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. 

Drama Queen

I’m from a deprived generation. I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into a mining community; I wasn’t lucky enough to be brought up to believe I deserved a job for life. I never inherited the right to harbour hatred for anybody who managed me, or for anybody who achieved success outside the confines of collective action. And I never did master the art of looking down on anybody who believed he could get by on his own merit without the permission of a shop steward.

Outside of the hive you have to do it all for yourself; there is nobody else to blame. But at least you don’t have to undergo the indignity of being spat on because your grandfather was a scab. In some caring communities the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons and bitter memories are long and twisted. I didn’t have the union to fight my corner, but I also didn’t have the unions to tell me and mine, forever and after, what to think and how to vote and who to hate.

When a company I worked for went into decline, or when I was made redundant or made up my own mind to leave, or on the one occasion I was constructively dismissed, I neither expected nor received assistance. It was my life, my decisions, my responsibility to accept the consequences, good or bad. It’s called freedom and it’s a good thing, but to some people it appears to be pure selfishness.

To Labour, Mick Phillpot was a product of Thatcherism. “Greed!” shrieked Glenda Jackson, among others blaming the actions of every bad British citizen on the legacy of somebody who left power over two decades ago. This is the same opposition who snarl and spit at whatever the coalition proposes to rein in thirteen years of Labour profligacy, which ended just the other day. Of course, not a single Labour MP ever claimed dubious expenses or took lucrative seats on boards; no union leader ever earned a salary way in excess of those he represented, or demanded free living for life and as we all know, Lord John Prescott fought tooth and nail not to be ennobled.

Always with the shouting and the spittle, the Left, always the apoplectic outrage. High drama. No wonder they attracted an Oscar winner to their ranks. It’s a wonder she isn’t rolled out to rend her garments in public more often. Perhaps they could erect a small stage for her at the funeral next week, where she can give her Ophelia... to an audience of none. Those staging their own little protests will selfishly try and disrupt the occasion. But their hysterical ranting will be drowned out by the quiet dignity of those they despise so much.

Glenda in The Commons Yesterday

Maybe this is the fundamental difference between Left and everybody else. The Left live in frenzied denial of human nature and treat every manifestation of it with visceral loathing as a thing to be suppressed, subjugated and legislated into change. Whereas everybody else accepts the animal that we are and then we shrug and try to rise above it.

Stately Piles

Being born with a silver spoon in my mouth was a curse. I inherited an enormous pile, but stately it most certainly was not. Its crumbling, mouldy stucco costs the earth to maintain and death duties and death watch beetle conspired to rob me of all my prospects. As a Grade One listed building the planners will not allow me to demolish and rebuild a more economic home and in its current dilapidation I have not managed to find a buyer in over ten years.

To keep the farm workers in wages I had to sell off the tapestries and the paintings and turn off all the heating. We live, my infirm wife and I, in two rooms and by attending every session I can manage in the House of Lords we just about stave off the demands of the tax man and the local authority, after which we have under £53 a week to live on. If there was a mansion tax we wouldn't even have that.

Thankfully we didn’t have children and the family name will die out with this generation but at least we’ll finally be free from worry. The estate workers will probably get by – a generation ago we gifted them their cottages - but if we had children they would be crippled by the next round of redistributive taxation that props up the precarious society in which we now live. I securely bolt all the doors every night, fearing the attentions of the baying mobs we see on the news; running riot in the streets, looting stores and throwing fire bombs at the police.

I admit that yes, my family made a fortune from our mills, three hundred years ago. And a century later we were ennobled because of the great largesse of my ancestors who built the town’s alms houses and library and later a school and we carried on the tradition to eventually found the local museum and donate land for the cattle market. But since the “War to End all Wars”, when my Great grandfather and all his brothers perished, our fortunes have declined somewhat.

My father was a child when the family celebrated the election of Clement Atlee in 1945 and, committed Socialists at heart, they cheered the creation of the welfare state and a whole, brave new world. It was wonderful to see the philanthropy we had always exercised over our mills and farms and their workers extended to the country as a whole and they thought this might bring our crippled country together to become wonderful and happy and prosperous again.

But it didn't happen. We assumed the common man to be a decent, hard-working example to us all, putting the welfare of society ahead of personal gain. But we were wrong. He was just like my forebears – why should he be any different? Given a chance to advance himself, the relative poverty of others was no concern until he had tobacco in his pipe and beer in his glass. Only then did he care whether his neighbour had the same. And he didn't care a great deal.

For a brief period in the 1980s we thought the rot had been arrested as the net wealth of the country expanded at breakneck speed. Our dear friend Margaret may not have been loved by all, but she got the country back to work, buried the dead and curbed the destructive forces trying to tear us apart. We got our faith in humanity back through her dedication, hard work and refusal to bend to popular, insular, selfish demand. She showed us the way; she showed us that Conservatism really cared.

