ON LIB-DEM IDEAS OF TAXING THE RICH TO BENEFIT THE POOR

Sounds like a pretty bloody simple policy, right? The new Lib-Dem ‘big idea’ is that those with houses worth over a million pounds should pay slightly more tax than every other fucker, for the simple reason that they have more money – clearly, they must have more money if they have a big house. Right? And these people with their big houses – about 1% of the population – should pay more because they have more. Trouble is, this simple moral outlook has an even simpler scupper. Why the hell should we pay more tax simply because we have worked hard to earn more? And what about those who own a million pound house but don’t actually earn all that much? If they’re retired, or inherited it, or whatever excuse they have.

In the economic system we have accepted to live by – and we have accepted it whether we like it or not – everybody has the opportunity to work hard and earn lots. You can go to university, get educated, and then go work in a bank and sell sub-prime mortgages and then cut and run before anyone can catch you and put a brick through your face. So why on earth should these people who have worked hard to earn well give their money arbitrarily to people who have shirked education in favour of state handouts and idleness? Why should they pay for pensioners? They have a state pension, don’t they? Well, there you go then, anyone can live on £80 a week, it’s not like pensioners need much money anyway, they don’t actually ‘do’ anything, do they? And as for these families living in council houses on the dole with eight kids. Well, they made their choices and got into that mess. Why should I, who have worked hard all my life, pay for these good-for-nothing scroungers?

Sound familiar? It’s the kind of thing people blurt out when they’ve just looked at their wage slip and seen how much has been confiscated in tax.  OK, maybe not about the pensioners, but certainly the situation in this country when it comes to social welfare is particularly fuckin galling. On the news this week were two stories which hit home to me and sent me into exhorts of vitriolic rage. The first was the Lib-Dems’ new dream of arbitrary tax for the rich, and the second was the story of women attempting to escape domestic violence being denied refuge by councils attempting to save money.

On the one hand was a stupidly idealistic idea that has absolutely no chance of coming to fruition, and on the other is a desperate case for the implementation of this stupid idea immediately. The fact is that councils are shit, and they cannot be trusted to spend the money we give them responsibly. They allocate money for road maintenance when it is needed to finance child protection services so that vulnerable children like Baby Peter can be removed from their dangerous parents before they batter them to death. Road maintenance is important after all. Otherwise people will complain about pot-holes. And as for these women fleeing their violent partners, well, an entire family on the dole with matching heroin addictions have a much fairer case for social housing than she does. There are more of them, for a start. And she was probably a nag anyway.

The fact is that you cannot justify the arbitrary taxation of the rich. What are we, communists? If we are then maybe we should be debating whether or not to put dole scroungers into factories and forced labour camps rather than debating the taxation of a whole 1% of the country. We have the infrastructure to protect the less wealthy in this country, it just doesn’t work very well. It’s not about underfunding, it’s about mishandled funding. Tax doesn’t need to go up or down, it just needs to be controlled and monitored as and when it is spent, and unfortunately this power lies in the hands of the government and the councils they umbrella. And they’re all fuckwits. But this is as much the fault of the rich minority as it is of the poor majority

We are all responsible for the behaviour of the people we put in power. We knew all about MPs’ expenses long before the numbers came out, but we did bugger all, and we’re still doing bugger all. They still regulate their own expenses, we have achieved nothing with our media outcry. We sit on our arses and complain but we actively do, and thus achieve, nada, zilch, NOTHING. We all know what we have to do. We have to massively increase income tax. That’s THE GOLDEN RULE NUMBER ONE on the road to equality. This raise in tax can then fund and sustain the raising of the minimum wage to a decent level, so that exploitation is eradicated and financial stability is guaranteed for the majority over the minority. Those are the first actions that need to be taken.

Those are the absolute fundamentals. Everything else can wait, we just need those two first. Then we can build. And as for the argument that “the brightest minds will leave”, then let the treacherous little swines leave, there are plenty who will gladly step into their places. No end of them in fact. Everyone wants in on this country, all over the world they want to be here. So those that want to leave may feel free to do so. We don’t want you.

