tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post6845263861234633053..comments2024-03-29T05:24:12.453+00:00Comments on call me ishmael: THE PRIME OF MISS FRANK FIELD.call me ishmaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-47859873548261546972010-06-09T23:36:21.685+01:002010-06-09T23:36:21.685+01:00Good for you, mr elby, that's ok.
It's on...Good for you, mr elby, that's ok.<br /><br />It's only words but hate and anger are two different things to me and I try to keep this place free of the one and bubbling with the other - but underscored with the blues, you laugh, to keep from crying, sometimes. Have one for me. Or two.<br /><br />They're playing your tune, further on up the road, at evensong.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-87676662222843656922010-06-09T21:13:07.377+01:002010-06-09T21:13:07.377+01:00Ish dear man,
I cannot but agree with you on all ...Ish dear man,<br /><br />I cannot but agree with you on all points. I do think we are close to terminally fucked. But - I have always been<br /><br />1. Stupidly optimistic. Hence I am having a honeymoon period with the Coalition, in which, quite simply, they have my qualified approval simply because they are not Labour.<br /><br />2. I fucking LOATH Labour. I voted for them with my bleeding heart liberal (my parents both such in that small liberal enclave in NW Cheshire that bred Ms. Bakewell) in the belief that the working man sure needed some protection, and I as a privileged family owed them my vote.<br /><br />Blair, Toynbee got it right regarding the nosepeg. Iraq did for that, the eternal sleaze, the assault on liberty; Brown finished it off. Death from a thousand hot needles would be too good for that cunt.<br /><br />3. I need a breather from the manic anger I have felt for too long; hate is not a good emotion for an old hippy, for at heart that is what I have always been. Never did student politics, though would ship weed into the sit-ins to keep 'em going and for the laugh of it. Far rather take a trip (the wild flowers in Magdelan Meadow, just behind St. Catz, covered in dew and spiders' webs in the clear crystal of an early summer's morn HAS to be better than a demo) and the politicos were SO FUCKING BORING.<br /><br />So you must indulge me in my all-too-brief fantasy that the new government mean well, and want to right some of the wrongs of the past 13 years. And if they kill off Labour in England for ever by finally answering the West Lothian question, than I will raise a glass to the ... cunts :-)<br /><br />Gentlemen all. Pleased to meet you. I lift my glass to you, and take a little toke in the spirit of the peace pipe. <br /><br />Fuck 'em all. <br /><br />PS. If you want a fantastic read recounting just how we got here, do read David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain" (45-51) and "Family Britain" (51-57). Sure takes me back :-)Elby The Berserknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-69417392908957526152010-06-09T01:40:17.072+01:002010-06-09T01:40:17.072+01:00Seldom far from my thoughts, mr mongoose, but smal...Seldom far from my thoughts, mr mongoose, but small beer compared with Abu Ghraib.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-76595766154220282752010-06-09T01:21:24.453+01:002010-06-09T01:21:24.453+01:00Perhaps you have forgotten the Cones Hotline, Mr I...Perhaps you have forgotten the Cones Hotline, Mr Ishmael.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-27700793540143972942010-06-08T16:50:04.871+01:002010-06-08T16:50:04.871+01:00That's grim, mr yiac, blue days, black nights....That's grim, mr yiac, blue days, black nights. Sounds like you are well-rid. Some of do the sinning, some of us are sinned against, both lose-out. All you can do is start over, as best you can; good luck with it.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-37718479188404432412010-06-08T15:00:14.580+01:002010-06-08T15:00:14.580+01:00cintinues...
Party politics is dead, we are gove...cintinues...<br /><br /> Party politics is dead, we are governed, now, quite openly, by an unprincipled, heartless, managerialist elite; it is not something about which we should be optimistic, much less laurels-resting. This is everybody's war. Anger is good for one.<br /><br /> Gosh, how the rich must mock our feeble attempts to emulate them, how they must laugh as we say Lord, we are helpless, here is our face, pray, shit in it. Anything, Lord, just so long as the bankers' books are balanced, that's the main thing.<br /><br />Tomorrow, in our series Exploring Modern Britain: Why We Really Do Need Those Witchfinders.