Putting Down A Marker

This will, in all likelihood, be the last post I make about British politics for a long time, if only because I simply don't have the heart for it any more.

So rather than look back at the events of 12th December 2019, I will instead present predictions for us as a nation moving forward.

Things will begin to get worse for, well, normal people. People like you and me. People that need prescription medication. People that use public transport. People that rent places to live.

It won't become a lot worse, all at once; but over the next few years, prices will increase with no commensurate increase in pay. Likewise, services will degrade, with no commensurate decrease in cost.

Taxes for the wealthy will be reduced. Taxes for corporations will be reduced. The savings will not be passed down to their employees.

Homelessness statistics will increase. If enough people notice and object, perhaps the definition will be changed, showing a sudden dramatic decrease in those that tick the "Homeless" box on a spreadsheet. Likewise, poverty - more people will slip below the poverty line until the line is redrawn.

Support will be cut for the vulnerable, resulting in an increased mortality in those specific sectors.

Another tower block may burn down due to having cheaper cladding, deaths perhaps reaching triple figures. Parallels will be drawn. Nothing will come of it.

There will not be fifty thousand more nurses. There will not be twenty thousand more police officers.

Hate crimes will increase. There will be less recourse for those who are victims of aforementioned crimes.

The economy will suffer. The stock market will not. Our national debt will continue increasing, despite the cuts in public spending.

There will be talk of a skills gap. News reports about a lack of people being trained to cover shortfalls in necessary services. This will be waved away as scaremongering, before the service is handed off to a private contractor.

Throughout all of this, there will be precious little protest. There will be no general strike. There may be an attempt but it will come to nothing. If a protest does happen, it will be heavily covered by half of the media outlets in this country and denigrated by the rest, and then forgotten about a week later.

There will be calls for us to put our differences aside and help people, because that is what will be needed, now. Not recriminations - support.

There will be those who are confused as to why others they know are willing to part from friends over their voting choices. There will be those who respond with vitriol because those voting choices have negatively impacted their lives.

There will be calls to change the system of voting. They will gain little traction, simply due to apathy. Statistics won't make much of a dent in this apathy.

Then Brexit will happen, and that is where my speculation will come to an end.

I hope - I truly hope - that I am wrong.

I hope that none of this comes to pass. I hope that everything is just fine, and that the hits to the country that we've suffered since 2010 are as bad as it gets. I hope that everything from here on in is up-and-up.

In a long while, I will look back, and I will see if any of this turned out to be true.

For now, though, I'm taking a big step back from following politics.

I just don't have it in me.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Frontload Your Outlay

I would like to begin this blog with a Pratchett quote.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. 

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Makes sense, right?

This is Victoria Street, in Ryde, somewhat near where I live.

After and before rain, about five hours apart, taken today. This is a main road - major bus routes use this road pretty much 24-7-365. It's the main route out of Ryde into Newport, the two biggest population centres on this bedevilled isle.

Anyone remember that line in Bad Boys wherein Martin Lawrence walks into the drug lord's mansion that has been shot to pieces, and quips that it looks like Beirut?

This bit.

So this is the particular side of Beirut that Lawrence is referencing, the civil war in the 80s.

This is what Beirut looks like now, for comparison.

Ryde isn't Beirut. It doesn't have a civil war to deal with. It has another problem.

See, that road out there gets resurfaced with some degree of regularity, but the job never seems to stick. It gets farmed out to the lowest bidder, and it gets tamped down with a little tarmac, and then the tarmac gets smashed to shit again. So money keeps getting poured right into the hole.

See, the solution is to spend the cash to resurface that entire section of road. Be prepared for the disruption of services, take the steps that you have to, and then cease worrying about it for as long as this full road surface will last. Which, if you do it right might be quite some time.

You'd save money in the long run, too.

The thing is...

Working on the assumption that the goal is to actually solve the problem, to give the citizens of Ryde (and the Island, and anyone who uses our public transport) a better situation, frontloading the cost is the most obvious "best" solution.

This is a false assumption.

Assume instead that those in charge of filling those potholes have no interest in a permanent or long-term solution - they have different metrics in mind. They care about how much money they are spending in this very moment, because potentially, they won't be around in several years to actually see the windfall of not having to keep throwing money down the hole. They can just ignore it and ignore it and ignore it until such a time as...well, not that it stops being a problem overall, but that it stops being THEIR problem.

The rebuilding of Beirut was left to a private company. There was a lot of issue surrounding this. Their business arrangements and such were very heavily tied in with the interests of the local government, and everything was over-budgeted, resulting in Solidere (the company that managed the rebuild work) making an immense profit.

The fact was, though - when it was finished, it was finished.

The government was going to be around for a while, it appeared. Those companies that sought to make money from the rebuilding of an entire city were survivors. They weren't there for the short-term, only hopping in to make their cash and then vanish. They were in this for real.

While that particular practice is still shameful as all hell - literal war profiteering, using the destruction of a place to make money from its rebuilding, see Iraq for more details - the difference between how the island deals with it and how it gets dealt with elsewhere is huge.

The other problem, I suppose, is that none of the people that would have to sign off on repairing the road actually drive on it. So why should they notice? And when it is brought to their attention, why should they care? The ability to adjust one's perspective, to ponder if something is a problem for another individual that isn't yourself, is...well...

...I hate to make a sweeping generalisation, but positions of political and economic power don't seem to reward any kind of empathy.

So I guess we'll just have to keep getting wet feet.

Homo Ouroboros

This is Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail.

It's quite an old idea - the earliest interpretation is from almost 3,500 years ago, in an Egyptian funerary text. It has all sorts of meanings attached to it, like life and death, creation and destruction, and other eternally cyclical things.

I see a creature eating its tail and it doesn't make me think of eternity.

I mean sure, if we're dealing with a mythical beast - like the world serpents of Nordic mythology or similar - then it could be something that literally lasts forever, locked in its shape. What I think about is something more prosaic: a living being, devouring itself to stay alive just a little longer. Autocannibalism.

I see the human race.

We feed on ourselves - as a mass, rather than individually. Doing so individually is a crime. Letting the species as a whole choke on its own tail is actually sort of encouraged.

How, I hear you ask? Let's take a look at feudalism.

We have the liege of an area, let's call him Lord Snakehead. Lord Snakehead has those lesser nobles that exist within his territory, the knights and so on that have a position of status over everyone else - let's call them the Order of the Belly. This would follow, in my rather blunt and obvious simile, to the farmers and workers of no social standing to be labelled as The Tail End.

I think it's pretty obvious how this works.

The Tail End works hard. They produce a significant amount of goods and material, more than they actually need to live - in fact enough to make them quite comfortable if they got to keep all of it. Obviously...they don't, because they are being fed upon by Lord Snakehead. He devours his fill from The Tail End, and in return provides the Order of the Belly with nutrients - though not as much as he gets, of course. Just enough to know that they are more important than The Tail End. The fact is, though - if The Tail End ceased to exist, the Order of the Belly would be next in the mouth of Lord Snakehead.

Because modern society is fairly feudal in and of itself - we might not use the same old terms, but we sure seem to have the same structure - it's easy enough to see how this example applies.

Of course there's more avenues and more structures than my example. More than one snake - more than one tail. Each individual business is an Ouroborean structure. Goverments, too.Large organisations. All snakes that feed on their own tails - there's always a head, and there's always a tail, and most people fight to be the belly.

"But John," I hear you cry, feathers falling out of your socks and pork pies in your hands. "But John, isn't that just the way life is?"

Well yes. It IS the way life is. It isn't how it HAS to be, but it IS how it is. Nobody who can change it has the interest in putting in effort to do so, because even if they wanted to eat less of the tail, their peers have interest in making sure they keep it up.

The problem is that every known case of autocannibalism has to draw a line somewhere - and the final line that is drawn is when enough of the eater has been eaten that they expire.