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ON THE POISONOUS NATURE OF UNIVERSITY FUNDING CUTS

OK, just watched Channel 4 news and am feeling incensed, so I thought I’d vent my spleen. Firstly on the news that the Liberal Democrats are shelving their goal of ending student tuition fees. There is a philosophy (you hear it in pubs a lot when people who work in offices and wear ill-fitting pin-striped suits get the credit cards out and start drinking sambuca) that claims people are naturally divided into those with the intellectual capacity for academic and economic brilliance, and those with the intellectual capacity to become hairdressers and bricklayers.

This philosophy attests that for a society to sustain itself these natural intellectual divides must be recognised, and that those with a low intellectual capacity should not be given hopes and aspirations above their intellectual stations. That we should not encourage or fund these people in university. Or really even in college or sixth form for that matter. Hell, maybe not even in GCSEs, unless they’re in hair-dressing and brick-laying, or leisure and tourism; those in the bad suits always need plane tickets to the Maldeves to be sold to them by someone; we can’t do it all by computer, we still have some realistic Luddite sensibilities. Still have. What was I saying? Oh yeah.

So anyway, this philosophy, it’s never quite been fully allowed to prevail, even despite the atrocious segregation of my parents’ generation between grammar schools and technical schools and no school at all, university places were funded with a grant. There were no tuition fees to speak of. Universities were supported by the state, even if they were still segregated into polytechnics etc. You could still go. The only thing holding people back was social apathy, i.e. their ignorant parents who were too busy down t’ pit or in t’ kitchen to give their children any intellectual aspiration. The fact is you could still afford to go if you wanted to.

The dream ended however when my generation decided they actually mostly wanted to go to university and not t’ pit or t’ kitchen (in modern terms, retail and catering). Wow, the state said, there’s too many of them, we can’t give them all this money, we need it for the banks and for a few wars we might have. Thus, the tuition fee was born overnight, and universities changed from unifying climates of intellectual and practical social amalgamation and progression towards utopian enlightenment like what we always see in sci-fi films and stuff. You know, where they’re always wearing togas and wandering around pleasure gardens. And instead they became multi-million pound businesses interested in only one thing: MONEY. Our money. Loaned to us by the state, to be repaid by us to the state in kind over the course of our entire frikin lives. Plus interest. And if they couldn’t get enough money out of us, then they had an international market to select from. FOREIGN MONEY. They could triple fees for foreign students, and give them course places over the poorer natives. GIVE US YOUR MONEY AND WE WILL CUT YOUR TUTOR HOURS AND THEIR WAGES, BUT YOU’LL GET A NICER ARTS CENTRE. MONEY.

The labour government – the fuckers – had a saving grace in their aim of 50% of young people going into further education. Half of the young population actively encouraged to reach for the intellectual sky and fuck what anyone else said. Half of the population shoved together on campuses and forced to coexist with every different social strata imaginable – an intellectual and social UNIVERSE, shoved together and mixing in scummy student accomodation, dodgy pubs and clubs, late night trips to Spar, home-sickness, sports halls and freshers week pissups. Even with the horrifying prospect of a $20 grand debt to haunt their adult lives, 50% of young people were going to be encouraged to go for it anyway, to better themselves and to enjoy themselves and to finally break down the social barriers their parents and their parents’ parents and their parents’ parents and their parents’ parents laboured under since the dawn of frikin time.

Oh, but now we’re in a recession, suddenly universities can’t provide the places for this many young hopefuls. Suddenly the government can’t afford to loan this many of its citizens the money for intellectual and economic fulfilment. Suddenly university managers are tightening the belts and sacking tutors and reducing places and turning down local applicants in favour of foreign applicants who can provide triple the money. Now the talk is of reducing the 50% goal. To what though? Is the pin-striped sambuca drinking office philosophy going to win out over the basic fucking ideal of human endeavour??

This is not recession economics.

This is conspiracy.

This is odious, noxious stench of economic elitism seeping into our most important weapon in the economic struggle, the education system.

They will win if we allow the intellectual ambition of the majority to die.

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

And if you want to go to university and the only thing you feel confident studying is hairdressing management or golf course management then you should go to university and study hairdressing management and golf course management, and no fucker should EVER make you feel like you don’t deserve to be there.