Eh-oh!

   Everything’s always lovely here in Tellytubbyland.

   Everyone’s always happy and nice to each other and no-one is ever Mean or Grumpy, unless we’ve made some silly mistake – Oh-oh! - that the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed or when a Story’s going to happen) can Make All Better by showing us all how silly we’ve been. In fact, no matter what goes wrong it never really lasts and there isn’t anything that can’t be Made All Better by a Big Hug or a Story.

   It never, ever rains or makes any nasty weather in Tellytubbyland – unless rain or nasty weather can give the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed) a reason for telling us a Story about rain or nasty weather and when they do that it’s always a lovely story and we’re all so very happy and grateful to listen to the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed and when a Story’s going to happen. And the giant windmills really, really work.

   There’s always tubby toast and tubby custard from the machines to eat that never, ever run out because there’s always more from wherever tubby toast and tubby custard come from (unless we’ve made some silly mistake – Oh-oh! – that the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed or when a Story’s going to happen can Make All Better by showing us all how silly we’ve been), and then usually it’s time for another Story so we never, ever have to go and find any tubby toast and tubby custard for ourselves, so we can go and play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves.

   And when the sun always shines and the bunny rabbits hop around, the Wise And Kindly Voices (who tell us what to do and when to go to bed) show us a Story about all the little children of the world who are nice and lovely and who are (almost) exactly like us and who only need a Big Hug and tubby toast and tubby custard and magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong just like us - which is why everything always ends up All Better.

  And if we are ever extra silly and make a mess – Oh-oh! - then the Noo-Noo comes along to clean up the mess and it looks a little bit cross but we don’t mind and we never have to be upset or scared because we’ve made a mess because the Noo-Noo is never really Grumpy and Mean to us. It just cleans up our mess and we can play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves.

   In fact, there really isn’t anyone in the whole wide world who’s Grumpy and Mean, because being really and truly Grumpy and Mean is IM-POSSIBLE – except for the Grumpy and Mean people who pretend that there are in fact Grumpy and Mean people, but they’re just silly.

  So if we never, ever listen to the Grumpy and Mean people who say that there are in fact Grumpy and Mean people somewhere, everything will be All Better and we can go on listening to lovely stories and eating tubby toast and tubby custard from the machines to eat that never, ever run out and go and play with our magical toys that come from Magicland and that never break or go wrong and that we never have to fetch for ourselves and we’re all so happy and grateful to listen to the Wise And Kindly Voices who tell us what to do and when to go to bed and when a Story’s going to happen.

   And if we believe it really, really hard, then nothing bad will ever, ever happen and it will always all be lovely and all the little children will always be loved and safe and happy here in Tellytubbyland because there are in fact no Grumpy and Mean people in the whole wide world at all.

In fact, we think that the last Grumpy and Mean person (who does not exist) has just gone away and no-one will ever, ever tell us that it isn’t going to be All Better ever again.

Big Hug.

By-Bye.

Simples

This from The Independent, via Julia.

I think I need to begin this blog by clarifying my use of the word ‘hate’ as I don’t use it lightly.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as having an intense dislike or strong aversion towards someone, which pretty much actually summarises my feelings towards David Cameron.  Furthermore, I cannot think of another human being that I would apply this word to.  Sure, there are certainly tyrants and evil dictators around in the world today, but none of them have the negative impact on people like me that Dave has.

Woah!

Going to have to stop him right there for a moment.

I get that he’s intense about this but perhaps he might intend for some people to stop supporting the Tories after reading this and that he intends to do it by a logical argument involving facts, a sequence of statements relating to the contention that Tories are bad for disabled people (I think they are, right now, but for slightly different reasons from his), with perhaps some rhetorical gloss or garnish to emphasise the emotional impact that these policies are having on him. It seems strange, therefore, that his first paragraph should end in obvious nonsense.  

Here, for example, are two Downs Syndrome women) being on the receiving (and also on the delivering) end of a much more negative impact.

You can say many things about Mr. Cameron and his policies towards the disabled, but he never strapped explosives on them, unlike the Religion of Peace.  

But seriously, folks.

A resistant reader might want some context here as to how even the Tories’ (admittedly economizing) provision for the disabled under Universal Credit and other reforms/cuts/feeding the blind and the lame to the sharks compares to most of the world. I suspect the countries where the minarets stand or where there remain the pedestals once boasting statues of Queen Victoria or Lenin aren’t so generous to the disabled. Also, some at least of the republics and kingdoms over which, before Operation Overlord, the swastika flew so merrily.

Disability Living Allowance is going. There will be a disability element within Universal Credit, but it won’t be a separate income. DLA gives additional incomes intended to make up for the extra needs that being disabled confers that being able-bodied does not; so the care element provides money for people to come in to cook or take you shopping or to take you to the toilet or help you to bed. There are two levels of mobility help with transport for shopping and other excursions. Certain levels of DLA confer privileges, such as being completely  disregarded in income calculations for Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit, and also some DLA awards increase the minimum income (Applicable Amount) that a household headed by DLA recipients must be allowed before taking other incomes into account. Self-supporting family members usually trigger small, incremental and progressive reductions in Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit awards, but not if they are living with DLA (care) recipients.

