The Cost of Dismantling the Welfare State does Not Add Up

This was my response to an article in The Gaurdian headlined as above.

It adds up if you are a Tory Boy and Dealer Dave Cameron is certainly one of those.


His comments "The thought of prisoners getting the vote makes me feel sick" and "People (on housing benefit) should not be living in houses they could not dream of owning" place him somewhere out there with Hitler. Dave of course plans to starve us to death instead of murdering us.

How can Nick Clegg continue to ally himself to the dealer while he is taking the food out of the mouths of children and the sick with one hand while slipping £35000 a year to the man who takes his photo with the other.

What we are paying for with the money Dave has stolen from us is the re-inforcement of Tory ideology.

Cameron was NOT GIVEN A MANDATE TO DO THIS. HE DID NOT WIN THE ELECTION. HE IS IN DOWNING STREET BY DEFAULT.

We saw how Thatchers destruction of the welfare state could not be repaired by Labour over 13years. Dealer Dave realises he probably only has one term to achieve his aims so he has set out immediately to undo the repairs Labour were able to afford to make.

The "URGENCY" behind his cuts is to protect the Banks and the Stock Market. The "Urgency" has nothing to do with the ordinary people of this country

Because of the actions of those with money in this country, those without money are being kicked while they are down.

The dismantling of the Welfare State, while stigmatising those too ill to work, and outrageously labelling as "work shy" those who are unable to find work, especially at a time when the actions of the government are about to cause millions to lose their jobs, are criminal.

It must be clear to even the stupidest fan of Dealer Dave that as the Job Market becomes flooded with those whose jobs have crumbled, that the disabled, the sick, and the long term unemployed will have no chance of obtaining the jobs that are available.

I still wait for an MP or a Paxman or a Non Murdoch Journalist to ask how these radical changes are being funded. If 85% of Incapacity Benifit desicions were overturned at tribunal how much did those tribunals cost, and how does that compare to the money "saved" from the other 15%.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

This is the big society we are all in together.
1. A reduction in child benefit for the wealthy will be easy to cheat and there are no plans to check up or enforce it.
This is the big society we are all in together.
2. The children of disabled parents are having the food taken out of their mouths because their parents benefit is being reduced for up to three months while people without medical information decide whether they should "seek work".

This is the big society we are all in together.
3. A new "airport tax" has come in to force. The BBC has already had tax experts on radio programs telling those who can afford to fly how to get around the new tax.
4. The BBC broadcast the news that 85% of people in Burnley who had their disability benefit cut had it given back as soon as a judge sought medical advice about their disabilities. The BBC did not question what this must be costing. Knowing the exorbitant rates of legal costs, one suspects it is a lot more than the money saved from the other 15%.

This is the big society we are all in together.
5. You may have read or seen that Rupert Murdoch told 30 business men that he supports the way Cameron is carrying on Thatcher's work.
6. You will not read, or learn, via Murdoch’s many media outlets, that people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia are being told they must seek work they have no chance of obtaining. The alternative, to stay in psychiatric hospitals that have no room for them, because Thatcher shut all the big psychiatric hospitals down.

This is the big society we are all in together.
7. You will have heard about Cameron’s stamp down on immigration.
8. You are not being told that asylum seekers whose cases are taking too long to investigate are being told they can stay before the investigation is completed. Remember this when dealer Dave Cameron tells you there are less asylum seekers in the system.

This is the big society we are all in together.
9. Cameron and the other 20 millionaire members of his cabinet are worried that the value of their investments will fall.
10. I am worried that even though I have been told by specialists who deal with my back, and psychiatrists who help with my depression, that I should not attempt to work again: and even though I have been retired from two very different occupations on medical grounds, meaning I am uninsurable and therefore unemployable: that someone who has not had access to my medical notes WILL decide I must look for work when I am honest and tell them that on a very good day I can stand at my cooker, while leaning against my sink, long enough to fry an egg. Does that sound extreme, it is already happening to people.

