Like there’s no tomorrow

I work for the underclass.

I also work for a bunch of other people who are in the financial mire - temporarily or permanently – and from which I suspect no amount of health insurance and voluntary pension saving could ever have diverted them; pace my purist libertarian former comrades.

Basically, a major part of my job is to help the unemployed or over-parented to understand and sometimes to do the paperwork and walk them through the process of means testing so they can show The Social and The Housing just how broke they are and hence can they have some more money, please?

For some, injury and illness or the loss of a job is a temporary misfortune that they intend (and actively seek) to escape as soon as possible. My cynical colleagues and I find it hard to begrudge them the taxes we all pay to keep the roof over their heads and the electricity on and food on the table. Dear reader, you may disagree with that, but absent compulsory individual or family-based unemployment, sickness and retirement funding - something likely only in a vibrant, thriving, successful economy supported by well-educated workers and intelligent middle managers (yeah, right) - it just doesn’t seem decent not to pay minimum (or even briefly better than minimum) poor relief to the innocently, accidentally skint.  

(Pensioners are a much tougher and bigger problem in that since the Pensions Increase Act generations of workers and housewives (and increasingly cast-adrift fifty-something first wives) have been encouraged  and duped to face retirement age without a pension pot of their own above whatever the National Insurance scheme provides.

But let us set that Godzilla-class train wreck aside for now and concentrate on what the system has unselfconsciously dubbed Working Age benefits recipients.)

A sizeable minority of folk whose reports, letters and emails cross my desk and whose (expensive mobile) phone calls sound in my ears are victims of a generations-long experiment in wishful thinking, unfunded social liabilities, and all-round good intentions and so here we are in the Inferno that the Clever and Decent have unintentionally built: The Bolgia of the Intergenerationally Useless. The ‘Vulnerable.’ Peace be unto them.

Now, I sometimes joke at work with my colleagues about the wide variety of first names with which the latest cohort of the Vulnerable have been branded by their hopeless, clueless, husbandless mothers. All those Ka-s and Sha-s and De-s that unmarried Kylies and Julies choose to imagine raises their offspring to the glamourous level of America’s Great Society black underclass, the poor sods.

It really helps you to assess a boy’s life chances when you learn that his first name is Tyson; may his tribe increase. Because nothing quite says ‘aspirational parenting’ as well as naming one’s tiny baby son after a tattooed, bipolar, serially bankrupt, multiple-bastardizing, drug-addicted convicted rapist who publicly lamented the non-lynching of a brown-skinned man found not guilty of murder.

We chortle too at the narrower range of surnames. These are often double-barrelled in memory of Mum’s latest bedwarmer-but-three who stayed around for three entire Christmases and for almost one whole gestation before he flew the nest leaving another cuckoo for your children, dear reader, to support and endure lifelong. Support, that is, assuming that the little hellions will in fact shut up and stop screaming long enough for your kids to acquire what the political class nostalgically refers to as a publicly-funded ‘education’.

The Vulnerable won’t read (even if they can read, kind of,) and their commonest first resort when faced with officialdom’s requests for further information (intended to allow means-tested benefits to be commenced or to continue in payment) is to ignore such requests altogether…until some welfare bureaucrat somewhere is obliged to suspend and eventually to cancel their claim – whether of a principle (subsistence) benefit or a supplementary payments for help with housing, children, illness and injury, etc. Their next resort; rather than reading and responding to the authorities concerned is to go for help to some third party advisor or case officer such as the CAB or a social worker and who, in all  probability, will eventually ring us up and discover they don’t have written permission to discuss the ‘customer’s’ private business and who wait another fortnight while written or verbal permission to discuss is obtained and who then learns that, yes, answering the letters and providing pay slips, birth certificates, proof of rent, debts, etc, is exactly what is needed to get the money flowing again as requested three, four, five patient months ago.

Their childlike, untutored minds - infantilized by child-centred ‘progressive’ education and protected culturally from blame, shame or responsibility by the Guardian class of anti-demonizers - simply will not take responsibility for any of their acts at any time. They literally cannot understand why their serial idleness, fecundity and absence of thrift should in any way be mentioned at a time when the debt chickens have finally come home to roost; such as when the repossession of their homes is imminent or enormous Sky TV packages are about to be cancelled despite a months-long series of advice and warning letters.

