Gravedancing

In years to come will we be asked if we can remember the details of our lives the day we heard the news. I was at a bus stop listening to Radio 2 (unless I wasn't, details are sketchy). It's hard to remember anything or think clearly in the midst of this nauseating propaganda pea souper; the outpouring of Tory sycophancy and mistruth has been staggering - and it's still going on, partly because of the disturbances caused by 'leftists' dancing on Thatcher's (for it is she that I speak of) grave.

I am currently typing this (if, thanks to this broken keyboard, it can be called such) at Bristol library. On the way here I heard a couple of students, kids, on the seat behind me; one of them was saying that she wanted to get into 'sales'. That is the legacy of the 'iron lady'. Even when I was at school (which was during her heyday) I remember people saying similar things; one lad saying he wanted to get into accountancy. Even then I sneered - ok we need some people, I suppose, to deal with money matters, but to aspire to accountancy? In each case the motivation seems to be the same: it's good money. Whatever happened to true aspiration, with wanting to do something at least beneficial for society. While we might need people to count the coins, that's only because we live in a monetarist age.

There are better places to go to find a true representation of her reign of terror. Another Angry Voice is a blog on the links on this very page, while the Red Pepper has another analysis. Both will know doubt be ashes in the mouths of effusing Tory eulogists who, like Cameron, are happy to waste public money burying this creature while using the whole affair to launch into more ideological bollocks. I'm not going to engage in grave dancing, that's the sort of form the right wing media has (I seem to remember they 'celebrated' the sinking of the Belgrano with the phrase 'Gotcha'). This is how they operate, not I how operate.

Besides this isn't a victory: it's the marking of a new phase in the war against the Tory monied elite that worship Thatcher. The battle has not ended.

This whole business has revealed the Tories in a way they perhaps didn't realise. In their public eagerness to reveal their love for her warped and broken ideology they show their true colours in a way we could only have dreamed of during the Corporate Sports Festival and the Diamond Jubilee last year. Where it was ridiculous for GOve to suggest we all chip in to buy the Queen a new boat, we are told we must for out 10 million for a funeral.

It is now clear in a way it has never been before just how desperately wedded to a small minded ideology the Tories are, along with their hapless Libdem underlings. Every tribute is merely a thinly veiled pop at socialism/labour/the unions; a remark on how broken Britain was during the seventies. Yet it took a war and the vile rhetoric of the gutter press to shore up her support in the early years.

Noone can deny the devastating impact that is her legacy. No social housing at a time we are forced to undertake a 'spare room subsidy' (it's not a tax, remember!). She sold off the housing which of course gave more power to the banking sector (that she also supported). Why do people still have to rely on a huge millstone of debt - hundreds of thousands of pounds - just to get into a home! Thatcher allowed people to buy these houses, which of course is a vote winner, and never replaced them. Gone forever it seems is the notion of housing as a right and a communal resource. Now it's all housing bubbles and property speculation, all helped by banks that were unfettered in he eighties as never before. Where has that left us, well that's obvious to anyone with a brain surely.

Utilities were privatised in a purely ideological drive to destroy society leaving people with a dependence on market forces and profiteering corporations. This takes more money out of the economy as people have no choice but to spend their money on heating lighting and water. That is less money to be spent freely.

Perhaps the most nauseating part of her legacy is the perverse notion that she was an example to women. People the world over - including hopeless Hollywood actors like Streep - see her as a powerful icon of womanhood. They of course forget that she was backed by a very rich husband and was, ultimately, stabbed in the back by the stuffy patriarchy that remains in power to this day. There are very few women in the Tory party and in politics in general, yet most of them are obliged to pay this singular tribute to Thatcher just because she happened to be born with a particular set of chromosomes: had Thatcher not been the first, someone else would have. In my, masculine, opinion it means nothing. She did nothing to reform politics into a more gender equal environment, certainly didn't reform the attitudes of the ruling elite, and has left us with creatures as reprehensible and morally dead as the disgusting Edwina Currie and Theresa 'catwoman' May.

