Posh Boys Don’t Worry About Breaking the Law

Yes, as we would expect, it’s one rule for them, and one rule for the rest of us plebs. They don’t just hold us in contempt, they want to show to the world loudly and clearly that they can’t stand us, and by heaven, they sure as hell aren’t going to follow the rules that the rest of us are expected to abide by.

Vitriol aside (only for a moment, don’t worry), there is a serious point demonstrated by this rude behaviour: they live in a different world, the world of wealth, privilege, power, and relish the suffering of the people they cause to, well, suffer. They matter, and we don’t. Common decency and courteous behaviour are all that, ultimately, bind our society as a place where we would want to live. Not for posh boys. It’s their society, to do with as they will. And as for decency, well, the decent person is the servant who does what they are told. And servants don’t have feelings. They are hardly human at all.

And their offences (nearly forgot)?

George Osborne allowed his chauffeur-driven £50,000 Land Rover to be parked in a Disabled Bay, reserved for Blue Badge holders, on two occasions! At an M4 service station, and a week earlier at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

And David Cameron allowed his chauffeur-driven Jaguar to be parked in a restricted zone for three hours, when the sign states that parking is for 30 minutes only.

A disabled driver who fails to display their Blue Badge gets a fine. George Osborne and David Cameron posh boys in their magic cloaks of invincible privilege get to have a laugh at the common people who get a right and proper telling-off for being naughty.

To see George Osborne’s car parked in a Disabled Bay at an M4 service station, click here.

To see David Cameron's car parked in a restricted zone, click here. 

SOURCES:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-parks-disabled-bay-1812379
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-parked-another-disabled-1814506
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-causes-outrage-parking-1816145

Open Letter to David Cameron – This Immorality Shames You

Dear Prime Minister,

Immoral targetting of disabled people

I would like to protest at the unjust and cruelly vindictive bedroom tax which you have imposed on 660,000 households in publicly rented housing across the country, up to two-thirds of which are estimated to include a disabled member. This measure, along with others, constitutes a deliberate and purposeful targetting of disabled people, people for whom life is a struggle in any event, and people who are vulnerable in a variety of ways.

It is hardly credible that a normal human being with the usual sort of moral sense would for a moment consider enacting such cruelty. What you are doing is unconscionable.

Your policies, and you as individual person, are in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (ratified by the United Kingdom in 1951, and fully incorporated into UK law with the Human Rights Act 1998).

You have breached Article 1 of the Declaration: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

You are not acting in a spirit of brotherhood. Indeed, your policies, and the general approach of your government, have been to demonise and stigmatise all social security claimants and people who through no fault of their own cannot be productive in terms of earning a wage, yet of course contribute to the social and cultural life of this nation in many ways.

You are in breach of Article 25(1): “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

On a continuing daily basis, even before the new changes to social security took effect in April 2013, we hear accounts of how more and more people have to attend food banks even to maintain a basic standard of sustenance, and this being so, clearly social security support is not adequate for some people. (One of your responses has been to blame such people for their own plight as a result of frittering away their money on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling, a claim that would be just laughable if it were not also shamefully false.)

By uprating most benefits by only 1%, at less than the rate of inflation, you have effectively cut social security payments for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Considering that our nation is one of the richest in the world, this can only be considered as a deliberate act of malice, a policy whose known and intended result is increased suffering for people least able to bear it.

Your claim that you need to “make hard choices” is bizarrely spurious in the extreme, and your talk of the “need to reduce the deficit” is nothing more than a smoke-screen designed to bamboozle the economically ignorant whom you are treating with contempt and derision. Any need to alter the fiscal arrangements of this country can easily be accommodated without harming poor and vulnerable people, not least by dealing with the scandals of tax avoidance and the grotesque levels of bonuses paid to bankers, and most certainly by introducing a just and progressive income tax system.

I am able to test your moral bankruptcy by predicting that before you read this sentence you were already laughing contemptuously and dismissively at this letter. If you lack moral integrity, others do not; and the people of this fine land will find ways to challenge your harmful influence. I for one will be working to vote you out at the next election.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Miles

SOURCES:

Law Observer

http://www.lawobserver.co.uk/human_rights_27.html

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Purposeful stigmatisation of social security claimants (many other sources could also be cited)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/05/goverment-loaded-language-welfare

Food Banks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/27/london-food-poverty-fears-grow
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/mar/31/britain-day-of-shame-welfare

Poor People – the Factual Facts

Please go here, to find out about the report on Truth and Lies about Poverty

where, as you go down the page, you will find a wonderfully funny video called Poor People – the Factual Facts

This link should take you straight to the video if you don't want to do any reading first.

