Fuck me, Jesus, these poor fuckers, what are they like, eh, good job Mr Cameron's put me in charge, at last.
Frank Field MP, (Lab/Lib/Tory)
She's back, tut-tutting, in her sour, I-Know-Best, Jesuitical fashion: the Poor, money's no good to them, not like it is to rich people, like my new boss, the current, unelected prime minister. Oh, but Frank Field is the only man to tell it like it is. Aye, right, him and Vince Cable. And Nick Clegg.
What I hate about these slimeball parliamentarians is the monstrous hugeness of their egos, this fucking worm, Field, like Abbott, and Corbyn and fuck me, look out, here comes a thieving bastard Queen's Counsel Bob Marshall-Andrews, is that they languish, parliament after parliament, having been elected on a Labour ticket, lowerlipping and poisonpenning, Oh, I'm Old Labour, me, lacking the balls, the character, much less the political intelligence to split away and form another party, they hang around, neither use nor ornament, year after pampered, parasitical year, awaiting an opportunity, as has been granted Field, to stab both constituent and party in the back, reaching for what he's wanted all along, a place on the ermine-edged ToiletBench of State, nasty, creepy bastard.
An anti-war party might have flourished, become a beacon for those sickened by Blair-Brownism, but not sick enough to cross the Duncan-Smith/Howard/ CallHimDave floor. Hoey, that wrinkled old prune and ghastly whinging Ulster fishwife, passed-over for promotion, conflating her ineptitude with principle. bitching and griping ever since, she's another, like Field beloved of the mad, old, expatriot, rabblerousing Filth-O-Graphers, generally detesting the poor, the different and the fairer sex in equal measure but making an exception for Kate. And Frankie.
Never mind coalition, he should be deselected; what's the new word, recalled; it won't apply to the likes of Filthy Frank, man of principle, decent one-nation Tory, all along.
46 comments:
Too right Mr Ishmael. Frank is no more principled than the 400 or so Labour MPs that sat through the 13 years of Blair/Brownian burning-all-the-money imbecility and said fuck all. They didn't have to cross the flor. They could have resigned the party whip.
Did they fuck as like.
I think it was Frank Field who declared that the problem - such as it is - is not poverty but rather poverty of ambition. I happen to believe he's absolutely right on that.
Not that I can preach too much having retired ten years ago in my thirties and my missus just in the process of working her last three or four days of her notice before doing the same thing. At opposite ends of the spectrum to the poverty-of-ambition that besets the Labour voting numbskullkature of Newcastle and Fife to be sure but bound by the same general realisation that - excuse me - what exactly is the point of me working when I can have all my days to myself just sitting on my duff.
In the case of those who do so because by the time they take their free benefits, housing, prescription etc etc into account then taking some shit shelf-stacking job represents a pay cut then me and the missus are a million pounds away from them by refusing to work to pay 51% tax.
You what? You fucking what? You want me to work from New Years Day until American Independence Day? For free? To give you cash so you can fucking well burn it?
But the sentiment is essentially the same.
Where's the fucking incentive to work?
How about 'Fuck off'. How d'ya like that?
For my sins I spent six or seven years in Fucking Dunfermline. The very ringpiece of the universe. But what I did learn in my time there is that it was the birthplace of a bloke called Andrew Carnegie. Now this young man and his mum had to borrow the money to flee to America but by the time he was my age he was the richest man in the world. A fucking ionspiration to all of the power of ambition.
You'd think there'd be fucking pilgrimages from every fucking Labour constituency on the planet to see his birthplace and museum and read of his great public works. How he funded practically every public library in the English-speaking world. How this poor boy made good.
No. Practically fucking anonymous.
A town and county with fuckwitted Labour voter voting in fuckwitted Labour MPs like the Maximum Imbecile to just hand 'em more fucking money. Not for them the tugging-the-forelock to a generous benefactor. Fuck no. When you can have your elected economic jackass plunder all the fucking money and burn it. There's real empowerment.