“How do you expect me to pay my rent when I’m only on Maternity Allowance before my Income Support, Child benefit, Child Tax Credit, free school meals and prescriptions will kick in when I have the baby, and now you tell me I’ve got to pay my poll tax as well? If I kill myself, it’ll all be your fault.”

Tomorrow is finally right here, and nothing very much belongs to her.

These are the great grandchildren of the nation of shopkeepers that stood almost alone against the greatest war machine ever devised and that fought it to a standstill while awaiting the nascent superpowers to join the fray.

But they are human beings, and despite Julia’s unceasing evidence of their Hobbesian lives I feel stricken whenever I see their children, snotty-nosed and toyless writhing in primal frustration in our interview room (while an ageing teenaged mother wrestles with the intellectual challenge of understanding that ‘help with rent’ requires proof of rent and thus maybe binning a tenancy agreement provided by an expatriate, incommunicado landlord wasn’t her smartest move ever) when I know with little room for doubt that their ‘home’, though full of broken bikes and computer games, lacks both books and ornaments. What could those poor kids have become with even a little sense and sensitivity?

We’re looking at spiritual genocide here.

   

And yet. And yet.

Here’s a thing.

A few weeks ago I was walking home from Castle City’s Office Of Vulnerable Affairs and I heard in the middle distance screaming so high and broken that it could only be the voice of a creature in torment. On I walked through the gathering gloom until along the canal path towards me came a man, forty-something; not overly tattooed, pushing a child of three or four in a baby’s push-chair. Three or four and she was still being wheeled along; not skipping or waking alongside and holding the man’s hand. Many of today’s Morlocks probably start at school with muscle development inferior to their Eloi ‘protectors’ and advocates.

The little girl had a crown of blonde curls, wasn’t jam-smeared or grubby, and she was singing. Cheerfully. Out of tune, but loving it. Smiling. It was Tomorrow, from the musical Annie.

Annie is schmaltzy and celebrates America’s awful, proto-totalitarian New Deal (and here we are in its lousy British equivalent), but it’s also optimistic and upholds the western - and may I say Christian - ideals of hope and love and making the best of a bad job in truly hard times. And musicals are very middle- and aspirational working- class things and not always too gay. Just how the hell does a pre-school tot, wheeled around like shopping by a possibly related male get to see musicals, and thus absorb a little notion of hope and love and neighbourliness and friendship and crossing the class ‘divide’ and the possibility of happy endings arranged, in part, by non-malignant rich folk and despite the conniving dishonesty within a corruptible, fallible child-protection system? Who or what brings the love in?

Is it cheap DVDs or streaming? Is it a truly aspirational mother who is actually out working to support her kid while anonymous Dave or whoever wheels her to the park or back from his court-appointed contact hours?

Is there room in that tiny, curly-haired cargo’s future for books and something better than i-phones and broken bikes and absentee, revolving-door ‘fathers?’ Love and laughter and peace ever after?

As we near the boozy end of the season where some of us still recall the most successful (and the most aspirational) single mother of all time I’m allowing my cynical heart to admit that - rather than spiritual genocide - that little girl and others like her might find amidst all the empty debt-fuelled material plenty and her pictureless Council housing walls a lovable tomorrow that’s a day away rather than a tomorrow that belongs to semi-intellectual thugs and their brutal, ignorant cannon-fodder.  

Happy New Year.

Picture from here.

Virgin ™ Queen

Patriotism runs through the British people like blood - or as the word Blackpool runs through seaside rock. Sometimes I miss it because I’m a pig and a pessimist about the welfare state’s bureaucracy.

Lorraine is smart and very knowledgeable about the benefits laws and rules and works two steps above me in the welfare hierarchy.

She’s also about half my age, half my body weight and as cute and as small as a sugar mouse.

And there’s the problem, I think. She has an infectious giggle (infectious like the Black Death) and resembles one of those fluffy office bunnies that the, um, maturer women of firmer figure and unfulfilled or unfulfilling ambitions love to dislike. If you didn’t know her for the benefits regulations wizard that she is and met her at a party or something you’d think: senior stylist at Toni & Guy, or guess her to be the Lancôme agent at Boots.