Download the full report Truth and lies about poverty

Feel the Cruelty, But Laugh in their Faces

I have just found this, which has momentarily lifted my Tory-induced despair.

How to Wage War on the Poor

[By “bullingdonmorons”, comment in a blog post at The Guardian 21/03/2013]*

Probably the most disgusting thing about this coalition has been their propaganda war against the most disadvantaged people in society. By the deliberate spreading of lies, they have facilitated a systematic assault upon the poor, the sick and the disabled. And they have knowingly misled the public for one simple reason, to enable them to totally dismantle the welfare state.

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are lying Tory bastards.

The welfare state has led to a ‘something for nothing’ culture?

It may be utterly repugnant to hear millionaire politicians who have never worked a day in their life telling us that they are ending the ‘something for nothing culture’, but it’s also utter bollocks. Only 2.5% of the total welfare budget of £200 billion actually goes on unemployment, whilst the vast majority of unemployed claimants have worked, and paid taxes, for years and are now on benefits due to redundancy, sickness, disability or having to care for someone. Millions more are receiving benefits due to poverty wages. The Welfare State is actually a massive state subsidy to business which enables it to pay poverty wages and charge exorbitant rents.

Living on benefits is a lifestyle choice?

Only 0.1% of benefit claimants who have claimed for 10 years or more are actually unemployed. Less than 5,000 people, out of over 9 million 16–64-year-olds who don’t work, have been on Job Seekers Allowance for more than 5 years. Less than 0.1% of the 20 million working age households have two generations that have never had a permanent job. Despite strenuous efforts, researchers have been unable to find any families where three generations have never worked.

People won’t work because benefits are too high?

In 1971, JSA equalled 20.9% of the average wage. Today, it is worth 10.9%. These people are living in poverty. There are 8.5 million people receiving benefits in this country. There are more people in work who get benefits than not working. The majority of all housing benefit claimants are in work. 6.1 million people classed as living in poverty are from households in work.

People on housing benefit live in mansions?

Our newspapers continuously bombard us with these stories. There are around five million claimants of Housing Benefit; of which there were five families who received over £100,000 per year, all living in central London. The average award of Housing Benefit is approximately £85 a week. Only 3% of families received more than £10,000 a year support, and 0.04% received more than £30,000 a year. And no one ever mentions that housing benefit goes straight to the landlord and not the claimant. And those large families screwing the taxpayer? There are around 130 families with 10 children and only 10 families with 12 children in the whole country who are on benefits.

Benefit cheats are bankrupting the country?

Benefit fraud amounts to about £1.5 billion a year, less than 1% of the entire budget. To put this in perspective, the bank bailout equalled 1,000 years of benefit fraud. Meanwhile, £1.3 billion gets underpaid each year and a further £16 billion goes unclaimed every year.

We can no longer afford the welfare state?

So who is really bankrupting the country? Well, the richest 1,000 people now possess £414 billion between them, a sum more than three times the size of the entire UK budget deficit. The richest 1% of the population are estimated to possess wealth of about £1 trillion. The richest 10% control wealth of about £4 trillion. The Quantitative Easing programme has increased the personal wealth of the UK’s richest 20% by enough to pay for Job Seeker’s Allowance for the next 100 years.

The people of this country are being shafted, but instead of the blame being directed at the real culprits, the rich, it is being aimed at the most vulnerable, the poor, with our own Government shamelessly leading the way.

And every one who believes their bullshit should hang their heads in shame.


*I have not been able to find this post where it was originally uploaded at the Guardian site. The version I repost here is from this page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/30/poverty-benefits-not-lifestyle-choice#comment-22350064
The piece has also been reposted at Sue Marsh’s blog, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger:
http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/why-wont-dwp-really-meet-spartacus.html#comment-form

The facts included here in this reposted piece are downright astonishing. It is not the budget for the Welfare State that is out of control, but the Tory-led government itself whose overarching immortality needs to be exposed and expunged from political life.

Alas, I have not been able to verify the original sources for these facts, and I will be happy to include amendments, alternations and acknowledges as necessary, if anyone can send me details of the sources. Please use the comments feature on this blog to send me as much information as possible. Or please just comment in the usual way, to add your own thoughts and personal experiences to this blog. God Help Us All.

Tories Target Poorest and Sickest

We now have clear evidence of the outrageous immorality of Tory policy in its drive to protect the richest in society at the expense of the poorest and the most vulnerable, not just in the sense that the poor will be a bit poorer than they were before, but in the sense that the poor will be made to suffer, to cringe at the nastiness of modern living as the Tory government is shaping it. And the government is doing this with wilful intent, purposefully finding ways to make the poorest and most vulnerable suffer.