This is the big society we are all in together.
11. William Hague’s mate Lord Ashcroft, the tax dodger who gives millions to the Tory party and said he would move to the United Kingdom if Cameron won the election, has decided not to move here after all. There has been no mention of whether the Government will now attempt to obtain the tax he owes.
12. Dealer Dave said on Wednesday that people on housing benefit, “Have no right to live in houses they could not have dreamed of if they were working”. Here in London this means that hundreds of old people who were once taxpaying workers but who have fallen on hard times, will be moved out the homes they have lived in throughout their lives and put into bed and breakfast. This will be coming to an area to you soon.

This is the big society we are all in together.

Davey boy gets his missus up the spout again

So, the MULTI-MILLIONAIRE who want's us to call him 'Dave' Cameron, and his (independently) MULTI-MILLIONAIRE wife Sarah, are expecting their fourth child.
Try doing that on the average wage during a recession.

So, the Australian MULTI-BILLIONAIRE Rupert Murdoch has bought the silence of Max Clifford so we will never know the extent to which Murdoch's ex employee, and Daves current image consultant, illegally tapped the phones of politicians while he was the editor of the tabloid News of The World.

At the same time the SUN owning voice of the common man, Australian MULTI-BILLIONAIRE Rupert Murdoch who also owns The TIMES, has financed an 'indepentent' documentary by Chanel 4 which sets out to make three resigned LABOUR cabinet ministers look as devious as Geoffrey Archer, The Hamiltons, and a bloke who's name I have forgotten, were made to look by the SUN in 1994 etc, etc. They are forgetting that the main focus of the anger of the common people was that the 1990's Gang of Four were all found guilty of lying in court. Us commoners are so used to the 'high ups' in every workplace fiddling their expenses that the financial aspects were not very important to us 'ordinary people'.

What MULTI-MILLIONAIRE ,Dave, and his (independently) MULTI-MILLIONAIRE wife Sarah, and their MULTI-BILLIONAIRE Australian friend Rupert Murdoch, don't seem to realise is that even us 'mindless' Twitter and Facebook users are able to notice the extent to which Disaster Dave and his family and friends are trying to reconstruct the succesfull campaign of Tony Blair, right down to the pregnancy of the glamorous wife.

Dave's favourite terms when discussing Gordon Brown are: 'EVERYBODY' - -  (doesn't like him), and 'NOBODY' - - (Listen's to him, believes him etc) - - ANY MORE. The usage of the terms 'anybody'; and 'everybody'; used in this context are of course the verbal weapons of the playground bully. Oh yes, and the tabloid headline writer.

“’Ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go” (Or - things we are learning now that Dave has had to stop insulting the Prime Minister and reveal what Dave is really like.)

Do you remember the arrogant, smarmy, patronising way that Tory MP’s would speak to us when they hid behind Thatcher thinking she was invincible? Well: have you noticed that Cameron talks to us just like that too? Like the teacher the kids loathe and make fun of behind his back, mimicking his over emphasised hand gestures and his alien (to all but pals) accent.

You would think he would now welcome the chance to stop pretending to be important and become the “real thing” by handling a couple of recent controversies rising from his Patriotic, one Britain, party. You might expect him to have fully answered a couple of recent tricky questions, especially considering the way he has repeatedly wasted PM’s Question Time by making cheap jibes about the PM, and demanding on behalf of the people in the street, (who actually don’t give a toss about such trivialities), that the PM must answer ‘in person’ questions of great national importance about “issues” such as which way his handwriting slopes and whether he always remembers to say please and thank you to his secretary.

But no! Twice in a week he has said as little as possible in response to situations that offered him a chance to demonstrate how Patriotic and Egalitarian his leadership, and his party, will be if they win the election.

The first of these occurred two weeks ago when Nicholas Winterton, MP, made it very clear during a radio interview that he is not yet ready for the classless society Dave is inferring he will create. You’d have thought this was a situation just made for Cameron to show his mettle, but no, a mumbled response from Tory Central Office claiming the errant Lord was “out of touch” was all we got. Difficult for Dave though, because just a few days before he was busy claiming that you, and I, and, well, just about anybody who uses the internet is a lesser mortal than he and his chums.

