you’re being bribed!

One of the reasons the UK is going broke is bribery. There is a massive well organised and completely public programme of voter bribery. Involving all major parties.

You, your mum, your dad, potentially even your silver haired nan are part of this, and it is bankrupting our nation. Not only that but it is denying support to the most vulnerable.

These bribes have names like child benefit, winter fuel allowance and Disability Living Allowance.

The problem is they are not means tested. When a person who would be destitute, cold or trapped without them receives them, then they are a benefit. When they are received by somebody who doesn’t, then they’re a bribe.

The government is rapidly finding that hundreds of thousands may receive incapacity benefit and millions receive job seekers allowance. But the number receiving child benefit or winter fuel allowance stretches into the tens of millions. So the benefits which stop people starving or living on the street are cut back or ever more carefully tested. whilst The bribes that are just handed out once you can prove you have a kid or you’re old are not. Of course here and there, there are the occasional family who score a hundred thousand in benefits. But they are a tiny minority against those living on a pound a day per person. It Is now easier for a 60 year old, mobile, employed person to get a freedom pass. than it is for someone who cannot walk more than a few hundred yards.

If you need help with your personal care, which in all likelIhood you want be able to afford,. the welfare pot is so scraped that all you get is two portions of 15 minutes a day. at that point that bribe starts to look a little foolish,

This is silly, this is wasteful and most of all it isinsulting.

It’s insulting that our leaders view us as being so venal, we’ll vote because we’re handed a bribe for being over a certain age or for having kids.

Why not just do away with the pretence? Let your local MP hand out £50 notes on election day?

Because right now the cuts are landing where they hurt the most and can be afforded least. Today the government announced the scrapping of the Social Fund. This was a benefit of last resort. It existed for those with no bank account and no access to credit and only benefits as income. It was a small bridging loan from giro to giro. It was helpful if you had been mugged or your fridge failed. It wasn’t expensive nationally. It cost one hundred and seventy eight million pounds. But for that money there’s going to be several thousand people with absolutely no where to go and no money in their pockets. People only bribe you, as a away of taking something even more valuable later.

Things are tough aren’t they?
Sardonicus’s left leg can tell a story about NHS cuts.

About 5 years ago Sardo got an ulcer on his left leg. Ouch not nice; the nice nurse at his surgery dressed it. When he needed it looked it and couldn’t get an appointment he popped into an NHS walk in clinic. And when it started to get better he was prescribed dressings and took care of it himself.

It came back a couple of times, as these things do. Only a couple of years later NHS walkin clinics stopped treating wounds, then dressings stopped getting prescribed without increasingly tight monitoring.
So the last time Sardonicus’s leg used up scarce resources at his clinic, cost him hours of work waiting to be seen. And took longer to heal.

A little example granted. But the withering cuts are there for everyone to see. If you work in autism the damage from parents not getting the most basic advice from speech and language therapists. Or people moving from diagnoses of asperger’s syndrome to more sever psychiatric conditions because even the most basic support isn’t there.

28% cuts in care and health as we all live longer and survive more are there for all to see. Quickly we are becoming a sicker, harder more fearful society.

Of course there needs to be cuts, we’re not as rich as we once were and the economy is sick.
But are we all contributing we should? Cuts would be more bearable if everyone was paying their way.
There’s too many people in this country with too much money, paying too little tax. But what to do? When the tax avoider can pay his accountant ten times what the government can, it’s only ever going to go one way.
No there is only one person who can sort this out. And in the unlikely chance you’re reading this Queen Liz, it’s you know. No Sardo isn’t suggesting beheading them or seizing their lands (well maybe Fred the Shred).

No there is one thing even the most dispecable crook seeks and that’s respectability. So you’re Queeness next time you get asked to knight some captain of industry or CEO ask the following question.
Does he or she pay your tax collectors 25% of their disposable income? That’s pretty much what everyone else pays.

You’ll need a copy of the Times Rich List, their P60 (and/or tax return) and a calculator.
If they don’t knight them, don’t patron their charities (giving thousands to charity whilst dodging tax millions in tax is a swizz). Don’t have them at your palace.

Because if you squeeze them hard enough that the cuts are only 26% not 28% it’ll make such a huge difference to thousands.
Not least of all Sardonicus’s leg.

Gary Glitter signed onto Twitter last week.
Shock horror.
Except it wasn’t Gary Glitter it was a netvigilante pretending to be Gary Glitter to reveal the dangers of netpervs getting access to your kids!

After about half an hour of such brilliant posts as “I’m Gary Glitter I like soup” or “You want to be in my gang? Oh I see that was one of my hits.”
Fake Glitter was rumbled. And was a chance for comics to dig out all their old paedo gags (now disguised as ironic protests at him). And some hilarious threats of violence from premier league footballers (albeit surprisingly well spelled).

This was a protest about the easy access paedos can get to the Internet. So no need to worry about a big glittery, twittery van to turn up like a glam rock pide paedo and snatch your kids away. It was all a big attention seeking exercise. Oops I mean a cogent protest.

Poor old Glitter even channel 4 hanged him last year. If he wasn’t a sinister sex offender one could quite sympathise with him.

Monitoring sex offenders online is a great idea. And it’s terribly remiss of the government not to do it.
But the government can’t even stop convicted murderers having twitter pages whilst in maximum-security prison. And selling photos of themselves stabbing other notorious but less popular crims to the tabloids.