It's not sustainable, and I don't mean that in a sense of environmental collapse. That is happening, right now, and is indisputable. The science is incontrovertible. Denying it is like denying that the sun rises. I mean it in the sense I just stated: in the end, what happens if the serpent eats too much?

If we could trust Ouroboros to keep eating at a steady pace, then perhaps it could continue - and the mythic beasts of yore can be trusted with such things. They are beings of their nature, a nature they can't avoid or escape.

The problem is, Homo Ouroboros is a slave to its nature, too. That nature is inherently greedy - as I've previously discussed, humanity's inherent insecurity leads it to try and dominate its environment, and a primary method of it doing so is through acquisition of resource. It's what we do. So we can trust the serpent to constantly try and eat more than it was ten seconds ago.

Which, as we have ascertained, is unsustainable.

How does this work in practical terms? Well, you can see it every day in the way we live. People having to dip more and more into their savings as the needs and wants of those who feed from them - those who benefit from their work, via surplus value - drive them to raise prices and lower payouts. Trimming away the fat an inch at a time. Every way we look, we see businesses focusing on making cuts and savings - and do those ever result in lowered prices? Of course not, they aren't FOR lowering prices. It's the snake gobbling more of its tail.

It's been pointed out that the less the average individual gets paid, the less products they can afford to purchase, and the less companies get paid. I believe an accurate term for this is cost-push deflation. It's happening, right now - but as long as we keep cutting and keep kicking and do whatever we can to keep our heads above water, then we don't have to care.

You can see it at work in the wake of Grenfell Tower. Regulatory cuts and basic greed. Lives of the wealthy made easier at the cost of the poor - and for the victims of this travesty of justice, many of them paid the ultimate cost.

For a long time there has been a trend of demonising and persecuting the homeless. As society has...I hesitate to say advanced, so let us say changed, those trends have changed. The boundary has grown bigger. Those who require or receive benefits because they don't have a job were next. Following that, the victims became those who were poor. It won't be long until the next victims are those who are less poor. Inexorably, the serpent is devouring its tail - and soon, it will be the belly that is being fed upon.

How long until the head reaches itself?

How long until Homo Ouroboros autocannibalises to the point of its own demise?

More importantly...

How can we stop it?

Human Investments

I am lucky, because my landlords are good people.

They are honest and genuine. When they first heard that a group of adults (five at the time) with no familial connection wanted to rent their property, they were initially skeptical - but after meeting us, they decided to take the risk.

Whenever there has been a problem, we have felt we could talk to them about it. And to be clear, those problems are sometimes with the property, and often with the letting agents - not our landlords themselves. They are fine people, and we are lucky to have them.

There are two million private landlords in the UK, according to research conducted by several organisations. There are over four million private tenants, too, though that number may actually be slightly conservative. I know plenty of people who rent or have rented, and I consider myself lucky, because the majority of them have found themselves in (sometimes repeated) problematic situations with their landlords.

Letting agents aren't without sin, either. The amount of cash they demand for even simple tasks - even tasks that don't strictly need to be done - can be astounding, to the point of extortion. Three times, they have actually made errors in regard to OUR rent, and we have temporarily been blamed for it - something which goes away very quickly when they realise they forgot to carry the one.

Again. We are lucky.

Our landlords are concerned with our safety and security. Regular checks to our fire alarms, gas, electricity and water supply - adherence to the rules and regulations that keep us safe and help us live with as little risk as possible - it all takes time and money, but they do it. In part because it is implicit in their role, but also, because they are responsible and considerate people.

Again. We are lucky.

Others are not so lucky.

One of the real highlighting factors of income and wealth is how one thinks of houses and homes. I am currently at the "I will probably never be able to afford my own house but it would be nice" level. I know others who are on their way to their own home, others who are just moving in, others who have been in for years, others who are onto their second and yet others who own two and rent one - and others who own two, but keep one empty so they can go on holiday in it. There are those worse off than me, too - having to rely on social welfare, for whatever reason, whose shelter is actually directly reliant on the state.

There was a huge push to get everyone into houses back in Maggie Thatcher's day. The reasoning for this is multiform, obviously, but everyone owing money to a bank gives it a lot of leverage to swing around its newly-deregulated investment schlong. Owning property became the way we should all want to live, and renting became undesirable. There were those, of course, who already had homes - and those, of course, who could already afford more than one.

If, via income disparity, one is forced to rent - and had little hope of actually affording a home to move into, so it isn't so much a choice as it is necessity - then one is at the literal mercy of landlords. That is a power dynamic that Europe actually addresses - Germany has a solid renting culture, and thus has better protections and guarantees for tenants, and more strict regulations for landlords and the properties they rent. Perhaps if the UK had such a culture, then how we view the relationship between landlord and tenant would be different, too.

It is literally an investment in human living conditions, but with the option of increasing your profit margin if you reduce those living conditions; and where income inequality means that people are forced to rent, the ability to avoid those landlords who do compromise those living conditions is severely hindered.

Over four million people rely on their landlords being decent human beings who won't cut so many corners that the entire edifice starts to roll away. Rely on those who are already wealthy above and beyond their own means to care enough about their wellbeing to sacrifice greater income to increase their safety and give them somewhere half-decent to live.

Well, the attitude toward that somewhat shows through.

Just ask any student that has had to rent privately in their second year, who get scalped for thousands and denied the return of their deposits because they are students and probably can't afford legal assistance. Just ask anyone living in a shitty tower block, wherein if you call maintenance to fix something, you may as well roll a die to see if they show up. Just ask anyone whose landlord simply refuses to fix things, important things, like that dangerous external cladding or that faulty electrical system or the lack of fire alarms and sprinklers.

The thing is, there are legal protections. There is a raft of health and safety legislation, specific to rental properties. We are just so used to them being ignored - to corners being cut at every single turn - that we count ourselves lucky if our landlords just obey the law.

It doesn't help that the current "government" - the Queen hasn't ratified them yet so they earn the quotation marks - have been directly responsible for tilting the balance of power yet further. Attempts to further deregulate the responsibilities of landlords have been partially successful. Laws on this topic are primarily voted through by Conservative MPs who not only claim expenses to maintain their own homes but also rent out properties to others. Yes, that is a conflict of interest. No, nothing got done about it.

There was a debate about whether or not rental properties should be fitted with smoke alarms by law. There was a debate about whether or not a rental property should be considered fit for human habitation, before someone is moved into it. Let me repeat that: a swathe of the Conservative party, many of whom are landlords, wanted to make it legal for a landlord to rent a property that is not fit for human habitation. Yes, that is a conflict of interest. No, nothing got done about it.

To further the gap, legal aid has been cut, and the access to council housing and housing benefit has been reduced. So if you are lucky enough to earn enough to get into a rat-warren without fire alarms, then you discover that this rat-warren doesn't have fire alarms, then good luck finding anywhere else to move and good luck actually mounting a legal challenge. You already have to rent. You probably can't afford a lawyer.

Again. We are lucky.

We are lucky because our landlords are not scalpers. They are not cutting corners. They are available if we need to talk, they fix problems (often physically themselves), and they intercede on our behalf when the letting agency becomes problematic.

We are lucky because they aren't a large private concern, who decided we didn't need smoke alarms. We are lucky because they ensured that our electrical system was reliable and worked properly before we moved in. We are lucky that they didn't fit a cladding on the outside of our building to make it look nice for the rich folk that live nearby. We are lucky that the cladding they chose wasn't fitted at a slight discount rather than making it actually fire resistant.

When enough corners are cut, the edifice rolls. The people making the money don't care about that. It probably won't be them who actually suffers the crushing calamity of it rolling. They will probably be able to skip away clean, because the people who make the laws about this kind of thing are just like them: contemptuous of human life, especially of people who earn less than they do.

Again. We are lucky.

We are lucky because our landlords see us as human beings. They talk to us, they are polite to us as we are polite to them. We have a mutual respect.