The estate picked up. We started to believe we might save the east wing. We began to talk about starting a family... establishing a new dynasty. Even the weather got better – or at least it seemed that it did – and with every little victory Maggie brought us we felt a surge of confidence, a thrill of renewal. It was a good time to be the Lord of the Manor.

But then came Socialism again and the great sell-off of everything we held dear – courage, honesty, integrity, national identity, character and fairness – everything was sacrificed to bring us to where we are today. We have given back everything we ever had, most of it before I was even born. We have atoned for every advantage our family ever gained. We have nothing left to give, yet they still come after us for more. Toffs they call us, but we can't afford Sky TV and I'm typing this on a ten-year old computer.

Our house. In the middle of our estate.

So, we're on our uppers too. We're about finished. When we go that will be the last of us, but it is beneath our dignity to go on the rampage. And I don't mean to grumble, but I still can’t afford the operation to get this fucking spoon out of my mouth.

Ding Dong!

Oh my head! I love party politics! I was up all night partying and singing the song I was taught at my mother’s knee. It was a riot. The song goes “Ding dong the witch is dead...” I don’t know any other lines but neither did any of us in halls. I should explain: I’m at university studying Politics and Philosophy because that’s the way to get a really good job and earn loads of money, which the Mighty Ed has shown is ‘the Socialist way’.

The Champagne’s flowing because somebody called Mrs Thatcher died yesterday and the whole world can now be free again. We don’t really study her at uni because there’s no room in the syllabus for such a divisive monster, according to Professor Owen, or Eóin or however it’s spelled... or pronounced.  But I know she was super-horrid because my mum told me all about her. Of course, my mum doesn’t really remember her – she was only a kid in school when I was born - but she passed the knowledge down from my gran.

Gran is very wise – she is 48 after all – and she made sure I was prepared for any argument with a hated Thatcher supporter by telling me the facts! Everybody knows that facts are much more important and much more effective than just bigoted opinion. So here I give you the facts about “Fatcha” The Factcha, if you will:

1. When Fatcha was in power education was free. This was ridiculous because it could bankrupt the country and back then it meant that any idiot could go to university. Well, that started the rot for sure and you can see that legacy even today; I look around me and see a bunch of brainwashed idiots – especially the engineers who seem to want to get on and do stuff all the time, instead of talking it through for hours like we do.

2. Immediately after the Second World War, when it was desperately needed, she personally went round all the schools and literally stole the free milk from needy children, one by one. Straight out their mouths, like. As a result, half the adult population grew up with brittle bones and rickets and stuff. The hateful cow! Of course, they are all long dead now, so nobody will ever hear their story.

3. Because Arthur Scargill, the brave freedom fighter and most popular person in the country, was winning the War of the Mines, she deliberately invaded Argentina by colonising The Falklands – which are a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland – and made friends with General Bill Grano, the sick man of Europe, who then closed the British Leyland factory and put eleven million people on the sick.

4. Then she set fire to the coal mines, demolished the steel mills and flooded all the Welsh valleys and in a disgraceful show of guilt caused billions of pounds worth of hard-working people’s taxes to be sent to try and redevelop those areas. The nasty, spiteful bitch wanted everybody to find work, instead of living off benefits which is their right in a compassionate socialist country. And all that stuff caused global warming, so it’s her fault we have German wind turbines everywhere now.

5. She believed that everybody should provide for themselves if they can and we should only care for the old and infirm and children and ‘the less fortunate’. How hateful is that? On our course we are taught how everybody is better off when we all care for everybody else, because ordinary people are pretty thick and need to be told what to think. We are all ready to take offence and intervene on behalf of people too stupid to be offended themselves. She believed in low taxes, small state and self-determination when any fool can see that if we all shared everything out and everybody worked for the state we’d all be equal. I mean, it stands to sense, doesn’t it?

6. Every bad thing that has ever happened to any person, any company, any industry or any region; Any bad thing that has ever happened to any country, to the planet, to the weather and even to the universe itself is all directly attributable to ‘The Big Bang’ which is how Margaret Thatcher started the expansion of the universe, which is ‘a bad thing’, probably. I think that’s proven fact.

I couldn't find a picture of the evil Fatcha, so here's a 

nice one of somebody who looks a bit like my Gran.

So, even though I still don’t really know who she was and don’t care anyway, I’m glad she’s dead. She’s gone and with her go the slaves to her controlling policies. Now, everybody can finally be free again. Free to work together for the glorification of the mother state, from whose wondrous teat we all must suckle. For ever and ever, Amen.

Oh. I found an alternative view here. But my tutors tell me it's all lies.

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.