" The Howard League is a membership organisation and draws its members from all parts of society - from MPs, QCs, peers and academics, to students, prisoners and legal professionals."
On a lighter note, my regular readers this week will both be pleased to learn that my diet is now approaching its triumphant conclusion. As the last remnants of the toxins typical of industrial-age food leave my body after five days of eating only raw fruit, vegetables and salad and eschewing all grains, starches and potatoes my mind has become clearer still.
It’s now plain that my belief - acquired yesterday after a mere 96 hours on 800 kCal per day - still left some room for error. In fact my annoying colleague proved not to be a Roswell Grey hiding underneath a terrestrial skin after all but was in fact a platter loaded down with scorched tuna steaks sautéed potatoes and salsa, followed by a generous serving of chocolate truffle torte and cream. I checked with Sir Rupert, King of the Pixies and the Vegetarian Society’s head of bacon, and they assured me that tuna steaks, Roswell Greys and colleagues at the Department of Hurt and Awful Nuisances are all root vegetables.
I must say that the empty desk opposite me looks rather sad and lonely with its hastily emptied and hastier-refilled drawers and all that fingerprint dust but I’m happy in the knowledge that I can recommend to you both four solid days subsisting on roots, nuts, and berries or, as it is more properly called ‘The State Retirement Pension, 2020 style, Gordon Brown Special Commemorative Edition.’
Old Sir Rupe also points out that my line manger, a lifelong Labour Party and Liverpool FC supporter is, in fact, a tuber corm or rhizome.
Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance.
How's that for an opening? In the entire history of civilization, has any human society so ordered its affairs that it would seem entirely normal to combine those words in that order in a single sentence?
And it gets better:
3M, a company with operations in 60 countries, refused to sign Berkeley's nuclear-free disclosure form as required by the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act passed by voters in 1986.
As a result, the library's self-checkout machines have not been serviced in about six months. Library officials say 3M is the only company authorized by the manufacturer to fix the machines, which were purchased in 2004.
The library asked the Peace and Justice Commission for a waiver, but at its Jan. 5 meeting the commission voted 7-1, with two abstentions, to reject the request... "The act is meant to be a blow against nuclear war. We're serious about upholding that."
The way things are going it won't be necessary to nuke the Bay Area.
I chuckled and then thought, how about us? So I Brit-Googled nuclear free northwest and sure enough got something.
Latest news
First nuclear free city in the world remembers the A-bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Published Wednesday 27th July 05 in Business news
Manchester, as the first nuclear free city in the world, will be commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, this August.
In August 1945, atomic bombs instantaneously reduced the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble, taking hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Lord Mayor of Manchester, Councillor Mohammed Afzal Khan will be representing the city in Hiroshima, from August 4 -6 for the sixth General Conference of Mayors for Peace.
Read the rest right here if you like and chuckle or weep as per. But, what’s going on here?
The old Lefties who were more or less working for the Soviet Union still can’t be thinking the Good Old days are on their way, can they? I mean, really, do they think that Tzar Vladimir Putin is going to sweep across a disarmed Western Europe and help the working people of Manchester reclaim their alienated surplus labour value? Perhaps so – browse in any search engine and use Lenin and see just how many true believers there are still out there.
A Right-wing paranoid afraid of nuclear blackmail or attack by Iran or Pakistan or any other Islamist would-be world purifiers might suspect, just suspect, mind you, that this was part of some plot to disarm and demoralise the West preparatory to just such a case of future blackmail. So that’s bad. Perhaps the islamists have picked up all that old 1980’s should-be-illegal Lefty bureaucracy and is running with the ball to the coming of the Caliphate…
But I think it’s probably something else. And pray it, really.
The Lord Mayor of Manchester, Councillor Mohammed Afzal Khan is probably acting simply as a member of the mainstream governing class here. Despite that it is improper for public funds to spend money on foreign-policy junkets[quaint notion ‘public funds’ – it’s our money, comrade], and despite what I suspect is Manchester City Council’s need for a few quid, perhaps to mend the odd council house roof or to check up that everything’s tickety-boo with its child protection procedures just in case, you know, they might be able to help a child or two who come onto their books, no rush, no pressing local concern; despite all that , this isn’t about sending anti-nuke coals to the radioactive Japanese Newcastle. Forget the millions that this kind of farrago must be costing local authorities nationwide for the moment – the loss of good services that local administration can justly provide.