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-91153423110545678312010-06-08T14:59:46.353+01:002010-06-08T14:59:46.353+01:00Shame there isn't a Steiner-equivalent health ...Shame there isn't a Steiner-equivalent health service, eh? Where discerning parents could get better treatment for their own. Shame those nasty, post-war socialist bastards established an NHS which spared us, you and I, mr elby, rickets and diptheria and polio and whooping cough and gave us school dinners and milk and orange juice and built homes and brought pensions to our parents, idle feckless, working class bastards, what with the mum at home boiling-up the washing and calculating the rations, and the Dad working sixty and seventy-hour weeks down the fucking pit or in the fucking foundry or on the fucking production line, after a crippling war that our betters, the Old Etonians, had failed to prevent. Great that we had some conservative intervals, to keep those riff-raff in their place, with great measures like Selective Employment Tax, a good job that worn-out, many of our parents died within a few years of retiring and stopped being a burden on their masters.Only good poor bastard's a dead poor bastard,<br /><br />As for the filthy communists, nationalising British industry, well, what a shame we won the war, eh, if we had been Jap or Herman, encircled by encroaching Red Menace, then Good Old Uncle Sam might have rebuilt our industry, too, from the ground-up, at a cost, in today's terms, of trillions of dollars, instead of bleeding us white, as it was, bombed-out, skint and desolated, we managed to build homes, an NHS and a state pension scheme for our parents, things which Uncle Sam can't manage seventy years on. Fuck America, Fuck Conservatism. All the things which we, here, take for granted, a degree of health, for ourselves and our children, just for instance, have been opposed tooth and nail by the millionaire fuckpigs we now, infant-like, laud as Saviour, Fuck me, a dashing, millionaire Old Etonian rescuing broken Britain, with the help of his handsome young partner, it's what we should expect, this tripe, we raised on Wagon Train and Bonanza, we, smugly convinced that Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band is anything more than wastrel, druggy doggerel. <br /><br />I dunno how it is that nobody noticed but this isn't ConservativeHome, and not even they would be so foolish as to chastise the weak for the failures of the strong, here there is no distinction between a Labour parasite or a Tory one, or any of those toilet-creeping, degenerate, dog-murdering, shit-eating, holierthanfuckingthou, nasty, gabshiting fascistic wankers, led, for the moment by the ridiculous poltroon, Cleggy.<br /><br />The Tories have no twentieth century achievemants worth shit, war and slump, hunger and social breakdown, Bravo, aka Balancing the Books, cunts all of them, RedBraces vandalism their only legacy. Go on, tell me one lasting, valuable social reform we can attribute to Thatcher and her spivs, Tebbit and Lawson and that oily shitbag Parkinson, setting MI5 on his jilted, pregnant mistress, the rotten smirking piece of shit; Tories, fucking rubbish, bullies and gangsters, all of them. At least - as my dreadful, working class father used to say, when he wasn't single-handedly running down British industry, like all of his kind - Dick Turpin wore a mask.<br /><br />Such few meagre advances in the lives of our sixty million as can be ascribed to political action can be laid at the door of the post-war Labour government. They may not, only by the purblind, be cancelled-out by the actions of NewLabour and Gordon Snot, the horrible fucking bastard.<br />continued....call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-81833614218429481252010-06-08T11:17:27.116+01:002010-06-08T11:17:27.116+01:00This comment has been removed by the author.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-44750404714393423092010-06-08T09:21:04.492+01:002010-06-08T09:21:04.492+01:00Elby, I shouldn't worry too much about the des...Elby, I shouldn't worry too much about the destruction of British education. There are still many oasis of excellence despite the general dumbing down. It is in any case an egregious lie that by somehow issuing degree certificates to 50% of kids that we have somehow actually educated them.<br /><br />50 years ago tranches of them would have left school at 16 and got a job in a telephone exchange. Now the same kids spend an extra five years hidden from the dole and 20K of their parents money to get a job in a call-centre where they have to stick their hand up to go to the bathroom.<br /><br />Are they any better educated? Really? Of course not. Good for fuck all but with a much inflated sense of entitlement and an i-Pod to show how clever they are. Look at me - I can operate this piece of Chinese trickery and you can't. That's why I have a degree and you don't. Give me a job that befits my graduate status.<br /><br />Oh do fuck off.