i don't exactly understand why our beloved secretary of state for sardines has rushed to repond to criticism of his welfare-reform policies and in doing so constructed a defence so full of holes that it makes emmental cheese look like a more effective substitute...but he sure has...and whilst it oh-so-perceptively addresses the hitherto altogether unexamined issue of overspending labour-fuckwits, it wholly fails to address his own dogmatically heartless and hypocritical attitude towards the less well-orff in our communities...
...and bearing in mind that spark up! stands for the abolition of the welfare-state, every form of compulsory taxation, and all government generally (since the genuinely free-market, along with basic common-sense-and-decency, can go far further towards remedying social, financial and spiritual ills than any brain-dead bunch of dictating 'democratic' demagogues), i here reproduce, thanks to the spite-facilitator, the right honourable iain duncan smug's open letter to ed militant in its full and unexpurgated glory:
Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
February 2013
Dear Ed,
We would both agree that social housing is invaluable for the hundreds of thousands people in the United Kingdom who need help and support in getting accommodation.
With 2 million households in England on housing waiting lists and 250,000 families living in over-crowded accommodation, I am sure you would agree the need to tackle the issue is pressing and deserves to be debated in Parliament.
But what we saw from you at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday was not an attempt to engage in a constructive discussion on how to address the problem of helping people find suitable housing, rather it appeared to be a pathetic exercise in political point scoring and scare mongering that does not help one single person, child or parent move any closer to having the home they need.
Your description of this as a ‘bedroom tax’ says more about your lack of understanding of how Housing Benefit works than anything else. This government is restoring fairness to a welfare system that was left in dire straits following thirteen years of Labour Government. One of the many steps we are taking is bringing housing benefit and social housing back into line with the private sector, so you only receive a payment for the number of rooms you need.
The truth is that after years under the last Labour Government, where this problem was allowed to grow out of control, it is the Coalition Government that has decided something must be done. You should know that local authority housing waiting lists rose from 1 million in April 1997 to 1.8million in April 2010. You should also know that by April 2010, house building in this country had fallen to its lowest peacetime levels since the 1920s, with the number of social rented housing stock falling by 421,000 units from 1997 to 2010. These are problems that we are having to deal with in government and try our best to resolve. To do that we have invested £19.5billion in affordable housing and will deliver 170,000 new affordable homes by 2015.
Given the last government, of which you were a member, failed comprehensively to deal with the housing problem, I would have thought you would have been the last to criticise what we are doing to alleviate the crisis you left behind. Nearly one third of working age social housing tenants on Housing Benefits are living in accommodation that is too big for their needs. That equates to nearly a million spare rooms currently being paid for by taxpayer and denying hundreds of thousands of people the chance to adequately house their family.
I am sure you would agree that every family deserves the chance to be housed comfortably. I would hope that you would also agree that the hard working tax payer who has to make tough choices of their own about what sort of property they can afford to live in, should not be paying for what is effectively a benefit subsidy for empty rooms.
At no time in the last 2 years and 9 months have you explained how you would deliver your 2010 manifesto commitment which stated very clearly that Housing Benefit would be “reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford.” Your colleague, the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liam Byrne MP as forced to admit last year that the cost of Housing Benefit – at £20billion a year – was too high and you admitted last year that Labour in Government “didn’t do enough” on housing and that you “don’t have a solution for this”.
However, despite this admission, you sought to play politics with this issue. Yesterday, you referenced two cases of vulnerable people without making any mention of the fact this government has made £155million available to Local Authorities through Discretionary Housing Payments so that those very people you speak about can be helped make any adjustment necessary.
The use of individual case studies may provide political sound bites, but I must tell you that in every local community there are case studies about children having to stand to do their homework and others sharing bedrooms with their parents and baby siblings. You seem to have failed to be concerned about their plight, caused by the last Labour government’s housing failings which we are now trying to rectify.
The changes we are making are ensuring that our social housing stock is used as evenly as it can be so as many people as possible can access this invaluable resource.
I remind you that the Labour government you were part of, left us with a housing benefit bill which almost doubled in 10 years to £20billion and under your own forecasts would have risen to over £25billion by 2014-15, as well as over-crowded housing and an appallingly low level of house building. Not a legacy I would have thought you would have wanted reminding of.
Yours,
Iain
yesseree, the confessions of a confused man, who's never had the plebeian pleasure of dwelling in an inner-city council-flat, i'd say...
- in the first paragraph, the secretary of state commits himself to social housing, yet his government is not committed to financing the development of council houses - it merely proposes a programme enabling the building of affordable homes, most of which will be utterly unaffordable for minimum-wage earners.
- in the second paragraph, the secretary of state begins to lay the foundations for his masterplan to cram 2 million households, including 250000 in already over-crowded housing, into the notoriously tight drums provided by the cheap-skate architecture of state-funded estates.
- in the third paragraph, the secretary of state accuses ed hi-tax-band of pathetic political point-scoring...and then proceeds to spend much of the remaining letter doing precisely the same thing.
- in the fourth paragraph, the secretary of state indicates that [we plebs] should only receive a payment for the number of rooms [we plebs] need - obviously implying, in light of his proposals, that, unlike people of his class, we plebs don't for example require a study-room from which we can strive to better ourselves.
