we went on strike for pensions
we went on strike we public servants
against the government’s intentions

We’ll fight the bloody cuts
we’ll fight the economic crisis
we’ll fight the cuts in public services
that mollify the rich list

We’ve suffered silently we have
we’ve suffered silently for years
we’ve suffered against our better judgement
because we’ve known nobody hears

We’ll not take it any more we won’t
We’ll not take your student fees
we’ll not take paying for tribunals
we are going to get up off our knees

We’ll protect our welfare state we will
we’ll protect it from the markets
we’ll protect the NHS and schooling
from your managers and targets

This society you’ve formed you have
this society’s not one of our choosing
this society has become a place
where the majority are losing

We do not have your tax exemption
we do not have your old school tie
we do not have your gold-plated pension
now we must work until we die

Stuff your bankers and your bailouts, stuff ‘em
stuff your paltry interest rates
stuff your rises in inflation
that more of your wealth creates

Beware the riots of the mob you should
beware us the 99 per cent
beware the jobless and the dispossessed
for each word I wrote we meant

~ Song Of The Day – Steve Miller Band – Take The Money And Run

there’s a sign in the forecasts but he wants to be sure
cause you know sometimes figures have two meanings
in a department off whitehall there’s a civil servant who sings
sometimes all the economists are mistaken
ooh it makes me angry
ooh it makes me angry

there’s a feeling I lose when I watch all the news
and my spirit is crying for this country
in my thoughts I have seen golden parachutes for the mean
and few voices from those who stand looking
ooh it makes me angry
ooh it really makes me angry

and it’s whispered that soon we will not avoid the doom
and the papers will fuddle our reason
but a new day may dawn if we unify the throng
and the 99% will have victory

If there’s a picket at your workplace, don’t be alarmed now
it’s just the poor with no pensions
yes there were two paths we could have gone down but in the long run
there was no choice but to change the road we were on
and it made me angry

your money’s worthless and it’ll all go, in case you don’t know
the strikers are urging you to join them
politicians can you hear the battle cries, and did you realise
your highway leads you to guillotine

and as we career on down the road
our pride was gone but not our soul
there walked a spectre we all know
who wore black shirts and wants to show
how everyone just wants their gold
and if you protest very hard
the change will come to us at last
when we are one and one is all
to stand and fight not lie and fall

and we’ll send them on their highway to Hades

Song Of The Day ~ Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne however does not feel that focusing on the energy companies is the correct strategy, after all “They aren’t the Salvation Army” and infers that it is the consumer that is to blame for not insulating and finding the cheapest tariff.  The argument that the high cost of energy has been due to the contraction of players in the market from 40 when energy was deregulated in 2000 to 6 now has been refuted.  Phil Bentley the MD of British Gas claims that the sole driver of consumer energy prices is the wholesale price of gas in the international marketplace and cites the fact that we currently import 50% of the gas we use.  According to figures quoted in the Daily Mirror though the energy companies have made an ­estimated £30billion in profits since 2006 of which £8billion has been paid out in dividends.  British Gas themselves reported a 24% jump in profits to a record £742m last year adding 267,000 customers to its 16million customer base.  In addition operating profits at British Gas’s parent company Centrica broke through the £2bn mark, increasing by 29% to £2.3bn, which is also a record.  At the same time around 8 million British Gas customers were hit with a price rise on 10 December 2010, raising the average customer’s dual-fuel bill from £1,157 to £1,239 a year.  Centrica mounted a defence of its prices when it announced the figures, pointing out that British Gas made only £4 profit each month per customer and that it would pay  £761m in tax during the year.  One wonders therefore whether it is Arthur Andersen who is doing their books since £4 x 16million = £64 million – £761 million does not come anywhere close to + £742 million… or am I missing something like a fucking decimal point or a 0 somewhere here?