Cunts all.
The 'success' of Labour has been to disincentivise not only the rich but the poor from working.
What a shower of incompetent cunting cunts eh? Unless that's whatthey actually intended to do. In which case - well done.
Aye, Carnegie, I know his tale, read books in his libraries, bless him. No, it isn't the discussion about welfare reform to which I object, just the discussers.
I do believe that the current dependency is a cross party responsibility, Thatcher was happy to massage the figures with Incapacity Benefit status, to prove that the closure of large industry, without a moment's thought of its replacement was a price worth paying and that a similar contemptuous disregard for ordinary people, ghettoised and made villain by government diktat -Presscott's Underclass, the shameful hypocrite - has been the hallmark of Mandelsteinian Labour.
I don't entirely disagree with Field, it is hard to, but I loathe his cowardice, his hypocrisy and his current opportunism. That's what they are like. His brief will be, wahtever the fuck you do, don't upset the rich, there's a good tory chap. Up against the wall Coalition motherfuckers
What surprises (well, not even slightly, really) is that surely to fuck it should have been done before. What on earth was the preparation, the planning the err..what's the word again? Ah, yes, the fucking work? Now I know that fiddling expenses and generally getting pissed up all day whilst being an arrogant git does take a bit of time and effort but aren't there some researchers, assistants or even fat truculent and diabetic motherfuckers incapable of boozing who at some point believe that maybe, just maybe they should perhaps commit pen to paper, engage brain and consider having a look at public administration and perrhaaaps think that maybe a bit of analysis could be of benefit?
Seriously though, their constituency work is done by their caseworker, their speeches are infrequent, their appointments and engagements only vaguely hectic when there's an election coming, their scope of realistic policy research limited to none finance and foreign matters. Does no cunt do any work?
Or, as is no doubt the case, do a report Frankie that no cunt will read as we've got a bottom drawer here which is screaming out for mothballs. Hmm...indolence takes quite a lot of effort and these cunts seem to be putting their backbones into it.
Wotsontelly - BBC4 have got a thing on shanties and sea songs which is very lovely.
Aye, that - think the fucking unthinkable and do some bloody work.
And Frank has been a Tory his whole life. And while he is not as bad as the worst, indeed is among the best of his kind, we should not give a savage one of the bastards an inch.
What is our solution to the benefits/welfare/poverty/idiocy trap? The truth is simple and short, and a little horrible to think about. We need to educate the people so that they can find productive work. We need to somehow provide this productive work once again. And there must be an incentive for the idle-but-able to take up this work. (How about income tax starting at £16,000 instead of £6,000?) But you have to do all three or folk won't play.
We should also not tax relatively poor people for earning but tax relatively rich people for spending. Also short-term CGT = high; long-term CGT = nil. Build soemthing, enjoy the proceeds; make a quick buck, pay your bloody taxes. And we need to realign the justice business, to turn away from being mad as hatters on money crime, and start to punish/discourage violence and hurting people. This starts to build back what the last four decades have snipped away - the communal respect for other people, their comforts and securities, and the right to get on with their lives unmolested by any savage wee fucker who has an insult in his head.
But Frank won't do any of this. The prat apparently believes in National Service. We've got rid of a mad and miserable Presbyterian and swapped him for a prim and pious Methodist.
Mr Ishmael, we are all shaped by our personal experiences around poverty. I grew up in Birmingham, parent of immigrant (Mick) parents, but their ambition for their kids was utterly fucking burning. Their respect for education as a way out of the ghetto was unshakeable. Their only lament was that their mother country had no such schemes as Open University or evening classes or any way for folk whose father wasn't already a schoolteacher or doctor or some 'made' member of the Irish political/professional classes to break through. The UK offered that 100 years ago and offers it today.
You went to the best grammar school in Birmingham? Me too. The High School or Camp Hill? - it depended whether your parents realised how little a scholarship place cost. We might even have been in the same class.