<br /><br />I'm all for education but it has been reduced to simply a cynical tool to hide a couple of million extra from the dole queue and give 'em unrealistic expectations. At their own expense.<br /><br />So I say fuck 'education, education and education'. We should be pushing 'ambition, ambition and ambition'.jgm2noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-50467301214904565232010-06-08T08:32:13.064+01:002010-06-08T08:32:13.064+01:00Should you be interested in just how we got here, ...Should you be interested in just how we got here, I highly recommend David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain". I gobbled that up and am now thundering through the next volume, "Family Britain", which starts the year of my birth, 1951 (2 years before sweets stopped being rationed).<br /><br />What is clear is that the post-war nationalisation of much of our larger industry made them even more inefficient than they previously were. Hand in hand with the gradual destruction of the education above (see above, thanks Gents), it seems to me that we are probably FUBAR, in that in the best of all possible worlds, it will be at least a generation before we have anything like a skilled workforce again.<br /><br />Mr. Smith, I can't gainsay anything of what you say. Yes they are all cunts. But I can't stay angry all my life and I truly am enjoying the fact that Labour have - God willing - destroyed themselves. If it should be that the coalition do what Cameron promised, and castrated the cunting Scottish MPs who have ruined my country, then that will be one loud ring of the bells for freedom. <br /><br />Scotland, it seems to me, still believes that Socialism benefits everyone (rather than, as we know, the ruling elite). Let Scotland be the Socialist Paradise, and England can be what it really is, conservative with a little "c". <br /><br />I'm with Gove on the education side, and hope they soon get to fund Steiner Schools, as so many countries on the continent do. All four of my kids went to them, none bothered with Uni bar the eldest, who went at 27 to the Royal Academy of Music to study the Baroque Flute. All are in employment, all self-supporting, and all have been since they were about 20. It was Steiner who said that the purpose of education is to produce "Free and responsible adults". Quite so. Trying to factor that into the education system as it stands is impossible. Indeed, my stepdaughter, and highly intelligent girl but NOT of an academic bent, was utterly failed by her public school, as the teaching was so boring and exam-orientated. My 60s experience of public school was that I was fed spoonful after spoonful of delight and intellectually stretched in every way. <br /><br />Stepdaughter gave up going to lots of her lessons. She got 6 As in her GCSEs and 3 A stars.Elby the Beserkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15060519682739666145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-82470162530158056892010-06-08T03:32:31.289+01:002010-06-08T03:32:31.289+01:00****If I didn't come here, I wouldn't know...****If I didn't come here, I wouldn't know what to do.a young Anglo-Irish catholicnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-77789904982489502062010-06-08T03:30:48.867+01:002010-06-08T03:30:48.867+01:00Me too, 75 percent Mick by descent but missed the ...Me too, 75 percent Mick by descent but missed the Grammar skool by 12 months, closed sown it was by the perma-Labour council locally, despite an extraordinary record. Virtually Eton standard. You just didn't get a proper accent.<br /><br />The comp was utterly useless. Well-funded by the Pope, but lax, lazy and ready to send you down the road to the local giant works, even though it was dying.<br /><br />But, Mr I, don't fear the reaper. NewLabmadeupeconomicsanddebt increased public spending by 50 percent in REAL TERMS.<br /><br />Those of us here are hoping furiously that ConLib can sack the 980,000 made-up white collar (almost all) female box ticking jobs and spare those at the coal face.<br /><br />We must hope Mr I or face the final chronicle of Riun.<br /><br />I have not achieved like Mr JGM, but then I didn't get the extra lift of the Grammar school. Until the last few weeks I dreamt to be mortgage free in central London with herself. Worked my finger and mind to the bone, renovating houses while living in them. Hard, very very hard. Two jobs and all that.<br /><br />Then a few weeks ago, while I was on the other side of the planet, she packed her stuff and fled to an empty house on the other side of the river. Minimum payments and no divorce for two years, she said. <br /><br />Don't want any trouble, don't want people nosing around in my mobile phone records. Work for the royals, you see. First rule: don't embarrass the Prince, fuck no.