The name of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation should indicate to you just how much they see their investments as human beings. Tenants are things to be managed. You put them in a box and they give you money. To hell with the fire alarms. If they go away you can just get more, everyone needs somewhere to keep their stuff. So what if Grenfell Tower burns? KCTMO manages 9,500 properties - there's always more tenants to extort.

The same "government" that wished for landlords to be able to house people in inhumane conditions, to endanger their lives and to limit their access to legal recourse and housing support, also defunded fire and emergency services across the country. Reduced staff levels, closed fire stations, you name it. All in the name of saving money, though how that has helped anyone is still up for debate - it certainly hasn't reduced our national debt at all, or reduced how much we pay in tax.

Both groups of people - and I am unsure if there is any overlap, but as I already mentioned, many Conservatives are also landlords - show through their actions that they don't see tenants as human. If you don't have the money to afford your own house (regardless of the increased price of houses, which is a whole other blog) then you aren't worth listening to or caring about.

The dehumanising of the less wealthy started with those who had nothing. Painting the homeless as a nuisance and a bother without considering them people. Then there are those who almost have nothing, people who need to claim benefits to survive - we've all seen the hatchet job done on them. Now we're onto those who have enough money to live but not enough money to own a house or secure a mortgage.

The line is creeping up, people - but by the time the line is high enough that the very wealthy turn on the not-as-wealthy, everyone else will have been churned under.

It is this callousness, this total sociopathy, that has led to the edifice rolling. Too many corners were cut. The profits have been pocketed for years, and now, it is time for the real price to be paid.

This is what income inequality does to us.

It makes us look upon individuals who are following the law and protecting their human investments as the law calls upon them to do, and call ourselves lucky.

Of course it isn't just housing that this sociopathy rears its ugly head in, either - but then more than one of my blogs have pointed out the negative impacts of right-wing greed-based policy the world over.

If only there was an alternative.

Wouldn't we be lucky.

Community & Society

So my last blog post was read over 1,200 times, which has left me absolutely gobsmacked - but if any single one of those reads has helped someone, or has encouraged someone to vote that wouldn't before, then you know what? It did its job. So my thanks to any of you who shared it, and a greeting to any new readers I have because of it.

I can't promise to always be so succesful, I'm afraid...

I'm going to begin with the definition of two words.

Community: The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

Society: The aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

We're social animals, and we always have been.

Ever since our earliest days as recognisable and distinct creatures, we have formed social groups, and social evolution is a codified study of that very notion. The idea is simple: we did better because we worked together, a prehistoric example of division of labour that's as old as wolves.

Was everything equal, back then? Hard to say. Probably not. We weren't very complex creatures, comparitively. The idea of equinamity was probably beyond us. Nevertheless, we did manage to live long enough to even invent the concept of equinamity. We must have done something right.

I'm sure most people who read this blog have undergone team-building exercises. I'm pretty sure you've worked with people to achieve something, too - for your own edification. Anyone ever had to do a group project and located the one person that has neat, fast handwriting to do all the scribbling? Or the rapid typist? Or the one with the gift of the gab?

We all have different skills and abilities, and it is in the utilisation of those for the good of others - in the reasonable expectation that they will do the same for us - that our strengths really lie, as a species.

That is what a community is. A collection of individuals all linked by commonalities, all working with each other to achieve a given goal - that goal, usually, being to get to the end of the week with food in our bellies and four walls around us, with as little upsetting data in our brains as possible.

And we can surely do that. Right? as people, we can do that. ...most of the time.

And what is a society, but the sum of everyone in a community? In fact, what is OUR society, except for the sum total of ALL our communities? Society is all of us. The mass of people that make up...everything.

As a plurality, as a significant amount of people working together, we have a lot of power. We can do a lot of things that several smaller groups would find more difficult, or that we as individuals would find it impossible to achieve for ourselves. We have roads, maintained (mostly - I am from the Isle of Wight) throughout the entire nation. We have sewage systems, electrical networks. We have a health service.

...at time of writing, anyway.

So how did it all get so badly screwed up?

Well, there's money. I've done a LOT of blogs on this topic, in particular on greed and austerity. (Money Talks, Drowning In It, The Two Great Evils, That Which Is Owed, Cause, Effect, Regret, and Kraft Und Macht, Wille Und Geld are a selection.) We found money, and it made life easier; and then it made life a lot easier for a small amount of people, the same small amount of people as seemed to be in charge in the first place. It's a system that can be gamed, and it has been, to the hilt. The mighty money is what dictates success in many echelons in society, and when the point of the game is to gain the paper tokens, those that write the rules have a lot of ways of getting those tokens.

Of course, where we are part of a community - and thus a society - there comes a point that one can actually gain those tokens at the same time as other people gaining them.

A pack of wolves can bring down far bigger prey than one wolf. A pack can even bring down bigger prey, in terms of mass per wolf, than a bunch of individual wolves could manage even if they added their stacks together. So if there's one particularly businesswolf that instead demands all the other wolves go and hunt and it takes a proportion of their kill, there's not much to go around at all. If only they had all worked together - yes, including the businesswolf - then perhaps there'd be a bigger prey takedown, and thus, more for everyone, even if the businesswolf demands a bigger share.

Every time someone rejects an increase of the minimum wage, or spending on the poor, I can't for the life of me imagine that they've thought about an actual extrapolation on what that would achieve.

The British people are - or used to be - one of the most highly taxed on earth. Even if we don't earn enough to pay income tax on our wages, we still pay in a lot of other ways. Many of the products we consume every day are taxed with VAT. If we use public transport, the ticket prices incorporate the taxes the company pays on fuel and its own running - as we have to pay tax on the fuel we purchase and the vehicles we drive. We pay council tax to our local government. Every pound we spend, more than a few pennies go back to the government.

So if we get more pennies, then so do they. Right?

But why should companies bear the brunt of this, with - say - an increase of minimum wage, or in paying for a universal basic income out of their taxes? Why should the wealthy subsidise those that aren't wealthy?

If we want to take a really basic view on this, it's because it's the right thing to do. It's the GOOD thing to do. We help each other so we can all make it out in one piece. We pay it forward, because we'd hope that if the situations were reversed, someone else would. That's what empathy would have us do. Sympathy would have us feel that reducing the suffering of others is just inherently a good thing to do - because it is.

What if empathy and sympathy are devoid from your decision-making process? (I'm looking at you, Ian Duncan Smith.)

Well - let's say we have four companies who have all been told that the minimum wage is going up. Companies A and B put their ages up immediately. Company C does so later, but before the deadline; Company D does so on the day of the deadline.

A and B will take an initial hit as they pay their workers more. But in general, every company that those workers utilise in their daily lives will benefit - extra money in pocket means more spending. Now, Company A may be the kind of company that doesn't deal with your average consumer - like those that work for it - but Company B may be, say a retail store or similar. The same can be said for Company D. Everyone needs food, and everyone needs stuff, and so B and D will see an uptick in income simply because the people that shop there are earning more.

So by the time C and D both put up their wages, their incomes should have increased - perhaps by a small amount, but enough nonetheless to slightly offset their workers being paid better.

In the end, we all benefit from those who have the least benefiting, because it pays forward and upward. Trickle-up economics - wherein those below are allowed to increase their income and thus their expenditure, swelling the economy by sheer numbers of small increases rather than large increases in a few paychecks - would perhaps even see to it that people have slightly easier lives, an unexpected benefit of taking a long view at earning as much money as possible.

So when the establishment as it stands demands that we turn on each other - puts pressure on us until looking out for number one is the only real option - it turns out that they're not just punishing us, and preventing us from organising or helping others or thinking for ourselves. They're hurting themselves, without ever wanting to admit it. So ideologically opposed that they won't even consider the alternative.

I quite often talk about how much I hate right-wing thinking, Tory thinking, austerity thinking. I do, it's true. Now and then, though - intermingled with that hatred is just...pity. Pity and sadness, that the people who are clutching the purse strings are so hypnotised by the gold in the purse that they can't work out how to get more (and in doing so accidentally helping out, you know, the rest of the world).