It didn’t really surprise me. I can remember the deafening silence a few months ago when Dave’s old university chum Boris referred to the ‘ordinary’ people of London as “Hoi Polloi”.

Having missed his openings there you might have expected Dave to grasp with both hands another opportunity to demonstrate to the voter in the street just how patriotic he is. I am referring of course to the news that major Tory fund provider, Lord Ashcroft, had reneged on his agreement to become resident in the UK in exchange for his peerage. Dave could have taken the opportunity to tell us why avoiding payment of taxes, and using the profit to fund a political party, is different from fiddling expenses while working for a political party. He could also have told us why Ashcroft is saying he will move to this country if Dave’s party wins the election. I wonder if Dave has told him something that we, and his other pals, don’t know.

None of this really surprised me either. After all, Dave didn’t think twice about joining up with the power seeking Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, and, in this week of all weeks, the whole world is becoming aware of how Dave has planned to sell out the BBC to diminish the Beeb’s ability to reduce the profits of Murdoch’s Broadcasting and Newspaper Empire.

I guess we should all thank Dave for showing us in advance that if he wins we are due to return to the free market, anything for a profit, days of Thatcherism.

In which poor, bullied Nick Griffin turns to Disasterdly for help.

Disasterdly must be getting something right. He has been chosen by Nick Griffin to be the only political leader he (Griffin) has asked to join him in condemning what Griffin perceived to be bullying by David Dimbleby, and the question time panel, and the question time audience on the programme.
This can only be because Griffin perceives Disasterdly to be the 'big party' leader whose policies are closest to his own. Various panel and audience member described Griffin as 'devious' and he undoubtedly is, but no more so than Disasterdly who placed an unelected Asian Woman on the panel to face Griffin but neglected to tell her that by not making it clear she is a baroness she might also be perpetrating an inacurate view of Tory party membership to the watching public.
I felt one chance was lost, by repeatedly calling on black or asian members of the audience to comment on BNP policy David Dimbleby provided Griffin (who conveniently seems to have forgotten that the majority of the audience condemning him were white) with ammunition to support his claim that London has been 'Ethnically Cleansed'.
Grifin was described as a holocaust survivor. Once again discussion of the holocaust understandably focused on the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish communities in 1940's Europe. Overlooked once more was the fact that that hundreds of thousands of disabled, older, and mentally ill people, were also sent to the Gas chambers. The bullying of the infirm and the mentally ill is an area where Griffin could legitimately claim that Winston Churchill did agree with Nazi policy, as does his would be ally of choice, Disasterdly David Cameron.

Regarding the Ethnic Cleansing of London, Boris the Bludgeon sought to gain merit points by making a point about Griffin not being wanted in London. Being the Bludgeon he naturally attempted to make his point in a humorous manner, not a suitable way of treating a bigot, and a chance lost to remind Griffins followers what Ethnic Cleansing actually does entail.

The Bludgeon has cause to be grateful to Griffin. By dominating the printed and broadcasting media this week he has almost obscured any discussion of the fact that Bludgeon has subsidised his vote catching middle class policy of scrapping the extension of the congestion zone by increasing bus and train fares in the city.
A foresight of the changes the public will become very familiar if Disasterdly and his chums win the election next year. Bludgeons mates from the suburbs in their 4x4's overtaking buses filled with genuine 'greens' and those who cannot afford to travel by car, who are paying more for the privilege.


OH WELL, I SUPPOSE THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU VOTE FOR PERSONALITY NOT POLICY, which of course is the reason that Disasterdly has wasted every Prime Ministers Question Time for the past three years by trying to demonstrate Gordon Brown's unwillingness to play the personality game, instead of asking questions that we voters wanted to hear the answers to.

in which Tory Boy puts in an appearance to "big up" an old friend.

8th October 2009


Well, well, well. I couldn't believe my ears. On a news bulletin an extract from a speech made by Tory Boy William Hague telling us all how a government led by Disasterdly will be just as successful as the one led by Thatcher was! He went on to say that successive Labour governments have undone all of the wonderful things Thatcher achieved.

