearing are you still disabled, or are you cured? If a prosthetic allows you to live a normal life and hold down a job are you still disabled? My father is nearly blind; he’s also nearly eighty. He wouldn’t take kindly to being called disabled, although he is well pissed off about it.

 Then what about encumbrances of our own making? Obesity, alcohol and drug dependence and all the new behavioural diagnoses to excuse lack of effort and discipline in families whose very existence is nothing but a drain on our resources? Calling any of these things ‘disabled’ is an insult to the genuinely needy and it inflates our invalidity rate (and I use the word invalid in both its senses) to percentages so utterly implausible that the thick end of the electorate swallow it whole.

Whatever those who desperately need the figures to show heart-wrenching levels of misery believe, the fact that many hundreds of thousands of disability benefit claimants simply opted not to be reassessed is telling indeed. Wouldn’t we do far better by our citizens if we started telling the truth? Yes, Mr Normal, you are a fat bastard. I prescribe, “Get the fuck out of my surgery now!”

No, you're alright... I've got this.

Once we were called ‘The Sick Man of Europe’. They thought it was all over. Well, according to these inflated statistics, it is now. 

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...

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.

Sick and Tired

Back in 2004, when Anastacia sang that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired, concerns had already been rising for a decade about the growing numbers of working age Britons 'on the sick'. "Boo! Nasty Tories!" came the cry because back then we were in the euphoria of Gordon Brown's 'no more boom and bust' economy and the nation's socialists were convinced that it could only be boom and boom for the welfare state. Milk and honey and plenty more where that came from.

But where was it coming from? Why, the lovely bankers of course! Those loveable financial prestidigitators, conjuring up endless streams of free money from... from... oh there was no need for us to worry our pretty little heads about it. Here, have some more money and buy yourself something nice. Venture any opinion on the unsustainability of such an arrangement and you were castigated and labelled a Victor Meldrew; a relic whose principles of thrift and fiscal propriety were exactly what had held us back all these years.

But, of course, we were right all along, as we knew we were. Just as throwing money at the problem has never worked for education and the NHS, neither has it done anything to control the raging tide of personal entitlement that has driven our national character underground for year after year. So now, just as we're getting our mojo back a little, courtesy of the Jubilee, the Tour de France and the Olympics, maybe we can raise a little bile to greet this news, hidden in the background noise of the medal count:

A cough? A bit of a bad back, feeling a bit fed up? No problem; sign here and get on the sick. 3.2 million now claim disability living allowance, costing £13.4billion per year. And many have not been reassessed in a decade or more. While Britain's best are out there fighting for gold and glory a good proportion of the malingerers will be sitting in front of the telly, watching, while you go out to work to pay for them.

A typical DLA claimant

Well, I am sick and tired of paying for the sick and tired. In the race of life there are winners and there are losers. And in racing they shoot horses, don't they?

The Good Old Days

The Grauniad's stance on the news that Jobseekers are being 'encouraged' to work for their allowance is predictable. "Where will it all end?" their readers cringingly ask, not an un-wrung hand amongst them.

Yesterday, on Twitter I suggested that the word 'breadline' is bandied about as if there really was such a thing in Britain today. Well, today, I look to the future. Here, in an extract from an interview published in The Guardian 16th February 2087, you can clearly see the damage being wrought...

"Strikers threaten families like us."

Jean is a typical young mother, struggling to cope with ever-increasing demands on her income. She is a fashionably trim eighteen stone and always makes an effort to present herself well, but times are getting hard. Jean tells of a terrifying encounter in the car park at her local Asco superstore:

"So, there I was, puffing and panting, trying to get my shopping into the hover car and would anybody help me? No. And I'll tell you why - the lazy, skinny little bastards that Asco employ are only interested in one thing - prising as much of my money off me as possible. I mean, it's not like I'm wealthy is it? They just watched me struggling and I think I saw one of them laughing... or it might have been a cough - so many of them are diseased aren't they? They should just be grateful they have jobs, I mean the state just can't afford to support them; they have to pay their way, innit?

I do my bit. I try, anyway. I always buy the best cuts and I don't skimp on the trimmings... and I don't bother with that scrimping and saving that some whinge about. I'm a member of a health spa - fat lot of good that does me, as I never go, but it does help to move money round the economy doesn't it? Every little helps. I even take one of my holidays in England these days, just to help, you know? We do go abroad, yes, 'cos you have to get away from the hell of it all, don'tcha? We tried Scotland once, though. Big mistake. 'Orrible. All them beggars and slums and stuff.

Anyway, what was that? The gym thing? Oh yeah, the government decided that with my condition it would help me lead a better life, but it wouldn't be no good, really.  I have a low metabolism. My homoeopath told me and she don't come cheap, so she must be right, right? And that's just one more expense, I mean, what with the aromatherapy and the acupuncture as well, it all adds up. I'm no stranger to cutting back, I can tell you - I had to cancel my daily personalised horoscope subscription. I cried that day; just like it said.

I like, blame Mrs Thatcher. My great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather told me. Well, it was all her fault, really, the breakdown in society. I mean, it stands to sense doesn't it? Before she come along, everyone was happy doing their bit for The Unions, gawd bless them. (Jean crosses herself) But she started that war, you know, with the young people - the minors - and then all hell broke loose. It was never the same afterwards and it wa'n't worth it anymore.

I mean, back then,you worked for the unions and they promised to pay you what you were worth, whether you were worth it or not. A fair deal. They even made the government employ twice as many people as they needed sometimes, but she ruined all that. And look where it's come to! It's come to this! (By this, Jean means the bustling activity of the supermarket.)

I mean I can hardly bear to look at them, they're like, like... insects! I can hardly say their name - those 'workers' - ungrateful bastards. They make my flesh crawl. Last time we needed to put up taxes to keep the country fed they threatened to go out on strike. Strike! It's always "me, me, me" with them. They only threatened, mind, because they know the police are allowed to shoot on sight at civil disorders. Can you believe the cheek of it? If I had to work, I'm sure I wouldn't begrudge 80% of my wages to help us poor people, struggling to get by on benefits."

Our interview closes with a last word from the beleaguered Jean:

"I have to get off. I have an aerobics class I'm not going to go to."

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Sometimes I'm accused of being out of touch with the thoughts of upright, decent, socialist members of society. It's good to know that, on Twitter, I can find as many right-thinking friends as I like! Here's what one Tweeter posted this morning - follow her and be saved!