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.

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.

A Touch of Class

So, we wake to a new day and a whole new way of being labelled, classified, graded and packaged. As Shakespeare wrote, “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't.” Gone are the Upper, Middle and Lower and all the sub-grades in between. In come the seven circles of hell on earth as experts regrade our social structure... probably on the back of a fag packet.

I took the test and based on my deluded sense of self I came up Technical Middle Class. Well, that can’t be right at all. After all, I know my entitlement and I’m more what you’d call ruling class, surely? This survey must be flawed, which shows just how far you can trust the experts to screw up. An expert is, after all, another word for the unemployable who nevertheless manage to con huge amounts of money from the public purse for their pointless pontificating. 

I may as well do it myself. So here, based on extensive research on Twitter, are my new sophisticatedly nuanced and socially sensitive class grades.

Lucky Fuckers: The most privileged class in Great Britain who dine on swan and quaff champagne as celebrate their having been born into high society. They don’t do fuck-all, they don’t know fuck-all but they do fuck-all real harm to any other fucker. 

Dodgy Fuckers: These are the self-made, the Alan Sugars, who have risen high on the backs of others but like to talk about how they started out flogging hooky gear out the back of a van and deserve every dirty penny. While patronising high profile caring charities, they will nevertheless shit on any fucker who gets in their way. 

Decent Fuckers (Also known as Technical Middle Class - see my test results for reference): This is the top level of social strata that you can access without going through security controls. The salt of the earth made good, and the social class who all lower classes secretly aspire to reach.

Busy Fuckers: This is the class that does the business. Ducking and diving, dreaming up smart phone apps and making fortunes overnight. They are a young and fit, attractive and active and frankly quite annoying. (But they’ll be old one day, so…) 

Meddling Fuckers: This new class has low economic capital and little experience of real life but they absolutely believe in the sharing out of Decent and Busy Fuckers’ income among those who can’t be arsed. Often working long hours for little pay they should be applauded, but their naïve wholesaling swallowing of juvenile political agenda means the best you can hope for is that they grow out of it. (Owen Jones - this is you) They are exploited by:

Lazy Fuckers: Formerly the Working Class, few of them now admit to wanting to actually work when it’s so much easier to prey on the class above and live a life on the state. Although older examples of this class profess to missing the good old days and occasionally don the Pearly and sing about knees, boiled beef and following vans in Lambeth, they are a shadow of their former worthy status. 

Which leaves us with the final class. This was a difficult sector to classify as many of its typical members may not even be actually human. 

Useless Fuckers: The professors prefer the term 'Precariat' to describe those fuckers who fuck and breed without apparently knowing the connection between the two. Capable only of taking, they act as breeding colonies, dumping their offspring into the care of the state in the hope that one day one of them might win the lottery off the back of a stolen scratchcard or get rich in an honest trade such as flogging counterfeit fags and booze, or running a skunk factory..

I look up to him 'cause he's a Lucky Fucker.

And there you have it. I don't know how long it took the so-called experts and how much it cost but it took me less than an hour and I give it to you free, gratis and for nothing. All that remains is for you to tell the world what sort of fucker you are! Comments below...

No more fools...

It's not April Fools Day any more. Oh well...

And this is no joke either...

Socialism. It's just one big laugh after another - and you're paying.

Seriously?

Seriously? You fell for that?

And hey, if it's after noon, you didn't get the link from me! More fool you! Fool me once.. er fool me again.... won't get fooled again! Treat yourself and click the linky~~>  George Dubya Bush.