<br /><br />And me, from just this side of the poverty line. Brought up on ultra-thrift and self respect and paying your way and something for a rainy day, just a few weeks on free school meals.<br /><br />Herself? Overweight, depressed, from Fife, a practised lier (the worst thing to me) and prodigious burner of money at first.<br /><br />But unlike Brown she was brought up in a multi-miilionaire family. Father inherited at 21, castle in Fife, modern art on the ceiling (do you like Paolozzi?) Loot all gone within 20 years.<br /><br />Cared not for my penny counting and thrift, bored, aggressive, listless, telly addicted AmericasNextTopModel darling.<br /><br />So, I'm set slide back down the ladder. It is a personal chronicle of ruin.<br /><br />I'm the sort of person who expects something to turn up she said recently.<br /><br />Aye. Me, with my cheque book and a plan to rescue from near-bankruptcy small legacy burnt on fuck all and Coutts bank charges.<br /><br />But no longer. For my 43rd birthday I will start all over again. And blood pressure tablets at 38.<br /><br />If I didn't some here, I wouldn't know what to do.a young Anglo-Irish catholicnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-82108659981564988302010-06-08T02:22:37.176+01:002010-06-08T02:22:37.176+01:00If it were just my kids, like the Apache, Mr Ishma...If it were just my kids, like the Apache, Mr Ishmael, I would have them leave me out in the economic winter. Where is the bright-as-a-button-Cambridge-dickhead who will call for Darwinian economics? "I am the grandson of Maggie; I am become death."<br /><br />You are quite right. The numbers do not add up. Our children's generation will be working until their bones are very old.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-29783470252235459602010-06-08T02:04:06.196+01:002010-06-08T02:04:06.196+01:00This comment has been removed by the author.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-63462718125907615282010-06-08T01:52:28.392+01:002010-06-08T01:52:28.392+01:00You should find and study the figures, mr m, care ...You should find and study the figures, mr m, care of the ageing population, make your hair stand on end, make all this stuff look silly.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-90089273662396734752010-06-08T01:49:37.244+01:002010-06-08T01:49:37.244+01:00All these people that you mention, mr jgm2, yes, I...All these people that you mention, mr jgm2, yes, I know them, a holiday, a holiday, how can you afford that, I enquired, oh, just put it on the house, extend the mortgage, it doubled in value last week, you know, he a van driver, she a part-timer in an estate agent's. There wasn't any way of talking these people out of that, not against the apparatus of the state and of skymadeupnewsandfilth and so I resist the idea of a punitive, or even uncharitabble approach to them, now, that the bubble has burst.<br /><br />I have been saying much the same as you since 1985 but from a different starting point, mine being that there are Limits To Growth, there is no way in a capitalist economy that the provision of a luxurious -extended by longevity - pension for everyone can be attained, not without a huge, high-temperature cooking of the books, a dizzying inflation of spurious assets; this is exactly what has happened and it is the shortsightedness of this Babylonian compulsiion to greed which has wrought the Ruin of so much that was Decent. Chasing the concept of moral hazard around Ruins firebombed streets is probably a waste of time, now; morality was all but legislated away, not least by Thatcher and Co digging the foundations for NewLabour's abomination.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-17445327478539917452010-06-08T01:15:39.504+01:002010-06-08T01:15:39.504+01:00.... And Labour all swooning about double-dips and....... And Labour all swooning about double-dips and 6bn on NI here or there and all manner of shite when anybody with an IQ greater than plankton can see that we're still 150bn quid short of being out of recession.<br /><br />It's fucked Mr Ishmael. Your chronicles of Ruin are on the button. Utterly fucked. And layabout, interest-living bastard that I am I'm mentally prepared for another 20% hit on everything coming in. Not that I have to do anything for what comes in these days but still...<br /><br />And as to these folk, encouraged by Blair/Brown to squander 20K getting a shit degree in order to qualify for boxtickery at public expense and then go out on their public salary and buy a house, a German car and a Buy-to-let flat all the time pumping Brown's miracle economy up with VAT and stamp duty on their insanely over-borrowed miracle-economy purchases then, God forgive me but errr where's the moral hazard? <br /><br />C'mon Mr Ishmael. That wasn't me or you. We didn't buy into the idiocy. We were telling anybody who would listen about the folly of creating a million jobs with no visible means of funding. A million middle-class aspirants chasing quarter of a million new middle class houses. Everybodies house accelerating in value by 15% a year on the back of this and average personal indebtedness going up by the same as Brown encouraged everybody with his annual proclamations of economic brilliance about how he'd abolished boom-and-bust and the poor, dumb, innumerate fuckers went out and borrowed another 20K for a family holiday in the Seychelles.