Yet since Monday the BBC has gone into overdrive, predictably I suppose, hosting an endless array of political superstars from yesteryear, from spitting image puppets like Douglas Hurd to Glasnost Gorbachev. It's like some ghastly TV reunion show. No doubt next week there will be wall to wall coverage of her corpse proceeding through the streets of a changed London, as oblivious in death as in life, to the havoc her stubborn ideas wrought.

Vile

If you didn't see the Daily Mail's headline in the wake of the Philpott verdict then you'd have to be blind or perhaps very lucky. 

Vile product of the welfare state, is how they lead yesterday's episode of the daily hate crime that is the Mail. Splashed above a family picture of the now-guilty Mick Philpott. I have never in my life read a headline as vulgar, as crass and as deeply offencive as that. 

It's been no secret for a long time that decent journalism has been in terminal decline in Britain, but this takes the absolute fucking biscuit - to use the death of children to push an odious agenda like this is not just a new low, it's the absolute nadir of journalism. Yet there will be plenty of people that believe this garbage. Plenty of programmed, emotionally charged insecure people that the Mail has convinced are the target of every weak minded lesser lazier person on the face of god's green earth. Whether it's foreigners, people practising one of those odd desert religions, people with brown faces, people on benefits, leftists, trots, socialists, unionists, unmarried women, single parents, children, other people, everyone else, they are all after you, your money, your house, and your family - in that order.

These purveyors of hate - as guilty as any Muslim hate preacher they spent the last decade decrying - would have us all believe the welfare state breeds these people. That it turns decent people into idle, good for nothing criminals, one step away from becoming the next child murdering arsonist scrounger, all because the devil makes work for idle hands. 

Social security is a very important safety net. Without it the capitalists have free reign to abuse and exploit. If you don't think that would happen then you are completely out of touch because it's already happening. Chris Rock, the comic, once made a joke about the minimum wage saying that what it really meant was "if I could pay you less, I would". How true. These are all protections for those of us not born into the right class or the right money. Take them away and we have the law of the jungle - then you really will see the likes of Mick Philpott multiply.

The way you deal with people like Mick Philpott isn't to deny those who need the money their benefit (a pittance paid to allow the dignity of not dying in the street). It is to invest in society. Instead of cutting the state to the bone and selling the hot flesh off to grubby American privateers, we should be investing in social services and education. Instead we get more horrible divide and rule hate crime from the black and redtops disguised as journalism.

If someone threw a petrol bomb (please don't) into the offices of the Daily Mail resulting in a complete loss of life, Mick Philpott would still be an even bigger criminal.

More BBC Bias

Yesterday I blogged about James Bartholomew and his bullshit performance on 5live's morning phone in. I didn't mention that he was opposed in that discussion by Polly Toynbee, who many see as a voice of the left - a 'guardianista'. This is because she was useless, conceding way too much and providing bugger all authoritative opposition to the flurry of unchecked right wing histrionics.

However at that point I had not listened to the entire discussion. Later, at about the 50 minute mark (after the umpteenth travel and weather update) the final three callers were brought on, together. Eileen called in from the Benefit Justice campaign, Jason called in as the voice of entrepreneurs from, of all places, the south of France, and Francine, a small business owning bigot, came on and spoke first. 

What she said was some of the most disgusting bigotry I have ever heard. Using the term 'benefit breeders' this ignorant bigot proceeded into a lunatic tirade against feral kids, antisocial behaviour and large families. When corrected by Eileen she couldn't even keep quiet, again another right winger so programmed, so on edge, that she had to release that tension by huffing and tutting and sighing audibly. 

Throughout her tirade Nicky Campbell did nothing to correct her or moderate her appalling bigotry. Of course had she made equal comments about race, gender, sexuality or even age, you can be 100% sure he would have stepped in. Yet, and more proof of the BBC's disgraceful bias, when Eileen made a broad point about big business evading tax, he stepped in to 'correct her' articulating an apparent, yet hypocritical, need for accuracy. 

