The dirty, dirty bastards!

So, here's the thing. The reason I wasn't chattering away on Twitter last night? (What do you mean, you didn't notice?) I had to drive up to Leeds to get my house back.

Four years ago, when I first rented it out it was all newly finished. Rewire, new kitchen & bathroom,  re-plastered,  new central heating & beautifully decorated throughout. Early this year, when the first tenant left, it was still pretty much immaculate. Now, nine months later, I receive an anonymous text, asking me if it is available for rent, as it is empty.

What the f...? Call tenant; no pickup. Send text seeking explanation; received text back saying she'd tried many times to contact me to no avail. Funny how, when she blew up the washing machine, broke the back door and flooded the bathroom, etc, she could get hold of me just like that. Funny how everybody else who tried to contact me on holiday had no problem doing so.

Cool as you like she informed me she'd vacated ten days ago, that she'd got a council house and when would I like to pick up the keys? Leeds is only 110 miles from Birmingham, but it took 2-1/2 hours to get there through rush hour, accidents and lane closures. Did she show? Of course not. My reception committee was a pair of sub-human, track-suited, pond scum with overtones of welfare-funded, common or garden paedohilia in the form of a hooded middle aged man with an emaciated teenage kid in tow, who tossed the keys to me from over the road with a cursory grunt...

Their reason for my ex-tenant's no-show? She had the kids 'back'. When she took the place - recommended by previous perfect tenant - she had only one brat... turns out the others have been recovered from the social services lost property shop. To people like this, this is just a normal event. When I got inside I immediately saw the real reason she didn't meet me... dirty protest. (The kids are just an excuse; as easily ditched as soon as a better offer arises.) No wonder I got no notice until the evacuation was a done deal.

To us, the decent, striving, tax-paying fuellers of the economy, Life of Grime was a freak-show documentary about people with extraordinary and slightly amusing mental aberrations. To the underclass of idle, scrounging, sprog-popping, benefit-thieving peasants, it was a design for life. The Labour Party would have you believe that everybody is deserving of minimum standards way above those they have the ability to afford or appreciate. I defy you, after seeing the state she left MY house in to demand anything better than extinction for this breed of animal.

Labour's legacy

I am owed rent. The place needs a top-to-bottom, hospital-standard, disinfectant deep-clean -  full carpet & curtain replacement, new shower, total redecoration - before it's fit again for habitation. So, not content with taking our money - she/they lived entirely off the state - she sees nothing wrong in leaving me further costs to recover what is mine to a reasonable standard.

Do I have any sympathy for these generations of 'forgotten' souls? Do I believe for one second that they are the equal of any other human being? Do I think their squalid, mean, existences can be improved and that that improvement would benefit society as a whole? Do I reckon this breed of sub-human is the result of decades of mealy-mouthed, weak Socialism?

What do you think?

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)

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?

The enemy within

Shhh, they're all around. Hiding, listening, waiting until your back is turned.

You put your back into your work, build something from nothing, nurture your enterprise, then these dirty, idle scroungers set about you and tear the shirt from your back. What is it about these shifty freeloaders that they can't understand the concept of work and reward? Why do they always expect to get a free ride in life?

It's not enough that they are born into families who have never done a day's work in their lives. It's not enough that they have a living handed to them on a plate. Oh no, scraps and handouts aren't good enough for them any more. Now they want what we've got. And without jobs to go to they can afford to hang around all day, just waiting for you to drop your guard.

Well, it's all gone too far. Why should we have to put up with wasters and thieves and feral scum like that any more? If I had my way I'd shoot the lot of them. In front of their families.

But, "Oh no, you can't do that!" bleat the bleeding-heart save-the-earthers, "Every life is sacred. Every life has worth." Worth? Worth? I'm telling you, nobody would miss them. But they say they can be re-trained to serve a purpose. They could be couriers, for instance. Couriers for fuck's sake, I wouldn't trust them with anything of mine... which gets us back to the problem at hand.

I'm not allowed to shoot them, we can't deport them because they were born here, apparently it's not right to introduce any form of enforced birth control and we can't even herd them up and put them in prison. No, this something-for-nothing culture is embedded too deep and apparently, they have 'rights'.

So I've had to go to my option of last resort and put my brassicas under poly tunnels.

That'll fox the little pigeony bastards!