It is all very well for Huhne and Cameron to say that the consumer should be looking for cheaper tariffs in the morass of variations and that loft insulation should be carried out but let’s look at this a little more closely.  The switch sites are very often on commission based on the deals they offer, it is therefore in their interest to get you to switch supplier since staying on your existing one denies them any revenue.  The myriad assortment of deals and their terms and conditions is baffling to anybody’s mind and this has been admitted by this government and the previous one, both of whom have failed to do anything about it.  On the subject of loft insulation let us ask what the position is for the few remaining council tenants, do they all have insulation?  If not then what provision is being given to councils to do it?  Presumably the same that is given to them to install solar panels to increase self-sufficiency.  What pressure is there on private landlords to ensure all of their properties are sufficiently energy efficient?  Where are the schemes for the worst off to receive free loft insulation since such moves would be more likely to reduce their bills and increase their ability to live from day to day, perhaps even to not have to solely rely on state benefits?  It would seem to be a far better method in getting people off benefits by raising their household income and lowering their expenditure rather than arbitrarily removing them from certain benefits whilst not advising them of others to which they would be entitled.

Labour have attacked the energy companies and the government however whilst Ed Milliband may talk a good game he did little to stop the rampaging energy company profits whilst he was Energy Secretary in the last administration.  This would suggest that he either did not wish to do so or that he was unable to do so, either way what exactly has changed to make it more likely now?

In perhaps the most cynical comment of the debate Chancellor Gideon George Osborne thinks that keeping to our climate change goals on emissions will hurt business “Britain makes up less than 2% of all global emissions so we’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business.”  For a man who went to one of the best schools that his parents could pay for he seems to have a quite catastrophically inept grasp of logic.  If the planet is not saved there won’t be a country let alone businesses in it.  For the wider universe this must represent a tantalising prospect.  Or again am I missing something here?

Investment in renewable energy sources by the energy companies is 5% of their total investment, in the last year the UK has gone from 3rd to 13th in its investment in renewables.  The government claims that green energy will cost £300/year per household in order to make itself sustainable, why should it, surely the latent sustainability of this form of power generation would in fact guarantee the energy companies revenue long after fossil fuels have run out.  In fact is it not the case that the government is doing British business a grave disservice by not ensuring their long-term future?  Is it not sensible to take no chances with regard to whether or not impending climate doom may befall both from a moral and economic perspective?  The argument as to whether wind farms are an eyesore or not should be devolved so that communities be permitted to opt out of central funding for renewable energy generation on the proviso that they be removed from the National Grid and thus responsible for their own power generation.  Why when profits are increasing, in contrast to often the dropping of wholesale prices, is the difference not ploughed back into investment in renewables?  Why in the age of fuel imports, tightening of belts, “rising wholesale prices” is the head of RWE npower, Volker Beckers, getting a £1million compensation package last year while EDF Energy’s Vincent de Rivaz has got a 30% rise to £1.3million?  Former Scottish Power boss Nick Horler received £1.3million, E.On’s Paul Golby £1.2million and Ian Marchant of Scottish and Southern £1.2million.

Putting the onus on the consumer is merely an example of the cosy relationship between government and business and the utter contempt for which government holds for the vast majority of the population who are facing real-terms pay cuts, pension obliteration, rising food prices and huge fuel bills both at home and on the road.  The consumer does not have the power to change energy policy, the consumer does not have the ability to force investment in renewable energy, the consumer does not have the lobbying power or influence to put any pressure on the energy companies merely to blithely accept what they are all doing multilaterally which is to raise prices at the very time that demand is likely to be highest.  It isn’t a wonder that people are out on the streets it is a wonder they haven’t been out prior to now.  After all for most currently the streets may well be warmer than our homes.

Rather than blazon out the storm and simply say that nothing had happened, or to come out ashen-faced and say he screwed up and throw himself on the mercy of the Prime Minister as might have happened in the media-naive pre New Labour days, Fox has been a great deal more crafty and ended up doing a combination of both. Let’s have a look at what he said:

“I do accept that given Mr Werritty’s defence-related business interests, my frequent contacts with him may have given an impression of wrongdoing, and may also have given third parties the misleading impression that Mr Werritty was an official adviser rather than simply a friend”

Let’s deconstruct this tangled web woven by the minister, the phrase “given the impression” implies that despite how it might look no impropriety took place.  To then use the same term again in that the impression may have been given that Werritty was an official advisor implies that somehow people have jumped to the wrong conclusion on both points.  In fact Fox did not stop here but went on to cast aspersions in the more than a little right-wing biased Sunday Telegraph stating that “underlying issues behind these claims and the motivation is deeply suspect”.  Clearly of the belief that being held to account for his actions was a task well beneath a minister.  So did he actually do anything wrong or is this another ‘expenses defence’ in that no actual rules were broken despite the morally questionable nature of the conduct being pretty plain.