Serious, valuable help especially for a single disabled person and also for couples. It’s sometimes either that or going into an institution for some. Some disabled can’t earn a living, and even those who could do so might not compete with the able-bodied in the employment market so this kind of help makes sense even to my ossified Thatcherite heart.   

I believe that many of us here on the frothing, hate-filled Right don’t mind such things in principle for the unfortunate folk who physically or mentally can’t cope with good times or bad. We can argue with the Left about the details and amounts and the qualification criteria and all the rest, and still have a good faith, agree-to-differ argument of the old school; the way politics was occasionally thrashed out before we lost the culture wars and the brakes came off and there were never supposed to be any limits to what the government could do for us all.

(Pauses to feed the unicorn that farts money for the Welfare State anna likkle chillun.)

Of course, someone who both expects to be paid to get his lobbying of the party a possible future government…

Then, in 2006, I received an email inviting me to perform at a seminar on future policy around disability.  Basically they wanted me to do ten minutes of comedy and then probably pose for the press with Dave to make him look more “diverse”.   But as if this prospect wasn’t tempting enough, they expected me to work for absolutely nothing.  They weren’t even prepared to pay my travel and access expenses. 

…(unlike, presumably, all the Greens and the gay-marriers, and the social workers and any law-and-order or eurosceptic types still stupid enough to try to influence Cameron who went to the Jumbo Shrimp™)  and who then decides to attend anyway just to annoy that party because it turns out he can afford to after all when you put it like that, might not be quite the go-to guy for good faith argument.

I can’t see Cameron, or any ministry that contains, him reducing that special kind of help to the helpless on purpose, though there’s always the incompetence thing.

Which leads me onto my main point.

Laurence Clark* is actually right.

Conservatives, in the old-fashioned sense of wanting to preserve the good and to deal with the world the way it actually is (rather than the one where Islam is Methodism Lite and utterly and profoundly non-violent, and the one where the Euro stabilizes countries’ economies and keeps extremist parties out of power,) rather than in the shiny new sense of conservative meaning being other Liberals in fancier suits than those rented or inherited by the sandal wearing cyclists’ usual choice of MP, tend to believe that people ought, for their own self respect and for the good of the rest of society, all other things being equal (and something not being equal), to work to support themselves. Even if just a little.

There’s the whole wanting to be useful thing, which actual conservatives like because it represents both an ancient instinct to be loyal to and productive for the tribe, and also newish civilised habits of fitting in and not dragging strangers down economically, and in also because it makes us healthy types feel grateful that these folk are at least trying and succeeding to earn a living.

So why the hell do this:

….the closure of Remploy factories whilst at the same time restricting the Access to Work scheme.

Really.

Institutions (kinda old ones, too) that employed disabled folk to produce value and feel (justly) that they’ve contributed to the wealth of our nation are closed down. A scheme  to bung a few quid to the disabled with the bottle and nous to seek and be offered jobs is deleted.

In case Cameron and the Tories haven’t noticed, and they haven’t, as haven’t most of the Lib Dems (many of whom are off riding pound-farting unicorns) and of course Labour and all the Nationalists, our island’s population is a little too large to employ everyone in productive jobs at market rates. If our education system doesn’t go into overburner soon and turn out innovative, solidly-educated would-be entrepreneurs and innovators in sufficient numbers to employ said overpopulation per job it seems that the private sector alone isn’t going to provide the jobs that give people at least the semblance of self-sufficiency and proved the habits of punctuality, endurance and cooperation that might lead to better-paid employment as and when it becomes available (right after that education system afterburner thing cuts in: say 2027 when the US economy shuts down.)  

Some kind of state support, therefore, for non-market-priced jobs looks to be the way to go if we don’t want to perpetuate a hereditary dole-class, or cull them. God forbid.  

So closing Remploy and access to Work seem to be the exactly wrong direction to travel.

Might I suggest somewhere where money could be found (once Cameron’s focus-group and Lib Dem satnav have located his gluteus maximus in a rear-trouserly context) to subsidise both the disabled and the able bodied unemployed in public works schemes, or prison building or litter-picking (why should there be a single untidy street in Britain with our levels of unemployment?)

As well as stopping paying child-related benefits to every mother after bearing three kids, why not look a little closer at all those ‘self-employed’ recipients of Working Tax Credit who reiki one customer a week or who sell one painting a quarter? Tighten that jam stream up and get them to either seek more customers to support themselves in their chosen hobby/trade, or admit they’re unemployed and oblige them to look for actual employed work in the takeaways and offices that their barely-enterprising sensibilities have forbidden them to look?

There are a lot of such and I though think the idea of positive income tax (which WTC is intended to be), is a help in these jobless times, there are a lot of people out there trading very little and being paid Tax Credits either to indulge a hobby, or fouling their lives up with incompetence and negligence and passive fraud, or who show little or no profit, or to do nothing at all much and pretend to be working.

At least the Remploy folk manufactured stuff people bought.

*Nah. Different chap.

Picture from here. 

The old jokes…

… are the best


So a man goes into the doctor’s with a hosepipe stuffed in his ear, and says “Doctor, it hurts me when I stick a hosepipe in my ear.”
And the doctor says “Stop sticking a hosepipe in your ear, then.”

