Monday 8 April 2013

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
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Purposeful stigmatisation of social security claimants (many other sources could also be cited)

Friday 5 April 2013

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.