And yet now we have education, education and education used as a political tool to hide 1.5 million naive teenagers from the dole queue while they spend three/four years and 20-fucking-thousand-borrowed pounds downloading essays from the internet and kidding themselves and their parents that they're fucking geniuses. First in my family to get a degree doncha know. Meanwhile those actually in-the-know doncha know - the recruiter, the HR directors, are pissing themselves laughing at the CVs of these muppet graduates from comedy rebadged adult literacy colleges.
It's getting more and more ridiculous. My kids go to Saint Cakes now. Two or three kids in every class (of 16 or 18) are so 'dyslexic' or 'poor handwriters' that their every piece of work is submitted on a laptop. At the age of 10. So their lax spelling, syntax, grammar, whatever all gets underlined in red or green allowing, as in the corporate and political world, absolute fucking plankton to present themselves on paper as literate. The next generation of 'made' Brits passing their civil service exams, administering the idiot Marx-Stalin-Keynes-some-other-cunt-because-they haven't-an original-thought-in-their-fucked-up-heads-politician's latest idiocies.
The utterly fucking criminal abandonment - condoned by the likes of Labour - because it suits them to have a hopeless underclass of voters, is what makes my piss boil. Whole generations of natives robbed of the belief that they, personally, are the greatest hope they will ever have to make something of their lives. Millions. Literally tens of millions of people bred and brought up to believe that they are completely powerless and that they need to vote Labour so that they can be supplied with free stuff and pretend jobs. Yeah. Just take it off those rich cunts. Yeah. What do they need all that money for. It's not fair.
For Fuck's Sake.
Meanwhile, even today you have the two richest men in America - Buffett and Gates literally giving their money away to good causes - AIDS drugs, curing malaria - rather than - as here - having their money sequestered before they can ever accumulate enough to make any difference and then having it systematically burned in a politically motivated pissing contests.
Maggie might have given Blair/Brown the inspiration to hide a few hundred thousand here or there from the politically inconvenient dole figures but I think we can both agree that the Blair/Brown government of all the imbeciles has reducto ad absurdum the whole fucking issue of rigging figures.
Innit.
We are the same, Mr jgm2, we three, in our stepping stone blessings. In my case I was down the A45 at the best grammar school in Coventry. Likewise Mick. Like parents. Properly educated in all the ways that matter. But none of this goes on any more. Even at good schools, all they get is a watered down thin gruel. Only this very evening, I gently - very gently - corrected my lad. He said "But I already sound the poshest in my class." (He meant not accent but grammar.) And so it starts. Can I hide my cleverness, Dad? Can I hide the polish of my brain? The chavs take the piss, Dad. If I had bowed, we would be on the way to an LCD Grauniad mediocrity. Fuck that! "Nathan and I, lad, do things. Other people do things to Nathan and me. Speak quietly and correctly, as best as you are able. But I am your father, you will never correct anyone else and you will be polite to everyone." But we are alone now. The schools do not help us. I fear that they know not how.
Mr Mongoose, I shit you not, my parents bought a TV after the Birmingham pub bombings to hide my Irish accent. An accent acquired by the simple expedient of having only my parents to talk to until I went to school aged 5.
As a result I acquired a splendid BBC Cholmondely-Warner accent that had the children of the architects, lawyers, stockbrokers, accountants taking the piss out of my posh accent when I went to grammar school. Christ, if that makes you laugh, you fuckers should hear my 'home' accent. It was like being bi-lingual but without the extra free Urdu 'O' level.
But I was a punchy fucker so I was able to deal with such teasing but even at grammar school the culture of native idiocy was strong. Oh fuck no. Don't study. Don't try hard. An easy attitude to have when your parents buy you a brand new car two weeks after you turn 17. Because they're fucking minted.
And here's me now. Minted. And my kids at St. Cakes. No idea how blessed their lives are.