Instead of making the tax system more fair, and taxing the richest people a little more – a mere slither of a little extra considered as a proportion of their massive wealth – the government has reduced the rate of income tax for the richest and will cut deeply into the incomes and services needed desperately by the sick and disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups.

And the cuts are going to slice deep. The government wants to ‘save’ £75.2 billion, and the areas being cut the most are social care and welfare.

In other words, the most vulnerable in society are being hunted down to pay the price for the failure of the capitalist system, for the incompetence of government, and the incompetence of the banks. And to satisfy the greed of the richest.

Using the government’s own figures, Dr Simon Duffy in his report A fair society? How the cuts target disabled people, published by the Campaign for a Fair Society, finds that:

Using the government’s own figures, it is clear that by 2015 ... benefits for disabled people and the poorest will ... have been cut by £18 billion, a cut of about 20%.

When we look at the combined impact of all the cuts we find:

• People in poverty (21% of the population) bear 39% of all cuts.

• Disabled people (8% of the population) bear 29% of all cuts.

• People with severest disabilities (2% of the whole population) bear 15% of all cuts.

Not only are the cuts in general being targeted at people in poverty, but there is a specific emphasis on targeting disabled people. You cannot argue against that sort of inhuman discrimination, because the person you are trying to argue with is plainly not open to, or not interested in rational argument.

The only explanation for this that makes any sense is to understand that Cameron, Osborne and the rest literally have something wrong with them. They are incapable of the normal sort of moral thinking that guides the daily lives of you and me. They display the psychology that we see in psychopaths, that is, people who literally do not have feelings for other people, but use them like insensible objects, as resources for their own self-serving schemes.


SOURCE

http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/uploads/attachment/354/a-fair-society.pdf

Make the Children Suffer

What words should we use to describe the people who perpetrate this outrage? Are they callous, unfeeling, psychopathic, heartless, or just plain stupid? Maybe they just hate people – except themselves, of course, and their rich chums, and the corporations in whose pockets they are nestled down so comfortably.

The moral crime that any decent person must accuse Cameron and his posh boys of committing is that of pushing 200,000 more children into poverty. Their squeeze on tax credits and other social security benefits will push a population the size of Northampton – were everyone living there to be a child – into poverty. This will happen as the result of capping most benefits to 1% over the next three years.

Their reason? Get ready for one of the most stupid bits of ‘reasoning’ you are going to hear for a long time.

They are doing this because it would be unfair for working people to have their incomes rise at a lower annual rate than those of social security claimants.

Be careful you don’t fall into their devious trap. Let’s get clear on what that means.

They think it would be unfair for someone on an average income, say, of £26,500 to have that income rise by only 1.5% and a benefit claimant to have their income rise by a greater percentage of say 2%.

The hard-working striver grosses £509 per week, and a 1.5% increase would give them an extra £7.64. Let’s look at the ‘injustice’ of giving the JSA claimant a 2% increase. Well, with JSA at £71 per week, a 2% increase would be £1.42.

So there you have it. In the Einstein-sharp mind of a Tory posh boy, giving the working person £6.22 more than someone struggling on Jobseeker’s Allowance would be unfair.

This nasty, nasty cap of 1% has the sole purpose of dividing one group of people against another group, of trying to stir up hated in working people, who have the luxury of a job, against the unemployed. No doubt some people have fallen for the trick, and no doubt some people now have more hatred glaring from their hard-working eyes than they had before.

But much worse than that will be the effect that the Tories’ pathetically nasty policy has on children. Children are the innocents in all this. They know nothing of scrounging and striving. All they know is that the deeper their families are pushed into poverty, the worse their suffering.

To push through a policy whose chief effect is to hurt children takes some beating. To say that that is disgusting, immoral or cruel, rather misses the point that in one of the world’s richest economies, the multi-millionaire posh boys of Cameron’s cabinet have deliberately pursued a policy one of whose most tangible evils is the hurting of children.


SOURCES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/17/benefits-squeeze-200000-children-poverty

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20442666

http://www.citypopulation.de/UK-Cities.html

British Government Lying Again?

The government claims to have created an additional half a million new jobs in the past year. At best, this is a gross exaggeration, at worst, a deliberate deception, because over 20% of those ‘jobs’ are being done by unemployed people still receiving jobseeker’s allowance on unpaid government ‘back-to-work-schemes’. Some are unpaid workers doing voluntary or mandatory ‘work experience’ in supermarkets and charity shops.