In the Ministerial code it clearly states that ministers “must ensure that no conflict arises, or appears to arise, between their public duties and their private interests“.  That would appear to make it quite clear that at least in respect of Parliamentary conduct Fox has transgressed.  Moreover since Werritty attended meetings with Fox and had business cards printed that referred to him being a direct advisor it is pretty clear why such an impression might have been arrived at.  What is also interesting about the latter point is that Fox claims that he told Werritty in June not to hand out these cards because they gave the wrong impression.  Given that he was aware so long ago why was the matter not made public at this point in order for Fox to be open and honest about the situation, rather than waiting until late August when confronted about it by MoD Permanent Secretary, Ursula Brennan?  After all in the Sunday Telegraph interview Fox had said that he had “absolutely no fear of complete transparency in these matters” which doesn’t quite seem to tally with the months of silence.

Let us also not forget that this is not someone just taking their mate to an office party to avail of a free bar, this is a man who has already brokered deals between Fox and businessmen being admitted to a circle that inevitably involves highly classified information of a national security nature.  How this could be construed as anything other than a serious conflict of interest and abuse of ministerial privilege is beyond me.  David Cameron on the other hand believes that Fox should be given the chance to explain, a pity the latter was not keen to do so before the revelations were made public by the media investigations and I’m afraid this is where I lose sympathy.  If you have done something wrong and you are aware of it and wish to atone you come clean and ask for forgiveness, if absolution is given then you may return to the fray hopefully a wiser person and with your integrity intact. After all we all make mistakes but it is what we do with them both during and after that defines our true conduct.

The truth is that Fox has been caught with his hand in the till but was not clutching any money at the time and would have us believe that the money in his pocket is not the result of the pilfering and that to suggest otherwise is to accuse without substantiation.  [Rather like the accusations of those on Incapacity Benefit all being scroungers that sort of thing, the Tories know a thing or two about unsubstantiated accusations.]  The fact is that Fox is trying to make a great fuss about the accusations about the contents of his pocket in order to deflect his attention to his hand being in the till in the first place.  Cameron has shown himself to be either too weak to do anything about a member of his cabinet or unwilling to take a stand to preserve the semblance of moral integrity of the government.  There may be multiple reasons for this.  Firstly Fox is a senior figure on the Tory right, given that the Tory centre is to the right of Genghis Khan this means Fox leads the rabid section of the party (you can make the jokes up at this point yourselves!)  Cameron is not keen to have such a senior member languishing wounded and angry on the backbenchers where he may snipe at an already frail government.  Additionally Cameron probably feels that Fox has been foolish but not outright criminal, but this misses the point, very often ministers and MPs have to leave their positions in order not to bring the government into disrepute because they have lost the confidence of their colleagues, this as stated at the beginning though is a new Tory party, one with the same politics as before and very often the same figures but more adept at smoke and mirrors.  Let us not forget that the Health bill is going through the House of Lords this very week so further deflection from this is also very much to the government’s advantage, especially since the Lib-Dems are having to try to pressure their own peers who are reluctant to support the bill and are not subject to the same political control as their colleagues in the Commons.

All in all it is yet another example of power and privilege, of the contempt that the national politicians show the wider population, if there is anyone out there who did not know this already then where the fuck have you been?

Song Of The Day ~ The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy – Down The Drain

“Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine — the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you.”  - V For Vendetta

Do not let the media whitewash dictate what you believe, do not let the media or your leaders tell you what you should be thinking.  If in another context someone was consistently failing to be able to build something and charging you a fortune for the privilege of their mistakes you might think of getting another builder.  Capitalism isn’t broken, it was never the raw materials to build a fair society.  It is time to tear it down and start again, what the new structure will look like we’ll have to discuss and try some things out, but let’s not live in a house with no roof just because we’re scared we’ll have to live in a tent for a while whilst we build a proper house.