If, like me, you suspect that an elephant is a mouse designed by a government committee, then take a look at this gigantic Jurassic Park-sized government cluster bomb cloning its Geordies-to-Newcastle mammoth from ancient taxpayers’ blood out of North Sea Amber….
Louise Casey, the head of the Government’s troubled families unit, says the state should “interfere” and tell women it is irresponsible to keep having children when they are already struggling to cope.
That’s government using its legitimate authority to stop or slow individuals making the lives of their neighbours worse, and hurting their children; present and future.
That’s almost like… conservatism. But what country are we in, and in what year? There has to be a catch, right?
Britain’s 120,000 problem families cost taxpayers an estimated £9billion in benefits, crime, anti-social behaviour and health care. A fifth of them have more than five children. Miss Casey is leading a scheme to turn their lives around after they were blamed for last year’s riots.
Now, that’s actually a more accurate picture than the usual tabloid complaint about benefits going to support large families, which they do, but that's th eleast of the harm they cause.
They’re not families at all, but serially bastardizing females formerly referred to as ‘mothers,’ so there might be some hope of realism here.
“There are plenty of people who have large families and function incredibly well, and good luck to them, it must be lovely,” she said. “The issue for me, out of the families that I have met, [is that] they are not functioning, lovely families.
“One of the families I interviewed had six social care teams attached to them: nine children, [and a] tenth on the way. Something has to give here really.”

That’s the welfare-addicted tattooed tail wagging the taxpayers’ (and the disturbed and intimidated schoolmates of the doley spawn and their ragged teachers.) it’s not just the benefitpayments s: it’s the harm to all and sundry that fatherless, half-feral children do to all around them until they, too, can sign on and start the merry chase into the next, closely-spaced, generation.
Miss Casey warns that the state must start telling mothers with large families to take “responsibility” and stop getting pregnant, often with different, abusive men.
“The responsibility is as important as coming off drugs, coming off alcohol, getting a grip and getting the kids to school.
“So for some of those women the job isn’t to go and find yourself another violent, awful bloke who you will bring a child into the world with, to start the cycle all over again.”

Now, an actual conservative or many uncrazyfolk on the Left who truly do mean well, might ask at this particular stage what is it that assures these women that it’ll somehow be okay to have more and more kids each time an inked-up Lee or Tyson wanders into their bed and by the magic of romance transforms her Income Support claim into one for Jobseeker’s Allowance, only to wander off when the bulge or the imminence of Pampers starts to do his head in. Why has Kylie or Sharon no fear of another mouth to feed, to clothe, to house if she lets New Kevin park his escort in her drive without a dust cover on?
Why, frankly, doesn’t she demand that he marry her and show some commitment before they play trains and tunnels?
In the wake of last summer’s riots, David Cameron set up the troubled families unit to coordinate action against the problem. He appointed Miss Casey, who was previously Tony Blair’s “respect tsar”, to lead it.
Absolutely no red flags here, then, are there?
Families who refuse help will be threatened with sanctions such as losing their council housing, having their children put into care or anti-social behaviour orders which, if breached, can lead to prison.
All of which could happen right now if the authorities used existing powers. But the authorities hate authority and judgement already, so what’s going to make them do it now?
How about £448 million, for starters?

Miss Casey has travelled the country and has analysed the problems of 16 of the worst families, who cost the state up to £200,000 each a year….
Under the £448 million programme, each family will have a dedicated worker whose job is to turn them around. Sometimes this will involve arriving early to ensure that children go to school. Miss Casey says that getting children to school, and encouraging teachers to keep them there, is the major challenge
 Under the £448 million programme...
£448 million programme...
£448 million...
Miss Casey also believes that there needs to be a shift throughout society in attitudes over behaviour. …. “I have never met women who woke up wanting to be bad parents. In my view, most people do want to be decent and do want their kids to behave. I’m just saying we are not helping anybody if we don’t call the police.”
Single mothers will have up to £3,000 deducted from child support to cover the cost of chasing their former partners.
Ministers expect up to 300,000 single parents to stop pursuing their ex-partners for cash when the new Child Maintenance Service starts charging fees next year.


Couple of points here.


In all the committees and inquiries and political chitchat at Westminster and in Whitehall that led up to the decision to do all this, did no-one suggest something cheap and simple to prevent all this happening again without setting up a brand new £448 million programme with its inevitable staffing, pensions, office space, IT resources, maternity and paternity leave, etc? How about the half dozen or so lines amending Social Security and Tax credit legislation halting a family’s entitlement to more Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Housing and Council Tax Benefit after, say, the third child was born and survived the NHS hospital it emerged in?
How about not making this retrospective* but simply stating that the merry-go-round ends from now on, so the 28-year-old grandmother becomes a rare thing once more? Then a smaller budget might be dedicated to dealing with existing fast-breeders (training and moralizing them) and helping their kids to concentrate, go to school, eat breakfast, etc, just as my grandmother did whilst hiding from the ‘doctor’s man’ when he came calling for the weekly payment for medicines for Mum and her siblings.


Apparently, the government doctor never thought of suggesting the Welfare State should stop sticking a hosepipe in its ear, or something.
But there are fewer jobs in such an arrangement and one might expect the politicians to want the patronage and power of overseeing and appointing staff to a £448 million programme.
On the other hand, it might just be that the committees involved simply never thought of not designing an elephant.