It’s all about them. It’s all about the ruling class saying ‘We’re the good guys. We’re for Peace, and you’re either for War, or you’re with us. So, sayonara, humble yeomen of Manchester in your awful deck housing amongst the Incapacity Benefit mills, we’re of to show the world that the Wise and the Good still love you all, and are keeping the warlike tory wolf at bay.’
It’s territory marking. It’s parading power. It’s the solemn procession of our third millennium city fathers before the masses whose goodly governance is their sole concern. It’s a declaration of moral righteousness in the culture war.
Which is why we must fight on, everywhere and anywhere, with whatever force we can to show people what our peaceable, loose, free, family-based and property-respecting responsible culture is like.
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week. Day Four. It’s all become clear at last.
My Feinian colleague doesn’t put me on edge because of their absurd faith in social engineering, or their historical ignorance. In fact, it’s not political or ideological at all. It’s racial. Looking across the office, my mind clarified by night-on four-days of uncooked vegetables and fruit, my precious bodily juices purified and my rapid-neurons strengthened by privation now allow me to see the truth for the first time. My colleague isn’t an antagonistic human being at all and is in fact as Roswell Grey. I can clearly see the pupil-less black eyes and the Quorn-like alien flesh moving under what is a very good replica of human skin. It’s all so obvious now! Nobody that stupid and ill-informed about the basic facts of life in this country – this planet! – could ever have been brought up here.
Let alone choosing to spend the whole morning discussing a buy one, get one free menu of our local posh grub pub.
As the Ranting Penguin points out just how deep, wide, thick and sticky is the mess this country’s been dropped in, linking to the Mail, I thought I’d add a positive note.
Or put the cat amongst the pigeons, if you like.
It’s going to take to the 2030’s to get national debt down to the 40% that Mister Brown prudently said would be his ceiling.
So that’s twenty-one years, or twenty-five, tops.
No problem.
Actually in the scale of things, twenty-four years isn’t so long. Time enough for my daughter to have grown up and started a family perhaps…and perhaps to have taken for granted some opportunities on the way that it took other women centuries to reach for the first time.
Below is a link is to a site extolling the…well, here’s the blurb for Ladies First:
LADIES FIRST is primarily about women who were a "first" in a career which had previously been closed to them because of their sex. However, it also includes women who were "first" to achieve something which had not been achieved before by either man or woman, women who founded institutions such as banks, clubs, magazines etc relating to women and women who were a "first" because a man could not have done it anyway.
I don’t know whether to laugh bitterly at how many of the achievements that are now available to women in our free(ish) society are open only for the first generation, or the third, or the fifth: or to be glad that it’s happened at all after all the millennia that such things weren’t available – and even to men in a lot of cases -, or to make snippy comparisons with other cultures where things aren’t even as (partially, imperfectly, relatively) good as ours is.
Take a look here anyway, and let’s imagine, hope, and maybe act to keep what is good in our country that has got us all so far up the ladder of oportunity. Eventually.
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.
Day Two. three. I mean Day Three.Losing it.
Ketosis must be setting in now surely. All those damned seeds and leaves and roots and no bread or pasta, rice or potatoes. Or salt.
Lovely salt.
Dark, rippling shadows waver at and wave from my peripheral vision. Things writhe and skip in them; chittering and eating pizza.
Evil things; but useful by taking my mind off even my insanely collectivist Feinian colleague.
Some calories added by dried fruits – three varieties, all of which resemble in some way or other the previously-enjoyed meals of small mammals. Raisins, apricots, and especially figs.*
And macadamia nuts of course. The lady in the whole food shop recommended macadamia nuts to my hunger-enslaved, plastic willpower for protein and cholesterol control and so I bought them like a Korean War POW.
Cruel, really. It’s got to pinch when they, and…I mean what do they do with the rest of the macadamias afterwards? Release them into the wild to be the butt of whole-bodied macadamias’ cruel humour and put in charge of whatever passes for soft furnishings or children’s television in the macadamias’ lush forests, shady bowers and bosky dells? Or do they just make musical instruments out of them, like armadillos or cake stands like elephants?
I comfort myself that this is good for my muscular acidity and hence for my back.
And then comes Friday. O Friday, with its cereal-based foodstuffs and dairy products beckons to me like a siren.