These are our countries, our cities, our streets, our homes.  We owe it to our children, our children’s children and our disenfranchised and dispossessed brothers and sisters across the world and their children.  It may be the only way we may look ourselves in the mirror.

Song of The Day ~ Moloko – The Time Is Now

If what I think is what I know
and is because I tell me so
what if I am lying though
I might have to ponder that a mo’

the things of which I cannot see
are they of relevance to me
if I should live empirically
then nothing that’s not here can be

And what of that which I know not
outside my sphere I know not what
I don’t really understand a lot
yet what I know is all I’ve got

can I declare that I exist
or is there something that I missed
if so am I a nihilist
or just an enquiring pessimist

and what of you my reader dear
how can I prove that you are here
or just a dream, it isn’t clear
perhaps I might learn more next year

Well the Tories have done it, they’ve found some money to spend on public services, let “Call me Dave” be praised, and what worthy cause have they chosen to invest this unexpected windfall in.  Rubbish.  No that is not an indictment of their policy… let me rephrase that, no that is not merely an indictment of their policy, they have chosen to sink this money, the sum of around £250 million to give to councils in order to roll back the decision by many to go to rubbish collections every 2 weeks rather than every one.  This scheme implemented to try to maximise the goods recycled by consumers has attracted much criticism, usually from well-to-do house owners who claim that they have more than enough rubbish to warrant a weekly collection.

Eric Pickles, [the man who a year or so ago on BBC's Question Time attempted to defend the MPs expenses and then got in a strop when the audience expressed its moral outrage by saying that he wasn't prepared to debate it because in the eyes of the audience MPs couldn't do anything right anyway] said that the reason the Conservatives had taken this step was because they had evidence that the move would be better for the environment and better for hygiene.  He didn’t however give the source of this evidence, which does not necessarily mean in every circumstance mean that the person speaking made the evidence up, but does on this occasion mean that the person speaking made the evidence up.  This was graphically illustrated by a very calm rational spokesman for Friends of the Earth who pointed out that their evidence showed that people were more likely to recycle if they did not have a rubbish collection every week and furthermore that there had been no evidence to suggest that the change in policy in rubbish collection had anything to do with rat proliferation and that in fact the population of said rodent was in steady decline.  Which, given the nature of modern large tall plastic bins seems of little surprise except in London where everything is just dirty anyway!

Pickles does not stop with the mere making up of facts, he is considerably more pompous than that, he goes further to assert that it is “a right” for people to have their rubbish taken away every week.  ”Weekly rubbish collections are the most visible of all frontline services, and I believe every household in England has a basic right to have their rubbish collected every week.”  Of course the Conservatives have form in a rather subjective interpretation of what constitutes a ‘right’ since they resisted the imposition of the Social Charter from Europe on the grounds that such rights would be too costly, it appears they also have a rather interesting interpretation of what constitutes the visibility of a front-line service, I’d like to offer a school or a hospital as slightly more visible and thereby important examples than a bin.  However state schools and state hospitals are of far less use to your average upper-middle class voter since they would normally be availing of private services already.

According to Pickles to mitigate the recycling issue the government will continue to look at incentive schemes, the one he cites could not be more classic Tory, that of Maidenhead’s points based system that gives vouchers for M&S!  I’m sure this will delight the people on the breadline when they can turn up to avail of a bottle of Chablis to have with their egg and chips.  A situation where people are coerced into compliance is hardly ideal but it has proven at times to be the only way to get people to change their habits, the hope is that once this gathers some impetus people will recognise the value of doing it themselves.  This latest move, I suspect, is designed to give people a grain of sugar to help the nasty tasting medicine go down, and is another example deflection tactics that have been used to obscure attention from the House Of Lords’ reading of Andrew Lansley’s NHS ‘privatisation by stealth’ bill.

Where I live we have not only a good recycling system where glass, tins, cardboard, plastics, paper and garden waste are collected every other week but the county council also fund an extensive composting system where the cost of the hardware is reduced and the installation is free.  This removes the need for quite so much food waste in our bins, one of the things apparently responsible for the problems of not collecting rubbish every week.  I have not filled up my rubbish bin to the top since I moved in over a year ago, and whilst I may live alone most of the week I do have two children and a cat who make more than enough rubbish to compensate for that.