Ok, the point about taxes may have been slightly off topic (though not really) and it may be, technically, a bit of a generalisation to say they all pay zero percent tax, but really that's the part you decide to correct? That's the comment that warrants an intervention? This is the problem with the BBC; the left is at a huge disadadvantage because of the prevailing media message, yet is never given a proper platform on an equal footing accordingly.

I tweeted Nicky Campbell about this. To his credit he did respond, but only to say that 'it wasn't an interview it was a discussion', and that 'lots of callers corrected her'. They didn't, those three were the last to phone in; besides it's the job of the chair of a discussion - in my view - to maintain objectivity and correct false information and prejudice. Not so with Auntie.

I Hate James Bartholomew

Know the Tory mindset: according to these creatures welfare breeds dependency. Meanwhile they do not want to set a minimum wage, they do not want to create legislation to protect the un - and under - employed from the predations of the system they benefit from. That word is chosen deliberately, because they like benefits for themselves - the ability to sack whom they like, when they like and how they like. In this UKIP are the same. This is the febrile heart of the right wing.

Yesterday on 5 Live's laughable morning phone in - bigots drink for free - another right wing excuse for a human, James Bartholomew, revealed another aspect of their nasty prejudice and staggering ignorance. Not surprisingly this vile creature was once a banker. He writes (if one can call it that) for the Telegraph and though I don't know the content of his ballot paper, I dare say I can guess. He props up every tory myth about the unemployed and welfare with dull witted aplomb.

He believes people have been induced to worklessness. A thoroughly bizarre phrase completely unsupported by facts, evidence or even anecdote. He believes that the government's welfare reforms are the proverbial bitter pill that, after the pain of swallowing has subsided, will bring about a change for the better. These changes will lead to more employed people in the country. This is a complete nonsense, unless you are so delusional that you think starving people out of their bed in the morning (if they have one left after paying for their 'spare' rooms) will create jobs. 

How will this create work? In the minds of these fevered capitalists it's all the fault of the claimant (though they try and soften this by blaming it again on the state, conveniently). The situation here isn't so dire that they can explicitly blame the unemployed for their condition (as they view it), but no doubt that's what they think. So if we do away with welfare - regardless of the human cost - there will be no impediment to work. But what work? What wages? People receive tax credits as a sop to the corporations that refuse to pay decent wages. Capitalist big business want it both ways and make sure their Tory servants achieve this: keep wages down, and keep welfare down. I don't think that's sustainable. 

Bartholomew thinks that tax credits subsidise the worker. He doesn't get it at all. They don'; they subsidise the employer. They are a poor substitute, typically of New Labour, for a decent wage that enables the right wing and libertarians to squeal about how the state breeds dependency. Of course someone working for NMW in the likes of Tesco is 'dependent' on Tax Credits: they can't live otherwise. In truth it's the employer that gets the real benefit, but benefits for the capitalists and the rich and the corporations are the acceptable face of welfare.

There was a caller, audibly anxious and using a pseudonym, that commented on the difficulty of life under ATOS. She explained her health conditions, suffering from extreme anxiety (only the most hard hearted could deny the clearly perceptible reality). She even said that, if a home visit from ATOS was possible, she'd be happy to go through the process. In response Bartholomew made some of the most disgusting comments I've ever heard:

"James Bartholomew," says Nicky Campbell (of whom I'm not a great fan), "there's a lot of people in Sarah's position."

"It's incredibly difficult to decide if someone is capable of work or not," James is not a doctor, nor has he any training as a diagnostician. People don't just get sick notes. If a GP cannot determine, with enough confidence, the veracity of someone's claim they can send them to a specialist who will know. But of course such people are marginalised by the right wing media that lacks the guts to come right out and accuse them of fraud. Insinuating this instead.

"The big rise in the disabilities that people have come to the welfare state with. The big rise has been in two disorders: musco (sic) - skeletal disorders - in other words backache - and mental problems."

But wait it gets better (that is to say, worse):

"These are two areas, not by coincidence in my view, where it's impossible to say yes you have or no you haven't a problem."

But wait it gets better (that is to say, worse):

"There's been no rise in broken legs or deafness. Only a rise in these conditions which you cannot verify."