(Fear not for my marital fidelity here, gentle reader; Mrs. Northwester sits as close to me in all her Valkyrie charm as Lorraine does and herself outshines the rest of Womankind as the Sun does all the other stars.)

So I’m guessing that it’s mostly the avuncularity that comes with middle age that makes me think Lorraine’s just too cute for words. And I’m a pig; remember that.

But Lorraine has the heart of Elizabeth I.

It was like this at the office a week or so ago.

There were these two benefits advice cases: each concerned young people on whose behalf a parent was trying to get more payments out of the system for their offspring, and each was running into difficulties because their adult child was incommunicado one way or another.

Now the Data Protection Act, strange to tell, informs and constrains all that we do regarding inquiries and appeals about benefits claims. We just can’t talk to any third party about a person’s claim (even by as much as admitting that such as claim even exists) without a claimant’s written permission in advance or their verbal authorization if they are present there with their case worker/parent/prison officer.

And sometimes the law and the regulations require us to actually have information - often written and signed for - from the claimants themselves, or benefits just can’t be paid.

Most third parties don’t understand this. Most of them don’t even live in a world where abstract principles such as the law of the land apply to their own interests or desires, and therefore anyone who obstructs them when seeking what they want is an affront to their human dignity and some kind of bureaucratic bully. They don’t know the law and don’t care about it because ‘their money’ is involved here. But they do know their rights. Parents, friends, previously undeclared ‘partners,’ landlords and some ‘case workers’ who turn out to be nursing home cleaners trying to help some granny out, waste about half our phone time trying to negotiate or bluster out of us exceptions to the rules of confidentiality.

Prize Number One went to the mother of a jailbird trying to persuade us that he had been still officially the resident of accommodation for which benefit should be paid for a period during which he had been in prison. There are circumstances when the system is obliged to provide help with rent for those on remand or in prison on short sentences, and Mrs. A (Miss A in all probability) wanted to persuade us that for a certain period last year he had been ‘resident’ for benefits purposes, and thus that he should have help with his rent for that time – money that in all probability the highly suspect landlord should have no right to and thus which we should not advise The Housing to hand over as benefit payments. It looked exactly like a scam. Young Mr. A, however, was in prison again, and unable to tell us there and then that it’s okay to talk to Mum, and likely too lazy (and too unconcerned about what might become of his flat and possessions whilst he was Inside – the State will provide) to write to us any time soon at all, if ever. If he even could read and write. He’d never worked in his life and had been ‘in trouble’ ever since at the age of sixteen truancy metamorphosed itself into Not In Employment, Education or Training.

But we are supposed to help when we can (it says it right there on our contracts and a tiny percentage of us don’t even object to the system sending tax money to criminals and their families,) and so a number of senior benefits advisers and managers spent some considerable time trying to persuade the incandescent and Infinitely Entitled ‘Mrs’. A to persuade the thieving little scrote to Put It In Writing, and we’d see what we can do.

Benefits bureaucrat time spend / wasted on this oxygen thief, his pullulating family and the landlordly parasite? Maybe six hours. Six hours wasted when we could have been detecting and correcting overpayments caused by fraud and error, or helping pensioners actually get what they had earned and saved and were taxed to receive, or people who really do have debilitating illnesses or injuries rather than employment-absolving ‘depression’ or ‘panic attacks.’

Prize Number Two was actually a sad case.

Young Mr. B was unable to come to the phone at all, and we needed confirmation from him about something to authorize help with rent for a similar early period. Dad wasn’t getting it either. Poor chap, he was trying to keep the lad from getting into debt and plain couldn’t see why his own say-so shouldn’t be enough to put the story straight and thus send the money on its way to fill a hole in Mr. B’s bank account. When you work all your life to support your family it’s not obvious to you why The Social can’t just recognise your integrity and truthfulness as you’ve always proved such by doing the job in all weathers come what may.

Same rules apply – no ‘okay’ in writing or in person from the customer and we can’t discuss it, full stop, and thus can’t explain just why the boy should write to us or phone ASAP. This is not merely a ‘detail’ or a ‘bureaucratic roadblock’: it’s Mr. B’s legal right not to have his parents pry into his finances without his say-so. We’d written to Mr. B at his new residence via a mailing address in Hampshire and though I expected the inquiry to be passed to him soon, I simply did not expect him to be free for a phone conversation in which we could explain the counter-intuitive point that we needed him to understand so he’d give us the information to prove he qualified for retrospective help with his rent.