They say it takes three generations to turn full circle. And I see it happening in my own kids, God love 'em, their idiot dad not accorded a fraction of the respect of some teacher with a PGCE from Brighton Poly. But that's for me and them to reconcile. Probably when it's too late.
But, as I've said before, what utterly crucifies me is that there is no overarching cultural belief that you are your own best hope. Fuck no. There is always some fucking nasty, opportunistic, snakeoil cunting politician who will tell you that your life is shit not because your parents are wasters or because you personally are a waster [again, a bit rich coming from me, possibly the worlds most idle fucker] but because 'they' are oppressing you and the only way to address that is to vote for me so I can steal their money and give it to you. A process that demotivates absolutely everybody.
As you say Mr Mongoose, all we can do is try and instill some fucking hope and self-belief and self-reliance in our kids and then - and I think we may yet do it sooner rather than later - just fuck off to another country. Because after 13 years of utter imbecility this one is fucked.
Quite literally fucked.
Might as well get the kids a second language while they're young rather than sitting on the sidelines for a generation or two while the Brownian Imbecility and its economic and social clusterfuck gets modulated out.
The other thing that really, really kills me is that it would have been so much easier for the Maximum Imbecile and his 400 Labour MPs to get this right. If they had the IQ of a fish or a synapse of original thought they couldn't have fucked this up any more spectacularly.
I loathe pretentious arts and open-air opera and all that shit, lets take a picnic out to the middle of a field and listen to a rendition of Carmen, a language I don't understand - no better than my Catholicism indoctrinated mother who would travel from Birmingham to the middle of London to listen to a Latin mass. Might as well have been a dog watching Concorde lifting off for all it meant to her.
But what I absolutely am not is anti-reason. And the past 13 years of imbecility have been a masterclass in anti-reason. Plenty of rhetoric. Plenty of money burned. Not a scintilla of reason. No tough philosophical arguments about how much reason there was on a pin-head for that bunch of economy-wrecking cunts. Not a trace. Not even a hint of the DNA of reason. It's sweaty fingers, it's dandruff, even the condensate of breath from reason is absent from the past 13 years of the tyranny of all the imbeciles.
Utter fucking idiocy. Self-serving, myopic idiocy on an Epic scale. Idiocy of Biblical proportions. If the 1997-2010 Labout government had been at large 2000 years ago there would be a book in the New Testament called 'The Book of Idiocy'. That's what a shower of fucking imbeciles we're trying to recover from.
Also short-term CGT = high; long-term CGT = nil." Not any more 18% no if's or buts. Now if I with limited resources and even more limited money can take derelicht properties (and were the neighbours glad to see me) and turn them into des res's not the council with all their vans and equipment driven by lazy twats making sure they get their full entitelment to the alloted sick days per year, not the government getting covered in 100 year old soot, you know all about this, but me. Now its going to be 40% but as its you 30% ain't we good? Who will do it now not me nor anyone I know what's the point? Looking at at more slums dirt cheap empty for years on end full of damp, used syringes and rats. Free enterprise, why work?
It was Camp Hill, mr jgm2, and a wee bit before your time, I feel, although I, too, was bi-accented. Somebody should write about that strange period in Anglo-Irish history, one a they reee-suchers.
I'd love to join in this one but a possible medical emergency looms - not me - and I need to go elsewhere. Back tomorrow.
I hope that you and yours are kept well this dark night, Mr Ishmael. Bon chance.
It is true that the New Luvvies, Mr jgm2, had an open goal for reform in 1997. They could have done almost anything. Instead, they just bankrupted the country and called it "The Investment". Enough! We understand already.
So why didn't they do what could have been done? The only answer can be that they did not have that project in mind. they wanted power for power's sake. And the 18-year Tory-fest gave them their only lesson in how to get power. I will yield to nobody in my contempt for the Blair/Brown disaster. I have voted for all of the fuckers and they have all let me down. A shower of shite from the front to the back.