After all, the word Commonwealth exists, doesn't it?

Smash And Grab

I think I've worked it out.

All of those measures that the government have taken, recently. All of those cuts to benefits, tax breaks to big business, funding reductions to necessary services. Concessions to fracking companies, tightening of the screws of austerity.

All of the truly suspect conflicts of interest that are just being undertaken without any regard for the law, or fairness, or even trying to appear fair. Gideon Osborne being an MP and also an editor for a newspaper, finally leveraging his political career to succeed in the career of journalism that he'd failed in on his own merits. Phillip Hammond, harming most of the country with his most recent budget, while his own firm gets a significant tax easement. Andrea Leadsom, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - whose job it is to prevent hydraulic fracturing on protected or green-belt land - previously having worked in an investment fund that dealt primarily with fossil fuel companies. The Prime Minister's husband having investments in the private companies that will do very well from the increased privatisation of basically half our nation.

Every single thing they do - from forcing through Brexit and anti-privacy and anti-person laws, to clear instances of lying to the public and deliberately sabotaging diplomatic relationships with other nations - has been a confusing mess of sociopathic thrashing, but I've finally settled on the key.

They don't care any more.

They know they won't win the election in 2020. They just know - they are throwing it. And instead, they are literally tearing apart the nation's resources while they still can, and divvying them up between themselves and their friends.

This was it, the big one. The cash out of dreams. No need to make tiny profits hiding in the shadows and pretending to be a bunch of valid politicians. The austerity kick lasted for six years and had precious little effect, doing nothing to reduce national debt or make anything better for anyone at all. No need to hide behind the common good, now - so instead, it's a fire sale.

The punishing effects of Brexit are being felt already, but they will have truly started to dig in, in three years. By then we'll have signed the paperwork and we'll be out on our collective ass. We'll be hurting - and there will be opportunities. Opportunities for companies to make a killing off our low pound and our need to trade outside of the single market. Opportunities that can be tapped by the right investment firms and companies.

Such companies and firms will probably already be made fat from buying up the NHS, student debt, and who knows what else. Virgin had a knockback from getting their claws into our health service - OUR health service, WE pay for it - and so are considering court action, and are spewing venom all over the press. Employment figures are still all over the place, and people are desperate for work - desperate enough that companies can profit from a reduced set of worker protections (the EU sets those) when hiring. After all, they'll need to somehow make up for everything they lost from a ready market of immigrant labour.

You wait and see. They will all be friends of our current government, or connected to them in some way. I would place money on the fact. The people that make the most profit from our nation's loss will be the family, friends and old work colleagues of the Front Bench and their cronies.

Because they won't have to care, come 2020. Because they aren't going to try and win. They will probably still receive a significant amount of the vote - because hell, a vast swathe of the country doesn't pay attention to what is actually going on anyhow - but they will lose. And then, they will start resigning in droves.

Come 2021, the Tory opposition will contain less than half of the faces that it currently does. Those left behind won't be the party faithful. They will be the outliers, the back benchers, the ones whose name nobody really knows. The ones who haven't been part of the Cabinet, who have just sat quietly and made their expenses claims and voted to take money from disabled people.

There will be more. There always is. And maybe in five or ten years, they'll pull themselves back together again. And those who win the election of 2020 will work their guts out, trying to rebuild, repair and recussitate the crippled husk of a nation that they are left with once the current crop are done with it.

And come 2030, those still hurting from the mass sell-off - those still disadvantaged by the plundering of a nation - will be told how Labour (or whoever is in charge) can't be trusted to fix this mess, and that new leadership is required.

And god help them, some people will believe it.

And the entire cycle of shit will begin again.

I hope this isn't how it goes. I truly hope this ram-raid smash-and-grab profiteering isn't what happens. It just seems to be the only explanation for the decisions these people are making.

I'll be keeping an eye out, though. Just to see who is there to salvage the wreckage of the United Kingdom, and to see who they know that wears a blue tie.

(Yes, I am aware of the irony that I present this theory a mere week after putting out a blog about how conspiracy theories are all bunk. But still.)

Will Of The People

I have come to hate the phrase, Will Of The People.

It only seems to apply when a political decision that is going to make things worse for us has the support of a vocal minority. It rarely gets rolled out when things are done that the people would actually want to happen. "Parliament Must Obey Will Of The People And Rough Up More Brown Folk", the headline will read, not "Parliament Obeys Will Of The People And Issues Free Solar Panels And Awesome Stuff To Literally Everyone".

It is another example of needing to pay attention to what politicians - and those in the public eye in general - do, rather than what they say.

Theresa May is desperate to finish off the job of total privatisation. She and hers want this country slashed to pieces and divvied up between the private investors they are mates with and married to (and sometimes actually are, let us not forget that some of these Tory bastards actually still have business interests). The thing is that privatisation is great for two groups of people only - shareholders and predatory businessfolk.

We will be told it is the Will Of The People.

It's not going to work out well for us. It didn't the last few times this happened.

Cast your minds back to the Thatcher era. Those miners were a bit upset, weren't they?

Well, that was because their livelihood was being sold down the river. Thatcher decided that, rather than subsidise the British coal industry, we would be able to import it cheaply from Germany. So, that put an end to that. Pole-axed an entire industry. Say what you want about coal as a source of energy - that literally killed off a big cornerstone of British industry.

(Out of interest, the reason why we could get it cheaper from Germany is because the German government subsidised their coal industry.)

More recently there has been the failing of British steel and Royal Mail. In the mist of time we have lost British Telecom, British Gas, and dozens of other nationalised services.

Next will be our NHS. It's been on the cards for a long time. It WILL happen.

Meanwhile, there was enough public money kicking around to bail out half a dozen banks, to refit and replace nuclear weapons that we don't need, and to underwrite the arms industry.

Is any of that due to the Will Of The People?

I fucking hate that phrase.

Parking (Not) Fine

How much is a parking ticket?

Recently I have had this discussion with a fair amount of people, and it's something that I haven't really thought much about until...well, now. The past couple weeks, certainly. Just something that has never occured to me.

So if you have had this conversation with me - well, follow it through anyway, because you might find it interesting.

A swift google search reveals that the average Penalty Charge Notice (a parking ticket to you and me) is around £70 - £50 for a minor infraction, £120 in central London. I am sure there are private companies that are more shady in their issuing of such things...but finding data for them will be more difficult. They have something to hide and be embarassed about, see.

You notice how it costs more in London?

Now in part I don't doubt that it is because of the traffic situation. They want to keep the roads moving as fast and effective as possible. All sorts of measures to keep that happening - cheap and effective public transport, congestion charges, and this greater parking ticket penalty.

I bet in part, though, it is because - in London, people get paid more.

I'll come back to that.

Speeding tickets. These things are £100 and 3 points, unless you are going fast enough to be put in court - then it goes up to £1,000, £2,500 on the motorway.

Here, the deviation is based on effect. There's more cars moving in higher volume on the motorway. I can understand that. A crash on the motorway is going to have a greater knock-on effect than one off it, if we get down to brass tacks.

What is it you notice about all these charges?

Well, what you will notice is that - if I am working on minimum wage, as many folks in this country are - picking up a parking ticket will cost me an entire day's wages. However, if I was, say...

...an MP?

If we totally ignore the fact that they get expenses, they are paid approximately £62 an hour in this day and age - almost 9 times more than you and I - which means that it might actually save an MP money to just park wherever they want and do what they have to do, rather than spend time using public transport and taking consideration to park elsewhere.

And that's just MPs. The Office for National Statistics estimates that over 1.2 million people in this country - 4% of the workforce - actually earn a million pounds or more a year. That's perhaps twelve, thirteen times more than the already-affluent Commons politicians, and so the amount of time these folks would need to work to pay off a parking ticket (even in London) is probably less than the amount of time they will be parked wherever they get the ticket.

