The Judge RANTS!
Date: 13/04/15
Manifestly Predictable
This week's Well Fucking Hell, We Never Saw That One Coming, Did We? Award goes to the British Labour Party.
Their manifesto was published to great fanfare and the obligatory drooling media coverage today. It shows all of the expected courage of a party which long ago forgot what it was originally intended for. The stench of the focus group and the think tank oozes mephitically around it like the wraiths of long-decomposed Blairites (some of whom are still - at least technically - alive; or, rather, undead).
So there is nothing in it which could be described in any way as radical, except in the sense that the word 'radical' has come to be used in a time when all you need to call yourself a 'progressive' is to suggest that perhaps 'austerity' may have gone a tad too far a touch too soon, and that the 'responsible' approach would be to torture the vulnerable a little less vigorously but over a longer period of time. Whilst wearing expressions of the deepest possible concern, natch.
The craven surrender to the tenets of neo-liberalism - which catechism of screw-youism has hardened into a set of dogmata every bit as vicious, every bit as heedless of humane values, every bit as pious as anything which ever emanated from a Pontificate or a Politburo - pervades the whole of the sorry work, but I want to concentrate on just one area of what - for the sake of custom alone - one may term their policy.
It is noticeable that when you go to the Party's website (and I'm not necessarily recommending that you do, by the way; but if you do, the link is here), what Labour obviously thinks of as being the important areas are on the left of the screen; 'Economy' and 'Immigration' being two of them. You have to make at least one more click before you reach such minor matters as, say, 'Housing', 'Education', or 'Environment'. Here too you will find 'Social Security' (and it is a surprise that they have used that old formulation rather than the now-customary term 'welfare', a word which whistles at C above the stave to any passing tabloid mongrel).
So what do the 'People's Party' have to say on the subject of how we make sure that our society - should it still exist in any meaningful form after five years of having been Bigged Up by a group of Olympic-grade hypocrites - tries to ensure that no-one in this land of plenty starves or freezes?
Well, right at the very top we have that word 'responsible'. It's an absolute must for the modern Labour Party to show at all times how frightfully 'responsible' it is. Except in the sense of being 'responsible' for illegal wars and criminally under-regulated high finance, obviously. So long as you bracket it with that other cipher-word 'fair', of course, which seeks to paint you as a bunch of jolly good chaps and chapesses who have the fate of the downtrodden so close to their sclerotic hearts that they even deign to remember that they exist from time to time. Indeed, so insistent are they about how 'responsible' and 'fair' they wish to be that they repeat exactly the same formulation just three lines later. And we're not even into the actual promises yet. They must be serious about it, then.
So, on with the Pledge (other methods of polishing turds are available - ask your GP's outsourced-to-a-call-centre-a-hundred-miles-away surgery which one may be right for you), along with a few helpful translations. Oh, what fun this will be!
Here's the first:
- "We will not cut tax credits"
"We will continue to subsidise cheapskate employers with your money"
- "We will do more to help unemployed people get the skills they need"
"We will provide more juicy contracts for such go-getting success-creators as A4E and Capita"
- "There will be a guaranteed, paid job for all young people who have been out of work for one year...that they have to take, or they will lose their benefits"
"We haven't said how much they will be paid, note. That's because we can't even promise to increase the minimum wage by even a bare smidgeon until at least 2019 because it might spook the 'business community' if we did, and we need the donations given that we've completely pissed the unions off. Who cares if you can't survive on it anyway; it's either that or the gutter, that's how much we care about you"
- "We will pay a higher rate of Jobseeker's Allowance to those who have paid in over the years, funded by asking people to contribute for longer before they receive the contributory benefit."
"So, if you've never earned enough to have to pay National Insurance, then double fuck you; not only will you get less, but we'll make you pay for other people to get more"
We go onwards and...sideways:
- "We will abolish the cruel and unfair Bedroom Tax"
"That's the 'cruel and unfair Bedroom Tax' that we introduced for private-sector tenants, thus enabling the ToryDems to roll it out to tenants in the public sector later"
- "We will reform the Work Capability Assessment...with an independent scrutiny group of disabled people given a central role in monitoring it."
