Representative

This is the Palace of Westminster.

It's where Parliament sits, when it does. That's where the laws of the country get settled. There's more to it than that in the grand scheme of things, but for a basic overview, that will probably suffice.

The people in the two houses of Parliament - the House of Commons and the House of Lords - are really, really not like you and me.

No, I'm not going to repeat some weird antisemitic conspiracy theory involving shape changing animals and mind control. I'm going to prove it with two of my favourite tools: Statistics and Anecdotes.

Lets start with the stats, shall we?

The average age of a person in the UK - as of 2020 - is 40.5 years of age. There's approximately 99 men per every 100 women, leading to women making up 50.25% of the population. Around about 87% of the UK is white, and 60% identifies as Christian of whatever denomination. (The next highest religious choice is None, which sits at around 26%.) The average household income annually is £29,800 - though we're going to see a graph about that later that might pique some interest. 7% of the children in the UK attend private schools (the cost of attendance of these schools is on average around £17,200 a year), and around 50% of those who leave compulsory schooling in the UK attend higher education afterwards (which costs approximately £18,000 a year, unless you went between 1962 and 1998, in which case it was free).

(Those statistics were pulled by a variety of sources, including IPSOS-MORI, the Office of National Statistics, and a dozen others; feel free to have a quick check around to check my maths if you feel I've flubbed them somewhere. If I'm wrong I'm not too proud to admit it.)

Let's take a look at the House of Commons.

The average age of an MP is 50 years - Mhairi Black of Renfrewshire is the youngest current MP at 22. Women make up 32.5% of the Commons, 211 of them versus 437 men. 92% of MPs are white. There's no religious data kept on MPs, though 2% of them are Muslim, compared to 5% of the population of the country. Their average household income is skewed by the fact that they are paid over £70,000 a year, plus expenses, plus pay for cabinet positions; though perhaps an inference to the income of the households they came from can be provided by the next statistic. 29% of MPs were educated in private schools - 45% of the Conservative party, significantly ess for other parties - and 89% of them are University graduates, with a full 23% of them holding a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Due to their average age, this means that most of them attended University during the years when it was free to do so.

(These stats were almost all provided by the House of Commons itself.)

These are the people we vote for, with our weird old voting system that is long out of date and seriously needs renewal.

When something is described as a Representative Democracy, it means that citizens Democratically select people to Represent them in the political arena; but it seems that the people that get picked don't actually represent the population of this country, in several ways.

For example the Isle of Wight is represented by one Bob Seely, who isn't from here, doesn't spend much time here, and doesn't really respond to any letters sent to him by his constituents, so, you know.

Is this, perhaps, why decisions are often made that don't seem to be the best for the average person in this country? It might explain why our current political establishment has precious little empathy for anyone of an average income or a less than ideal life situation. The phrase "Out Of Touch" used to mean that individuals didn't understand the basic needs and pressures of life, before it got co-opted by people to try and undermine actual experts.

Statistics don't always tell the full story, admittedly. As promised, here's a little graph of the average household income in the UK; and you can see where the average is, and that is definitely not where the highest point of the graph sits.

Looks like the average gets shunted up quite a lot by those folks up near the other end, hmm? Which happens to include MPs, on their £70,000 a year.

But that's only one side of our government. The OTHER side is composed of the House of Lords, which is... a bit different.

The average age in the House of Lords is 70 years old - more than one of them were born in the 1920s. 27.6% of peers are women. The House of Lords is 94% white. Religion is actually weirdly statistically skewed in the Lords due to the fact that the Church of England gets to have 26 Bishops sit in the chamber just by virtue of being the apparent state religion. They're called the Lords Spiritual. That doesn't mean there can't be MORE Bishops - the rest have to earn their place the usual way. (By being nice to the government.) The Peers of the House of Lords do not receive a salary; they can claim £305 per day in expenses (or a reduced rate of £150 per day). Here come the big deviations; approximately 57% attended private school. 90% of them attended University, in a similar proportion to the House of Commons.