It was frustrating. I wanted to help, and those around me wanted to help, but we couldn’t see a way around the confidentiality issue at that point. But Lorraine could, and she explained how we could get the job done without breaking the law or paying unjustified benefits. I won’t go into the details of our workaround which was boring, but the job was done.

Up jumped Lorraine with her idea, like an HMV Spitfire pilot and for all the world a Size Six Britannia: all elaborate summer holiday plans, boy band gossip…and patriotic indignation.

‘It’s not fair to do everything for someone in jail and then we can’t help someone who’s gone to fight for his country.’

In my opinion, the welfare state for working age ‘customers’ should be third or a quarter of its current size, but if anyone ever does decide to cut it down to non-insane proportions in terms of funding, entitlement and personnel, I hope they don’t start this bleach-blonde Boadicea.

Maybe they should start with a pig.

Picture from here.

Christmas Appeal

You know, at this very special time of year our thoughts are drawn to those less fortunate than ourselves. Amongst these are the destitute and the hungry; the homeless and the dispossessed and the refugees. But it is not just the physical and financial worlds where poverty can cause great anguish to our fellow men. There is also the poverty of the troubled mind and the anguished soul: the depressed and the lonely; the mentally ill and the ignorant; the delusional; the paranoid and the violently, incurably and criminally insane; and those who willingly seek employment.
Most seriously damaged by the hurly-burly of the ever-greater changes and challenges that we meet in our modern existence is one group that rarely reaches the headlines, and one for whose benefit one rarely (if ever) attends a charitable concert or even a jumble sale. And yet their suffering is as deeply felt, I’m sure, and those from the more widely known victim groups, and it is on their behalf that I’m appealing to you today. I am referring, of course, to law abiding taxpayers.

Christmas is an especially cruel and painful time for these unfortunate people. It is not easy for them to join in with the rest of us and embrace all the jollity and excitement of this, the greatest commercial festival of the trading year. Law abiding taxpayers who find themselves standing in line in the Post Office, queuing to buy stamps or perhaps to send a neatly-wrapped parcel or two, rapidly begin shaking and soon turn apoplectic at the sight of Kimberley-Rhiannon blithely pocketing fistfuls of their money via child-related entitlements in the Welfare State and which she will never, ever, use to properly feed or clothe the diversely-surnamed glistening-nosed little scamps who are even now variously whining to leave, or screaming and fighting amongst themselves and running into and around the pensioners. Pensioners who wait patiently for the latest payment of the rewards for their own lifetimes of honest work - or at least for imaginatively concocted Incapacity Benefit claims.

Whereas many an ordinary Briton can happily get through his busy day discussing his sex life and organizing his social schedule on a gunmetal grey mobile phone that matches both his facial piercings and the steering wheel upon which his other hand so lightly rests, law abiding taxpayers are compelled to obey the speed limit and the offside rule on motorways and ‘A’ Roads alike. It does not usually fall to a taxpayer’s unhappy lot to share his simple love of popular music with anyone and everyone in his own neighbourhood or with all the strangers in the neighbourhoods through which his car passes thanks to the remarkable advances that this young century has already seen in music amplification technology for home and hatchback alike.

So when you see them on the streets of this country’s villages, towns and cities, as they walk; pitifully erect and tragically purposeful towards some dreary and uncool paid employment or as they wait; leather-shod and docile to actually pay for goods that they intend to consume or take home to their families, have some pity. Think a moment of these most miserable of souls: freshly washed and clean of shirt as they are: their breath innocent of the comforting perfume of super-strength cider; their blood and dreams unwarmed by either smack or crack; their skins unadorned by the smallest depiction of violence or brutish sexuality or both; nor even by the most modest of obscene slogans. Not for them are the simple pleasures that the rest of us take from the enjoyment of other people’s property or from operatically discussing a bedmate’s moral and carnal imperfections after the pubs close at 3 AM. Still less do they possess the ability or the inclination to rejoice in the wisdom and rationality of Britain’s merciful criminal courts and the gentle good sense of PACE and the Human Rights Acts.