A siren with a crust.
Meanwhile, the freedom directory’s beginning to be populated, and it’s slow work so I’m a little way off eBay or Amazon status quite yet…But all I want to do anyway is destroy the drooling collectivism of my countrymen. Keep the campaign ideas coming please, by the way.
* a rich source of natural brown which the growing body needs to promote strong healthy ankle and earlobe development and in later life enables it to penetrate a vibrant, prosperous economy and sodomize it into a state of supine bankruptcy in eleven brief, fiction-filled years.
I got going as well: some quips, a truly dreadful pun and…and then it struck me that I was wasting my time today.
This person is so far out of the world that we know and care about that even the pleasure of larting him remotely would be a guilty pleasure.
The British war dead don’t exist to him, or matter. The bed-wetting, emotionally retarded children of Israel unfortunate enough to live near the death-cult bearded crazy rocket monsters don’t matter to him. The Japanese and Nazi empires and what it took to stop them didn’t exist or matter to him; let alone the Soviet and Maoist and Cambodian charnel houses – they especially didn’t exist or matter to him – not to someone whose email address is
Miners poring by candlelight over Workers’ Educational Association books, or parsons meeting with local magnates to show off and explain about slavers’ chains and collars, or printers waiting to get into work at Wapping standing under a barrage of abuse and missiles; all nothing. Social Democracy and Christian Socialism, nothing; civic Conservatism and liberal individualism, nothing. Women’s’ suffrage and the Jarrow March, the Anti-Corn law League and the gentle, courageous work of pacifist nurses in the trenches, all nothing.
Modest, gradual, non-violent and piecemeal reform; worse than nothing – a foe to subvert or destroy.
His Manichean dualism with all good on his side and all evil everywhere else seems unlikely ever to let any other viewpoint in.
So I’d better do a bit, today, getting the message out elsewhere.
Sue’s idea is the first suggested incoming campaign to go on. Thanks, Sue.
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.
Day Two.
Getting to me. Feinian colleague who can’t wait for Maggie to die to dance on her grave in ecstasies of delight over incoming snacks. Mange-tout and cucumber salsa not different enough from onion and cucumber salsa yesterday and not enough calories. More chocolate talk…gossip turns to pizza and slow cookers. I shall be strong. Got to stick it to the bad guys on blog tonight. Three more days of carrots and celery and not a crust or spud in sight.
The government is to be asked to pay £12,000 to the families of all those killed during the Troubles - including members of paramilitary groups.
The families of paramilitary victims, members of the security forces and civilians who were killed will all be entitled to the same amount.
Be warned; the main posts and comments alike are larded with obscenities from the start.
Cool.
But setting aside any bitter, acid invective against the Olympic levels of all-my-ancestors-were-each-others’-cousins levels of stupidity and insensitivity to the innocent bereaved that this recommendation demonstrates, and manfully resisting the urge to speculate about what kind of dietary deficiencies or degenerative infections could produce brains feeble enough to generate moral equivalence of this nature from the start of the process; moral equivalence that led supposedly educated people to imagine that the deaths of uniformed professionals dedicated to preserving the lives of law-abiding British subjects were somehow similar to the deaths of plain-clothed war-criminals (as all terrorists are), I have to point out that there might be another problem here.
Where does this leave ‘The Peace Process?’
I mean, if it’s being done to ‘draw a line’ or ‘move on,’ is twelve grand going to be more than an insult to the bereaved? I have some pity for the orphans, but the IRA and UVF widows likely knew exactly who and what their lovely, Semtex-stained beaux palled around with.
So do the wise and the good think that twelve measly thousand’s going to bring somebody’s daddy back or make up for an adolescence of dreary commemorative visits by scary sods it nasty suits and putting absurdly large ‘patriotic’ floral displays on graves each year some how make it all better?
These lancet-minded former bishops and retired policemen must be thinking in the old money from when they were lads so maybe a dozen kilosovs looks just the job to them.
Or is it something else? Is this some part of a continuing squeeze operation against the British taxpayers for more protection money, or else the terrorists will go back to shooting prison officers on their doorsteps in front of their just-then widows and screaming children, or nail-bombing pubs?
Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.
So is that it – ‘Pay up and massively subsidize our sewer of an economy and our ‘paramilitary’ families at all times and in all places,’ or what…?