And, of course, we don't elect them. They get chosen; and often they are chosen by whoever is in government at the time. A recent example of this being news was when Jon Bercow, former Speaker of the House and well-known for annoying the current Tory party by insisting they not be disrespectful in the Commons, was snubbed for a peerage - despite almost every single former Speaker of the House being offered one in the past. Theresa May's husband, Boris Johnson's brother and Ian Botham the Cricketer were all offered seats, mind. Can't think why.

This does mean that governments can, effectively, try and seed a legacy of Lords that will be friendly to their cause later on down the road; loading the metaphorical deck with individuals that will vote the same way they do, or the same way that the party in general likes to vote.

And that's entirely putting aside the influence of government advisors, who are utterly unaccountable.

What does this mean for you and me? Well, it means that those that make the decisions are often fairly far removed from the decisions that they end up making. Humans tend to naturally have selective empathy that they reserve for those that are more like them than not, which is why the Prime Minister burned a £50 in front of a homeless man, amongst other charming little anecdotes.

Note, I am not forgiving them - because learning to have empathy and to think about how things affect others is a big part of being a decent human being. Deliberately not doing so is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.

It says a lot that the standardised uniform of the House of Commons used to include a black silk top hat. In fact, there's a whole anecdote (I TOLD YOU) about one man who brought his working class ethic into the Commons.

Keir Hardie was a gent. He helped form the Labour Party as it exists today. He stood for progressive taxes, women being allowed to vote, the abolition of the House of Lords and free education for all. This is a genuine campaign poster for when he ran for Parliament in 1892.

Notice how he is not wearing a top hat. Keir Hardie entered the Chamber wearing the cloth deerstalker hat, a normal working man's suit and a red tie, and caused a significant uproar by doing so. He faced many accusations of undermining the reputation of the House, by "wearing the cloth cap" of the working class.

Think about that, for a moment, as you take in the things that the man was campaigning for. An eight-hour work day - he wanted to bring us DOWN to an eight-hour work day. With the single exception of temperance reform (the temperance movement was a whole other thing), we can get behind that entire list, and frankly, laws have been put in place to cover almost all of it.

Things have improved somewhat since then, obviously. Most people don't wear hats into the Chamber these days; and while there is still an expectation of a certain level of decorum, and traditional behaviours undertaken by all in the House, we've got a far clearer idea of what is actually disrespectful these days.

Right.

So how do we change this? How do we make the House of Commons more like the majority of the country, and thus more representative, and more likely to work in the interests of most of us? And, it follows, more likely to promote Lords that agree with that agenda?

Unfortunately, we have to vote.

We have to get involved at a local level. I know that in some areas, that is harder than others. That some places are seen as safe seats for the incumbents. But without the work being put in, nothing will change. We need to attack political apathy wherever we find it. It is said that if voting changed anything they would ban it - but if it didn't change anything, why would they spend millions of pounds and a huge amount of effort trying to sway the process one way or another?

And we need to make that push now. We need to do it while the government is showing us who it really is - not in three years, when it can start to hide all its fuckups. Now.

Because representation matters, but so does action.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

The Third Estate And The Bastille

Today is my thirty-sixth birthday, and I am fortunate indeed that my birthday falls upon the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

The French don't really call it Bastille Day - they call it La Fete Nationale (the National Celebration). It doesn't need a name - it has its date, and that is how it is greeted to others. Joyeux Quatorze Juillet!

Why is it so important?

To understand that, we must go back to France as it stood in the late 1780s; an economy in crisis free-fall, partially from throwing its support behind the American Revolution, partially due to taxation being what we now call regressive (the highest burden falling upon those least capable of paying).

France was divided into three estates, effectively. The first estate was composed of the clergy - many of them upper clergy who were effectively living as nobility, but any individual within the church was part of the first estate. The second estate was formed of the nobility, of anyone with any kind of noble title - and, importantly, not a one of them was subject to taxation. The third estate was...well, everyone else. The common rabble. 98% of the population of France.

An Etate-General - a meeting of all three states, overseen by the King - was held to address the issue of the realm shitting itself to death in fiscal terms. The Finance Minister of the time - one Jacques Necker - had suggested tax reform, indicating that some of the obscenely wealthy members of the second estate should pay their way. In short, the people who weren't paying any damn taxes were furious at the implication that they should contribute to running the country they lived in. So on 11th July 1789, Necker got it in the neck - summarily dismissed from his post.