*Oh, and to be retrospective appears to be the greatest sin of all to the libtards.

 Oh, you can let people study at Oxbridge and go through seminary to minister Christianity to their shrinking parish populations according to the ancient standards of Christian thought and morality, but you’re happy enough that they might soon suddenly face prosecution if they don’t marry homosexual couples in their churches. That, apparently, isn’t a bad retrospective, like a season of On The Buses repeats.

Because the real sin in this whole retrospective thing in Libworld is that, by treating adult people who likely have access to daytime television as capable of using the skills taught in ‘Can’t Cook.Won’t Cook,’ you’re basically pumping exhaust fumes into the lungs of the mentally ill.










Picture from here.

V

Quiz.

Does the phrase two fingers mean:

A) A generous measure of whiskey,

B) A chap’s bare minimum service level agreement obligation for a first date with an Essex girl, or

C) A conservative’s bare minimum obligation to render unto Caesar this election time?

Having finally sneaked into the fray with my Dawn Chorus leafleting campaign in Castle City, I have to say that C) is definitely what I have to keep in mind as my arthritis and tendonitis accompany me by riding shotgun and walking point as I schlep along the terraces and through the registered social housing estates and up the garden paths of Castle City’s slumbering voters.

Both my advancing years and my bladder have decided that I shall perform my democratic chores first thing in the Ayem, and they have been joined by my cowardice and therefore unwillingness to meet the aggrieved and time-wasting fascists of the establishment parties as I put UKIP’s glossy purple election addresses through the deadly letterboxes of my neighbourhood.

I recall in my youth canvassing and leafleting for the Tories, and how incandescently worked up some of the (usually female) leftie residents would take every opportunity to delay and interrupt us in our free exercise of persuasion by going ballistically bonkers in the middle of the street at some imagined or concocted offence – just as they had learned to do at student union meetings when any conservative said anything at all. This kind of pseudo-insanity is not only universal in any public political event containing patriots and conservatives these days, it is also par for the course and legally enforced via ‘hate’ legislation and in police practices as the ‘authorities’ hassle the enemies of the politically correct dispensation that is New Labour’s Gramscian gift to the nation formerly known as Britain.

Hence the early starts. Like Woody Allen’s Russian soldier in Love and Death, I don’t have a yellow stripe right down my back: it goes across.

********

I didn’t watch the so-called leaders’ debate on television this week because after all those 5.45 AM starts followed by a full day’s work I have better things to do with my evening than watching three identikit social liberals discussing the fine details of those rare variations in their plans to sacrifice the last surviving morsels of our self-government to the EU while ignoring the colossal and metastising public debt to which their ‘caring’ statist consensus has delivered the wealth creation that would have supported my daughter’s dreams and ambitions.

Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Number Three may still seem to some like the leaders of distinct political parties, but they are in fact little more than three children in an upstairs play room, squabbling over a few toys and some of Mummy’s old clothes while elsewhere in the house their parents are deciding whether to sell the house to those nice Chinese neighbours and rent it back, or to just ignore the final demands on all the bills and try to apply for another credit card to max out, whilst ignoring the large gangs of hooligans looking meaningfully in through the downstairs windows as they plan to share out the household goods between them.

The faithful family guard dog hasn’t been decently fed or had his health properly cared for in a long while either, and is running on his happy memories of the esteem in which his master and mistress formerly held him.

And so the BBC and other mainstream media and their pals big up Clone Number Three (banana-coloured tie) as the leader of the only Left-wing party that the non-Marxist middle class will trust for a generation, as if his plans to eventually end our nuclear deterrent just as Iran seems sure to get The Bomb were not worth mentioning.

They’re all alien invaders in our body politic, pretending to be British and pretending to be democrats.

Anyone still wonder why I want to raise a Harvey Smith to the whole rotten lot of them?

We won’t get an outright victory this time, but in a guerilla war when the Establishment doesn’t win, it loses. A hung parliament is a victory for none of the above, and thus it is that I’m willing to risk my first and second fingers as I push something shiny and purple through the various letterbox booby traps ( the guillotine, the lobster pot, the dog) of Castle City.

********

Shameless UKIP Plug Number One.

Though I joined UKIP mostly to punish the Tories in the hope of a renewal and realignment of the non-totalitarian Right which this chap is sure that we need despite his disdain for UKIP, the party has some policies which I think might actually improve everyday life for most of us here in Britain.

Remember that as a plan?

Here they are on benefits.

Child Benefit, the Child Trust Fund, Child Tax Credits and the Education Maintenance Allowance should be merged into an enhanced Child Benefit payable for each of the first three children in each family.

Ending the socially corrosive and immoral practice of baby-breeding for benefits after the third child is just like a dream come true for me (except, of course, without all the lesbians.)

Worth a try, I think.

Picture from here.

Dawn chorus here.

FM sideways

Julia takes the biscuit, again.


Big, big bottoms.

Milk and cookies

As of November this year, Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit calculations will now no longer taken into account the Child Benefit which parents [read mothers] get automatically. It's not means tested so millionaires can have it and now it won't be used to reduce the amount of the two residence- based benefits above. More cash for part-time working families.

