I hate this government
I've been away from this blog for a long time and it's strange to think about what's driven me back to it. It's not exciting adventures or silly mishaps or even cool fish. It's the government. Before I get going I should say I will be trying, if I can get momentum, to post more here and those posts will be better sourced than this one which is going to have no links, no references, nothing but the words that I need to get out right now.
I hate this government. This government is destroying our country and everything that made it great.
They're destroying the NHS by stealth. Privatising small portions so we won't notice until, like an infection, it's spread so far that removing it would kill the whole thing.
They're destroying our schools. Allowing academies to flourish while cutting funding to local authorities and forcing struggling schools to be converted, whether the students, staff or parents want it or not. These academies don't have to hire qualified teachers, or stick to the national curriculum, or do anything that anyone would reasonably expect of a school that gets government money.
They're destroying our higher education. Our universities and tertiary institutions. One of the first things they did when they got into power was to increase fees to £9,000 a year. Of course, that was supposed to only be for exceptional circumstances but what did they expect? The less generous of us would say they expected, or at least hoped for, exactly what happened. Students now have to consider whether a £27,000 debt (before living expenses) is worth a degree. You can't get a decent job without one but then again it seems almost impossible to get a decent job with one these days so really what's the difference? They're pricing poor people out of higher education, a level of education that should be based on merit (and was to some extent when these politicians went to university with their government grants) is now back to being based on money. This increase in fees has been combined with a decrease in government funding, so HEIs are struggling. This struggle will only get worse because the higher rate of fees mean fewer students are going to be able to pay them back. These fees were supposed to top up the funding and instead it's making both the institutions and the students poorer. How many schemes can say that?!
They're destroying our social services. Cutting benefits to millions who need it, while governing at a time when more people on benefits are in work than out of it. Because they've done nothing to increase the minimum wage while allowing prices to rise beyond most people's capacities to cope. They've allowed zero-hours contracts (don't call us, we'll call you) to flourish meaning people can't claim benefits but also can't be guaranteed work from one day to the next. They're forcing people out of their homes because they had the temerity to live in a house with a spare room. No matter that 'spare' room is being used to keep equipment necessary for maintaining health, or belongs to a child who has just left for university. These people must move, despite there not being the houses for them to move into, so they end up in temporary accommodation (paid for by cash-strapped councils) or, worse, on the streets.
They've destroyed the support for disabled people. Closing the factories that used to provide them work, pay and a sense of meaning and usefulness in their lives. ATOS has ruined the lives countless people by deeming them fit to work even if they were so ill that in some cases they died while waiting for their appeal to be heard. Now they're even cutting the Disabled Students Allowance, a small pittance that can be the difference between succeeding and failing in higher education for thousands of disabled students.
They've destroyed mental health services, creating critical situations that would never have arisen if proper preventative care had been provided. People whose lives could be meaningful and productive are being prevented from living them because funding cuts have been so severe that even seeing a mental health professional for an assessment can take months.
They've killed the Post Office. Royal Mail is now a private enterprise, owned by hedge fund managers. The sale went through with little commotion and has since been revealed, as anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen, to have been staggeringly undervalued. Undervalued, it should be noted, by the very people who bought the shares and made an absolute killing by selling them for more than double the cost they bought them.
They've done everything they can to destroy services that help those parts of society most in need of them. The poor, the vulnerable, the mentally and physically ill. These people, it seems, are not worthy of compassion. Are not worthy of consideration. Are not worthy of money.
So who is worthy of compassion? Lets see . . . the bankers who brought this recession upon us. No prison time for them. Not even the loss of their jobs, except for a few sacrifical lambs who undoubtedly got golden handshakes on the way out. They're still working, still trying to come up with get rich quick schemes to earn money for themselves and their friends. Their friends in government.
Who else? . . . The ultra rich. No tax increases for them. Tax increases for pretty much everyone else, but not for them. Can't harm the 'job creators'. Remind me how many jobs they've created recently? Compared to how many lost or outsourced?