Why didn't they do it? Because they no longer have an it to do.
Don't forget Gerald Kaufman MP for Gorton little place just south of the Peoples Republic of Manchester. Not one of the places mentioned in Location,location, location or usually in How to be a property developer who by the way in telling people how to do it never mention CGT. Our Gerald lords it over a place known for its consumption of lard, single parents, a brand new library and swimming pool that was so badly vandalised it was boarded up soon after opening and redistributing wealth, usually by breaking and entering. He needed a decent pen so we bought him one only 400 quid then he decided thet the grapefruit bowls were not worthy of him so another few hundred to buy some lead chrystal ones that were. This champaigne socialst has never voted against the government and not likely to in the foreseeable future just hope the pen doesn't run out of ink while he is filling out the expense forms.
Geez, this thread has gone a bit downhill since last evening.
Whilst I can in no way disagree with most of the analysis of fucked upness expressed I do find it mildy depressing the thoughts of 'getting the fuck out of Dodge and don't spare them there fucking horses'. Perhaps i'm showing my age in that i'm just 35, but like some others here, half Mick, raised by a single mum who would have Geoff Capes crying like a little girl should he have curtailed my mother's detailed plans for myself and Our Bob and whilst being quite a lazy guy I was damed lucky to fall in love with politics from the age of about 5.
It's been a fucking long year and i'm back to work today after having decided that for the rest of the summer, well, it's my time. At no point will any emotion be attached to the state of Ruin, just football (even tho not too bothered other than it would cheer folk up I guess if Blighty does well), roasted chickens, gardening and being friendly to family & chums.
I just can't be arsed being arsed so flick the switch, turn it off, get back to being Ricky. Can't fight the machine every day - have given myself decent health problems and, frankly, it's daft behaviour.
Hope you all have a lovely and relaxed summer and that you and all yours remain in fine fettle.
Thanks Mr DTP. The threads go the way they go, not just here, everywhere. It can be depressing, but only if you let it and the dire nature of things expressed reflects more those being reported-on, than the reporters, themselves; rather like our fragile and pampered and conniving footballers, we pay them so much, in erturn for so little. You take care.
Regardless of how one views Mr. Field, we have to thank him for his exquisite plea to Blair, begging him not to let Brown become PM - his words - "Please don't let Mrs. Rochester out of the attic".
One plus mark for the man.
Yes, they are all cunts, but I am trying to look on the sunny side re the Coalition - 1. It is NOT Labour. That has to be good. 2. They have just announced a new inquiry into David Kelly's death. 3. The Great Repeal Act.
Ishmael wrote a while back about how New Labour had put the poison into his pen. Yup. Released his inner cunt, maybe? And he not alone, the same for many of us 50somethings methinks. However, a state of permanent rage is not good, so I am trying to see what is good in the current set up and to take it from there. Cameron and Clegg, whatever their faults, do seem to belong to the same species as I. The New Labour bastards not so - invasion of the bodysnatchers always comes to mind when I think of them, and clearly such as Miliband D are not human in any sense of the word.
At ease. As you were.
Mr Elby. You are right about one thing - actually several things - but your point about the Labour Imbecility bringing out the poison is bang-on. The cunts bring out the worst in all of us.
Just as the TVs are filled with 65th aniversary shows about the Dunkirk evacuation which I suppose could be said to bring out the best in so many people then the last Labour government is the exact fucking polar opposite.
Everything they touched turned to shit and any time you attempted to warn them of their idiocies they just persisted even more stridently in their idiocy to the point that you ended up screeching yourself hoarse at the TV or radio as the glib, grinning fuckwits set off on yet another entirely predicatble ill-thought through scheme for burning even more billions.
And now the self-same culpable cunts are lining up to jump into dead-man-Brown's shoes by proclaiming that, yes, we failed in this, we failed in that, we fucked up the other in fact we failed on every conceivable measure, I was against the Iraq War but bravely said nothing, oh aye, me too I was against it too but bravely said nothing too, and me, me too. All against it only didn't want to rock the boat of personal ambition. Just like Brown. Cunts.