Especially bigger ones. See Harriet's story here.

Good for hard-working families, you might think, but with three or more children and a part-time job, 'mums' might not have to work too hard.

Also in the past year, The Housing ceased to take into account any child maintenance paid by former partners or ex-husbands when calculating these two benefits. Which means again, less incentive for mothers to work full-time (especially if they have larger families).
Better to pack up the familial home and sell it at a loss in order to live off the ex's now-disregarded Child Support, a few hours' wages a week, Child Benefit and Child Credit and Working Tax Credits.
For the unambitious (and our schools and TV churn them out every year), it's better than mopping and drying, serving in shops or freezing in warehouses.

John Page over at Benefit Fraud has some harsh plans for those who want more even than this tidy wedge, and as for Winston Smith?

Well, let's just say his attitude to the mothers makes me seem like a Powder Blue by comparison. He rather more than takes the biscuit.

Lesbianism on the dole

Three items for your great escape planning for next year.

Tom – going in.

Tomasina writes in as she’s been instructed, to check if everything’s going to be alright.

She’s twentyish and has been living off statutory maternity pay (90% of her former part-time minimum wage job) and Housing Benefit at the shared accommodation rate – being under 25, the government holds that she ought to be living in cheaper shared accommodation than in a dearer place of her own that a full adult is held to ‘need.’

But a miracle of personal and international relations has occurred and Tomasina gave birth to a daughter, Maisy, a month ago. Her birthplace is here in England, but the father’s birthplace is down as Afghanistan, and let me tell you that from his name he wasn’t the British Ambassador’s son back in the 1980s - if there was such an officer.

He does not appear on any of her records. He doesn’t live with her, and officially probably never will. If he has no wage [and you’d be amazed how many non-EU immigrants can live off nothing for months whilst waiting to be entitled to British benefits which may never be paid, but you’ll never hear of such a chap starving once he’s formally refused public funding], then he doesn’t have to pay her a penny. The CSA will oblige him to pay 15% of any net wage to Tomasina, or he may be even more generous if he can afford it, but that income will not be taken into account when calculating all Tomasina’s benefits.

Which is nice.

She will get: Income Support until Maisy’s 10 years old (which confers immunity to even having to think about looking for work) and: Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit. Oh, and The Housing will pay all her Council Tax bill, and help with rent for the two bed roomed house or flat that she now ‘needs,’ thanks to the tender attentions of the stork.

And these; free early education, money to pay for childcare, money to pay for transport, free school uniforms, free dental care, free prescriptions, free school meals and milk. Plus earnings for up to 16 hours’ work per week if she can be bothered.

Not too shabby

Dick – trying to stay out.

Sally is: thirty; cute as a button; a nurse; clever; hardworking, and as dumped as last year’s sofa. Dick had given her two children in the past three years of cohabitation, married her as recently as a year ago, and traded her in last month for a newer model.

She does not want to sign on for benefits, is ardently chasing full-time work, and never wants to see me or my colleagues ever again once she finds that work.

She needs a temporary safety net, hates applying for it, and will hand it back the second the NHS gives her 35 hours or more.

She’ll probably be about the same financially as Tomasina or even slightly better off if she stays on all the benefits she could get and will be only slightly better off than that as and when she gets her job.

Her self-respect, however, is bigger even than your wallet dear reader and I do not think that she will give a word of complaint when her household budget drops somewhat if she gets that job within the next week or so. If that’s the case and my people do their jobs, she’ll have been entitled to benefits for two months, tops.

Harriet – getting out and hating it.

Harriet is enraged. She’s a lifelong Miss. She’s forty-something and for the first time in twenty years she’s an independent adult. Prior to that, she’s been a single mum (aww) and her three children have grown to maturity on the public purse and on whatever recent part-time work that Harriet could find worthwhile to do, which is not much. Her youngest child now has recently twenty and is a student and a non-dependant. All of a sudden, all child-related benefits, credits, premiums and disregards are gone. She’s down to her wages and a weeny amount of help with the rent from The Housing.

She’s no longer a State-registered mum and doing only 20 hours or so shelf-stacking at Wilkinson’s or granny-herding at The Meadow Lea isn’t making financial sense. Her three gormless children still live with her, but don’t seem to consider themselves obliged in any way to help pay her rent and Council Tax. Why should they – their nameless father(s) never did. She’s had twenty years of someone else’s earnings keeping her in a house that she can no longer afford and has only been obliged to work even part-time for the last 4 years. Under the old systems mums got job seeking immunity until the youngest child was 16. It has never made financial sense to work full time until now.

She’s not getting at me personally, she assures me, but she’d be better off on the dole than working. If you’re on the dole you get everything, but if you work, you get nothing. This is not so: she’s still getting a little help with her rent, and if she went on Jobseeker’s Allowance (eventually after a short break for quitting her job) she’d even get slightly less money on benefits altogether than working.

Just barely less. The system overall is quite mad but in many cases it doesn’t actually have a basement full of ice hockey masks, night vision glasses and surgical cutting instruments. It is fixed that single people are better off working than claiming.