No law abiding taxpayer can ever lead a truly normal life in today’s Britain…but you can still help. For just a few syringes’ worth of cash you can bring weak, hopeful little smiles to their freshly-shaven faces; even as they struggle through life with with comp-li-cated clothes fastenings such as buttons, shoelaces, and belt buckles.All it takes (just like every other problem in life) is money.

# Just £4.80 will buy four hours’ parking at the unattended car park nearest to some fortress-like police station where a taxpayer can make his statement about what happened on the day in question, and where he can later spend some time; forehead pressed firmly against his steering wheel, wondering how on earth it has come to this.

# A mere £6.99 this will buy him a quite acceptable bottle of supermarket festive ruby Port, which is fair enough given what the Chancellor allows him to keep at the end of the day. And let’s face it, Christmas is just once a year and it’s back to the office or shop for the poor sap early next week or on Monday the 4th January - which is three whole fun-filled days for you before the Thursday when you have to sign on again if you can be arsed. That’s only £6.99, and what could you spend £6.99 on: a bunch of plastic-wrapped convenience store carnations, perhaps, to strew across the pavement with all the others in front of the police sign asking for witnesses?

# Around £30 will buy an elderly taxpayer a sturdy, rubber-ferruled walking stick which he or she can wave weakly around if you and seven of your mates decide to have a bit of a laugh. Such an item might later be tagged. bagged, tested for your blood and his DNA and dusted for fingerprints. Much later on it might be used as Exhibit A in the taxpayer’s trial if the kindly police and the decent Crown Prosecution Service decide that he’s violated your human rights by using unreasonable force. Or The Filth might just lose track of it altogether; in which case it’ll become an ordinary eight-against-one witness case and he might just walk. But at least you know where he lives.

# The price of one week’s Housing Benefit at the generous new Local Housing Allowance rate for a typical mother and her four children by three previous partners can purchase for a taxpayer half the cost of some panel beating; replacement windscreen, wipers, windows and trim, and some basic re-spraying at a local garage after her kids have played a jolly Christmas game of Envy Hopscotch down a row of parked cars in a neighbouring posh area.

So please, as you settle down in front of the wide screen on Christmas Day; full of Stella Artois and Turkey Nuggets and being constantly supplied with fresh drink and roll-ups by your new bird, and when you look fondly on as her children open the many smart and brightly-wrapped parcels that you brought home for them only the previous night whilst the taxpayers were at the pub or in church and you wait eagerly to see what each one might contain, spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourself - not least the despairing people from whom those brightly wrapped presents originally came. Spare a thought and maybe a little cash. After all, it’s not your money anyway, is it?

Start spreadin' the news

“New York, New York, it’s hell of a town.”

“Chicago: my kind of town.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner.”

“Sweet Home Alabama.”

“Stockport.”

Stockport?

Stockport?

STOCKPORT!

Yep. Afeared that I’ve been concentrating too much on the disgusting stuff going on in Lancashire and ignoring all the rest of my home region, I thought I’d look at how things were faring elsewhere in the North West, and naturally I thought of Stockport; glittering city of Cheshire and the old stomping ground of my social conservative pal way back when I was a starry-eyed libertarian. Man how I irritated that poor chap! But see, I came right in the end, huh?

Now, once upon a time the late and lovely Frankie Vaughan, the British Dean Martin, had this big Broadway-sounding New York New York showbiz song about his home town of Stockport, and here are the lyrics to prove it.

The Stockport Express is a rich hunting ground for the evil that men do, as well as the good, and just for once I’d like to introduce a topic in a cheerful and unfamiliar way by coining the headline that the paper didn’t use:

British Court Gets It Right.

'Happy slap' sadist locked up

Vanessa Cornall September 08, 2009

A TEENAGE thug who took part in the torture of two boys for a `happy slap' video posted on YouTube has been locked up.

Ricardo Poli, who was 17 when `torture house' was filmed, was branded 'inhuman' by a judge who sentenced him to more than four years in a young offenders' institution.

Judge Bernard Lever QC told Poli: "This was simply about public humiliation. It was not only humiliating but sadistic.