See, there’s a bit of a cash shortage about just now and, you know, someone’s going to have to start cutting public expenditure sometime.
I hated the Good Friday Agreement from its appeasing, morally-equivalent start with all its dreamy big-tent, hands across the sectarian divide, Phony Tony Things Can Only Get Better evasion of centuries of history and decades of monstrous terrorist cruelty.
And now the filthy thugs have their hands on our cash-flow and not a leader in sight to put a stop to it.
On a lighter note, I was able to use this cheering little story to put up the first contact post on the freedom directory thing here, showing the Consultative Group’s email box and email and other contacts for the lovely ex-bishop of ’Derry’ should anyone wish to comment upon the Group’s work...
Take a look if you like. I’ve nearly finished the framework pages, but apart from this cheery little tale of our tax pounds in action, it’s empty of data so far.
I hope to make it much bigger really soon…
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.
Day One.
A little peckish after breakfasting on only two tins of fruit, and colleagues were quite happy brandishing and extravagantly praising some extremely chocolatey biscuits as my stomach rumbled, but I can take it. There’s nothing a right-wing blogger can’t do once he sets his mind to it.
Just a post to check in and reassure my kindly and tolerant readers that I’m still somewhere out there in the blogosphere carrying on Maggie’s Great Work. Way out there, as it happens.
I’m concentrating this week on setting up the directory site wherein will be listed the names and addresses of Britain’s numerous friends of liberty and also of Dorothy.
I’m absolutely not a techie - as Cherry Pie points out in the comments of the previous post - so making Google’s Blogger do a job that I really need a proper website for is going to be a bit tricky.
Next week’s going to be fraught anyway as it’s back to work for me after a blissful week’s holiday with the incomparable Mrs. Northwester. The osteopath has put me on a week-long diet of raw fruit, vegetables, nuts and salad for my back. No grains. No starches. No bread or pizza or potatoes. No cheese or milk or eggs. I’m a vegetarian so I can’t even gulp down bloody chunks of raw squirrel. I expect my posting to get a bit erratic and possibly paranoid.
Bastards.
However, I haven’t written anything rude about the Prime Minister for days and I’m beginning to get the shakes. Also I’m arrogant and greedy enough to dream of putting Ad Sense on this blog one day so I can save up enough cash to buy a mansion and retire to some tropical socialist paradise where land and housing are inexplicably cheap such as Cuba, Zimbabwe or Gordon Brown’s Globally Warm Britain. So I better do a Right-wing rant, and sharpish.
So just this, and then it’s back to the freedom directory for me…
One of the things that moistened the Left’s gussets in anticipation as Day One of the Era of the Blessed Tony approached was that the enlightened new regime would go easy on Third World Debt.
Many of the wise and the good sang Tony’s and Gordon’s praises as the expected day dawned and the burden of the evil banks’ loans and loan repayment schedules would be lifted from the people and from the government leaders’ Swiss accounts.
They never paid heed to the fact (they never seemed to know about it: let alone acknowledged it) that much of this debt came when OPEC quadrupled the price of oil to punish the West for supporting Israel’s self-defensive genocide-avoidance efforts in the Yom Kippur War.
The worldwide depression that followed left less help available for the often venal and viciously oppressive African governments - a great deal of petrodollar loans had been embezzled or spend on armaments because what starving thirsty and malarial Africans really need are spiffy new tanks and helicopters.
So now, irrespective of the history involved and the petty moralising about the rights and wrongs of borrowing money you have little intention of paying back or spending on your people’s welfare, and at the bidding of many, many singers, actors, writers, political activists and other economic experts (plus some actual economists) the West rather than OPEC was to stump up and support lifting mad and bad African kings’*1 debt (but leaving the Latin American and Asian debtor nations in the soup).
African Development Fund*2 andIMF anddebts were written off by a generous Gordon Brown and someone called George W Bush who strangely doesn’t seem to have drawn any praise for this act of financial kindliness except from peripheral non-entities who are certainly ultra-Right-wing racists anyway.
Okay, I really feel sorry for the Africans living and dying under the crooks, imbeciles and serial mass-murderers that so many of their countries have for leaders. Maybe this has done a world of good which I would not begrudge to those poor people.
But.
That was 2006. Now here’s the thing. On the Wikipedia page I see, at a quick scan only, of $48,000,000,000 written off.
Now it’s 2009.
