Sunday, March 24, 2013

Total Wipeout

Does anyone, apart from the rich and utterly misguided, think the current government is doing anything at all to help anyone that hasn't got a 7 figure bank balance?

By now most people must realise that George Osborn and his rather dopey friend, the prime minister Dave Cameron (or Baldrick as I used to call him and can't understand why I stopped, what with his cunning plans...) are not interested in fixing the country or reducing the deficit (that's been proved by the amount of money they're still borrowing), they are just fixated on dismantling the welfare system to the point where, if we had a Tory majority or a UKIP coalition, they can either push the human rights act to the limit or abolish it completely.

You'd think that in the 21st Century, at a time when we are more aware of our humanity than ever before, the idea of a supposedly civilised government taking away our human rights so that they can inflict untold misery on the have nots would be treated in the same way as we think of North Korea or Zimbabwe. If it was reported that a government was victimising the poor and needy, we'd be sending a task force over to depose the tyrants running that country; yet because 'we're all right, Jack' we allow it to happen under our noses and only now, and mainly from women, are we beginning to say, "Hang on a minute, what this government is doing is a) wrong and b) not what any non-Tory voter voted for. There is no mandate for these massive, life-changing 'improvements' to the way our country treats the unfortunate.

Yet, do you know that if you tell the average person in the street that corporations 'swindled' the government out of £2000billion in unpaid taxes, while the entire welfare bill comes to £63billion and the so-called scroungers and fiddlers account for just £2billion; the average person in the street will say, "Yes, but, we can relate to the dole scrounger because we see them every day flaunting the system." So, by that logic, if someone, like my neighbour Fuckwit, is scamming the system EVERYBODY using the system shall be punished. Oh, I forgot, that's already actually how it is. If Starbucks don't pay their taxes, then neither do Amazon, Vodafone, etc etc., but if Fred Bloggs screws the system, then every person already struggling to live, feed themselves or exist will be punished as well. Where is the fairness in that? How is that 'we're all in this together'?

Gideon Osborne can argue till he's blue in the face that if you don't give corporations tax concessions then they will take their money to some other country, well, I kind of think that if they're not giving us any money they can take their money elsewhere, because we're not seeing it anyway!

The other thing the Tories are doing, which really is the most abhorrent and heinous thing and it beggars belief that the Libdems are so impotent around them, is implement so many expensive changes, subtle changes and bureaucratic changes that whoever gets in power next will not be able to do anything to solve the country's woes because it will be stymied by the trail of madness left by the current government. Melvyn King said in 2009, whoever gets into power at the next election faces an entire generation of not seeing power again. I think the Tories know this all too well and therefore are making sure that a) no one is electable and therefore because Tories can mobilise their core vote much better than Labour b) they have a good chance of being re-elected pretty quickly because the party that replaces them won't be able to fix things without bankrupting the country.

We're then left with a country run by people who view it as a company that's always ripe for asset stripping. Oh, that's pretty much what its like now, eh Vince?

How many people are beginning to get fed up with the Tory stock excuse - it's Labour's fault?

You all have bad memories, don't you? However, this is well documented so I'll repeat it to remind you - in 1997, Tony Blair, inheriting a country that had teetered on the brink several times in the early 1990s, came into power and banned his MPs from blaming the previous administration, saying, quite rightly, that the people aren't really interested in who is to blame they're only interested in it being fixed. I cannot remember one single Labour MP in 1997 saying that the mess the country was in was down to those blasted Tories. The blame game does no one any favours, yet the Tories have this default setting - it's everybody else's fault but ours. Aren't you getting just a wee bit fed up with it never being anything to do with them, especially when it plainly is?

Gideon Osborne has had FOUR budgets to try and turn things around (including the infamous 'Omnishambles' Budget of 2012), yet its still Labour's fault the economy is in a mess. I kind of think even Tory voters would like to hear someone say, "actually, the whole of Europe is fucked and it isn't Labour's fault that Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal and several other countries are on the verge of bankruptcy." People seem to forget that for all his faults Gordon Brown was praised by both Newsweek and Time Magazine for, albeit temporarily, stopping Europe from sliding into financial oblivion. He was on the covers of both magazines being heralded as the saviour of Europe's economies. Fortunately for Brown he is never going to be as vilified as Blair.

I'd worry about this country turning into a police state, with the Old Bill dispensing Tory justice like some Judge Dredd comic, but where they were once the party for law and order, they're now the party that has royally pissed off every decent copper on the force and most of the dishonest ones too. At one of the anti-austerity marches a couple of years ago there were so many policemen there, on the actual march, that you probably didn't need all the police there 'protecting'. Everybody is paying for the mess except for Dave, Gideon and their mates. But, you have to remember - WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!

***

Of course the weather doesn't help. I'm sure I'd be talking about something else entirely if I can sit in the garden with my shirt off for a few hours without getting frostbite or freezing to death. Last week I (almost) confidently said it would be warmer by April 2; that has been reappraised by the weather sites to April 14; although there is a suggestion that on a couple of days we might just see the temperature reach about average. If you saw the 5 day forecast on Countryfile tonight you would have seen the panic in Susan Powell's eyes when she got to Good Friday and suggested that we might see 'another snow event'. That saying 'March roars in like a lion and goes out like a lamb' has been put into a canon and fired into the stratosphere. March roared in like an Arctic fox and is going out like a demented polar bear with the DTs.

I read somewhere that the BBC has been fiddling with weather forecasts; cutting them short and making the 5 day a 4 day forecast because 4 days of future misery is more tolerable than 5. Sounds feasible.

***

I have a number of projects on the go at the moment, lets just hope I can concentrate on one of them long enough to achieve anything, eh?

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