That didn't set right with the people. It took a day for the news to circulate properly, and then the public demonstrations began. Marches, disorder, the works. Goods that had been hoarded away by - well, you can guess who by - were raided and redistributed. A convent, rumoured to be one such hoard, was raided and found to contain over fifty wagons full of wheat.

There had been some military enforcement of order, of course; a cavalry charge had broken the back of one of the demonstrations, though it had been called short to avoid further bloodshed. The people knew that the only way they would survive this would be to deny this militia the means of combat. So early on the 14th, the partisans stormed the Hotel de Invalides, which was being kept as an armoury of sorts. They took the thirty thousand muskets held there, but found out that all the gunpowder had been transferred to the Bastille.

So off they went. The crowd - almost a thousand people, as records have it - took up position outside, demanded the surrender of the facility and the arms within. What began as negotiation started becoming fractious as the crowds outside - those not invited within to speak directly to the governor - decided they wanted in anyway. Thus began the actual fighting and subsequent breakdown of negotiations, leading to 98 of the vainqueurs being killed for only one of the defenders inside. However, as the day went on and the partisans were reinforced, the governor realised he couldn't hold the Bastille forever. He surrendered, at first with specific terms, then unconditionally.

That was it. The king conceded. He called off the military units still under his command from Paris. The Marquis de la Fayette - yes, that dude from Hamilton, the guy with the statue in Boston - took over the Parisian militia; the leader of the third estate was made officially mayor of Paris, and the king himself met with the militia to indicate capitulation.

The Bastille itself was disassembled and removed in five months. La Fayette himself gave the key to the Bastille to George Washington as a gift - it is still on display at Mount Vernon today. Many members of the second estate fled the country, fearing violent repercussions (which many of them met), and took to trying to stir up support from neighbouring monarchies. In late August, the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen was adopted by the National Assembly. It would form the basis of the French constitution, and begat the very fabric of Human Rights as adopted by international law.

The day that I share my birthday with was a day that birthed France as it stands as a modern nation. It was the first turn of the wheel on the journey from a pyramid scheme of a nation to something more egalitarian and humane, even if later in its life it started forgetting to apply such thoughts to the people it decided to make part of its empire. It is something I wish to see happen in EVERY nation - freedom for its citizens, equal treatment for all, and respect for one's fellows.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité. It remains the French motto. And as much as my father would spit at the notion - a man of Lebanon who was taught in a brutal French convent - I think those are words that we could stand to live by.

We've watched the second estate get fat off the backs of the third estate for a long time, people.

One of these days, we're going to have to storm the Bastille.

Happy birthday, me.

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.

Phase Two

Recently I have been reading the IDW run of the Transformers comics.

They're a marked improvement on any of the old comics, or the TV series, movies, anything really. The art style jumps around a bit over its ten-year-plus publication but that's fine, in all honesty. These are beings that change their forms on a regular basis. The best part? The story.

The story is wonderful. It adds depth to existing characters that were perhaps not so well developed - Skids and Wheelie getting full backstories. It gives a new angle to already developed characters - Prowl becoming an ultimate manipulator, Thundercracker an impassioned scientist. More than anything, it gives structure to the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons.

The Decepticons in particular have a very specific way in which they overtake worlds, a six-phase engagement strategy. It begins with Phase 1, which is infiltration and information-gathering, and proceeds all the way to Phase 6 - absolute world-shattering genocide.

Phase 2 is the particular phase of interest, to this blog; as it details misinformation, manipulation, and the usage of such methods to undermine the stability of the world in question.

It's through these campaigns that the Decepticons seek to bring war to a world without ever firing a shot. It is from the ashes of this war that the warmongers themselves make their own killing - they are seasoned by four million years of civil war, they know how to kill and they know how to win.

Taking a look at the current political landscape of this country, I believe we are in Tory Phase 2.

Have you noticed how, all of a sudden, there's a lot of shit-talking and shit-stirring going on?