How does he know these conditions cannot be verified? He doesn't; he's basing his entire position on the usual 'John had backache but was caught refereeing the local football team on Saturday' stories. Stock in trade for the right wing press, of which he, don't forget, is a member.

And the broken legs/deafness comment is just...what the fuck? 

But wait it gets better (that is to say, much worse):

"So it's going to be very difficult to distinguish between those people who have maybe below average intelligence, or not very able, or some mental problem, and those that have a smaaaall (his emphasis) problem and are egging it on and don't really want to bother."

'Mental problems' = low intelligence. Nice. James, you're a cunt. Of course he can't comment on Sarah's case "I can't comment on individual cases". No, but you can make sweeping wholly uninformed generalisations instead. It's all a mess, apparently, and you can't clean up a mess - unless you live in the grandeur of Torygraphshire or Westminster or the Square Mile - without pain. So suck it up, that's the message. 

No, James Bartholomew, people are not, nor have they ever been, better off unemployed. If you are only looking at the money - and even then you are only looking at a very few distorted cases (someone with 11 kids for instance, never mind that she's had cancer as well) - then you are not just missing the point, but wilfully ignorant.

The Myth of Workfare

You hear this a lot these days: “isn’t it better that so and so is in work, even if it’s not their dream job? Isn’t it better they are working than sitting on their arse collecting dole?”

I find this quite insulting. It’s also hyperbole as of course it presumes the alternative to honest labour is idleness and sloth, ostensibly in front of the television (which ironically makes money from this). I don’t see the DWP chastising Jeremy Kyle himself, or the channels that profit from the ad revenue gained from daytime television.

It’s an ignorant assumption based on outdated religious values. The presumption is that work per se is homogenous and wholesome (and that non-work spreads idleness). Of course work is far from homogenous. There are many kinds of work at many levels and not all of it is necessary or even healthy. We don’t consider what is beneficial; we just assume that any work is, even if it’s unpaid or even if it’s in the most low rent retail venues possible.

The idea seems to stem from the Garden of Eden; exiled for the crime of innocent curiosity Adam and Eve were set to toil in the dust all the days of their lives. It’s a nonsense – and it implies a punishment. Yet we still cling to this value: work corrects a failing moral character. Certainly that’s how Duncan Smith views it; unfortunately he’s living proof of the complete opposite.

We hold to this religious legacy as if it were timeless wisdom, fundamental in its certainty. Yet it is propagated in a society riddled with inequality imbalance and division under the yoke of a biased all pervasive media and administered by corrupt and equally biased ministers. Telling people they are going to benefit from working stacking shelves in the businesses run by their friends, many of whom sit unelected in government, is hardly wise. Who does this benefit? Where is the paper trail that connects months of shelf stacking at no wage to a life of good character and rampant opportunity? Even if a candidate wanted a career in Poundland, striving to be Mr Poundland, his chances are made exponentially slimmer by virtue of the government sending everyone there as ‘work experience’. This creates the dog eat dog world we live in as the aspirant is forced to compete for the increasingly fewer positions that appear the higher he ascends the pyramid scheme of capitalist working life. Yet he does so because these are the positions that pay the most, and that’s what’s important apparently.

Duncan Smith is a dangerous zealot. A short tempered and ignorant man with too much power who has become convinced (perhaps even manipulated) that welfare is not just a drain on the public purse, but itself is unhealthy. Apparently being on the dole is a dangerous dependency. Yet no one can explain how this makes any sense; people are not dependent on welfare, they are dependent on money. In this working and unemployed are the same, including many politicians (i.e. those not born into inherited wealth, status and privilege). If state dependency is so bad then perhaps Mr Duncan Christ should give up his expenses. That won’t happen; quite the opposite as the MP’s receive an extra £100 a year second home allowance from April (an act of supremely malicious irony). Meanwhile the Tories want an extra 30% wage. Is that dependency or just self entitlement? It certainly reeks of all the things the Tories, in particular, advocate as the great moral failings of the day.