This set me thinking, the majority of my working life occurred under governments led by Thatcher and, because my ambition, my illness, or my disability caused me to change working environments throughout that period I possibly have a unique insight into just how "successful" those governments were.

Between 1972 and 1980 I worked for a company that manufactured agricultural machinery and sold both its own and other manufacturer’s products. At the time I joined the company it was strong and healthy and had just taken over another company meaning it had branches in three separate towns. Between 1979 and 1984 I had a role in the company which meant I had responsibilities in each of the three branches. We survived petrol shortages, we survived power shortages and the three-day week, we survived changes in agriculture. The manufacturing branch of the company had to radically rethink its products and became a market leader with several products and, with one in particular, was a major exporter.

During the first five years of Thatcher we began to benefit from the misfortune of other companies who had been forced to close down. In my department life became more difficult as more and more companies went to the wall and we were increasingly finding it difficult to source spare parts for machinery that was obsolete within months of coming onto the market as small manufacturers closed down at the rate of about one a week.
In many instances the only direct replacement for a British made product was manufactured in the USA or in Japan. Because of the high exchange rates our customers were paying up to twice as much for machinery and equipment that was no better than that which had been manufactured in Britain but was no longer available.

Between 1984 and 1988 I was working in the accounting and IT departments of the company when the worsening financial situation meant we had to close down the branch that had been acquired shortly after I joined the company. Our manufacturing company was frequently let down by raw material suppliers and found its marketplace shrinking as more and more small farmers went out of business.

I left the company in 1988, by 1999 both the retail and manufacturing companies had been forced out of business. So much for the successes of Thatcher's or the subsequent Tory government regarding buisness.

I had moved into full-time Social Work in 1988. I discovered I had moved into a world where staff shortages and lack of resources meant that a lot of overworked people were attempting to provide assistance for an ever-growing population of clients in substandard facilities because of the local government cuts imposed by Thatcher's government.

Children are still at risk today because there has never been enough government money available to compensate for the damage Thatcher caused by ripping the heart out of initiatives that were still in their infancy, (social work as we know it only began in 1972), and were being forced to make cuts in service before they had had the chance to grow to the size they should have been.

Services for the mentally ill were affected in the same way, in fact, almost every time we read in the media of violence being perpetrated by someone with a mental illness it can be shown that this is a person who would have been receiving more support if it were not for the changes brought about through lack of funding in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

The reason that many older people are being forced to sell their homes to cover the costs of residential care for a much loved dependent relative can be directly traced back to the point at which a lack of support from central government led to social services selling off, or simply closing down, their resources for older people.

At the same time as social work was tossed into this state of turmoil from which it has still not recovered the police, the Probation Service, the National Health Service, and Educational Support Services were left in a similar state of malaise because they were forced into a permanent state of transition as they were called upon to try out the latest "favoured approach" of their political masters before ever being given time to adjust to the previous one.

In 1998 the combination of my illness and my disability forced me to retire from social work. In 2000, having undertaken training, I took up a post in adult education leading courses focusing on Health and Social Care.

Here I was astounded to come across intelligent young adults between 16 and 19 years old who had been so let down by the education system that we had to teach them basic literacy skills before they could embark on the course of their choice. My sadness for them was equalled by my anger at "the system" because I had direct experience of, and was aware of, the cuts made in educational support services between 1988 and that time which led to the removal of the specialist facilities those young people would have benefited from.

Now, if Disasterdly, Tory Boy, Bludgeon, and their chums were to read this their retort would be that Labour governments have had 14 years to put these things right. That is rubbish. They are relying on the fact that the amount of damage wrought upon these essential Social Services is probably beyond the comprehension of any person who didn't experience what was happening at the time. In fact, living in their wealthy families and being educated in their public schools they will never have faced the dilemmas that cause people to turn to the services.