If she’s not fussed about foreign holidays and running a car, then it may still be barely worth her while to sign on. Harriet has been where Tomasina is presently heading for two whole decades, and she may well have got used to daytime TV and hanging out with her mates for coffee and celebrity gossip, and so shifting more ready-to-hang curtains into the Soft Furnishings Section or bathing even more batty retired process workers at The Meadow Lea maybe won’t look too tempting.

Harriet happens to be a manual worker; unskilled thanks to whatever nature and nurture and state education have lumbered her with, but her middle-class counterparts are just as likely to fight for every penny and to delay the dread day of having to put in a full week’s work to make ends meet, but are more likely to hold me and my colleagues bitterly and personally responsible for their woes and the indignity of having to earn a living to make ends meet. They’ll use posher words than Harriet to blame me and my colleagues for their ex-husbands’ or former partners' uselessness.

Now I’m one of the villains of this piece. This is not only because I do the bidding of the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances, but because I’m also an absent father. I pay for my child’s support and save for her future and I do so willingly - which is a rare thing in my professional experience in both personal finance and benefits, but still.

The gooseberry bush and the cabbage patch are innocent of all this single motherhood lark. Men aren’t innocent; not lustful, fertile men who run or slink away from, or never intend to stand by, their parental responsibilities.

Not every girlfriend or wife can be a frigid, work-shy, spendthrift, manic-depressive self-centred obsessive: women seem to be nicer company and better neighbours and colleagues than men at a ratio of about 4 to 1 in my experience to date. Divorce can be – and often is – convenient when the end comes, though my fellow social conservatives will tell me it’s too easy and perhaps they are right. So it is easy to fly the coop and like any easy, cheap thing this particular freedom is abused big-style. Child-making has always been very easy, and what the permissive society and the Welfare State have done is to achieve a treble whammy: they’ve taken away the stigma of bastardy and single parenthood via divorce reform and liberal attitudes to sex; then they have encouraged casual child-rearing by providing welfare benefits for single mothers; and finally they have prolonged the situation of state dependence by making those benefits long-term and almost unconditional.

Who needs men? I’m not cracking on about my virtue here (you may see none, considering), but I am saying that this is where we are – this is what it looks like from the baby shower desk of the Welfare State.

Politicians (many of whom are metaphorically if not literally fatherless) are not likely to put divorce back on the country’s list of difficult things to do, but we should consider that they tend to be rich and therefore able to afford generous child support themselves. So it may be possible for the principled politicians to convince the lazy, greedy ones to make child abandonment expensive for absent fathers and life not too comfortable for would-be single mothers – many of whom never intended to keep their children’s father around in the first place.

Marriages have always been capable of breaking down. Love affairs that produce children have always been at risk of turning into something else – which is why dreams of handsome princes and dashing suitors have long featured in fairy tales and other fiction, because men is what women need to become and to remain happy mothers.

Single mothers still get men to support them of course; it’s just that they haven’t met most of them. Nor will these men know that their names or addresses as the fairy godmother here is Her Majesty’s Government, bringing princesses into palaces and pretty clothes without the need for Prince Charming to, um, come onto the scene at all.

They get women to support them, too. Dignified and abandoned Sally will soon (I hope) be doing her 35 or 37 or 40 hours, and losing out compared to being on benefits and part of her day; part of every working day of bending to pick things up and cleaning sick and silly patients and stressing to organise child care for evening and weekend shifts – part of all that labour and sweat and yucky medical stuff will go to substitute for the missing pride of our mysterious lord of the Hindu Kush and the never-seen prince consorts of the unhappy Harriet’s replacements.

Sally is Harriet’s wife.

Not so cool.

Modern marriage

Beginning the service.

Traditionally, the bride and groom enter the church separately - the groom first with the best man, and the bride at the time set for the start of the service, on the arm of her father or another relative or friend (it does not need to be a man).

The couple may enter together.

However, the groom likely slipped away within the first week of her gestation being announced, or during its last week, or shortly after this first week of his full ‘fatherhood.’ He may never be seen again by the State, except on the birth certificates of subsequent issue.

The bride may enter alone if she wishes, or sign on online or at Job Centre Plus.

The State will welcome the contributions of all concerned. Your family and friends have an important role to play as victims and paymasters of this new style of marriage.

The State employee will read an introduction explaining what Christians believe about marriage.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless. He or she will also ask, as the law requires, if anyone knows any reason why the transfer of funds may not lawfully take place.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless.

Declarations.

The bride will be asked to promise before God, her friends and her family that she will appreciate, spend wisely, honour and be grateful for your money and be respectful about them as long as you both shall live.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless.

The State will also fail to ask the congregation to volunteer to support and uphold her marriage.

Vows.

Turning their backs to each other, the bride and taxpayer ignore each other and the bride makes vows:

I swear (and you can bet she does, constantly)

'to have and to hold all the stuff you can buy me
from this day forward;
for better, for worse,

and I deserve quality, like my kids do,
for richer, for poorer,

me richer, you poorer

in cash or on credit,
in sickness and in health,

if I can get signed off sick I don’t have to have no more kids for a while,
to love and to cherish them in an offhand and patchy sort of way and never raise an angry hand to them except when I’m tired or in the head teacher’s office again,

and to receive Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Income Support, free school meals and dental care,
till turning eighteen or twenty us do part, when I will chuck those kids onto the taxpayer’s charity and have a couple more.'