My question is about Mister Brown’s high taxing, high-spending, non-government-reforming policies as Chancellor and Prime Minister.
Did the Reichsuberwankenfuhrer ever think that if at any time he felt short of a few billion or trillion that there might have been other financial techniques and policies he might have pursued in relation to - oh, I don’t know - the taxpayers, employers and house-buyers of, say…this country?
Because today we can talk about Third World Debt levels and not refer to anything beyond the shores and borders of Britain.
*1 The pan-African dialect word for hereditary absolute monarch is spelled ‘President’ in the Latin alphabet.
*2 whose “ sources are mainly contributions and periodic replacements by non-African member states. The fund is usually replenished every three years, unless member states decide otherwise. The total donations, at the end of 1996, amounted to $12.58 billion. The ADF lends at no interest rate, with a service charge of 0.75% per annum, a commitment fee of 0.5%, and a 50-year repayment period including a 10-year grace period. The Tenth United Kingdom replenishment of the ADF was in 2006.”
It's been suggested that there should be one-stop shop for information about people campaigning to preserve this country's freedoms and character rather than finding out what's going on from random [favourite] blogs.
We all pretty much share the same antagonists as they destroy what they can’t subvert of our culture and its virtues.
I’m vain enough to try, and so I’m going to spend some time setting up a freedom and country notice-board.
There’s a price to everything, and that price is time.
As my employers plan to remove my works internet permission at the end of the month, but not my email, TJAT may have to have fewer posts for a while until I get its sister site up and running.
I'll try to write stuff at work in plain and email it home for evening posting, but much of my blogging evenings will have to be for the notice board blog for a while.
I’ll do my best as I feel I’m getting somewhere [arrogance again no doubt!] and there appears to be a browser problem that might require buying some software which will slow things down further.
I hope to be back to my masked obscenities and circumlocutions of rage for what our rulers are doing to this beautiful country and world as soon as I can.
The Declaration of Utter Dependency of the 57 States
In CONGRESS, January 21, 2009
The unanimous Declaration of the fifty-seven united States of Utopia.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a diverse people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with their history, and to assume among the powers of the Environmental Movement, the submissive and apologetic station to which their nation's many unforgivable crimes and human rights violations demand of them, a guilty conscience about the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (except for women - who are better), that they are endowed by their betters with certain socially-constructed rights, that among these are dole, equality and the pursuit of pleasure. --That to enforce these rights, governments are instituted over The People, deriving their unlimited powers at the insistence of the governing class, --That whenever any form of government becomes inconvenient to untrammelled power, it is the duty of The People to have a new one dictated to them, and to finance new government departments, paying for their foundation on such prejudices and organizing powers in such form as to the rulers shall seem most likely to secure their Power and Privileges.
Political necessity, indeed, will indicate that governments long established can be changed for trivial and fashionable causes; but despite this all experience hath shewn, that persons are more disposed to obey, while evils are sufferable, better if their new leaders subvert the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their duty to kowtow to such Despotism, and to provide new funds for its future security.
It has been the erstwhile experience of these Democrats; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to subtly alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the former President of The United states [George W Bush] is a history of repeated policies and innovations, all having in direct object the resistance to an absolute Tyranny over the Seas. To prove this, let factoids be submitted to an envious world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public sector labor unions.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of doubtful and transitory importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the enrichment of large numbers of politicians, unless those politicians would relinquish the right of snouting through the trough, a right inestimable to them and formidable to taxpayers only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places luxurious, comfortable, and distant from the depositories of Political Correctness for the sole purpose of good government.
He has vetoed administrative measures repeatedly, by opposing with manly firmness their invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such vetoes, to cause others to be imposed; whereby the administrative measures, unworthy of elevation, have returned power to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time defended from dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has obstructed the Abolition of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judicial activist powers.
He has made Judges dependent on the Constitution alone, in return for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new defenders, and sent hither swarms of heroes to harass our peoples’ enemies, and to confiscate their substances.
He has set around us, in times of war, Standing Armies without the consent of the Liberals.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Liberal media.