Naturally there are some people who may claim with good reason that they would prefer a weekly collection, those with very young children still in nappies will find their rubbish stacking up quicker than most of us.  However to adjust the whole system for that is like expanding the roads to try to keep in line with the number of cars on it, it is neither economically nor environmentally sensible and likely to create a cyclical necessity.  The move to weekly collections removes precisely the principal incentive for people to recycle assiduously namely that if they do not their bin will overflow.  Yes it would be nice to think that people would recycle out of a feeling of duty to the Earth and our children’s lives in it but I’m afraid if you look around Western Anglophone society these days it is hard to conclude that this is the case.

Pickles has little time for the detractors, it doesn’t help that in one of the interviews he continually referred to “refuge” – perhaps this was a Freudian slip and signified his discomfort having to put another hare-brained scheme before the public.  When asked where the money had come from Pickles with a clear lack of comprehension of irony said that it had been hard but that his department had cut down on waste!  One must applaud the Tories for recycling failed Thatcher policies at least for the lack of new paperwork it creates, the civil service must be delighted, or not since many of them will be made redundant and the rest stripped of their pensions.

Labour’s Caroline Flint criticised the plans and said the money was effectively a bribe to councils to “save Eric Pickles’ face”.  If you take a close look at Eric Pickles’ face Flint’s argument is persuasive, though you might be forgiven for thinking that it is in fact we, the taxpayer, who needed the saving from it and the nonsense that streams from it.

Song Of The Day ~ Juke Box Fury – Something’s Missing

I will not dwell on the riots themselves, much has been said by people who were closer to it and can give a better insight into what was really going on rather than the media whitewashing that took place.  I have been asked by many of my more moderate friends to actively condemn the riots but I have been unable to do so.  I would not condone actions that put other people in serious danger as with the isolated acts of arson but the damage to property that will already be insured is of little concern to me.  I would like to point out that to those of us with a solid middle-class education and surroundings it is very easy to presume that people should seek dialogue and collective and constructive action to make themselves heard.  Is it not us who are the naive thinking that if our voices are loud enough that we may be heard?  Government policy in recent years has not upheld that assumption.  The young in this instance have not concerned themselves seeking dialogue with those who would not even bother to understand the language were they even prepared to listen, they are not burdened by the self-importance of the educated presuming a right for their subjective rationality to be heard.

The government were quick to condemn those involved and equally quick to try to use it as a graphic illustration of the fall in moral standards amongst the youth.  The term “feral underclass” came into being, a crasser piece of media-posturing and complete lack of understanding of the world as it is one could not have found.  Should we be surprised that a group of public school boys who breezed through both school and university without ever a fear of failure, penury or unemployment should fail to understand the situation as it affects the vast majority of the population?  The truth is that since 1979 the pervading establishment line has been of individualism, commercialism, consumerism and capitalism such that the worth of a man or woman is solely judged by their material possessions or the money they have as the potential to have these material possessions were they to choose to do so.  Thatcherism did not stop when Thatcher left power, it became more insidious, more caught up with the very fabric of society.  What seemed deeply wrong in the excesses of the 1980s became normal, accepted, heralded.

Social responsibility has not decreased because of the younger generation, it has done so because of the very actions and policies of those who now complain about it the loudest.  If you create a society such as this and then marginalise vast swathes of it without hope, education, prospects or surroundings that they can take any pride in could one really expect the outcome to be anything other than what happened?  If you create a society based on a comparison of material possession it is inevitable that you will further entrench the divide between those that have and those that have not.  Where the fluidity between the two factions does not exist it is understandable that people will look at what the alternatives are, be they gang membership, drug dealing, theft, looting etc etc. as a criminologist at the University of Bedfordshire pointed out “if you don’t want these people to be in gangs then you have to ask where do you want them to be?”  The rioting is not something done with the express purpose of offending, it is something done by people to re-engage at least a little in what this society considers to be normal.  Why should any section of society owe an allegiance to a system that so clinically alienates them?  So often is the idiom ‘you have to earn respect’ trotted out that it is a wonder that none of the people who say it seem apply it to themselves.