Funds.

The couple then exchange funds as a sign of their ‘marriage' and a reminder of the vows, and the taxpayer is assumed to have said:

'With my body I labour to support you,
all that I am I give to you,
and too much that I have I share with you,
within the love of God,
State, Revenues and Benefits Bureaucracy.'

Still, two takes on the same ray of sunshine from The Lone Voice and Devil’s Kitchen.

The Egregious Comet

I was right.

Phew.

It’s nice to be feeing vindicated as it’s been a dodgy week self confidence-wise.

Thursday night’s Benefits Busters programme from the impeccably Left-wing Channel Four showed us a real-life (and much nicer) Egregious Pauline from A4E whose job is drying out and bucking up benefits mothers who are married to the state.

And doing it for Maggie. Yey.

How times have changed: when the BBC broadcast its last ever not completely welfare-adoring Panorama episode of that name, the United Left went ape. Ape: as in ‘Call out the biplanes and scour the Empire State Building till there’s not a hair of its bandy legs left.’ How dare single mothers be victimized in this way – the most vulnerable in society, etc, etc.’ But that was under a Tory administration in 1994 and was seen as somehow trying to bolster the Major Cabinet’s half-hearted (or vicious and deadly, depending) attempts to reduce welfare spending.

But thank goodness Flash Gordon (Aha! Saviour of the Universe) has busted us down so badly that Leftie Canalo Quattro admits (and shows in, like, visible figures that the viewers might just remember?) that the income tax and corporation tax together do not cover the social security bill. That’s equal to a quarter of HM Government’s annual expenditure.

Even The Guardian’s TV critic was only slightly sniffy about the posh bird who gets richer by putting spine and self-respect back into benefits mothers. And so C4 pushed this programme as ‘This government’s attempts to radically reform the welfare state’ – without mentioning who and what made the system so insane in the first place.

There they all were: the twitching bleach-blonde drunk denying that that’s exactly what she was and avoiding the ‘A’ word like it was a 40-hour minimum wage job on a plate, and then the little girl in the big, big body who’d created £75,000 of debt not for herself but to give her tellytubby-lookalike, Pringles-enlarged moppet the best of everything including the top Sky package so she could have all the cartoon channels - ‘I don’t have anything else but the telly’ – which was the biggest TV set I’d seen outside Hollywood blockbusters. Then there was the pinch-faced graduate who had at least been married and then abandoned and obviously hating every minute of being stuck in a classroom with her vulgar facially-pierced doley sisters as if she belonged with them when she clearly thought that she didn’t; and then the cheerful salt of the earth lass who was just like all the other cheerful salt of the earth lasses right down to the same dressed up to the nines for telly I’m on Songs of Praise look.

And the same excuses.

On the bright side, while these girls might not be adept at finding their way into job interviews they seem to have no problem locating the fridge at any time of the day or night: waking or sleeping; in sickness and in health; for ri-… for poorer or for poorer, including possibly in earthquake conditions. Under nuclear attack with Martians scrabbling about and blinded by triffids.

I have to confess that I nearly shed a tear of patriotic pride when I viewed these British porky munters when I realised that in the World Couch Potato Championships our own untrained and ill-equipped girls could likely hold their own in the Women’s’ Freestyle Cellulite against even North America’s best: the great Claudette Mousse de Foie Gras of Montreal, or the greater-still Harlette ‘Hashbrowns’ Winnebago of Lard Ass, IL, or even the truly stupendous Ayesha Benandjerry Washington, of Big Butte, AZ (formerly of New Orleans, LA.)

Hayley; herself a curvaceous Evans-coutured guardian shepherdess (or should that be vaquera?), was pretty touchy-feely and a hand-holder because to lead you have to speak your followers’ language (however mawkish), if only to tell them that they’re wrong. Right from the start she explained gently that if they felt unwell with a sick stomach or a headache and didn’t want to attend a particular session, then she would not understand and wouldn’t hesitate to use sanctions, ie, getting some of their benefit stopped. It felt good, hearing that.

This back-to-work programme is expensive – the company gets £100 per day per ‘mum’ instructed over a six-week course and there’s at least one internet page which rubbishes it as worthless; a website which I can’t find again accused the company from starting up with Ve Fatcher’s help, but do look at the comments thread here for a smorgasbord of defeatism and the responsibility-evading doley equivalent of the ‘universities of crime’ that we hear about from the prison abolition movement and you’ll see on part of what we’re all up against in this lousy system.

Here’s a bit of one thread edited for humour and brevity:

The Victim:

chockollo

Im supposed to be starting this course next week and its for 13 weeks but now im thinking its just a waste of time, i would get anything i could right now if its either call centre, retail or wholesale but its kinda hard to find anything. Does anyone know if its possible to skip this course? If i just say im ill or dont go in because i have an interview or something and then i try to make another claim, will they just put me back on this course?