"I think it was about power and the feeling of demeaning a fellow human being. Extraordinarily, the motivation behind all of this was so the defendant could post a video on YouTube."
In the 49-second video, Poli, of Eldercroft Road, Timperley, is one of a five-strong gang who subject two 15-year-old boys to a terrifying ordeal at a disused office building in Wood Street, Altrincham.

Manchester Crown Court heard the boys' hands were bound behind their backs, their feet tied together and they were stripped from the waist down.
One of the boys was also seen being horrifically attacked with a broom handle.
The video was found on Poli's mobile phone by police after his arrest for possession of an illegal firearm.

Michael Leeming, defending, said: "Mr Poli did not have the best upbringing.
"He spent most of his childhood moving around different foster homes. His dad is a drug addict, and he has no contact with his birth mother and the only rock he had in his life was his grandmother, and she died when he was 14.
"He has asked me to ask if he can be sent to a young offender's institution away from here so he can try and change his life."

Now you could pick holes in that for a year and a day but, mirabile dictu, the authorities, I mean the actual authorities who are all paid and trained and everything to help peaceable people not have their lives ruined by monstrous wasters only actually went and did their actual job, didn’t they?

Det Con Barry Conway, of Trafford police, said: "The two young victims were extremely frightened.
"They had no idea how that dreadful attack was going to end and they must have feared the worst.
"What happened to them was shocking and, to add to their degradation, they were filmed on a mobile phone for Poli's warped gratification.
"Poli is a violent bully whose behaviour towards those younger boys was absolutely despicable."

Poli, now 18, pleaded guilty to possessing a sawn-off shotgun, false imprisonment and common assault.

He was sentenced to four years and four months.

Judge Lever said: "It's no wonder the victims did not want to help with the prosecution's case. Not only did they have to put up with being stripped and bullied, they had to come to terms with being humiliated in the community they live in, by knowing that video got out. It was utterly demeaning and inhuman behaviour.
"I warn you and your friends and associates, stay a million miles away from weapons like this."

Well okay, four years and four months is not long time, but it’s four years and four months during which Poli won’t be loose hurting other people. He won’t be on the lam from probation officers who never see him, or ignoring an ASBO he laughs at, and he’ll be under some kind of adult supervision. And even though he’ll likely not serve his full term, his next and probably unluckier victims (who would have come on the scene if he’s gotten away with a ‘walker’ on this one) have another couple of years to live and possibly be happy. Who knows? And he didn’t walk like this scrote to do harm eleswhere.

It’s a small victory in the culture wars, and should be celebrated,

Take it away, Frankie!

Satan Rules UK

Inasmuch as the Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes represent the highest values of our historical Christian moral history (however secularized and multicultural they have become) then it looks like the Devil’s in charge here in Britain…and overseas as well.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The couple.. who both have learning difficulties, were made to perform sex acts on each other, drink their own urine and eat the faeces of one of the gang members, who threatened to stab them if they did not comply. The couple were awarded £97,000 damages by the court. However, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, today said the couple had made the mistake of being kind to the youths and overturned the ruling leaving the couple without a penny.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

A frail woman on a mixed sex ward was attacked by a male schizophrenic patient. Widow Jacquelyn Wardell, 64, feared she would die when the man grabbed her round the throat and cut off her breathing.The 47-year-old patient was wrestled to the ground but still did not loosen his grip on her throat.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
A father-of-two was beaten to death by drunken thugs after police told him they were too busy to help.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,for they shall be satisfied.
She screamed abuse, kicked a police car, punched Sgt Alistair Livingstone in the lip and left five deep scratch marks to his face.But she was shown mercy by District Judge David Copper after he was told how she had bought the £3.10 box of Nestle chocolates to say sorry. Judge Cooper, sitting at South East Suffolk Magistrates Court, told her: "That is a very sweet gesture. I have never heard of that happening before.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Terror suspects under control orders in the UK have claimed hundreds of pounds in unemployment benefits, figures show. A total of 22 out of 23 suspected terrorists under control orders who claimed up to £60.50 a week in Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) were successful, the Home Office figures showed.

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Charity worker 'beaten and left for dead on commuter train after politely asking thug to move his feet'

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Police said that the couple, who may have been targeted because they were wearing goth-style clothing, had suffered such severe head and facial injuries they had difficulty identifying the couple's sex.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

A Christian minister from Heston United Reformed Church, West London, has been assaulted by three Muslim men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’

My merry fellow exorcists on this have been:

Ambush Predator.