I got interrupted halfway through doing the maths, but I am fairly sure that if Wayne Rooney were to speed down a street for four minutes, he'd have earned the money to pay that fine in those four minutes.

Some folks might not see why this could be a problem.

There are many ways in which the justice system today is - or seems to be - one rule for us, another rule for them. One of the starkest measures of this is across the line of income disparity. This can be as simple as being able to afford a more succesful lawyer. One thing that is certain, however, is that in a world wherein the penalty for several different crimes (not all traffic related) is a monetary punishment, then making that monetary punishment be the same for everyone regardless of income is as good as saying that the wealthy deserve to be punished less for it.

Austerity creates income disparity. We are living in a time of austerity. This situation was engineered and is curated by people who do not suffer from that same austerity. There are companies and individuals who are profiting from such austerity - lenders, the companies trying to get a piece of the NHS - while the rest of us are doing nothng but lose.

At this time, when the term Food Bank has become a well-known term throughout the entire country - for people to be able to ignore the law because they have sufficient money is just an added slap in the face to those of us who are just trying to do our best and get by day after day.

The solutions hould be obvious, of course. Any punitive fine should be considered as a measure of one's income or value, rather than just a flat fine. The same as tax.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how it hasn't happened yet. And the more I consider it, the more fair and just it seems.

Money Talks

I'd like to conduct a mental exercise with your assistance.

Picture for me, if you will, a successful person holding an object of value. Imagine them in their home, and how that all looks.

Are we ready for the thought experiment?

Hands up if the person you imagined was wealthy, or had some obvious sign of being so - a suit or similar. Similarly, hands up if the object of value was an expensive one - and finally, hands up if the home would definitely rank on the pricey side.

I bet that's a few hands up. (Put em down again. You did it. Well done.)

Now you know my agenda, go ahead and look back at the request. I didn't mention money, not at all - though several of the words I used imply it.

We're paying attention to words at this point. The actual semantics of the situation. Now we can be careful about how we phrase things.

Who can remember a time when money didn't pretty much dictate our lives?

Not a lot of people who read this blog, that's for sure. There's a significant proportion of people alive in this day and age that live by subsistence farming and agriculture. Money probably doesn't come up for them very often - so I daresay it doesn't have the linguistic hooks dug into common parlance.

Here, though - here, today - most of the things we do have a coin involved somewhere. Work is so impressed on us, so central to our culture, that it is the default answer when someone asks us "What do you do?" - something I try and shake up whenever asked. "You mean for money or for fun?"

If we want to achieve almost anything, it is monetised - and if the act itself isn't, then the accessories and support services associated are. You can run for free, but these running shoes are £50 a pop. Lift weights? A branch will do - but unless you want splinters, join a gym, get the gloves, grab some dumbells.

To achieve things in this society - and to simply survive - we require money. It's difficult to do so otherwise. Some people do so, but they themselves will tell you how hard it is. Note that I do not mean living on benefits, as that is simply acquiring money from a different source (and is just as valid, if you are legally entitled to the money, you take it, it's yours). I mean literally not handling money at all. Often it results in criminality. This country has only just taken to heart the French idea to deliver unsold food - not even spoiled, just one day out of date - to places wherein the homeless and disadvantaged can access it.

Aspiration is often hitched to fiscal increase, too. If you want a better thing, it will cost you more - so you'd best get more money, hmm? And if the achievement doesn't require money or anything similar, then it is worth pointing out, because it is a difference, a change.

So when we talk about someone being successful, we assume that to mean wealthy - unless specified otherwise. Because what other universal handwave term for being well-off is there? Of course, in a world dictated by the flow of currency upward and upward, having more of it is a literal success.

Something being valuable is automatically assumed to mean expensive, too - because that is the de facto measurement of value. The thing is, the most valuable things to me are not the most expensive things I own, because there's levels of value. My most expensive possession is my laptop. Sure, I value it very highly - but not more than the silver chains my dad gave me, or the notebooks I have stuffed with old ideas, or the ticket stubs I still possess from the big five gigs of my life (Pearl Jam @ Hard Rock Calling 2010, Nine Inch Nails @ O2 2009, Counting Crows @ Brighton Arena 2009, Alter Bridge @ Portsmouth Guildhall 2008, Foo Fighters @ Wembley 2008), or the first CD I bought in America - also my favourite album of all time. Value is not monetary cost; however the cost is so important to us on a day-to-day basis that it becomes the standard assumed meaning.

The thing is, having money does not equate to having happiness or feeling satisfaction or security. It can contribute a whole hell of a lot, mind. If your income is very close to your expenditure, increasing that gap can only make life easier - there's less stress, less concern. We don't worry so much about having to take a week off, or missing the next pay raise, or the cost of bread increasing with little to no warning.

Of course it is also a truism that as income rises, so does expenditure. As we have more, so we take more. That's the nature of the beast - because again, in a society wherein the measure of success is money, that means that all goods that we may want have a cost, and the more desirable goods always cost more. Who doesn't want a slightly bigger fridge, a slightly nicer car, a slightly better laptop, a slightly larger house?

It all costs. We just accept that. To cover the costs we have to work, and we just accept that too. We earn so much less than the people who pretty much instituted this way of life, and we accept that also. It wasn't a shadowy conspiracy of a group of figures in a dark room. The people with the money just wanted to make more, and so they did. Because that's how it works. When you have it - you make more of it.

When you think about it like that...is it not surprising that whenever anyone suggests doing something that casually disregards the constant hunt for further funds, that it is treated with incredulity?

Traditionally, the Labour party in this country has been a left-wing worker's party. It was dragged more toward the centre-right in the late 90s by one Tony Blair. They did well, because after Margaret Thatcher's hatchet-job on the average blue-collar worker to line the pockets of the financiers, right-wing attitudes in this country had started to come to the fore - but the Tories still had the reputation of being nasty. So we can still be right-wing money-grubbers and also not be held up as evil? Sign me up!

The thing is, they took over the entire party. Tory-lites. Women and men whose view of the world was pretty much the same as their blue-tied brethren on the opposite benches, just with a nod to the poor and the sick. And don't get me wrong - having been on the receiving end of benefits and sickness support in both the Blair era and the subsequent ConDem/Tory era, that nod actually helped us out a lot.

Recently, the party voted for a new leader. That leader was Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned left winger whose attitude is that we should really be helping people and doing the right thing regardless of income or profit.

For this, he was treated to a non-stop campaign of hate. People mocking him, calling him a communist (incorrect) and a socialist (they wouldn't know one if it hit them in the face), saying he was unelectable (despite being elected as party leader). There were threats of mass resignations, mass resignations, personal attacks, smear campaigns across the wide breadth of the media. The temptation of digging in and fighting back must have been great, but his line has always been the line of grace under fire. However much political capital he could have made from getting into verbal fisticuffs with all and sundry, he just got on with it.

All this came to a head in the most recent leadership re-election. A vote of no confidence was called. Those who wanted him gone were - as you'd expect - Blairite neo-Tory coatriders. Those who had profited from still being the right wing in an apparently left-wing party. Those comfortable in quiet opposition, which isn't really opposition when it comes down to it.

When it became clear that it would be down to the party members to vote, another hatchet job was put in place - and this time, it was basically electoral fraud. People who joined up for the party in droves in order to show their support for the party leader were told that they wouldn't get a vote, for...no apparent reason, other than the fact that Owen Smith and his people had ascertained that those new members were signing up to support Jeremy Corbyn. It doesn't take a genius or a statitician to work out that this was a calculated attempt to undermine support for the man who had already been made leader once.

Out of 551,000 members of the party, only 285,000 got to vote - just over half. Can you imagine the outcry if 49% of a country weren't allowed to vote in a General Election because it was thought that they were going to vote a specific way? Can you imagine? (If you live in Florida you don't have to imagine. Thanks, Jeb.)