Cunting cunts.
Oh for fuck's sake.
70th anniversary of Dunkirk.
Anyway, the general point stands.
And while I'm venting and hogging Mr Ishmaels blog - another thing regarding poverty and unemployment and that - I was listening to the radio a few weeks ago while driving. It was a Radio 5 phone in where they were lamenting the unavailability of 'suitable' jobs for so many unemployed. You know, unemployed accountants being offered jobs stacking shelves.
To which I say 'Stack away sunshine'. But they had some prick phone in to lament his own similar difficulty in finding jobs at the job-centre that matched his specialist trade. And what was this trade? Time served brickie, carpenter, plumber, electrician perhaps?
No. A fucking courier driver. It seems that there were no courier jobs on offer. So naturally he wasn't going to be taking any of the other unsuitable jobs that were on offer what with him being an experienced courier driver and all.
Fucking hell. When even a courier driver considers himself a trained professional you just know what idiocy stalks the land. Not that courier drivers aren't wonderful people of course. It's just the dearth of self-awareness that would lead anybody to believe that shoving a postcode into a Tom-Tom, driving there and getting a signature was a particularly skilled job requiring years of experience to get right.
Not the sort of professional you want to be throwing on the scrap-heap or asking to retrain eh?
The point, mr elby, was that Field and the rest of the winningly-called Awkward Squad could, at any time, have halted or interdicted the worse excesses of NewLabour, the most extreme of which, in human terms -which I prefer to accounting terms - is the rape of Iraq; at any time the malcontents could have said, as did we, here in cyberspace, that this kow-towing to Bush was preparatory to Blair's lucrative retirement and of no real national interest, Field and the rest would never say that, would they, wankers, for fear of souring their own post-retirement milk, The Flashmans for whom you express admiration, are so much like you that they joined heartily in this MickyMouse war and, don't forget, cheered Blair to the rooftops after his dishonest and hammy showstopper resignation speech, after the great statesman was, through blackmail or some other non-democratic device forced-out by The Brownies. When I was rebuking the bombastic, incompetent fuckpig, eight years ago, for his Nursery Rhyme economics Flashman and the rest were hailing him as the Iron Chancellor, prudent, far sighted, it must be said; today it's Oh fuck me, look what they've done, the only way we can make the bankers happy is to fuck poor people up the arse, again, oh, if only we'd known..... I fucking knew, eight hundred fucking miles away. What is it that you see in these lying, cheating, worthless career politicians which should replace or subvert or dilute the rage still felt by so many, across the board, in a non-partisan fashion? They were all at it, the expenses, and not being Blair or Brown or Mandelson redeems none of them.
You turn if you want to, in the words of another of them; the indecisive, musical chairs election and the cobbling together of a gang of wealthy, overdressed untrustworthy misfits changes nothing; to everything there is a season and rage, here, for now, is the order of the day.
It is not as if we have not been here before, is it? Every Labour government that there has ever been has crashed and burned in a financial crisis. (I must have typed that sentence a thousand times by now.) It has happened again. OK. We get it. So even I can admit that it is not directly the fault of the LibCons that they are having to sort out this mess.
But "The Canadian Model"? Jesus wept, Canada is the size of the universe, has massive natural resources and no fucker lives there. Population density of Canada? 3 people per square km. Population density of the UK? Nearly 4-fucking-hundred per square kilometre. Canada - rural, semi-arctic, longest coastline in the world, beautiful wilderness. UK - urban, post-industrial, semi-feral shit-hole. Is it just me that thinks that this might be a slightly different problem?
So are we going to fire 20% of the public workforce or cut all of their wages by 20%? Or will it be 10% sacked and a10% cut? Good luck with that, Dave, but there will be blood on the streets by Christmas.