Who else? . . . well that's about it. Unless you have money you are nothing to these people. If you have money you must be worthy. If you don't, conversely, you must be unworthy. Unworthy of any help. It's 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' time. Despite the fact that most of the people in government probably had nannies and fags to do this for them most of their lives, they somehow know everything there is to know about making a go of your life. It's so easy. All you need to do is go to the right school, meet the right people, become chums with the right families, go to the right universities and join the right clubs and you too could be Prime Minister one day.
What's that? You grew up on a council estate where you're family barely had enough money to buy clothes and food and pay the rent and the bills and your school was dilapidated and your teachers stressed and you never got to go to university because you couldn't afford it even if you'd got the grades but you had to start that after-school job to help with the bills so never got to do all your homework and so you only got a few Cs at GCSE. Well, clearly that's all your fault and the most compassionate thing to do would be to take away any safety net because if there's a safety net you know you can fall and will be ok but without one you'll never fall.
What's that? Oh, you fell. Well. . . . um . . . . tough, I suppose.
You see, we spent all our spare cash. Some of it, about £8 million of it, was spent trying to shoot a few badgers. 1771 to be precise. Yes, that's £4,500 per badger but that's what it costs to rid the country of TB in cattle. What do you mean independent experts said the cull actually made the spread of TB worse? And that it would have been cheaper and more effective to vaccinate? No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. You see, once the hunting ban was put in place no one was allowed to shoot wild animals any more and we've got lots of people with itchy trigger fingers just desperate to go out and have a bit of a 'bang, bang' in the countryside and a badger cull was a perfect opportunity. Yes, the sound of the 'bang, bang' did rather scare the badgers off and we spent quite a lot of time chasing the little buggers down. They can really run quite fast, donchaknow. It was fun though, took me back to my old school days when we used to chase Johnson down the corridors of the dorms with a wet towel. What larks!
Our government is trying to take us back to the Victorian age. Not the age of crinoline dresses and men in top hats, I mean the age of poor houses, children with rickets, and a working-age population to ill and hungry to be productive. They want us to go back to to the time of the workhouse and the debtors prison. A time when being cruel was somehow seen as being kind. A time when being poor was seen as a character flaw rather than simply the luck of the draw. A time when rich people thought that being rich made them inherently better.
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The NHS wasn't born solely out of compassion, it was born out of a recognition that having fit and healthy workers is better for the economy than having sick and injured workers. None of the social programs we have were born solely out of compassion, they were born out of a realisation that having a healthy society, one with money, is better for the economy than a society where everyone is too sick to work and can't afford to buy anything. It's insane to think that a conservative government, with all their friends in business, can't see that bankrupting the nation by cutting every safety net is not just wrong morally but is bad for business.
Throughout all this I've been thinking of this government as a Conservative government. Their policies are the only ones being enacted so I think this is a fair call. The one thing the LibDems stood for to many people of my age was their stance on university fees. No fees! We promise! First thing they did, Fees! Nine grand a year! My anger at this, and everything they'd done (or 'not' as it is more accurately described) is so great and so powerful that it threatens to make me burst at times. The things I've learned about this party in the intervening years has only heightened that anger and made me know that whatever my political allegiance, it will never be LibDem again.
This conservative government is showing the very worst excesses of a conservative party unhindered by any moderating force. As UKIP force them further and further to the right we will see more and more vitriol directed towards immigrants, poor people, minorities, and anyone else who can't trace their ancestry and money back to the Norman Invasion. People who have done nothing than try to live their lives as best they can have become scapegoats for a government unwilling or unable to see that the Austerity measures they have unnecessarily forced on our nation are not working, are making a bad situation worse and are going to take years, if not decades, to recover from. And that recovery will come only when these measures are removed. When funding is put back into the NHS, social welfare programs, schools, police services. Until then we are going to struggle and more and more are going to fail and find that the safety net that has been there all their lives has been removed at the very time they need it most.