"We have no intention of getting rid of it, of course; just give it a makeover, along with an equally cosmetic quango of hand-picked trusties whom we can sideline and ignore whenever required"
- "We will commission a separate Work Support Programme for disabled people"
"We really don't think that the disabled have been screwed over enough, so we're going to target them for extra attention. After all, it's not as if anyone is going to listen to them, is it?"
- "We will keep the triple-lock on the state pension so that pensioner incomes increase by inflation, earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest"
"These are the people most likely to vote, the only ones old enough to remember when we were a progressive party, and the only ones sufficiently ga-ga to think that we still are"
And finally, Esther (McVey)...
- "We will keep the Household Benefit Cap and...examine if it should be lower in some areas"
"We want to see how far we can go before pissing off the poor in The North and in Wales to the same extent as we've managed to do in Scotland. Not that Scotland will be exempt from this, of course; after all, we're Better Together..."
Well, there we have it, chums; a responsible and fair programme for responsibility and fairness which will be applauded by all decent, hard-working, striving, tax-paying, cliché-ridden folk, be they responsible and fair or merely fair and responsible.
All satirical intent aside, such a set of platitudes constitutes one large sweet F.A. to those who have already suffered under the policies of co-ordinated malice fostered and imposed by both the current régime and its predecessor; and one giant sweet nothing in the ears of the biggest group of entitlement junkies in this country, viz. 'the middle class'.
For it is that mob of Daily Heil readers and purse-lipped "Why-oh-why?" merchants who determine the outcome of every election to Westminster under its loopy, terminally-imbalanced and anti-democratic voting system. Call them 'Essex Man', 'Worcester Woman', 'Dudley Dickheads' or what you will; that tiny proportion of the public commands disproportionate power because they are the 'swing voters' in the few dozen 'marginal constituencies' which determine which brand of soap powder washes whiter for the subsequent five years. And so, they are the ones who must be pandered to at all costs, even up to that of a party's mortal soul, and hence we have the sight of the Labour Party's social security spokesperson stating with pride - with pride, for fuck's sake - that, in office, she and her colleagues will be at least as heartless, at least as brutal, at least as inhumane as such sewer-polluters as Iain Duncan Smith.
And which is also why the demagogues and ideologues who have dominated our political discourse since the beginning of the long war on progressive values which started in the US in the early seventies and took root here at the end of that decade have deliberately and assiduously cultivated the favour of the 'decent, hard-working people', and ensured that they got the clear, unambiguous and ubiquitous message that social security and social solidarity were eeeevils which must be destroyed because they damaged wealth-creators such as corpulent middle-managers and self-employed financial consultants.
(The old joke - if joke it is - goes like this: around a table sit the CEO of a FTSE-listed corporation, a member of the leylandii-growing classes and an unemployed - because blacklisted - construction worker. Before them is a plate of twelve biscuits. The CEO takes eleven of the biscuits and eats them. Then he nudges the leylandiista, points to the unemployed man and says, "Look out, he's going to steal your biscuit!").
I have a small and important message to all those who think that 'reforming' the social security system - even to the point of 'reforming' it out of meaningful existence - is such a good idea:
You - the smugly, self-confident, self-righteous pricks who rail against 'scroungers', 'spongers' and 'skivers' - are just one piece of bad luck, just one piece of bad decision-making by your employer, just one cardio-vascular accident away from being down among those whom you have learned so well to despise. If a system of social security is to mean anything at all, it must be there for everyone, not just those of whom you do not disapprove. So what if some people game the system? That will always, but always happen, and can no more be wished away than you can stop the sun rising tomorrow. Bear this in mind: the amount that you lose to fraud in the social security system is but a minuscule fraction of what is being leeched from you every single day by the very people who have succeded in persuading you that the supposedly parlous state of the land's finances is all the fault of the poor, the disabled, the unemployed and other sub-human phenotypes.
And when Madam Badluck knocks on your door, they will assuredly do unto you what they have encouraged you to do unto those whom you have been taught to hate.