Well it may be unpalatable Mongoose but that was the decision Brown bravely took three years ago. To continue borrowing 300bn quid in order to continue paying the extra onemillion bedwetters, boxtickers and bastards he'd hired at vast public expense since 2001. In an attempt to rig another election on borrowed money and fake employment. Rather than, at that time, at least imposing a public sector recruitment and pay freeze while the private sector was losing one and a half million jobs.
Oh, and not scapegoat the banks and try and kid on that the economic clusterfuck had nothing to do with his pissing away all the money. Now all he's done is divide the nation between public and private sector. A deliberate class-war policy to divide opposition to his idiocy and the country be damned.
Now, three years on, after proclaiming the end of recession on the back of 300bn quid of squandering, it will be hard for the bedwetters, boxtickers and bastards to be made to understand that, actually, the recession isn't over at all and now it is their turn to go through the pain of realising just how important your pretendy job isn't.
The recession is only 'over' because last year we tipped 160bn quid into a hole in order to rig 1bn quids worth of growth.
All this shit about 'double dips'. What a load of shit. we are still in fucking recession. Absent 160bn quid of annual borrowed and squandered money we are still in the deepest recession in UK history and we have no fucking hope of getting out of it until we face up to that fact.
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.
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.
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 everybodies 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.
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.
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.
Once again the evil fucker sacrificed good governance for 300bn quid and a long shot at buying the 2010 election.
That sound? That's the sound of my piss boiling.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Ghost-town.
Sorry, the above response aimed at Mr jgm2's note not Mr Ishmael's. Our posts crossed in the aether.
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.
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.
without we, the people, in dubious supprt of a dubious coalition, turning on each other.
But this is precisely what the evil fucker Brown baked into the cake.
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'.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The evil fucking fucker...
To be continued...
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
.... 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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
It's fucked.
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.
Oh, and for good measure hiring an extra million or so since 2001 to give credence to their 1997 commitment to education blah...
Christ.
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.
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.
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.
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."
You are quite right. The numbers do not add up. Our children's generation will be working until their bones are very old.
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.
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.
But, Mr I, don't fear the reaper. NewLabmadeupeconomicsanddebt increased public spending by 50 percent in REAL TERMS.
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.
We must hope Mr I or face the final chronicle of Riun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Herself? Overweight, depressed, from Fife, a practised lier (the worst thing to me) and prodigious burner of money at first.
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.
Cared not for my penny counting and thrift, bored, aggressive, listless, telly addicted AmericasNextTopModel darling.
So, I'm set slide back down the ladder. It is a personal chronicle of ruin.
I'm the sort of person who expects something to turn up she said recently.
Aye. Me, with my cheque book and a plan to rescue from near-bankruptcy small legacy burnt on fuck all and Coutts bank charges.
But no longer. For my 43rd birthday I will start all over again. And blood pressure tablets at 38.
If I didn't some here, I wouldn't know what to do.
****If I didn't come here, I wouldn't know what to do.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
Stepdaughter gave up going to lots of her lessons. She got 6 As in her GCSEs and 3 A stars.
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.
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.
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.
Oh do fuck off.
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.
So I say fuck 'education, education and education'. We should be pushing 'ambition, ambition and ambition'.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
continued....
cintinues...
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.
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.
Tomorrow, in our series Exploring Modern Britain: Why We Really Do Need Those Witchfinders.
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.
Perhaps you have forgotten the Cones Hotline, Mr Ishmael.
Seldom far from my thoughts, mr mongoose, but small beer compared with Abu Ghraib.
Ish dear man,
I cannot but agree with you on all points. I do think we are close to terminally fucked. But - I have always been
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Gentlemen all. Pleased to meet you. I lift my glass to you, and take a little toke in the spirit of the peace pipe.
Fuck 'em all.
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 :-)
Good for you, mr elby, that's ok.
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.
They're playing your tune, further on up the road, at evensong.
Post a Comment