Those of us providing, or attempting to provide, services to children and their families during the early 1990s will never forget the frustration as we witnessed families falling into a poverty trap. We'll never forget our anger as specialist facilities created to teach parents and children how to live together safely were scrapped for being financially unviable. Our amazement as vulnerable adults with Learning Difficulties or Mental Health problems were abandoned to their own devices because their situation did not tick enough boxes on some bureaucrat’s "risk assessment" sheet. Or took part in a battle between Health departments and Social Services over who was responsible for what part of the cost for services for a vulnerable older person whose identity was forgotten as they became labelled a “Bed Blocker”.

Thatcher and her advisors, of whom Tory Boy was one, caused unimaginable damage to Social Services that were still in their infancy and on a learning curve; and to the health, education, police and criminal justice services. Tory Boy knows as well as I do that there has not been sufficient time to address the havoc Thatcher and her government created, and his credibility flies out of the window when he attempts to manipulate these facts for political gain. He should be ashamed of himself.

in which Disasterdly reveals more of his fascist credentials and Bludgeon becomes bored.

7 October 2009

So now we know. To fund his bullying of the infirm and disabled Disasterdly is actually not going to take them off benefits at all, he is going to move them from invalidity benefits to jobseeker allowance.
In so doing he will reduce their benefits from the princely sum of £89.50 a week to £64 a week. For those of them with ongoing medical needs this will mean having to balance whether they can afford their prescribed medication against the need to eat.

Of course, what Disasterdly is not saying, is that what he is really doing is reversing a policy Thatcher implemented in the 1980s where, in an effort to massage the unemployment figures quickly, implying successful government, she found ways of removing people from unemployment lists and putting them on invalidity benefit instead.

Disasterdly and his chums also revealed more of their fascist credentials by inviting representatives of extreme right wing (doublethink for Fascist or Nazi) political parties from Latvia and Poland to speak to fringe meetings of the party conference.

Elsewhere at the conference members were being fed the nonsense proposition that the Human Rights Act is preventing effective policing because it prevents the naming of, what they choose to term as, dangerous criminals.

This of course is a backdoor way of preparing voters who place "law and order" high on their list of priorities to support the party when it follows up its plan to hold a referendum on the "human rights" aspects of the European Community. What is not being said of course is that the “dangerous criminals” who are protected by the act are those who have not yet been convicted. The removal of this aspect of our human rights means that any one of us could be accused in the media of anything and our identity is revealed regardless of whether the accusation is true.

The fact is that Disasterdly and his chums, do not believe we should have any "human rights" at all. They want us to return to a world where the rights of a human being have to be bought. This inevitably means that the greater the sum of money you have, the more rights you are entitled to. That's all right then, Disasterdly and his chums from the Bullingdon Club have plenty of money between them.

Disasterdly’s Bullingdon club chum Boris the Bludgeon should also fair quite well in respect of the removal of the human rights of others. He has always made it clear that he perceives a hierarchy in society which places him and his Oxford educated white male friends on the top of the pile with the "common people" some distance below.

Yesterday, while yet another of his personally chosen right-hand men was being removed from the London assembly for irregularities it was also being reported that Bludgeon is "bored" with his Mayoral role.

The term "throwing his toys out of the pram" comes to mind. If he can’t play with his own friends Bludgeon does not want to play at all.

It was clear from the beginning that bludgeon saw the Mayoralty as a minor acquisition. His grasp on the reality of the magnitude of the task was evident when it came to light that he had believed he would be able to carry out his Mayoral tasks on a part-time basis while he carried on his career as a member of Parliament for that bastian of the working classes, Henley upon Thames.

He had clearly looked long and hard at the duties of the Mayor of Henley-on-Thames and decided that being the Mayor of London would be a nice easy way of picking up some financial perks. One is left to consider the possibility that he actually perceived the role to be that of dressing up in funny robes, (back to the Bullingdon club here), and parading through the city of London in a horse-drawn carriage. That very public duty of the Lord Mayor of the City of London being just one of the many essential duties of the Lord Mayor that has nothing whatsoever to do with the role of the Mayor of London.

Of course, at the current time Bludgeon has the basic "human right" to extricate himself from the role if he wishes, but he had better hurry because if Disasterdly and his chums win the general election next year "basic human right's" will rapidly cease to exist.