David Cameron appears to have launched his crusade on fatherless families, who must, according to him, shoulder much of the blame for the decline in social cohesion which Cameron says the government intends to take action to deal with this.  However as yet the full details are unclear either as to what he means by this or what form exactly this action will take.  Indeed what Cameron and his cronies actually know about fatherless families other than what they read in the Daily Mail, that paragon of truth and justice, is decidedly open to question.  Perhaps the plan is to make it more difficult for families to split up?  Do they really think that locking people into loveless marriages will help either parents or their children?  Or is this a cynical exploitation of a situation to pedal arcane religious values that should have been rejected a great many years ago?  Already as the law stands unmarried fathers risk total lockout from their children if the mother wishes to exercise it, so why not seek to reform the rules in that area so as to protect the rights of children to maintain a relationship with fathers who have done nothing more than removing themselves from what is likely to have been a volatile relationship situation.

Maybe the great leaders resplendent with their Stepford wives and opulent lifestyles believe that not being married makes the fathers of the great unwashed more likely to just up and leave on a whim?  Have they bothered to research this?  I can state categorically that leaving my children behind with a woman I had grown to detest and fearing for their very well-being was not at all a decision I took lightly, or quickly.  I did so because I knew that to provide both me and my children a home and an environment with values that I believed in was the only thing I could do as a responsible parent to make the best of a situation that was already bad and getting ever worse with each passing day.  It has been a decision that has led to an iniquity of consequences that remain 9 years later.  Would being married have made me more likely to stay?  I would prefer to ask the question of given the circumstances would my staying have benefitted the children more than my leaving?  Is there any evidence that those who try to stay together for the children do any less harm to themselves or their offsprings?

The Conservatives have reacted to the riots the only way they know how, by appeasing those that have and those that own and removing anyone who gets in the way.  They have sought to exploit it for their own political purposes, as if this should be any surprise.  Imprisoning many participants with sentences that would make many violent criminals pale, or for that matter dishonest and/or corrupt MPs.  Statistics published by the Guardian appear to suggest that sentences for rioters are 25% longer than normal whilst most have been remanded in custody awaiting trials.  The imprisonment rate for these cases has been 70% as opposed to the usual 2% in Magistrates courts. This is clearly no coincidence, such action is not that of the odd hanging judge but the subject of political intervention. This in a climate where we have been told constantly that the prison numbers have stretched the system to the very limits of its capacity.  The implications of this are severe, firstly the cost to the taxpayer is immense, in a time where we are being told that public spending must be reigned in this seems like an unnecessary form of expenditure.  Secondly facilities whilst in prisons will not be available to many of the inmates and without the chances of rehabilitation it is well-documented that re-offending is far higher.  So who is this policy designed to protect?  Is the public in grave danger if those involved in the riots are left to go about their business on the streets?  Much of the justification for this has been that it should be a deterrent to others thinking of doing the same.  Here we are really getting to the heart of the matter.  Ministers have no problem making the taxpayer foot the bill for the cost of keeping property safe for doing so is their primary concern, they benefit directly from doing so.  However in perhaps the most despicable case of double standards the millionaires daughter who stole £5500 of goods and made off in her car was granted bail on the grounds she submit to a curfew in her parent’s large detached farmhouse with land near Orpington, Kent.

In order to ensure that the “feral underclass” get the message there are efforts to remove benefits from convicted rioters, as if the spell in prison and a criminal record deemed enough for murderers and rapists is somehow insufficient in this case.  It is difficult to see this action as anything other than petulance at best and more likely a sustained program of social engineering.  There is little point in having the argument about what prison is for with these people for it represents a brushing under the carpet, an abdication of moral responsibility and an act of retribution for the act of offence.  Rehabilitation is for the soft liberals, why bother paying money on people who have done wrong?  It is not worth having this argument because no matter how incorrect and short-sighted their position may be they are too blinkered, too stupid or just too damn bigoted to accept the truth that if you are going to pay money for convicted criminals then the investment yields greater return if targeted at rehabilitation, the trouble is that yield has no bottom line and no profit which is the only language that these people really understand, one condensed even more than the text speak of the people they despise.