He has combined with others to subject us to the sole jurisdiction of our constitution and upheld our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of legitimate Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops overseas:
For protecting them, by Due Process, from punishment for any acts of patriotism which they should commit against the Enemies of these States:
For protecting our Trade with all parts of the world:
For refusing Taxes without Democrats’ Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Media:
For transporting enemies beyond Seas to be held for war crimes:
He has guarded our seas, warded our Coasts, rebuilt our towns, and protected the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of loyal troops to resist the works of death, desolation and tyranny, elsewhere begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, as is wholly worthy the Head of a civilized nation.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the World Opinion for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the political class of the States, solemnly publish and declare, That these United States are, and of Right ought to be willing members of the United Nations; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the former Constitution, and that all political connection between them and the American Constitution, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as blood-Guilty and oil-dependent States, they have full Power to eschew War, dream about Peace, cancel Alliances, over-regulate Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Socialist States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the randomness and indifference of blind evolution, we mutually take from the American People your Lives, your Fortunes for our dubious Honor.
She phones my office in where I do the bidding of the Department of Hurt and Awful Nuisances and I take the call. She’s ringing to report some minor change in her circumstances that she fears may affect her Social Security benefits. She’s wrong – it doesn’t affect her at all.
She’s on Income Support which means that she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work and is only interviewed occasionally about her circumstances.
She sounds like a nice woman: friendly; polite; articulate; and our distinctive local accent is smoothed in her voice by intelligence and (I would guess) education. She sounds in fact as switched-on, bright, self-controlled and worthy of trust and as capable of employment as any of scores of women I’ve worked with over the years: teachers, corporate trainers, university and college lecturers, HR managers and entrepreneurs. In short, given my chequered (varied, diverse, disastrous) career, she sounded as if I would be working for her if only the Fates had spun their cloth a thread or too differently.
But she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work.
I reassure her that she need not worry about her change of circumstances, and she thanks me. In passing, she mentions she’s expecting another baby in the next few weeks. She sounds very happy, and I offer her my congratulations for which she thanks me again and she promises to call us as soon as she can after the baby’s born so we can advise her about any changes in her benefits. We say goodbye, and she’s off the line.
In anticipation of the happy day when that call comes, and in case missed something and need to call her back, I check her background files to see what, if any effect this will have on her income stream.
Here’s the bio.
Born in 1976, she had her first child sixteen years later and then one at seventeen and then another at nineteen. Now all these kids have the same surname (not the same as hers, so let’s call it Anonymous) so she may just about have been married to or cohabiting with Mister Anonymous for a few years and the both of them trying to make their way in life and make a living the old-fashioned way.
Somehow I doubt it. Living together would jeopardize the Income Support unless one or both of them can prove they are ‘disabled’. We’re not talking white stick and Labrador here or a wheelchair. We can be talking ‘depression’ or ‘panic attacks’ with the right care worker and the right doctor working together for the good of us all.
Income Support means an income for a single parent in addition to the following goodies: free dental care, prescriptions, school meals, Housing Benefits, and Council Tax Benefits. The latter two meaning she gets paid 100% of whatever proportion of a private rent that the Rent Service has allowed for her particular family in her particular dwelling (roughly, the more children there are, the more rooms she’ll ‘need’) and all her Council Tax bill. If she rents from her Council Housing Department then she’ll get 100% of her rent as council housing is assumed not to be overpriced, and the same for Housing Association lettings. God only knows how much taxation – local and national – goes to keeping this ‘social housing’ ‘affordable.’
Child Benefit is £20 per week for the first child plus £13.20 for each of the next up until sixteen, or up to twenty if they are in further education or training.
And because she is a single ‘mum’ she doesn’t have to look for work [ i.e., go onto the same amount of income but Income Support is replaced with Job Seeker’s Allowance and you have to sign on fortnightly and show that you’ve been looking at the jobs papers, visiting the library, etc] until her youngest reaches twelve years old. That’s changing to seven years old from October 2010. No rush. It’ll not affect her even when Septimus is born. Let’s assume that goes to plan and calls to delay this ‘cut ‘don’t succeed. Oh, and enterprising single mums can work up to 16 hours without loss of benefits, so there can even be a rewarding extra income on the side, if you can be bothered. But it looks like she may not have been too bothered as it happens because…
Did I mention the three other kids, surnamed, um, Beneficiary, born 2001, 2002, and 2004? No? Three lots of more of all of the above. And guess who’s paying to have them all ‘educated?’ Guess whose children are putting up with, and losing valuable learning time to their disruptive behaviour assuming that Eve isn't always effective as a cross between Maria and Baron Von Trapp
So let’s tot that up, shall we?