Even so - out of the 285,000 that got their vote, over 168,000 of them voted for the unelectable man. 59% of them. Then there were the supporters and affiliated voters, whose support for him ran at an even higher percentage.

It's only now that we can understand where the term unelectable comes from.

In a world where a successful person is one who earns a lot of money, and a valuable object is one that costs a lot of money, the one who understands both of these things to be inherently true is seen as more acceptable, more grounded than the one who does not. If we accept blindly that money should rule our lives, then the man who wants us to believe this to be true is our friend, and the man who wants us to question this belief is our foe.

In a world wherein our way of thinking is highly informed by money and worth being commensurate, the man telling us that there's more to life than just money has to be painted as a madman, a man without a grasp on reality. A hopeless man. A man that can never lead, can never expect to be followed. A man that is unelectable.

Now look around you.

Are you a failure because you aren't earning more? Because you aren't living in a mansion? Are you a failure because you aren't bedecked in jewels and driving a sports car? Are you a failure because you buy things at a discount rather than crates of expensive nasty-tasting champagne?

Or are you a success because you made it this far, rather than by how much is in your bank account? Are you successful for reasons other than a six-figure salary? Do the things you own have value that isn't connected to how much they cost you? Is your home your home, regardless of how much smaller it is than the homes of those that collect our taxes and make our decisions?

If the answer to any of those is yes, then you are already smarter than the prevailing attitude. The natural divergence of semantics based on who dictates what is good or bad hasn't changed you into a heartless machine, driven by greed. Because at the heart of it, nobody really believes it. Not really. It's just the way the world seems to be going, and is the way the world has been going since enterprising merchants started agreeing that this much maize was worth this much silver.

If we are to be higher beings than this, if we are to be better than simply biological machines to be used to make money for ourselves and others, then we need to look at the use of these terms. We need to apply them differently, to make specific examples. We need to find value in that which is inexpensive, success in that which is unmarketable, happiness in that which is free, and worth in that which is penniless.

That is how we elect a man who is unelectable.

The Gold Road

The way you think about money is wrong.

Okay, that statement is purely there to pique the interest, I'm sorry. I think I can state with confidence, more accurately, that the way most people think about money colours how they perceive other monetary interactions.

We've all had money, haven't we? We have got it, and we have spent it. We have spent years earning it and working out how to earn more, saving it, exchanging it for goods and experiences. We probably have some with us now. Our lives are pretty much devoted to its acquisition, if only because it is our shortest, simplest way to comfort and security - which can often lead to big problems, but I digress.

The way we handle our funds, and their physical existence in our perception of the world, implants a quintessential untruth about how it works and how it circulates. The difference between budgeting and economics is that economics looks at the whole, while budgeting looks at the individual case. People don't study economics - they budget, and thus they have a great understanding of budgeting...

...but not necessarily of economics.

I am not formally educated on the topic. I have done a lot of reading, I have debated it with a great number of people that know a fair amount on the subject. All of this is opinion backed with some research, not given as evidenced fact - so please, utilise a pinch of salt during your reading.

Why do folks hate people on benefits so much?

Because the way they see it, these individuals are being rewarded for something. They are being given something, and they don't apparently deserve it (not as much as the complainant at least). We all know someone who thinks that those who don't work shouldn't get anything, because they've worked hard their whole lives, etc, etc, repeat ad nauseam.

We probably know more people that believe refugees and immigrants shouldn't be given anything at all. They will often use terms like "charity begins at home", despite giving very little to charity themselves, or "why should we", or "where is it going to come from". I don't think that everyone who believes this is racist. I think that there are people who are racist that use those terms to mask their less socially acceptable thoughts, but I think the majority of people who wish to withhold support for expatriates (as I will be referring to them from now on) are doing so because they think we can't afford it.

And who is to blame them. We are seeing public services get cut because we "can't afford them". This is a line that has been touted so often that people repeat it without even questioning it. Even in the face of actual displays of where money is being spent, and how much of it can be reallocated to those in need. As I often say: It is never about not having enough, only about misallocation.

The mistake we make is assuming that, when someone on Jobseekers receives the kings ransom of £72.40 to last them for two weeks, the money simply vanishes.

Which is absurd, when you think about it.

So let us assume that there is an individual who has no other source of income. They receive housing benefit that pays for 100% of their rent and jobseekers allowance that pays them the aforementioned £72.40 a fortnight.

(If you aren't in the UK, these two things are means-tested benefits given to you by the government for various reasons, which are paid for out of public taxes. The circumstances in which you are allowed either housing benefit or jobseekers allowance are regularly reshuffled and usually made tighter. The welfare of poor people is not in the interest of our current government.)

To begin with - housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord. (Edit: it was, for a time. Now it is paid to the recipient of the benefit - but it is probably paid on in rent, seeing as there's not a huge rash of people claiming housing that immediately become homeless. Thanks for the correction, Nick.) That landlord is more than likely some kind of housing group or business, which has lucrative contracts with the local council; or the landlord is a private individual who owns the property and is kind enough to rent to those being assisted by the state. Trust me: many don't.

So the housing benefit only benefits the person receiving it insofar as it gives them somewhere to live. Meanwhile it guarantees the landlord a return on their initial investment, after removing the costs of maintaining the property. Either the private individual has any net profit to spend on their own day to day lives, their own house, their groveries, their luxuries - or the group or business receives a net profit, which it uses to keep running and pay its employees, who again go out to pay their rent and buy their groceries and purchase their luxuries.

The jobseeker's allowance, £36.20 a week of it, gets spent - because people in poverty don't actually have the option to save. The margins of affording to eat and not are too small. Where does it get spent? Shops usually - local small concerns and chain stores.

The money spent there, after covering costs, pays the employees (and in the case of bigger stores the shareholders). They then spend that money in other shops and on other things. Once more, that money is allocated and spent. And over and over it goes.

What happens every time someone spends money?

Tax.

While the UK doesn't have sales tax like the US does, the vast majority of products bought and sold have a rate of Value Added Tax (VAT). It is invisible to us because it is included in the price on the box. If you've ever been to the US from the UK and been stung by the sales tax - like you went to buy a dollar soda and it turns out to be a dollar and five cents, but the label says nothing about it - then what occurs with VAT is the reverse.

Standard VAT rate is 20%. Some goods - goods for children, electricity and utilities - are charged at 5%. Some goods, like basic food and apparent "necessities", are totally exempt. (Apparently condoms are considered a necessity and tampons aren't, which is absolutely fucking ridiculous, but that is an outrage for another blog.) Some goods and services even have special taxes in and of themselves - fuel pays an extra 10-50 pence per litre on top of the 20% VAT, 6% on insurance, 20% on travel insurance, significant additional taxes on tobacco and alcohol above and beyond the 20% VAT rate.

Almost every time someone spends money, they pay tax back to the government, back to the public purse. £20 of the benefit recipient's money gets spent in a local shop - £2-4 of that goes to the government, the rest goes to the shop. Out of the rest, a portion goes on costs, and the rest goes into the pocket of the people that work in the shop, which gets spent elsewhere. Every time the money moves from point to point, an amount ends up in the same purse that is paying for the benefit recipient in question. Even if they can't afford a car, they take the bus - and the money they spend on the bus not only funds the driver's purchases that week, but also pays a significant amount of fuel tax right back to the government.

Then there's savings and investment. Now, the average recipient of benefits doesn't get enough to save anything - it's just not possible, as previously mentioned. Margins are too small. However - those who benefit from the money of those recipients (see what I did there) invest. They put money away for a rainy day. That money goes into banks, who - since the dissolution of the division between investment banks and savings banks - use it to invest and make money. Those banks don't pay taxes, but they do provide loans to people who do - and those loans are spent on things, which again attracts tax.

Always, always, it finds a way back. It leaves the public purse and flows through wallets and pockets and by inches and yards makes its way back.