I don't have a solution. I don't know that Labour would have made a better job of things (though it's hard to see how they could have done worse). I just know that this government is killing our country and it really has to stop.
I hate this government. This government is destroying our country and everything that made it great.
They're destroying the NHS by stealth. Privatising small portions so we won't notice until, like an infection, it's spread so far that removing it would kill the whole thing.
They're destroying our schools. Allowing academies to flourish while cutting funding to local authorities and forcing struggling schools to be converted, whether the students, staff or parents want it or not. These academies don't have to hire qualified teachers, or stick to the national curriculum, or do anything that anyone would reasonably expect of a school that gets government money.
They're destroying our higher education. Our universities and tertiary institutions. One of the first things they did when they got into power was to increase fees to £9,000 a year. Of course, that was supposed to only be for exceptional circumstances but what did they expect? The less generous of us would say they expected, or at least hoped for, exactly what happened. Students now have to consider whether a £27,000 debt (before living expenses) is worth a degree. You can't get a decent job without one but then again it seems almost impossible to get a decent job with one these days so really what's the difference? They're pricing poor people out of higher education, a level of education that should be based on merit (and was to some extent when these politicians went to university with their government grants) is now back to being based on money. This increase in fees has been combined with a decrease in government funding, so HEIs are struggling. This struggle will only get worse because the higher rate of fees mean fewer students are going to be able to pay them back. These fees were supposed to top up the funding and instead it's making both the institutions and the students poorer. How many schemes can say that?!
They're destroying our social services. Cutting benefits to millions who need it, while governing at a time when more people on benefits are in work than out of it. Because they've done nothing to increase the minimum wage while allowing prices to rise beyond most people's capacities to cope. They've allowed zero-hours contracts (don't call us, we'll call you) to flourish meaning people can't claim benefits but also can't be guaranteed work from one day to the next. They're forcing people out of their homes because they had the temerity to live in a house with a spare room. No matter that 'spare' room is being used to keep equipment necessary for maintaining health, or belongs to a child who has just left for university. These people must move, despite there not being the houses for them to move into, so they end up in temporary accommodation (paid for by cash-strapped councils) or, worse, on the streets.
They've destroyed the support for disabled people. Closing the factories that used to provide them work, pay and a sense of meaning and usefulness in their lives. ATOS has ruined the lives countless people by deeming them fit to work even if they were so ill that in some cases they died while waiting for their appeal to be heard. Now they're even cutting the Disabled Students Allowance, a small pittance that can be the difference between succeeding and failing in higher education for thousands of disabled students.
They've destroyed mental health services, creating critical situations that would never have arisen if proper preventative care had been provided. People whose lives could be meaningful and productive are being prevented from living them because funding cuts have been so severe that even seeing a mental health professional for an assessment can take months.
They've killed the Post Office. Royal Mail is now a private enterprise, owned by hedge fund managers. The sale went through with little commotion and has since been revealed, as anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen, to have been staggeringly undervalued. Undervalued, it should be noted, by the very people who bought the shares and made an absolute killing by selling them for more than double the cost they bought them.
They've done everything they can to destroy services that help those parts of society most in need of them. The poor, the vulnerable, the mentally and physically ill. These people, it seems, are not worthy of compassion. Are not worthy of consideration. Are not worthy of money.
So who is worthy of compassion? Lets see . . . the bankers who brought this recession upon us. No prison time for them. Not even the loss of their jobs, except for a few sacrifical lambs who undoubtedly got golden handshakes on the way out. They're still working, still trying to come up with get rich quick schemes to earn money for themselves and their friends. Their friends in government.
Who else? . . . The ultra rich. No tax increases for them. Tax increases for pretty much everyone else, but not for them. Can't harm the 'job creators'. Remind me how many jobs they've created recently? Compared to how many lost or outsourced?