So what is the alternative solution to the quandary?  Many might say that police manpower will have a bearing on the level of control that can be exacted, others have said that water cannon and rubber bullets should be used, as if the evidence of their use in Ulster has done anything at all to quell unrest, in fact quite the contrary respect for the police and army could not have sunk any lower during the draconian period of the British government in the 6 counties.  According to the police themselves in order to police better they need more officers and better resources than now and if they are to be compared in statistics and response to cities like New York then they should have the same level of subsidy.  The Tories are thus presented with a problem because their plans had not included such increases in spending and public spending reforms are in fact likely to expect the police to do more with less.  It would. however, surprise me little if the Tories were to divert funding from other areas in order to stem this supposed moral collapse (which sounds to me much more like right-wing rhetoric using an emotionally emotive event as the metaphorical sledgehammer to crack a hazelnut.)

Would increasing the police numbers really have made a difference?  It rather depends on a couple of factors, firstly what it is it that the increased numbers of officers are charged with doing.  If there as more of a response to events that have already broken out then I would dismiss this as posturing and neo-fascist enforcement of the move to a police state (see graphic novel V for Vendetta), if however it would be to increase community work and enfranchise the areas and the people therein where the trouble is so frequently breaking out then this idea may have some merit, but only if in conjunction with a host of other measures.  Where for example is the education reform?  Where the plans to get people to work in ways that they can do in conjunction with their benefits rather than instead of?  Where the apprenticeship schemes that enable trades to be learnt and both trainer and trainee to benefit?  Where the empowerment of the dispossessed, the housing of the homeless, the facilities for the teenagers to learn and enjoy themselves?  Where the preventative healthcare system saving people from long periods of pain and unproductivity?  These would be examples of worthwhile public spending, things that made not just a tangible difference to those in receipt of the money but to the wider society as a whole for is it really only the individual who benefits from a reintroduction to society?

Would that I had the ear of the policy makers and were able to make them see sense but I have no more prospect of this than those who took to the streets.  More likely is that the continuation of disaster capitalism is using this as a battering ram to push even more human rights abuses into the mainstream now that the war on terror has been quiet for a while.  The backlash will be severe as can already be seen and yet the morally-bankrupt rich who have for decades milked and manipulated the system will continue to be allowed to do so without censure.  Does that not make you want to take to the streets in your droves?

Song Of The Day ~ Labi Siffre – I Don’t Know What’s Happened To The Kids Today

Don’t get me wrong, I am not so churlish as to say that the efforts of those trying to make a difference are not worthy of some appreciation, any assistance is better than nothing but to see people like Bob Geldoff and Bono cosy up to the same politicians who preside over the arms trades, the exploitative capitalist investments, the punitive interest payments, strikes me as either gross naivety or the most profane hypocrisy.  I’m afraid I suspect it is the latter.  It smacks to me a little of the Princess Diana argument, the populist media that portray what a philanthropic saint the woman was when in truth one would like to think that given a situation where we do not need to worry about a day job to provide accommodation, food on the table, education for our children or scrimping and saving for the scraps of holidays that we might all make an effort to do some laudable work with our time.  Diana found contrast in that the taxpayer has been paying vast sums of money to keep these out of touch freeloaders for generations.  And don’t you dare try to talk to me about the tourism angle, France gets tourism because of it’s efforts to remove its blue-blooded parasites.  But I digress.

Comic Relief sought to raise £5 million for 1 million mosquito nets which would massively reduce the potential infections of malaria, they achieved the desired amount ten-fold.  This is clearly a drop in the ocean but it is valid to try to at least do something for if it is not done people continue to die.  What this should highlight now is the hollow promises and lies our politicians have made in recent years with regard to alleviating the African poverty problem.  Herein also lies another problem, it is not just Africa where malaria is such a threat, though it is the area of the worst concentration, Central and South America, the Indian sub-continent, South East Asia remain areas at risk and where densely-populated regions of extreme poverty will provide easy pickings for diseases that thrive in conditions of malnutrition, dirty water and a lack of medical expertise and drugs.

