Saturday 2 February 2008

Perverting the Course of Social Justice

Unemployment, bankruptcy, repossession of houses, lack of credit, accompanied by despair, hunger, fear, cold, and powerlessness stare cruelly at us. At us, not other people. Many people are already coping with some of these; all of us are coping wih inflation (the official inflation rate, the Consumer Price Index, is only 2.1%. but that excludes such things as council tax, energy bills and mortgage costs) and even coping with one of these is hard to bear.

Each wave of the recession will take a new and better-defended group; already unemployment is advancing, credit is withdrawn from the weakest (banks have told nearly 200,000 people to cease any use of their credit cards from Monday), remortgaging is harder and so expensive, right now.

Now is the moment when Gordon Brown chooses to withdraw assistance from the poor. He wouldn't act against freeloading when the booming world economy offered the chance to earn their living to all - then his regime bought votes with working people's taxes, and rewarded Party minions with sinecures dressed as work. He wouldn't prepare for the wholly predictable downturn in the economic cycle, for the re-founding of manufacturing industry and provide an encouraging environment for anything other than a giant 'light regulatory touch' (read free for all) financial casino, using its spin-off to reward client voters and construct a tax-funded permanent governance of complacent political appointees.

The enormous shortfall in tax revenues occurring as the credit and spend economy collapses has produced the New Labour New Tough stance on claimants just as claimants begin to be made up of the genuinely unemployed, the genuinely ill thrown into despair by uncontrollable economic and social circumstances created by the fools and knaves of the Brown years; people who have worked and payed their insurance contributions and other taxes to support the client state now face denial of the security for bad times they thought they had paid for.

The man is perverse.

2 comments:

Sackerson said...

Yes. Before recommencing flinging brickbats at the "nasty party" (whom I don't support or trust, either), liberals should look more close at the faux "friends of the poor". If only more of the working class and underclass (a) voted and (b) understood that the well-rewarded political representatives/champions of the disadvantaged are heavily incentivised to prolong the existence of disadvantage; an aspect that probably never occurred to the principled (and in many cases pious) original founders of the Labour movement.

hatfield girl said...

Even while those likely now to need the services they have paid for all this decade are attacked, it is being reported that polygamous marriages will be supported by benefits obtainable for having more than one wife.

There is only one settled, large community in the United Kingdom that practices polygamy. If these reports are true then tax paid for support is to continue being made available to clients of the Labour regime even as an unhelpful and condemnatory provision will be offered to the victims of economic and financial circumstance; circumstances made greatly worse by Brown's perverted manipulation of social welfare to establish permanent rule for New Labour.