Who else? . . . well that's about it. Unless you have money you are nothing to these people. If you have money you must be worthy. If you don't, conversely, you must be unworthy. Unworthy of any help. It's 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' time. Despite the fact that most of the people in government probably had nannies and fags to do this for them most of their lives, they somehow know everything there is to know about making a go of your life. It's so easy. All you need to do is go to the right school, meet the right people, become chums with the right families, go to the right universities and join the right clubs and you too could be Prime Minister one day.
What's that? You grew up on a council estate where you're family barely had enough money to buy clothes and food and pay the rent and the bills and your school was dilapidated and your teachers stressed and you never got to go to university because you couldn't afford it even if you'd got the grades but you had to start that after-school job to help with the bills so never got to do all your homework and so you only got a few Cs at GCSE. Well, clearly that's all your fault and the most compassionate thing to do would be to take away any safety net because if there's a safety net you know you can fall and will be ok but without one you'll never fall.
What's that? Oh, you fell. Well. . . . um . . . . tough, I suppose.
You see, we spent all our spare cash. Some of it, about £8 million of it, was spent trying to shoot a few badgers. 1771 to be precise. Yes, that's £4,500 per badger but that's what it costs to rid the country of TB in cattle. What do you mean independent experts said the cull actually made the spread of TB worse? And that it would have been cheaper and more effective to vaccinate? No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. You see, once the hunting ban was put in place no one was allowed to shoot wild animals any more and we've got lots of people with itchy trigger fingers just desperate to go out and have a bit of a 'bang, bang' in the countryside and a badger cull was a perfect opportunity. Yes, the sound of the 'bang, bang' did rather scare the badgers off and we spent quite a lot of time chasing the little buggers down. They can really run quite fast, donchaknow. It was fun though, took me back to my old school days when we used to chase Johnson down the corridors of the dorms with a wet towel. What larks!
Our government is trying to take us back to the Victorian age. Not the age of crinoline dresses and men in top hats, I mean the age of poor houses, children with rickets, and a working-age population to ill and hungry to be productive. They want us to go back to to the time of the workhouse and the debtors prison. A time when being cruel was somehow seen as being kind. A time when being poor was seen as a character flaw rather than simply the luck of the draw. A time when rich people thought that being rich made them inherently better.
-----------------------------------------------------
The NHS wasn't born solely out of compassion, it was born out of a recognition that having fit and healthy workers is better for the economy than having sick and injured workers. None of the social programs we have were born solely out of compassion, they were born out of a realisation that having a healthy society, one with money, is better for the economy than a society where everyone is too sick to work and can't afford to buy anything. It's insane to think that a conservative government, with all their friends in business, can't see that bankrupting the nation by cutting every safety net is not just wrong morally but is bad for business.
Throughout all this I've been thinking of this government as a Conservative government. Their policies are the only ones being enacted so I think this is a fair call. The one thing the LibDems stood for to many people of my age was their stance on university fees. No fees! We promise! First thing they did, Fees! Nine grand a year! My anger at this, and everything they'd done (or 'not' as it is more accurately described) is so great and so powerful that it threatens to make me burst at times. The things I've learned about this party in the intervening years has only heightened that anger and made me know that whatever my political allegiance, it will never be LibDem again.
This conservative government is showing the very worst excesses of a conservative party unhindered by any moderating force. As UKIP force them further and further to the right we will see more and more vitriol directed towards immigrants, poor people, minorities, and anyone else who can't trace their ancestry and money back to the Norman Invasion. People who have done nothing than try to live their lives as best they can have become scapegoats for a government unwilling or unable to see that the Austerity measures they have unnecessarily forced on our nation are not working, are making a bad situation worse and are going to take years, if not decades, to recover from. And that recovery will come only when these measures are removed. When funding is put back into the NHS, social welfare programs, schools, police services. Until then we are going to struggle and more and more are going to fail and find that the safety net that has been there all their lives has been removed at the very time they need it most.
I don't have a solution. I don't know that Labour would have made a better job of things (though it's hard to see how they could have done worse). I just know that this government is killing our country and it really has to stop.
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