<br /><br />It's fucked. It's totally fucked. A million plus have already lost their jobs. We've got state-owned zombie banks declining to repossess a la Japponaise propping up everybodies house prices, we have practically zero percent interest rates to prop up house prices. And we're still 160bn quid a year short.<br /><br />It's fucked.<br /><br />If I'm scathing of the public service it is just Brown bringing out the worst in me yet again. We all appreciate our NHS and our roads and schools and all that good shit but as a population we needed to be educated to actually pay for the fucking thing on an ongoing basis as opposed to just getting out the national credit card and deferring it until - oh fuck me - right now.<br /><br />Oh, and for good measure hiring an extra million or so since 2001 to give credence to their 1997 commitment to education <i>blah</i>...<br /><br />Christ.jgm2noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-39741722138231443422010-06-08T01:15:35.099+01:002010-06-08T01:15:35.099+01:00There was a note in one of the papers at the weeke...There was a note in one of the papers at the weekend, Mr Ishmael, about the decay of community in places where tax and the State made the case for provision. (I cannot find the link.) The idea was that when folk are taxed they rein in on charity. (And I - and the writer - don't/didn't mean just money.)<br /><br />I had a state-provided, free education. Everything I am... blah, blah. But my parents drove me every bloody day to make it work. I rode in the cart of their DNA and their work. I morally deserve nothing from the advantage they gave me. I just have it. So I try, eegit that I am, to do what I can. What happens to those kids whose parents don't know the game? Who don't understand. (The kids who have the chance and the ones who don't, BTW.)<br /><br />I understand it. I remember carrying the Christmas plates - and others betimes - to the retired, almost-destitute couple who lived by the edge of my dad's work-bought safety. I remember. He made me stand up from Christmas Table, an all-knowing arsehole, and carry a couple of plates of turkey off the three hundred yards, and when I came back mine was cold. Did thee learn that, lad? I ask for no favour or fucking badge of valour. It is simply where we came from. A generation before this wave of slime and shite, we took care and notice, and did our best if life dealt us the cards so to do.<br /><br />My best mate - a rural doctor's son - tells of his dad scanning the envelopes and just dropping the bills aimed at the poor in the bin beneath his desk. This is called honour. This is called community. The ladder is not drawn up. The Devil may not take the hindmost.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-44987345478829151552010-06-08T01:14:02.348+01:002010-06-08T01:14:02.348+01:00without we, the people, in dubious supprt of a dub...<i>without we, the people, in dubious supprt of a dubious coalition, turning on each other.</i><br /><br />But this is precisely what the evil fucker Brown baked into the cake.<br /><br />Divide and conquer. For all the gobshitery of Nu-Labour and Blair there was no suggestion that we were involved in some eternal class struggle in 1997 - 2007. There was at least the fucking pretence that we were, as the cock-waving, Chinese money-launderer said 'All middle class now'. <br /><br />Do you not remember the sudden class war element to PMQ about 18 months ago when the evil fucker and his legions of bastards suddenly started focussing on rich-boy Cameron in lieu of answering any fucking questions. Economic policy forged on the fields of Eton or some such non-sequiter?<br /><br />Now, as regards dinner ladies and bin-men and suchlike I will be surprised if such folk on already meagre salaries are targetted by any austerity measures. I would be surprised too if no effort was made to tackle the proliferation of boxtickery and fuckwittery at large in public-sector-land. But as I've said before the time to be making tough, bold, leadership-type decisions was three years ago.<br /><br />Now it has all been neatly set up as a trap for Cameron. The rest of us. You, me, dinner ladies, binmen etc are just collateral damage.