"But John," I hear you cry, desperately pushing aside the crowding lobster pots filled with pokemon miniatures. "Doesn't this prove that trickle-down economics works?"

To you I say... nay nay.

See, as I have pointed out - those below a certain level of income can't invest. The money is needed for survival. It can't be squirrelled away in savings accounts, or used in share trading, or utilised in other financial instruments used to make large amounts of money. That requires a significant initial investment.

The money spent by those with a lot of it tends to stay within a certain circle of expenditure. I've blogged before about class and about those with high income. We can probably infer that high-value goods and luxuries are more their purview than anything you would buy in Pound Land. Likewise, the reason why "millenials aren't buying diamonds" is because they can't. They can't afford it. We can maybe squirrel away something in an ISA or a holiday fund. Cost of living has risen so much faster than wages.

But those big companies who sell a lot of products to those with lower income - I am loath to actually name any, as that is stereotyping, but I am sure you can think of your own - have wealthy shareholders who are not people who use those products. The inverse is not possible. DeBeers doesn't pay dividends to a bunch of minimum-wage folks; hell, it barely pays minimum wage to its own employees, but I digress.

Rich money may trickle down a little; but it trickles up far more. It's the money of everyday people that keeps the companies aloft, and lines the pockets of the shareholders and executives that are invested in them, and the politicos that they lobby. If it isn't money that they poured into the system, it is the product of their labour - every factory needs workers. It also bears consideration that those who are wealthy try and find ways to not pay taxes, while those who aren't, can't. Not really.

If the wealthy are made more wealthy by the money in the pockets of those who are not - and if the government is made more wealthy by the same - then...

...why aren't we giving more money to those that don't have much?

If we bring expatriates here, and if we look after them; if we fund the poor, and those on limited income; then not only will the government fund be further refurbished, but so will the companies that pay us our wages. If foreigners show up and they need houses, then build them. Sell them. Make money. Pay tax. Help the government. Help yourselves.

If I am to put my left-wing tendencies aside and speak in right-wing monetary terms: the poor and disenfranchised are an investment opportunity. Stop seeing them as scroungers and start seeing them as debt you can sell that WILL repay to you, sooner or later, in some way. The gold road will run and run, all the way through. Every step it takes, it feeds back into public funds. Sooner or later, it will have paid for itself in entirety - and paid some other people's way besides.

And hey - maybe if you put enough money in an expatriate's pocket, they might have something to save. Wouldn't that be nice for the banks?

I mean the only way you'd think this is a bad idea is if you were some kind of bigot.

The Panama Cabal

If you aren't sure what the Panama Papers are, haven't heard the name Mossack Fonseca or aren't sure why David Cameron is being questioned a lot about his taxes in the last few days, then I might suggest putting this blog down for a minute and taking a gander at whatever news site you think appropriate.

Was anyone actually surprised that this was happening?

Did anyone truly not suspect, at all, that there were companies set up exclusively to ensure that very rich people could dodge taxes in quasi-legal ways?

Nobody should be surprised. Surprised that there is actual paperwork and evidence, yes - but unless you're a buffoon, then you can't think it's never happened.

Isn't that fact in itself a damning indictment of this entire farce?

Nobody wants to pay taxes. Everyone wants to benefit from what those taxes pay for, of course. Everyone wants to eat the lobster, nobody wants to foot the bill. That's just the nature of humanity. We're greedy creatures at heart, and in a society and system that determines success by possessing both Things and Way-To-Get-Things, any means of getting Things without losing Way-To-Get-Things is going to be exploited to the maximum.

There is a bottom rate at the cost of living in any given country. A pure minimum, which is the basest essentials. Anything above and beyond this particular rate, well, here come the taxes. You go shopping, you pay tax. You rent or own, you pay tax. You contribute directly to the welfare of the entirety of society. At least - that is how it is meant to work.
Those on benefits - the people commonly painted as the bad guys whenever the boys from Eton roll out their media machine - spend damn near everything they receive in ways that make it back to the government via tax or otherwise bolster the economy. If what they buy isn't taxed, then it is paid to a shop or corporation that is in itself taxed based on its income. In a way, benefits are an almost guaranteed investment made by a government to itself.

The wealthier you are, though, the more opportunities there are for you to not contribute at all. Churches don't after all. Some companies just choose not to, and when asked about it, offer an insulting paltry sum as a way of indicating they've read the papers and know that people don't like them. Offshore accounts exist. They've existed for a long, long time, and they exist so that the rich can make their money and then keep it to themselves.

Why should anyone else benefit from their hard-earned cash after all? I mean, they earned it all fair and square, right? They earned it working hard just like all of us did, and so they shouldn't have to pay any of it to anyone -

- except for the fact that everyone else pays. The person that shined your shoes this morning pays. The taxi driver pays. The waiter pays, tip or not. The little people in your life all pay. They pay for things that you use, like roads and police and infrastructure and education. They pay and you don't.

You put your money in some account in some foreign nation that by virtue of paperwork means you don't have to pay tax on it, and in doing so, you become the freeloader. Even by HMRC's most conservative estimate in 2012, tax avoidance cost the public four times more than benefit fraud. There are bad apples in both barrels, but the tax barrel is worth a lot more, and those apples stink to high heaven.

And here comes the Panama Papers. Unmasking legions of wealthy individuals twisting the system to further line pockets already stuffed full while the rest of us continue to scrape by. There's been resignations and fall-downs already. Iceland's PM suffered a very public tearing-down.

So now, in this time of austerity, in this time of belts being tightened and people being told to make do with what they have, in this time of us all being in it together, we find out that not only is the Prime Minister deeply implicated in tax avoidance, but several other members of the government could be as well, including the Chancellor, who actually has stakes in a business that in itself doesn't pay tax.

What happens here, you ask?

...nothing.

Nothing, because we're good calves, and we'll just keep eating the grass and getting nice and fat.

In another era, this would have been a powder keg. Protests would have become riots and streets would have burned, and perhaps, rightly so. The anger at the government for hurting all of us so very deeply and in such a hypocritical fashion...it would be a fire so hot the asphalt would melt.

But no. Today everyone shrugs and murmurs about things that don't matter and just go on with their lives. It's easier for us that way. We can absolve guilt with such incredible ease, all the tools have been handed to us for generations. Before the baby boomers even knew who they were, the language and theory behind apathy and denial had set in.

So those that contribute will be painted as leeches, and those that steal will be painted as heroes, and we will just keep on eating it up until we're happy as pigs in shit.

You know what happens to pigs?

The people that own them butcher them for profit.

Time and again, you have been fucking warned.

Forgive the anger, but it's been a bad year.

Drowning In It

The UK government's projected deficit for the 2015/2016 budget is £69 billion.

Projected revenue is £673b - that is, the income the government takes. Meanwhile, the government's spending is projected to be £742b. The debt is owed toward a wide variety of individual funds, 35% of which are overseas; debt is an asset, and so it gets passed around and sold just like any other financial instrument.

Let's be real. These kind of numbers are big. They're not global-fiscal big but they are big nonetheless.

Government finances don't work the same as personal finances - something that a lot of people who advocate austerity and cuts don't realise.

You see, in your personal life, if your expenditure outweighs your income - then something has got to give, because no person has access to a near-limitless source of fiscal stimulus to buy themselves out of trouble. You reduce your expenditure, and you increase your income, and just like that - your deficit goes away. Therein is the acumen of austerity. Cut costs and increase income as best as possible.

Of course this is sometimes easier said than done. There's a certain amount of minimum spending that any human being has to do - guy's gotta eat. Just acquiring more income isn't that easy, either. As of right now the job market is still suffering, especially in my corner of these sceptered isles, and businesses (who are also still suffering) are trying to cut their costs as much as possible, so pay raises and extra hours aren't ten-a-penny.

