Lines

It must be nice to have a job working on a TV show you like, okay you may have to put up with the odd racist presenter and a punch in the face, but it's a small price to pay to be in the presence of such genius. No?

Almost a million people (and I use that term quite loosely) have signed a petition petulantly demanding that the BBC reinstate a programme about schoolboy hijinks dressed up as motoring journalism along with its lanky provocative-for-cash presenter. Tha's about four times as many who signed the petition calling for a debate in Parliament on the effects of the government's catastrophic welfare policies. Not only that but Jeremy Clarkson is a friend of the Prime Minister, so a televisual troll and vapid bigot receives the ultimate endorsement while Cameron's own government can't be bothered to even consider the effect of their  on the poorest. We don't have the right to call ourselves civilised.

Let me be clear: Clarkson is a cunt. He may have started out as a journalist, but all that remains is a husk formed from populist outrage. According to the Guardian his most recent Top Gear Magazine article consists of nothing more than tired stereotypes about foreigners and public transport (apparently the former drive taxis universally smelling of vomit while the latter are containers of disease). Outrage isn't really the appropriate response at this point; more a sense of resignation and tiredness. I'm so fucking weary of this cretin. There is no content to his bullshit and no taxi I have ever travelled in has smelt of vomit either.

Clarkson and his tedious insipid cohorts, the sycophantic Hammond and the terminally curmudgeonly-for-cash James May, stand on a line that seems to divide society quite deeply (if that petition is anything to go by). On their side of the line is a world where people can speak their minds, do as they please (drive as they please where they please, specifically). On our side of the fence is, in their view, a stuffy repressive modern world of political correctness inevitably gone too far (the only kind apparently) and where values and cultures are shockingly mashed together with no respect for...something - even though culture is born from the confluence of older existing traditions.

Clarkson is the last bastion of free speech to the repressed fans of Top Gear who delight in his brave license fee funded health and safety checked white skinned antics. He is no more a maverick than John Wayne was a real cowboy. Instead he receives a huge sum of money to comfortably say things that resonate in a vile echo chamber of public opinion warped by a right wing media. His fans are regularly told about Muslims wanting to ban Christmas and how their kids can't play conkers in schools -a very Clarskon activity - without crash helmets, about how their white skinned daughters will be robbed of their innocence by foreigners while they themselves are robbed for their livelihoods - and thus their sense of identity - by, well, other foreigners. It's deeply sad but somewhere along the line these people lost who they were. Capitalism sold them down the river: Thatcher stole the industries they worked in and gave them to outside interests full of people they were told were better and smarter for example. Now all these people have as an ideological refuge is that side of the line, the one Clarkson, Hammond - Britain's worst presenter and a tawdry clone of the man himself (only made more pathetic by his inability to be equally as innately offensive) - and Misery Guts for Money James May.

People revel in the maverick antics of the Top Gear trio as they throw cars that aren't 'cool' out of planes, or drive around America with provocative slogans just to upset the locals. But they aren't really in any danger, not even in Argentina, the BBC and the behind the scenes staff will cop the flak, just as one of them did when Clarkson got a bit tired and felt like throwing his weight around because one of them wasn't on hand to offer him a plate of Roast Bee or something. That poor sod felt the wrath of Clarkson's faithful who variously thought that he should never be allowed to work again (no doubt subsequently complaining if he signed on) and that he had a punchable face. These are the same people that audibly guffawed when, on the televisual kleenex that is the One Show, Clarkson referred his wisdom on the issue of striking public sector workers. He felt they should be shot in front of their families. 

But it's all a joke innit. If you don't find that funny then you are on the wrong side of that line. You are a stuffy do-gooder - worse: you are a repressive force doing the common man down. Of course these people should be shot. In this age of fluid opinion and fact free churnalism of course these people should be shot. Just as when some poor shmuck working for Top Gear (and thus Jeremy Clarkson) doesn't immediately rush to his master's side like an unquestioning faithful puppy. 

I want our society to move forward but it won't as long as people refuse to move past that line. 

Twisted System

Last night Dispatches on Channel 4 presented half an hour on the insanity of the mechanism of DWP sanctions. It is next to impossible to try and understand this system without coming away traumatised. Throughout all of this, on the broadcast and beyond, the government refuse to involve themselves in any discussion of the consequences, supported of course by the media and any useful idiots drawn in along the way.

How does poverty help people? 

This is control. That's all it is. This is the worst kind of authoritarianism: selective and exploitative. It just goes to show the utter hypocrisy and ideological bankruptcy of the right who have no compunction abandoning their ideals when it suits them. That is capitalism. This is what is in store at the general election; if one thing is certain it's that capitalism will win - even if that means fashioning some nightmare coalition across the apparent political spectrum in this country. After all the Libdems claimed to be left wing for so many years and they were quick to use the excuse of 'national interest' to grab power, to maintain capital's control over our lives.

This system uses poverty against the people in society. That is what is happening.

One heartbreaking case on the broadcast was a single dad of two schoolkids dependent on food parcels because his ESA was stopped. Non attendance of the Work Programme was the reason, in complete ignorance of his very obvious physical discomfort. A fused hip and a spinal hernia left him in clearly pain. But not only that he was also a victim of the Bedroom Tax to the tune of £28 a week which consumed the risible sum of money that the DWP left him with (I'm not sure of the full breakdown of his benefits, it's not important, nor any of my business really). The priority for the DWP - the government - was not to ensure that this man and his children were able to feed themselves and have shelter, but to make sure that what they deem he owed is paid back above even those considerations. The sense of desperation was palpable, he is now in rent arrears for the paltry sum of a hundred and twenty odd quid.

It is more important that, no doubt with the help of some Mitchell brothers style goons, the government gets its pound of flesh from this man than he and his kids eat. 

What does that tell you about capitalism? That money is more important than people. That a government can create a debt, in the form of the Bedroom Tax, out of thin air and trap a vulnerable man and his dependants for the rest of his life. 

And they will tell you this is the right thing to do; that it is helping people. 

There is not one shred of evidence that a single person, through the mechanism of sanctions, has been helped.

None of this even begins to address the inherent corruption, exposed by the PCS (who, even so, don't seem interested in actually doing anything about it). We all know that there is a rancid culture of setting targets, however it also appears there is a culture of ramping up conditioinality on those who do what is required of them. Such people are to be treated with increased harshness until, presumably, they ineivtably trip up. 

The DWP, under the stewardship of an ideological tyrant, wants people to fail. 

Clearly the government does not want to help people.

In fact I'm not entirely sure what it wants. I suspect there is no ultimate goal here; it is simeply about using social security (welfare is an Americanism) as a political football. The right believes it can exploit the existence of a safety net endlessly to maintain power. However that does imply that the Tories don't want it desotryed completely, which seems incongruous. You might be forgiven for thinking the Tories want to remove benefits entirely. They may well do, but that's because their ideology blinds them and makes them stupid. They don't realise that social security provides...security. If everyone is forced into poverty what's to stop them turning on the rich or turning to mass crime. If that happens the middle classes will turn on the Tories for making them feel unsafe in their little enclaves. So the truth is that the more intelligent (so to speak) element of the party (and I don't necessarily include Duncan Smith and his cohorts within this) want some form of social security to exist. However that element is to be abused to keep them in power, thorugh demonising the poor and making the faithful afraid of the poor. It's a small price to pay, in their minds, for low wages and the commensruate labour market insecurity.

Meanwhile people such as the case above are just collateral damage. Nobody within government will care. He will be trapped by a system that has been brutalised into something dark, that is no longer there to help but to harm.