Diseases such as smallpox that directly affected the developed world have been eradicated and a great many others such as Polio, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Tetanus and Tuberculosis have vaccines that have led to the diseases becoming effectively a thing of the past, except where conditions of poverty remain.  Hygienic sewerage systems and drinking water have lessened the spread of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria and dysentery which is why these diseases also remain in the areas that have not had suitable investment to provide such infrastructure.  It is clear therefore that diseases that can affect ‘us’ here in the West have a great deal of money spent on finding cures or at the very least on their containment and neutralisation, so I am at a loss as to see why even as part of that strategy more money is not spent on the containment elsewhere because it stands to reason that the efficacy of measures here are undermined by the lack of measures elsewhere.

The fact is that whilst people feel guilty-bound to give something when it is graphically shown on the television on nights such as Comic Relief they do not marry the effects they are seeing with the causes of the problem.  Therefore any action, however well-meaning can only ever be fire-fighting as if our healthcare system were looking solely to cure disease that have already happened rather than trying to prevent them in the first place, oh wait a minute…!  Africa is seen as a country that is either too poor, too barren or too corrupt to sort out its own problems.  The reason it is poor is very much to do with the wholesale removal of much of the mineral surplus by unscrupulous trans-national corporations and the selling off of assets under the instructions of the IMF and World Bank that are often bought up by the same TNCs. The too barren argument might well be true in the middle of the Sahara but there are a great many areas that with irrigation and access to supplies could at the very least make the population of that area self-sufficient, and this would be a monumental step-up from where these people are now. When it comes to the last allegation of corruption one has to take this with something of a pinch of salt. Corruption in this context is news-speak like, it means “not on our side” for there are a great many corrupt and despotic leaders across the planet who are not labelled so and not denied money accordingly. In fact a great many of the most corrupt play into the hands of the Western powers as they spend a great deal of any money they get their hands on on the military budget buying expensive weapons systems and planes in order to subjugate their own people. As long as the corruption is in this format there is little complaint from the world community, could it be because too many powerful people are making vast sums of money from such “corruption”.  Cynical?  Who me?

So we continue to make little inroads into the problem when ordinary people with little individual power stand in solidarity and give a little of their opulence to those for whom opulence is a mythological concept.  Is primarily to do good or is it to assuage our guilt, I don’t suppose the people whom it is helping would really care either way but perhaps if the former were more prevalent more people might pressure their representatives to do something about it.  The rise in attacks and hatred towards “economic migrants suggests that we prefer the poor to be out of sight and living off the handouts we deign to give them when we feel magnanimous enough to do so and not to get ideas above their station and come over here to get the crumbs from the table before they are stale and after governments and officials have picked the choicest scraps already.  To hear people talking about human rights as if this is somehow destroying society as we know it and allowing unacceptable erosion of our living conditions is more than merely nauseating it is an abject disgrace and blight on the period of history by which we will be judged in future generations.

Up to now I have been focusing on the plight of those far away as if somehow we have creed a fortress of sanctuary within which we have a harmony we do not wish to have disrupted but again this is simply not true.  The evidence of horrific brutality to children in our own country is perhaps more worrying than anything else.  That is not to say it is less important than trying to fight cancer or help people with long-term medical conditions or research into cures and vaccines, nor that we treat children specifically to the way we always treat adults, merely that our treatment of children should really highlight something deeply disquieting about ourselves and be contrary to our basest instincts as human beings.  The damage we are doing is not something that will only affect those far away from us, it is not even something that will only affect those in the future, it is something that should chill us to the very bone for we are shaping a generation, that which will have to look after us, in a way hardly conducive to them doing so with any great compassion.  Those who may be uncaring and also happen to be atheists might say ‘so what, as long as I’m alright why should I give a damn’ but for those who believe in a final judgement whether on the world in toto or individually at death there participation in this abhorrence seems mind-bogglingly short-sighted.  I suppose though if you cannot see the innate inefficiency of what you are doing in your lifetime how can you properly look beyond it to that which is supposed to come beyond.  I believe it may have been Alexander Poppe, an atheist, who said that if he were to find that God existed upon his death and had allowed the world to function as it does he would spit in his face for such a God is not worthy of any respect.

Amen to that.

Song Of The Day ~ Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Next