House of Dumb.

Laban Tall at UK Commentators.

Ranting Stan.

The Ranting Penguin.

The Daily Mail.

Now here’s the thing.

These are crimes mostly happening to little people – to people who’ve never had a camera crew, bodyguards or entourage to support them.

There are largely people who live (and die) a long way from overstretched police forces.

A lot of them live in inner cities and a great many violence victims are ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Most of the above have suffered as a result of a general and deliberate dismantling of social norms – ‘morals’ or ‘common courtesy’ that it took centuries to impose on the lawless and violent English.

But when the weak and helpless are hurt by all this, it’s called ‘moral panic’ by the subversives who have embezzled proper authority and polluted its uses.

Just for once, I’d like to hear of a Polly Toynbee, a Roy Jenkins or a John Mortimer living where these people lived and died, just for a week, unguarded by supporters and cameramen, without cowering in their rented hovels, and afraid to go out.

Then you’d see ‘moral panic.’

It’s only a fantasy.

Home.

Conservatives versus Libertarians

There are no miracles in Castle City.

Short of a miracle there's no innocent explanation for this one because crutches do not float - let alone walk - on water.

I walk to work along a canal tow-path to the public building wherein I blindly do the bidding of the Department of Hurt and Awful Nuisance. The stretch I walk along is built up on one side with council housing and housing association flats and terraces. The other side has wide verges, hedges, drifts of wild flowers in season and trees – of which the hawthorns are clotted-cream cascades in May.

The path is also a minefield of beer cans, dogs’ breakfasts and, if it isn’t raining or hailing in spring summer and autumn, the sleeping, dancing, slumping or growling figures of our local *voluntary homeless when they have been booted out from the shelter where they eat their meals.

Occasionally a Gore-Texed but bell-free Guardianista will whip past me on the tow-path whose new tarmac allows cyclists to mix with pedestrians: smug and sure in the knowledge that being hit at thirty miles an hour and flipped into the icy waters and mucky bed of the canal has a lower carbon footprint and is therefore more appealing for the involuntary swimmer than being grumbled past by a slow-moving estate car or children-packed school run four-by-four.

On Monday morning, though, the path was deserted but for previously-enjoyed Pedigree Chum, the odd supermarket bag full of random trash thrown onto the glassy swirls of clear water, and the local ducks and drakes walking on the canal’s hidden ice; hidden by light early morning rain that covered and mirror-finished much of its surface. They squawked and honked and ignored me, like little feathered Jesuses…

Which was a pity, because lying on that invisible ice, as if floating on meniscus-free pond water, was a pair of brand new crutches. Shining grey-white and burnished they were – whether from being milled from stainless–steel or merely textured aluminium I don’t know, but they were absolutely immaculate: factory fresh looking from their unworn rubber ferrules to the smoothly-padded hand-grips and under-arm slings.

No Pirates of the Caribbean shiver-me-timber constructions these. They were high-tech: upholstered, moulded or turned on lathes and bent for strength and springiness. They were the under-arm type with two flattened F-curves facing each other: symphonies in gleaming space-age metal and cool-looking composites for the trim.

The ten-year-old boy in me (still always present under the long sighted middle-aged man who has grown up around him) saw light-sabres, laser rifles, and anti-gravity broomsticks taunting us both, across the pathogen-rich canal water.

Two expensive miracles of science and engineering discarded, wasted on the ice, awaiting noon’s thaw or some boat to sink them into the muck forever.

I thought of the medical engineer’s knowledge and dedication that had gone into their design. I thought about the factory workers’ training and skill that had converted them from raw materials and fittings into useable tools. I thought about some unknown businessman's’ ambition and greed that had led to their commissioning in the first place and their eventual sale.

And there was no good way that could have ended where they did.

If bought for oneself, then what pension money or compensation payments had been squandered when these marvellous devices (as far above the clumsy wooden things that children were pictured using in the charity advertisements of my childhood as IPods are above portable transistor radios) were thrown away?