Workfare is a myth. We all know it has nothing to do with experience or opportunity. If it did it would be more sensibly applied and with more sensitivity to the finances of the individual. Instead it’s another portal to the hell of sanctions to expedite cuts to welfare. It’s a stealth tax on the unemployed. You will note how people that are sanctioned are ‘exempt’ from workfare: Duncan Christ isn’t going to start paying people’s benefits so they can attend a workfare placement anymore than the employer (pimp) is going to pay them, but without that financial support – a prime example of how capitalism contradicts itself – the sanctioned candidate couldn’t attend. How could he afford to get there or feed himself while on the placement?

Yet again, the centre cannot hold.

The Golden Bullingdon

We impoverish ourselves in order to compete with countries already further down the road of totalitarianism.

We make people destitute and push them further from independence just to have a 'competitive' tax system that cannot meet the needs of the society, which is the one reason people pay taxes at all.

We implement cuts to vital services in a bid to preserve rates of lending and borrowing while decrying borrowing as precisely that which caused the problem in the first place.

We are a nation of sheep ruled by wolves who have inherited their fangs from generations of stolen land and money guarded by usury. The secret knowledge of money and its accumulation are kept from the poor who can't afford to join the club.

In a primitive land a shaman sees the sun beating down on the land. He feels its angry heat and petitions the tribal elders to sacrifice another goat. This is the only way he knows to sate the displeasure of the sky god who blinds all that gaze upon her.

In a modern land Osbourne sees the banks that pay his wages collapse. He feels their angry heat and petitions the Golden Bullingdon to sacrifice future generations just to keep the system alive for one more day. Those elders sanction his plans and the capricious deities known as the free market grant him their favour for one more day, one more week, one more quarter.

Nothing is growing. They have salted the earth. Devil has taken the hindmost and is coming up fast.

Unemployment Application

Some seventeen year old in America built an app that aggregates news feeds (I typed that, I should know what it means). He's now sold it for a cool $30 million. He didn't do it alone; in fact while he built the thing he's had a lot of financial support from the likes of Stephen Fry and Rupert Murdoch. 

Now I don't want to denigrate this kid's work. Fair play to him for building something and selling it, even if it's for a ridiculous sum of money - especially for a kid his age. But he's had a lot of breaks other kids won't. His dad works for Morgan Stanley and his mother appears to be an international lawyer. Life isn't giving him lemons, it's giving him Sturgeon's eggs.

What does this tell me?

It tells me that I live in a world that has changed around me. A world that doesn't offer the same opportunities to people that find themselves out of work, never mind to disadvantaged people. Ironically while there are some systems in place for people with issues that are conventionally accepted, there are plenty that slip through the cracks. Surely everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to build apps that might make millions? But I wouldn't even know where to begin. I don't own anything that uses an app in the pure sense: I don't have an iPhone or a tablet or a laptop netbook pad device. Despite being continually told how easy these things are to acquire on the dole - they must be as everyone unemployed seems to own them - I cannot afford such things.

This is a world that passes me by. Here in my little hamlet there is no support of any kind. The Work Programme certainly isn't going to furnish me with smart technology and, though I haven't asked, I can't imagine they will fund me learning to build apps. Meanwhile kids these days are in schools built around this technology on a curriculum that is designed for a world that embraces these things. They do homework on laptops, they talk to each other through smartphones, they will probably one day have their entire school reduced to an app. All of this stuff is taken for granted, which is as it should be - technology is ever changing and should be assimilated as quickly as 

possible. However for people on the dole access to it - to the opportunities it affords - is a luxury. This is backward and self defeated thinking. We already have a huge problem with unemployment among the youth and they are the people at the cutting edge of this technology for reasons mentioned above: they own it, they understand it best, and they are raised on it in school. People on the dole having to deal with the sheer incompetence and poverty of the Work Programme are instead sent to musty old churches, or stuffed in failing prefab office spaces (the sort we went to school in, you know where there are roof tiles falling down all the time and a constant threat of asbestos), where the only technology is Universal Jobmatch. We are not given an opportunity to learn new tools and skills that, even at best, would put us on an even footing with the youth. So what chance do we have when even they have no chance?