Well, that's good. Fortunately for all of us there will be no more languishing on the dole.
Mr Cameron has said so.
Parliament, you see (that's the one in England), has passed the Welfare Reform Bill. And despite the fact that the House of Lords again rejected it, Cameron and his little helper Nick Clegg, got round it by calling it a financial bill, and in so doing took any little power the upper house had to stop the progress of the bill to the palace.
Now exactly how they managed (with help from Labour, I might add) to conclude that this was a "finance bill" is not quite clear. Of course it involves payment of a lot of money, but so does going to war, building nuclear power stations, deciding to fork out £25 billion for the Olympics... yet they are not financial bills. So, a crafty piece of fleet of foot from the master of deception, the git wizard himself David Blaine Cameron.
The aim of the bill is to make work pay, says their beloved leader. Right! First question: what work? There are nearly 3 million people officially unemployed, there are very many more who have recently be thrown out of work by Cameron's policies, and who would rather chew their feet off than go anywhere near the dreadful Jobcentre Minus in order to get a miserable pittance, and a dose of gratuitous stupidity and ineptitude by their badly trained staff. (I've worked there and was given just over an hour's training before being let loose on the public with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever, and I've heard staff recommending claimants, sorry, customers, to do ridiculously wrong things.)
Added to this, every day there are more people being laid off as companies close. And then there are all the sick and dying that Cameron's friends at ATOS are throwing on to the dole. So with something like 6 or 7 million people out of work, and with around 200,000 vacancies (some of which may be for a couple of hours a week), how exactly is he going to make work pay?
It seems that it hasn't occurred to him that for work to pay there will have to be a simple but utterly essential element, which is, at present, missing.
He refuses to tackle the low wages; he refuses to tackle the high rents. Instead he makes it almost impossible for people to live on the money that they will receive.
Well, bless him. Many of the effects of this bill won't be felt in the poorer areas of the country. No one will be anywhere near the limits laid down in the bill in most of Scotland, North England, Wales or Northern Ireland. The people being thrown out of their homes will be in London and the surrounding towns.
So for all the people who will find themselves homeless in London and the South this year, I believe a good place to camp out and do some begging will be where all these rich visitor will be congregated.
Around these stadia in the East end of London would be the perfect place for a beggars village.
Incidentally, I read the story over at the Torygraph, and I scoped the first page of comments. It hadn't gone down well, even with the faithful.
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You should have a look at this, as CH points out in his first comment: http://maxkeiser.com/2012/03/01/kr256-keiser-report-copyright-dictatorship-jack-booted-accountants/
I'm not entirely sure how much the House of Lords costs us taxpayers every year. Many figures are bandied about (and we are told how much cheaper it is than the Commons), but no one seems to know exactly what the figures represent:
Expenses of peers (or attendance allowance as it should properly be called) is surely only a small part. There is an historic building to be run, with priceless artwork to be hung and maintained; there are restaurants, tearooms, shops and bars to subsidise, staff to pay to open doors, type letters, run errands, polish coronets, oversee robing rooms, clean toilets, offices, corridors, etc. There are windows to wash, drains to unblock, doors to paint. And then there's security. There are government ministers to be paid and transported. And it all has to be heated and lit. (A lot of them are elderly and need lots of warmth...)
I dunno...£ 1/2 billion...£ 3/4 billion? More?
So... whatever it costs, if, as Mr Clegg tells us, it is necessary for the smooth running of our democracy, why is it that when the government suffers defeats, such as it has over the last few days because various sections of the Welfare Reform Bill have been voted out by their noblenesses, the aforementioned government can simply overturn aforementioned defeats the next day in the Commons, as if nothing had happened.
You see, I reckon that we don't need the Lords. Well, that goes without saying. Ermine collars, red gowns, coronets, together with titles like Duke, Viscount, Marquis, Earl, Baron, and styles like "your grace" and "my lord" seem to me to be completely out of touch with the reality of today. (I'm not, of course, saying that the reality of today has a great deal to recommend it, however, at least our parliamentarians should be living in it the same as we are forced to.)
But I don't think we even need a Senate. Surely one chamber, with good committees, real debates (without the disruptions of the wearing of top hats and cries of "I spy strangers"), and with sensible a good chairmanship (not pompous overblown little pip squeaks), should suffice to get the job done.
It's not as if having a second house has saved the UK, and England in particular, from some incredibly inept legislation, which can be, and is, challenged in courts, usually in London, but sometimes in Europe.
Every time I hear the government of the day saying that it will overturn the votes of the second chamber, I ask myself if the half or three-quarters of a billion pounds or more per annum, wouldn't be better spent on something useful.
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I see that Fred Goodwin is just that, Fred Goodwin...now that they have taken away his 'Sirness'.
Against titles as I am, it's a matter of complete indifference to me whether he has (or had) one or not. Like the titles in the Lords it all belongs to another day, another society, even more class ridden and riven than the one we live in. But that aside doesn't the whole "removal" thing have the smell of an exercise in futile populism by Cameron? That's how it seems to me, anyway.
Fred was, probably still is, a greedy bounder, who is as clever as clever can be at making money, and behind whom all these MPs were standing cheering when he was making that obscene money for the RBS Group, and of course for the UK. But he, like every other gambler, was bound to back the wrong horse sometime.
And he did. Big time. But he wasn't the only one. Goodwin didn't bring down the UK economy single handed. Oh no. There were many others. The City of London is teaming with them. Goodwin was just the best known. And Cameron wants to look tough with the bankers.
Fail...again. It all just looks as silly as giving him the daft title in the first place.