As things stand now, Eve has been exempt from the rat race; from listening to any boss at all tell her to bloody well get on with it - but has been housed and provided for and at all times taking into account and adding ever more income for the growing size of her ‘family’ - all her legal cigarette-buying life. And this will go on until 2021.
That’s 1992 to 2121.
A thirty-one year holiday, on your credit card, with no work-seeking requirement at all.
Am I repeating myself about that dull old not-needing-to work thing?
Sorry, but if someone was having a go at you in a thoroughly Spartan way with a Napoleonic Age ramrod and a hedgehog you might feel the need to repeat yourself too.
Today her Child Benefit alone amounts to £99.20 per week, every week. That’s £5158.40 per year. (Call it half a classroom attendant in the provinces.) Plus Income Support, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit, NHS dentistry, lunches for the kids on schooldays and all the prescriptions she’ll need, poor lamb, and Job Seeker’s Allowance at the same rate until 2029 when Septimus’ Child Benefit finally ends and all she’s left with is her wages or her Jobseekers’ Allowance if by some ill turn of Fate she doesn’t find a job that makes benefits unnecessary. And she’ll be pretty much near the top of the Council’s housing list due to the large size of her ‘family.’ So that’s a home for life.
On your tab.
By 2021 she’ll be 54 and expected to fend entirely for herself in a rugged, get-up-and-go frontierswoman Thatcherite sort of way until 2041, by which time, after maybe twenty years of exhausting labour (that’s the waged kind of labour, not the ’Push, push, you’re doing fine I can see the head’ paid-for-from-general-taxation kind) the State will step in to help this particular hard-working family to the State Pension and maybe Pension Credit as well to top up any retirement income shortfalls due to, oh I don’t know, temporary absences from the workforce? and hence gaps in paying her national Insurance payments and occupational pension contributions.
Do not, under any circumstances, get me started on people who say ‘I can’t afford to pay into a pension.’
Just don’t.
As I said, she’s a sweet-sounding girl, and I’m pro-life, and my suggestion is going to have to take both factors into account.
How about we stop paying benefits for further children after her third child? Make her work or seek work part-time after the last child’s reached five – say 9.30 am to 2.30 PM between the two school rushes? And no more child-related tax credits, premiums, allowances or payments after that third child has been taken into account. Ever.
Mrs. Northwester, a hippy-type Lefty, feels much the same about what needs to be done, but she thinks that it is a right-wing myth that women have children just to get welfare benefits.
It makes no difference if a bad thing's happening for right-wing reasons or for not right-wing reasons. It doesn't really matter if you're being hurt by the Dialectic of the Dodo or on the orders of Sir Rupert, King of the Pixies; when a Bad Man's waist-deep in another chap’s alimentary canal it's still going to sting like hell and make the chap want to use the cubicles and sit down to do Number Ones for the rest of his life.
But make her responsible for funding her life choices after that third child – and what politician seeking re-election would dare to stand on anything ‘meaner’ than help up to replacement-plus-one? – and maybe her life choices won’t include Quartus, Quintus, Sextus and Septimus.
Maybe she won’t take the decisions that lead to the lifestyles and drinking at the tax-wells that gave us the sylvan peace of Biff Malcolm‘s rich family life or the almost idealised tranquillity of Karen Matthews’ Walton’s Mountain-style home.
She might even choose Mister Anonymous a little more carefully in the first place. She might choose one she thinks will stay around, and try and make it work. She might insist on getting married, or something. She might just control her fertility.
This is not a right-wing myth, nor is it a rare exception. Without even trying to I encountered a couple more bios for two more ‘mums’ in the next day after this call, as colleagues mentioned them or paperwork crossed my desk.
‘Embla’:
Born 1980, issue 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 (twins).
‘Pyrhha’
Born 1975, issue 1992, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2008 (more twins).
I meet hundreds of ‘families’ like this per year.
Now if I was, say, a British Prime Minister hoping to do some lasting good for Britain that would temper history’s otherwise unanimous verdict of ‘The biggest Number Twos at Number Ten ever,’ and if I therefore wanted to find some money to help reduce the national debt in order to do so because I had, for example, put the whole economy on the nose of a horse who came in second, I might think of something like the above modest suggestion.
Except that Labour’s political culture will never allow ‘targetting the most vulnerable in society who need the most help.’