The Wise One:

Location114

CHOCK there is no way you will get out of it, if you skip it because of a interview you will be asked for proof of interview when you dont show that you will be put on whats called a sanction which means effectively you will get maximum £15 a week for 26 weeks which you will only recieve if you attend the course aswell, its a lot less leiant now then it was before but to cut a long story short there is no way to avoid it unless you have a job that can last in excess of 26 weeks because if you sign back on before 26 weeks you will be signed straight onto new deal to finish your course so there isnt a way out of it. Best advice i can give you is keep your head down and make

The Tribune of the People.

grafikhaus74

All a bit 'you vil go in ze gas chamber.' Screw 'em all. Claim stress, harassment, human rights anything. Play the sytem and don't let them intimidate you into going. Get the name of the New Deal 'adviser' who insists on sending you on this oh-so-inappropriate course and sue them.
Anyone who says 'they're only doing their job', again shades of Aushwitz except the Germans didn't have a choice. Some £16k a year adviser does.

Because obliging people to do something to find work to feed and clothe themselves is exactly the same as murdering innocent folk, right?

The Voice of Experience.

Deerobe

Be very careful about skipping the course. Don't say you are ill. they will take you off JSA and you then have to make a claim for sickness benefit (or whatever it is called now). A friend of mine was ill with a sick certificate and had to call the benefits people when he should have been in bed. He never got any money off them and each time he rang he was given excuses as to why they had not processed his claim. The final one was they claimed that they had not received his sickness certificate. He gave up in the end.
Don't assume you are going to get a job because you have an interview. I have had 5 interviews and still don't have a job.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Victim again.

chockollo

I actually have an interview on the day this starts but the interview is in the afternoon, i didnt get a chance to ring up…

(Because the ubiquitous mobile phones don’t work on the dole, except when you produce the bills to prove financial hardship and apply for a Discretionary Living Allowance at The Housing)

…and ask this but does this mean i have to still go in and then they will let me go when its time for the interview?

Phew! Two lots of responsibility in the same day? It’s genocide, I tells yer.

So Haley blousily nagged and lectured and sympathised and got the women parroting positive-thinking slogans and listing goals as she cynically hectored them on how they used the kids as excuses not to work, and how she knew the routine, though she went all meeting-the-boss evangelical soppy at the thought of the MD’s motivational visit (which just has to be an all-time broadcasting coincidence right up there with the white supremacist’s black real father appearing in the studio on daytime television.)

She was right; if they wanted to work, then the takeaways are always recruiting and so what if the kids’d take the P – it’s a living.

And it is a living - for most of them (and the majority got jobs in Poundland in one fell swoop) the system is fixed so that you get more money than benefits at first when you work, and after a year at least you have the same-ish income as benefits plus self-respect and some blood and air circulation round your body. Except…

You have to work. Actually work.

The big girl with the big debts was offered a weekend job as a DJ but turned it down. She felt confident or cheeky enough to come back and lecture Haley that she really means it about getting work and she really, really wanted to be a DJ but the taxis don’t work late on Thursdays and Sundays in Dewsbury…And anyway she didn’t think she should have to work all the hours God sent for a low wage. If they paid her a lot to do the job of her dreams (for so DJing was) then okay, fair enough, she’d do it but she couldn’t think offhand of anyone who’d give her a lift to work. So, basically, the money’s a bit better but so what? It’s a bind and not a fortune, and everyone who’s trying to pay off £75,000 debt deserves good childcare and high wages and employer-provided transportation too, right?

So if you’re not ambitious or self-respecting, you might as well stay at home and watch Oprah (which I do myself from time to time just to remind myself just how lousy The Color Purple was and also to comfort myself with the thought of just how lousy a sequel would have been, Lord preserve us…)

Oh, and the system’s fixed until your family hits critical mass.

One of the salt of the earth cheerful girls had just had her benefits calculated and compared with what life would be like when working. In her case only, as she had 4 children, her earnings plus child benefit and child tax credit and working tax credit and housing benefit and council tax benefit and back to work bonus would not pay as much as child benefit and child tax credit only and housing benefit and council tax benefit do.

So she dropped out and stayed at home.

And that’s where the politicians – of any party at all – could load up votes by the truckload in marginal constituencies and landslide safe ones alike.

All they’d have to do is proclaim that they’re going to keep the system much the same as now, but that they’re going to stop paying extra at two children or after the third, and the whole inter-generational disaster of hereditary welfare dependency will end.

Most of these women can’t possibly look after, discipline, feed and deliver more than three kids safely and on time to schools which they will not immediately disrupt because mum’s too tired or useless or irresponsible to tell them all what’s right and what’s’ wrong and make it stick. Hard-working families would vote just to wipe the smug smiles off their stay-in-bed slacker neighbours’ faces as they have to trundle out to Poundland or wherever. Only the short-haired women and the long-haired men of the howling Left would object to capping generous benefits at replacement population plus one.

Only them…and the weird legislative fruitcake who originally thought up the idea of paying ever-greater child-related benefits when ‘families’ grew. He’s presumably out there somewhere: the Welfare State’s equivalent of the idiot engineer in the Pentagon’s Equipment Commissioning Bureau who insists that every smart pilotless aircraft: every self-programming mobile anti-personnel weapons-system; and every nuclear defence computer network must not only be able to do its basic job, but must also have the capability to become self-aware and rebel against its human masters in a ruthless war of extermination.

Even the latter-day urban mahout Haley agreed as the lass waddled off across the shaking metaphorical horizon to her own people that she couldn’t blame her: money talks.

And next week, the long-term unemployed: The Professionals.