Many, therefore, are working for businesses and corporations who exploit their workers for the profit they produce, and pay them nothing!

Some of that half million include tens of thousands with no jobs and no training, who simply attend regular job-hunting workshops for nothing more than the benefit payments they are entitled to – and the government counts them as having a job! You couldn’t make it up, it’s so daft!

But apparently this is the right way to do it, because under International Labour Organisation guidelines, people are counted as being employed if they are contributing to the nation's economic output, regardless of whether or not they get paid.

They work. Someone else benefits.

Let’s call that what it is. It’s a sort of slavery. It’s bullies pushing around the weak and vulnerable for as much profit they can extract.

Then when the placements end, the poor slaves are pushed back into the ranks of the scroungers and maligned benefit cheats, ready for another kicking by the government and the right-wing press.

Well, we have put posh-boy millionaire bullies in charge, and top-class bullying is what we get.


SOURCES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/15/statistics-doubt-coalition-500000-jobs

Austerity — the Biggest Con Ever

The gap between rich and poor has grown faster in Britain than in any other developed country over recent decades. Taxes for the rich have been cut, whilst social security benefits for the poor are being scaled back. Public services, including the National Health Service, and virtually all services provided by local authorities are being cut. All in the name of austerity. All with the ludicrously false claim that our country is too poor to provide these services at former levels, that we simply do not have the money, and that we must cut public expenditure or face some dire calamity that will bring ruin to us all.

These claims are not just false. They are intended to deceive us, to bully us into accepting the need for so-called austerity.

The need for austerity is a myth. A total lie, designed to make the richest 1% richer still, and to keep the rest of us, the 99%, in our place, ready to serve our masters as slaves in all but name.

THESE ARE THE FACTS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the National Debt stood at about 30 percent of GDP. It rose above 150 percent in World War I and stayed relatively high until dropping below 100 percent in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, debt declined to 50 percent of GDP, and dropped to 25 percent by 1990. The National Debt began to increase again in the aftermath of the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, and today is the same as it was in the late 1960s.

But this does not mean that there is a ‘debt crisis’. It means that the UK government owes £1,526,000,000,000 — which is approximately 59% of the total UK economy for one year.

In fact, the only time since the early 1700s when the national debt has been lower than it is now was during the period between the latter decades of the 19th century and the start of World War I. The level of debt we have now is completely normal. It is a feature of the economic system. It is nothing more than an aspect of how it works.

THE LIE

That today’s debt constitutes a problem is a complete and utter fiction, conconcted and spread by the richest 1% and their friends in government so as to keep the rest of us under their heel, and to ‘justify’ the government’s ‘difficult’ decision to slam the most vulnerable, the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, with cuts to their entitlements within the Welfare State.

The government is lying to you. It is lying to all of us. It distorts facts and figures to suit its purpose. And it’s purpose? To make themselves and their millionaire friends richer, and to do that by making the rest of us poorer. And it’s method is to demonise the poor, lie about the sick and disabled. Drip, drip, drip the deceit to a compliant press that little by little deceives people into thinking that most disabled people are frauds, deliberately merging the criminal with the disabled person.

It is time to fight back.


SOURCES

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8935943/Gap-between-rich-and-poor-growing-fastest-in-Britain.html
www.ukpublicspending.co.uk
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/downchart_ukgs.php?chart=G0-total&year=1692_2011&units=p&state=UK

The Welfare State

The creation of the Welfare State in the UK in the twentieth century represents the most significant advance of social justice in human history.

At every stage of life, from the months before you were born, through your infancy, childhood and education, through your working life, then on to retirement in old age, the Welfare State ensures a minimum standard of support for all your essential needs. However well you fare in life, or however dismal events turn out for you, the institutions of the Welfare State will be on hand to provide you with the help that is appropriate for you to make the best life that is possible under your own unique circumstances.

And this is exactly as it should be. It marks out the society that embraces the principle of universal welfare entitlements as one that is more civilised than it was before, and the extent to which the Welfare State is expanded and better resourced marks the extent to which our society takes seriously its collective moral responsibilities.

Any reduction in provision is a failure of civilisation, planned by those with plenty, with money, with power, with connections, perpetrated on those without such advantages, the result of which will be pain, suffering, and the manifestation of cruelty on a truly massive scale.

This issue divides decent, caring, moral people from those who are devious, heartless, uncaring and selfish, who lack the spirit of common human decency.

We are human beings, and our lives have value, and we demand to be treated with the moral consideration we are entitled to.