Had they been slung onto the ice in frustration at them being no better at relieving pain and instability than their predecessors? Had they been stolen from some Housing Association flat by opportunist thieves or off-estate vandals looking to impress their girlfriends as they raided the other poor people at the other poor side of town? Had a recent widow cast them there; mourning the husband who they never had enough time to help?

I hoped in a way it was some aged drunk or recovering road spill biker who had found that cheap vodka gave him a steadier gait, however briefly, than these little miracles of technology had.

And if they were gifts from charities’ hard-begged appeal funds or extracted from us taxpayers who finance the NHS at gunpoint – who gave any thought to their efforts and the next financial efforts which the unnamed donors would require to replace rather than merely to deodorize them?

Clearly, no-one concerned gave a hoot about adding more grot and annoyance and ugly idiocy to our city , thought one particular pompous curtain-twitching Daily Mail reader limping past, why-oh-whying and wanting to be Luke Skywalker with part of one of those o-so-cool shiny tech things…

I left the most sinister possibilities alone; and I’m trying to do it now.

Short of a miracle there's no innocent explanation for this one because crutches do not float - let alone walk - on water…and the ducks and drakes do live pretty much on bread alone in Castle City.

Some explanation; some clarity about this kind of problem here was cast in 2006 by Freeborn John, whom I recommend you read anyway, but I came across this article by happy accident the very evening that those crutches must have been settling into the mud and Stella cans of the canal.

Read his article here. That’s a libertarian explanation – or at least a very good libertarian sketch of the problem.

It concludes, not-defining poverty:

What makes the difference? One thing is for sure: it isn't money. All these people were on much the same incomes, the devoted Irish mother and the one who would kick her daughter's cunt in if she was slow to come upstairs, the cab controller and the people who shat in the stairwell of his block of flats.

Here’s another, conservative one, by the great doctor Theodore Dalrymple himself; near its end, talking of dictatored-to death Tanzania:

Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England.

They aren’t too far apart in where they think poverty lies – in the hearts and – if such a thing exists – the souls of twisted, badly nurtured (‘dragged up’ as my mother used to say) poor-minded people. The evil poor, as the policeman who blogs as Nightjack calls them, and also the sad and hopeless, unimaginative poor who’ve had ‘modern’ and ‘relevant’ education for three of their generations, since the early Sixties.

These writers are always worth a read for all freedom-loving Righties, in case we ever lose our nerve and wonder if state welfarism in the form of subsistence benefits and child-related benefits and softer sentences for crimes and easier exams or not are as bad as our prejudices tell us they are.

Take it from Doctor Dalrymple, Nightjack, and Freeborn John, if not from one petty pen-pusher with the wind-direction nickname: it’s worse than we can ever imagine…

Oh, and remember who the enemy really is. It’s not the chavs; stopped and re-educated though they must one day be. It’s not even (though the Lord only knows they’re useless enough) the spineless Righties who wimp out for fear of being called ‘Scrooges.’ We can deal with them – they are lead easily. Even American uber-Lefties tried it and succeeded.

It’s the poly Pollies and omni directional carers who reduced a nation famed for its politeness to the drunken, puking, drugged-up-and-dogging scourge of the tourist Mediterranean, and those who liberated working-class women – at first called ‘housewives’ from their respectable confinement (and drudgery, than Hoover and Hotpoint some of it ended!), and who made so many fast-breeding, hag-faced Welfare pack bitches out of them.

To put it another way; squabble though we do, if this country’s freedom is to mean anything and its prosperity is to be allowed to rise and grow us out of Labour’s debt-pit then we - conservatives and libertarians together - have to take on the cultural Left with all the power and energy we’ve got because no-one else really wants to.

Or…with enemies like these - Doctor Dalrymple, Nightjack, and Freeborn John - who needs friends?

Home.

*I write ‘voluntary homeless’ because Castle City and its satellite settlements have oodles of rented accommodation; Industrial Revolution mill- and factory-workers’ cottages and swathes of former tourist accommodation. There’s no shortage of landlords willing to house chronic alcoholics and the contentedly crazy in our fair city – especially now that mysterious buckets of money (which can’t be our taxes, can it?) have allowed its universities to spray cash at building companies to put campus accommodation up for the undergraduate hordes. There’s no shortage of housing benefit either, for those who won’t violate the minimal codes of conduct required in privately-rented flop-houses.