<br /><br />Hundreds of billions squandered. The collective psyche moved on to the mythical land of recovery and yet we all know, 'cos we can do maths, that it is a monstrous fucking lie. There is no 'recovery'. Absent 160bn quid extra borrowing this year, next year and forever we cannot afford to keep the public service in the manner to which they have become accustomed. And Brown deliberately side-stepped the perfect 'we're-all-in-this-together' moment three years ago by choosing to scapegoat the bankers (private sector) and protecting the public sector and totally polarising the population.<br /><br />The evil fucking fucker...<br /><br />To be continued...jgm2noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-12941438760504712082010-06-08T00:45:02.265+01:002010-06-08T00:45:02.265+01:00That's okay, mr mongoose. Everybody can see th...That's okay, mr mongoose. Everybody can see that, or they wouldn't be here, they'd be further on up the road, eating Pizza made of babies. <br /><br />Do you have any idea, mr mongoose, of the demographic defecit just about to be unleashed on UK social services and health trusts? It is an expansion we need, not a retraction, a national call to caring arms. Well, we can always trip over the demented incontinents in the streets, I suppose; rather third-worldish, quite jolly I suppose, as long as a chap has his gated community to return to.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-12309603713660304442010-06-08T00:35:38.898+01:002010-06-08T00:35:38.898+01:00Sorry, the above response aimed at Mr jgm2's n...Sorry, the above response aimed at Mr jgm2's note not Mr Ishmael's. Our posts crossed in the aether.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-3130444751438113122010-06-08T00:22:21.084+01:002010-06-08T00:22:21.084+01:00I don't disagree with any of that either. My o...I don't disagree with any of that either. My only thought is - did you really expect Gordondon Broon to do that? No. So we are unsurprised that he didn't and unsurprised again that he left the nation fucked. OK. So now we have to live with it.<br /><br />I would drive the able, skilled out of the public sector into the private. To create wealth. I would once again build a place wherein kids with wit, and parents whose example has been set, could drag their backsides up the ladder a rung or two. Jesus, I sound like fucking Reagan and his trickle-down malarkey. But it is true, one can only redistribute wealth to the poor when the industrious have created the wealth to be redistributed.<br /><br />I make no argument with your logic of description; I just sat in Coventry in 1982 and watched skilled man fucked forever on the altar of market economics. Yes, they were made mad by the unions. I even had to watch my dad sign on the rock'n'roll. He dragged his arse back from the brink, and ours with it, by working and relentlessness but the skills and invention and industry of the rest of the city, all the things I think we need, were broken and lay valued at nought in the ashes of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4" rel="nofollow">Ghost-town.</a>mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-70354740018081609262010-06-08T00:13:43.034+01:002010-06-08T00:13:43.034+01:00Urological problems side, mr jgm2, there is a teno...Urological problems side, mr jgm2, there is a tenor to your argument which is, by its illogicality, discordant and the removal of which - as hinted-at by mr mongoose - might better amplify the more cogent of your points.<br /><br />It seems that you damn inactivty and unemployment, yet, damn, equally, those employed in the public sector, dismissing their working lives as irrelevant, as taking the piss, somehow. Yet, these people will have taken these jobs in good faith, from the JobCentre or the 'paper, some will have studied long and hard to qualify, many at their own expense, unconscious of your entrenched disapproval, many will be working way beyond their job descriptions, doing many more hours than similarly remunerated people in the private sector, doing, in the main, their best for their families, buying-into, in the main, the prevailing fantastical economic boom; why should they not, when their betters in government and parliament and in the counting houses insist that borrowing is good, les bontemps roulet, and when the imbecility to which you refer is shored-up by every parliamentarian, every media portal and every mainstream commentator, why should someone lacking our leisure, our education, say Oh no, fuck this shit, I'm off to start a business, especially when the teeth of the state and of Money and Power grind more fiercely on the small business than on the large? And what about if dinner-ladying is all they can do, does that justify your contempt for them, your accusation that these minnows, swimming along, doing the best they can are actually, the enemy within, complicit, each with the other in laziness and