Accusations of antisemitism. Members of a left-wing party being treated like terrorists. Doctors painted like greedy idle scumbags. Refugees and foreigners typecast as the traditional enemies of the rich.

The thing is, it works, doesn't it? I have no doubt that every single person who reads this blog knows at least one person who will claim with confidence any of the media spin stories that are profligate in the current climate. They won't question, they won't do anything of the sort. They'll just repeat Sun headlines, even the ones that contradict each other, with the same fervent and endless faith displayed in the Vatican.

It works, because these people either 1) believe the shit-storm stories over the actual circumstances of our country being torn apart and thus vote for those tearing it apart or 2) don't vote at all because they can't see the truth for the trees.

They're All The Same. We hear it all the time, despite there being a literal archive and catalogue of every way in which they are different. Name an MP and you can look up their voting record, in detail or in abstract. Find something you are passionate about and you can find which parties voted for, voted against, or abstained on. A good website for this is mySociety.

Do you see a doctor regularly? You can find out how your local MP or any other member of parliament voted for the NHS. Do you believe fitness and sports are important? You can see which parties voted to protect such things. Do you think the poor get an easy ride? You can see who agrees with you, and who voted to cut support for the elderly and disabled.

The difference between the Decepticons and Parliament is that Parliament has records. Decepticons can vanish in spaceships, whereas parliamentarians simply can't. What they do is a matter of historical record, and it is they who are accountable to us, not the other way around.

So while the public talk about whether or not a left-leaning politician has indeed made this or that comment about Hitler, we can find out the truth. We can find out what is being done to us, to our country, and we can find it out in real time.

All we need to do is put in two minute's effort.

All the Tories want us to do is not do that.

Don't give them the satisfaction.

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.

War Isn't Over

The three-way split between working class, middle class and upper class is something that has typified much of British history. Who doesn't remember this particular classic comedy sketch?

 The imagery associated with classism is something that is inseperable from the global image of the United Kingdom. Just think of how we are presented in films originating from other countries. (Dick Van Dyke, I am looking at you.)

The thing is, of course, such class warfare doesn't exist anymore. ...right?

...well, wrong. It just looks different.

I wrote this blog post over a year ago about - amongst other things - elite panic and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Sure, the entire notion of breeding and familial obligation doesn't really come into the upper class any more - these days, it's wealth and power, pure and simple. Perhaps, in days of yore when the upper class were held to certain rules and expectations (that they still broke regardless but anyway), things might have been a touch...fairer.

Today, though, the gap between the top and bottom of the scale continues to grow. The gulf is vast and increases every year. The top end tax rate has dropped by 15% in the past 30 years, whereas the income share of the top 1% of earners has doubled from 6% to 12% in the same amount of time, according to the OECD. The average income of the lowest 10% of earners has actually reduced, in real terms, compared to the cost of living.

Wealth changes your view of the world - your perspectives on things. Almost everyone takes some things for granted, and those things differ depending on circumstance.  Perhaps that doesn't create the rigid First World War-like expectations of class divide, but it does create boundaries - and those boundaries create shared self-interest.

When you get down to it - that is what class is. A social group within a divisive stratified system. It's a system that is not only designed to create such divisions, but also to expand the gap between them. That is how it defines itself - its measures for success are also its lines of demarcation.

No longer are our classes dictated by the colour of our collars (or if we wear them at all). Nor are there only three - if I wanted to try and divide them up I'd have to do some real study, though as a starting model I might use the results of this study here.

How does this affect you and I? Well...that's not strictly for me to say, aside from perhaps drawing attention to who makes the decisions regarding the rules and regulations of this country. The people that suffer the most from the decisions are almost always those diametrically opposed to those making those decisions. More and more, we low earners are encouraged to look at each other with suspicion, or to look down on those below us, or to enviously stare up at the heady heights we can't access - because then we won't realise how rigged the game is.

After all, it's an old trick to get all your junior execs to work twice as hard. Tell fifty of them that if they work their guts out, and if they do that, they will get to be a senior exec and earn five times as much. That way you only (eventually) have to pay one of them the extra, for all that added effort.

...just a thought, mind. Just a thought.