6 year olds seem to dodge most parental safeguards, as can those with moderate learning disabilities. In a world where a second hand blackberry, false ID and pay as you go 3g contract; will cost you less than a bowl of cockroach porridge will at one of Heston Blumenthal’s new happy chef’s (about £200).

Technology isn’t going to do it. Not unless you want SOPA or PIPA (is this the law with the best ass in the world?) and even then they won’t work.

The police, probation service should monitor the internet usage of manipulative criminals. But isolating and stigmatising criminals just makes them identify with their criminal identity and other crooks. Education and commonsense for users is the only route.

Remember stop, look and don’t post photos of your genitals.

Why should men have to sit next to women on public transport? There are 2 schools of thought why they shouldn’t.

School one. Women need to be protected from men. In Japan and India the railways provide women only carriages. Women can choose to use mixed carriages, but they have an alternative if they feel threatened by harassment.

School two. Men need to be protected from women. This school doesn’t suggest ladies will go on rampant rampages of male bum pinching, or making withering comments about bald spots and food stains on ties. Rather it claims that men are fragile creatures at the whim of their raging hormones and desires. Men are in danger of spiritual pollution by merely looking at a female form, however well concealed it might be.

The first school would seem an unfortunate necessity in some cultures. The second school is more disturbing. It suggests men are children or beasts unable to control their desires. And women? Why, they’re the very well spring of sin. Veritable ‘Typhoid Marys’. Just glancing at a woman, never mind being close to one can cause irreversible spiritual pollution.

A society that supports school 2 isn’t just and it isn’t kind. It’s a world where the sole duty of the individual is to uphold their virtue and avoid sin. It’s worth noting that the Taliban’s feared religious policy makers were called “the Ministry for the Upholding of Virtue and Prevention of Sin.” It’s a world where a harried mother with 4 kids and a baby carriage, trying to pay her bus fares, is a seen as a seething pit of potential sin.
Sadly, parts of the State of Israel is turning to school two. Buses are being segregated into men and women’s sections.
If the only way you can pursue virtue and sin is to place your virtue and purity above the needs of your fellow human beings then your virtue is worth nothing. It’s a neurosis that may benefit from therapy or other treatments.
Virtue is about moral courage, kindness and generosity. It’s about helping that woman with her baby carriage, or sitting with your family because you love them. Its about looking at a woman or man as a fellow human being. And if in the process you find them attractive its about enjoying that even if it smudges your virtuosity ever so slightly.

A kind and just society, is one where we help others whilst taking responsibility for our own behaviours and actions. A society where we’re not scared to even look at a human being, never mind respect them.

A DRAFTY CAREERS OFFICE IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND

MASTER
Right Badgersworth Your father’s merchant bank is bust, RBS are asking for at least one GCSE and the Household Cavalry are so broke they’re eating their horses. How are you going to earn an honest living?

BADGERSWORTH
I’m not sir. I’m going to be a bally gang banger.

MASTER
A what? You blithering idiot?

BADGERSWORTH
A cad, a ruffian, a rascal a law scoffing oik sir. I’ll sell Pimms to the gels at Cheltenham Ladies College, knock police officers’ helmets off and thrash some bugs from Eton with my cricket bat

MASTER
That’s no career you brainless imbecile. You’ll just go to the clink.

BADGERSWORTH
For about 2 years sir. Better food, no prep and I get my own Playstation. Then I repent my wicked ways. And swan around public schools telling all the new bugs not to sin the way I sinned. And getting paid a fancy coin all the time.

MASTER
By jingo you’ve cracked it. Can I join you? Only the burser has pissed my blasted pension up the wall and I’m going to have get a job as a double dratted classroom assistant at the local academy when I retire.

BADGERSWORTH
With all due respect sir. Respect!

MASTER AND BADGERSWORTH Snr bump knuckles

Ridiculous, non?

But this does seem to be how the community leadership industry works these days. The more you let your community down, the hungrier and more desperate the desire to see you turn up contritely at school, college or Newsnight to speak about having seen the error of one’s way. Well, it wasn’t your fault anyway, was it?

As Bim Adewummi in her excellent article in the Guardian says http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/05/diane-abbott-twitter-row-racism?newsfeed=true
Why when Barrack Obama was elected president of the US did the BBC feel the need to choose Dizzee Rascal to represent the black community? (and then act surprised that Mr Rascal is both informed and articulate).

Or in the case of Stephen Lawrence trial. Why was Maddox, a community leader and exgang member, interviewed on Newsnight? This is political correctness masquerading as racism or vice versa. Especially as the point made in the Lawrence case again and again was that Stephen was innocent, blameless and certainly not in a gang.

Diane Abbott’s initial tweet comments were ridiculous. The follow up that she was speaking about white folk’s tactics in the Congo were offensive. Not only do Caucasians not have secret cabal meetings on how to run the world, it is also ridiculous to compare us all to an insane Belgian dictator with an obsession with controlling the world’s rubber supply.

And most of all it doesn’t help.

Sorry, but even Nick Griffin would have had to resign if he’d started twittering all Black people think like Idi Amin.

There is a point where community leadership can’t be constantly handed to the least representative most negative and most self selected.
The 3rd rate remarks of a second rate MP like Dianne. Ignore the vast number of black and other minority people in the UK who rise above racism and get on with their lives. Who aren’t exgang members because the only gang they joined was their Union at work.

Because racism reinforced out of embarrassment and patronage is still racism. If anything it’s worse.