extortion, undeserving of their seven pounds an hour? <br /><br />It is, this bleak condemnation of the lowly-paid, like that of former premier Snot, a position undistinguished by logic, much less compassion and it disfigures your otherwise sensible points - paycuts - as long as they are equivalent in effect, and not a couple of grand off a six figure salary as the cabinet of arseholes bravely endures, this is not the same as two grand off a twelve grand salary now, is it? Come on, we can still do arithmetic, you and I, still know the value of money - are preferable to unemployment; it was time, as you say, for a frank explanation of the situation vis a vis interest rates and their effect on salary cuts, that Brown didn't do this does not trasfer blame to working people. This catastrophe is largely at Brown's manic instruction but not exclusively of his making, that so few in high places failed to criticise him, up until fairly ecently, indicates that there is a tier of society heavily defended against the rigours of the economic cycle, and they are the ones mouthing we are all in this tofuckinggether, even though we are not. That has always been the grievance, the one which spawned the Labour party and the education act from which we have especially benefited, the NHS which has eased our path through life, rickets-free, polio-free, diptheria-free, whooping cough-free, master of all the other ills which the Bankers and the Tories would have consigned us to.<br /><br />You know, for every layabout down the tip or on the bin lorry, there is a granny or two, busting her back in the care home, it is utterly iniquitous to cast so many as idle chancers. There should be no room in any attempted national recovery for the punishment of those who voted in a particular way, which seems to be part of your advocacy.<br /><br />The fault for this state of affairs lies with the house of commons and the other organs of the New World Order, that they now want to punish the people for their failures and crimes is hard enough to take, without we, the people, in dubious supprt of a dubious coalition, turning on each other.call me ishmaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369028864168461729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-14683867571320953602010-06-07T22:51:44.794+01:002010-06-07T22:51:44.794+01:00I'd fire the entire lot of them tomorrow and s...<i>I'd fire the entire lot of them tomorrow and sleep as soundly as a newborn babe. But 20% reduction means that some of the cohorts will be dinner-ladies and dustmen down the bloody road to despair and ruination.</i><br /><br />But this is further evidence of the Brownian clusterfuck. If, at the same time as private sector workers were taking 10 and 15% paycuts and working short-time in order to preserve <i>everybodies</i> job the Maximum Imbecile had done the same thing with the public sector (after all Labour kinda automatically has the unions on-side) then this would have been so much simpler. Now, three years after the event, with 'recovery' proclaimed for the last six months and a Tory government then it's all so much trickier.<br /><br />When he cut interest rates to 0.5% thus reducing practically everybodies mortgage by several hundred quid that was a perfect time to negotiate a 10% public sector paycut. He could proclaim a global clusterfuck, point to massive private sector job losses, huge mortgage reductions and slap on a 10% paycut. Most folk would have been no worse off.<br /><br />What was needed in Oct 2007 was 'we're all in this together' from Brown instead of scape-goating the banks and printing money to shield his client state from the effects. In fact increasing pay and payroll throughout the recession. All funded with more borrowed and printed money.<br /><br />Once again the evil fucker sacrificed good governance for 300bn quid and a long shot at buying the 2010 election.<br /><br />That sound? That's the sound of my piss boiling.jgm2noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6065998731267025499.post-55460796146382566372010-06-07T21:45:02.770+01:002010-06-07T21:45:02.770+01:00Don't get me wrong, Mr jgm2, that costs need t...Don't get me wrong, Mr jgm2, that costs need to be reduced is completely clear to me, and there are whole fucking legions of well-off, well-paid wasters in the public sector who do little but hide from the uncertainty of the private. These are people with ability, education, and wit who should be out here creating wealth instead of consuming it at the public teat. I'd fire the entire lot of them tomorrow and sleep as soundly as a newborn babe. But 20% reduction means that some of the cohorts will be dinner-ladies and dustmen down the bloody road to despair and ruination.mongoosehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14173341928744479143noreply@blogger.com