If one could lay hands on a certain amount of resources, mind, then this would become easier - and not just in a sense of paying for bills that the income isn't covering. Many people have debts that can be paid off (and thus reduce monthly costs) - many people could make investments in business, especially those that are self employed (and thus increase monthly income). People just can't, very often, count on that cash injection.

As previously mentioned, however...government finances don't work the same as personal finances.

So perhaps I can forgive those that might think that austerity cuts are truly the best way to repair an economy. Perhaps. Up to a point. There are those that should know better - if they don't, they shouldn't be working where they are, or governing us.

This country's debt has been increasing steadily (as a percentage of our GDP) since 2001 - slowly and steadily until 2007, then rapidly and vastly increased by the global financial crisis. It is still increasing now, despite the savagery of the cuts that have already been doled out.

The fact of the matter is - just decreasing cost to make the deficit go away won't actually solve problems. A country's economy is an elastic thing, and it is a thing that can be nurtured as well as atrophied. We can emerge from this crisis with no deficit and an economy that is shot to hell, or we can look at our recovery as more long-term - and actually recover.

But that's just me.

Wide And Prejudiced

It is my belief and experience that every single person on this earth holds at least one prejudice.

More than one, usually - and that does not mean to say that everyone is a little bit racist (regardless of what the song tells you) or anything to that extent. More I am stating, with a degree of certainty, that everyone has at least one belief that is prejudicial, that is not borne out by evidence, but that is part of them and hard to even recognisea s a prejudice - let alone combat.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else. I have several prejudices. The one I am going to be looking at, though, is my prejudice against the wealthy.

I think this is part of my raising as much as anything else. I was brought up during the time when Margaret Thatcher had her way with the economy, and when the divide between the rich and the poor just kept growing. My parents were both hard-working people, and both needed jobs. I saw very little of them; my dad in my early childhood, my mother in my tween-teen years.

I was always told by the wider world that being rich was the cure to all ills, and that everyone should shoot for that goal. Sure, there was the odd object lesson about money not buying you happiness; but each example of that was outshone by other examples, of how one needed to shoot for that new promotion, get that job, earn the respect of your peers. That was the prevailing culture.

At school, being poor was a thing to be looked down upon. It earned the derision of your peers. Despite the fact that we were children and couldn't earn our own money, we couldn't admit that we couldn't afford something. To do so was unthinkable. Rather than just say that our parents couldn't (or wouldn't) buy us the new trainers or the new game or whatever, we used to make up excuses as to why we didn't want them.

I once stood up for a friend of mine who was called some pretty fucked up names because they got school dinners paid for by the school.

It's very easy to have an unhealthy relationship with money. You may be looked down upon for it on a personal level, but hey - in business, you work for an organisation that has signed a contract stating it must try to make as much money as possible. That's corporate charter. Money, and the lust and reliance for it, is an immense evil that causes untold problems worldwide every day - and yet holds the world's economy together, in the optimistic hope that everyone's greed will somehow create a balance in which the market fixes everything.

We're told that what is good for the very rich is good for everyone. Usually we're told this by people who are fairly wealthy themselves, and this isn't an accident. We were told that trickle-down economics would benefit everyone, which it simply doesn't - the only thing that tends to trickle down is the burden of debt.

All this probably contributes to the way I feel about the wealthy. It's not a healthy thing to feel, but I feel it. I try not to let it effect how I live my life, but boy that is hard sometimes.

I feel that if one does have prejudice, it doesn't make you a bad person unless you act on it. If you try and fix it, or put it behind you and try and treat people decently regardless of your gut instinct, then it makes you a better person. If I help up someone who is my friend, isn't it more worthy of respect if I help up someone who is my enemy? We're all in possession of instinct - we defeat it every day with logic. That's what makes us better.

I have to acknowledge that how I feel is irrational. There are wealthy people who are good, both objectively and subjectively - and likewise, those who are poor can be bad. Income and resource does not dictate morality.

Still. I know it is there - but I'd rather know it is there so I can do something about it, rather than be unaware that I'm viewing the world through a flawed lens.

Terrorist Sympathiser

I found out very recently that I am a terrorist sympathiser.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that a bombing campaign, or even a full-fledged all-arms military campaign, in Syria will actually get rid of Islamic State or reduce their ability to hurt us, which leads me to think that signing off on a bombing campaign is a bad idea.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that the Russian bombing campaign is achieving the goals we are being told it is, because the Russian air force is busy flattening targets identified by President Assad's loyalists. It's fairly likely, therefore, the Russian bombing campaign is busy killing everyone that isn't in Assad's camp - which includes the 70,000 on-the-ground fighters that our government has quoted as being the actual troops with which IS will be defeated.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that any other nation's bombing of targets in the region made anyone on Earth any safer, which is in part borne out by the fact that bombing has been occurring long before the terror attacks on Paris, the Lebanon and Iraq took place. In fact, it is perhaps up for debate that the bombing campaign conducted by the French air force may have led to Paris being targeted either directly or indirectly, having the opposite of the intended effect.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the military situation as it stands is less like World War 2, with very clearly delineated battle lines and forces, and far more like the Vietnam War. Even with close eyes on the ground, we can guarantee that there will be civilian casualties. It is inconceivable that there won't be. Several nations are basically okay with this, and several people within this nation are likewise - I am not.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every single time we interfere with the Middle East, we cause more problems than we solve. It's like a wound that we made, that we can't help but touch and scratch and toy with. The story repeats itself, constantly, over and over again. We arm and support the rebels, or we arm and support the establishment, and people die. More and more people die. Because everyone remembers that the Russians were the antagonists of Rambo 3, but everyone forgets that the good guys became the Taliban.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every house we blow up, every school we implode, every building we collapse produces more people fleeing for their lives from a nation already riddled with war and death. Many of those people will try and come here. Shamefully, a significant amount of British citizens have shown themselves as finding this situation intolerable; they seem to be the same people who are very much in support of an action that would create yet more of those same refugees.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the loadout of a single strike aircraft costs enough to house and feed a significant percentage of the homeless in this country. A single Storm Shadow missile costs almost £800,000. If we fire six Storm Shadow missiles, that is the cost of a brand new hospital, fully staffed and with all modern technology and equipment. At a time when the public infrastructure is (some might say deliberately) overtaxed and under-budgeted, it is sheer madness to literally throw away such sums of money on achieving - as mentioned before - very little.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because our Prime Minister is showing himself to be an insecure schoolboy, desperately trying to show off to his head-of-state peers, and is willing to risk lives to do so. He wants to prove he's just as tough and brave as all of his chums, and will bully his opposition and cajole them until they let him go along with his multi-million-pound ego trip. He is the one that labelled me a sympathiser, in fact; it's a label he has dished out to everyone not siding with him in today's debate. He claims that inaction is not a strategy, as do many others. I can name two dozen nations that have done nothing and not suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of IS. It seems to be quite an effective strategy.

Finally, I am a terrorist sympathiser because if the powers that be insist on using this kind of rhetoric to reinforce their power and control over the citizenry, then I cannot conscientiously align myself with them. The greatest threat to our way of life today is not a group of militants in a far-away country - nor is that greatest threat a group of individuals who have lived in their target country for a significant period of time, far away from the far-away country that it is proposed that we bomb.

The greatest threat to our way of life is people like David Cameron, who truly believe that the best way to govern a nation is to drive it into austerity - for whom the health and wealth of corporate entities is of greater importance than the population of the nation. IS will never control Europe; but significant parts of Europe are already under the control of people like David Cameron. A man who marries himself to toxic media empires and desperately finger-points and blusters to protect his friends in office, regardless of their evil and incompetence. A man whose political stance is that of doing harm to his citizens, over and over again - death by a thousand cuts.

If all of these beliefs, all of these logical processes make me a terrorist sympathiser, then I will wear that label, and I will wear it with a defiant pride. I will not be intimidated by those who use fear to try and achieve their political ends - David Cameron - into forsaking my morals and my conscience.

I am a terrorist sympathiser.

Just ask the terrorists.