- in the seventh paragraph, the secretary of state affirms that every family deserves to be housed comfortably, yet apparently thinks nothing of ramming lodgers into historically cramped council accommodation.
- in the seventh paragraph, the secretary of state refers to the hard-working tax-payer who is paying for the so-called "spare-bedrooms", yet absurdly fails to grasp the glaring fiscal fact that his own blatantly discriminatory policy will inevitably and adversely affect hard-working tax-payers on low-wages who currently claim housing or council-tax benefits, not-to-mention those recently unemployed claimants who have for many years previously been, what he divisively terms, "hard-working tax-payers" - does the secretary of state not respect "hard-working tax-payers" who are content to provide services to the british public in return for low wages?
- in the seventh paragraph, the secretary of state refers to the "hard-working tax-payer", yet appears too bashful to admit that his labour-intensive work-programme has now transformed the unemployed classes into captives of industry, if not actual masters of their own material productivity.
- in the eighth paragraph, the secretary of state admits by implication that he does not believe in subsidizing benefit-claiming tenants in the private sector who pay rents that other ordinary working families could not afford - so are we to infer that the secretary of state believes ordinary working people should not be able to afford accommodation in the private-sector?
- in the ninth paragraph, the secretary of state underlines his government's generosity by confirming that £155 million has been made available to cover the cost of booting folks out of their homes - charming, neither do i recall hitler sending jewish citizens the bill for their train-fare to auschwitz.
- in the tenth paragraph, the secretary of state claims that in every local community there are case studies about children having to stand to do their homework and others sharing bedrooms with their parents and baby siblings - so does this maxim hold true in the secretary of state's own local community in leafy swanbourne, buckinghamshire?
- in the eleventh paragraph, the secretary of state describes social housing as a valuable resource - why therefore do his fellow cabinet members not pile-in and invest hundreds of billions of pounds in building more traditional council housing, as they undoubtably would do were the valuable resource some rare metallic commodity on the stock-exchange?
to the wider-minded british population (which, to be fair, broadly tolerates the wealth-waving antics of public-school-brats like income drunken smith), the condescending manner in which the secretary of state professes to be intimately apprised of the box-dimensions deemed socially-fitting for the likes of common state-educated scum must truly be gob-smacking; perhaps, instead of lording-it-up in posh london hotels or swanky state-subsidized pieds-à-terre, our members of parliament could, for the sake of the economy, try over-nighting in the wild wanton extravagance of a spare-room in a council-flat on hackney's pembury estate...?
20 comments:
this profile of income drunken smug's better-bred half is priceless - especially the acutely observed asides about the mean-minded old mizer himself...
...apparently during the late 1990s, or so it has been claimed, the couple's finances were so tight that betsy had to wear second-hand clothes and considered converting their £721,000* fulham home into a knocking-shop for needy members of parliament and lords of the realm...
*price of sale in 2002
indeed, a plausible theory shell...given the client-market the smugs would have been exploiting via their parliamentary contacts and the well-established behaviour patterns of said politicians when away from their wives for the weekend...
...and well, what-d'ya know...wishes do come true for some - thanks to 'the family', the missus has now got the run of an almost obscenely huge mock-tudor pub which cost one million doubloons to sling-up from scratch...
...there must be half-an-estate-full of spare-rooms upstairs...and although i guess you've got some pretty vivid notions about what goes on in them, shell...i'd wager a bet it's more likely the secret location of a cia operational hq or safe-house or some-such-thing...
mmm...there's been quite some heated philoshical debate about whether this "bedroom-tax" is, financially and ethically speaking, a true-blue-blooded tax, that is, in strict terms of objective metaphysical reality, you see...
...but the way i read it is this: although in itself dodgy in principle, the welfare-state is simply an expedient mechanism for clawing back the taxes which have been extorted from us workers over an historic period...come on, if people really wanted to hand over 75% of their wages to the government, then there wouldn't be any need to threaten non-payers with imprisonment, now would there? ergo if benefit-entitlement is cut back, many of us, whether working or not, will feel an increased net-burden in compulsory taxation, as will society as a whole...
...so yes i therefore conclude that the spare-room-penalty is indeed a bloody tax...just not one which affects all strata of our class-corrupted society...
...now, my old nan came from piss-poor beginnings next to the canal in paddington (i know that coz the tenements where she lived got bulldozed after the war and replaced with a council block), but during her 90-odd years i'd say that she was by-and-large one of those upwardly-mobile working-class conservative-voters...
...however, when maggie-who-married-money hand-bagged her way into number ten and imposed the poll-tax on us, my nanna (like many others) smelt a rat...because she recognized that this 'ideologically fair' tax was nevertheless still a compulsory tax which would, as opposed to the former property-based 'rates' system, hit 'ordinary people' far-harder than it would those belonging to the 'rich-bracket' - the 'high-fallutin' birthright-benefits of which, despite a lifetime of 'bettering herself', had always been automatically barred to her by traditional entrenched social discrimination...
...and to give her credit, she was, at the time, living on her own in a bungalow with a couple of spare-rooms - so the poll-tax would probably have done her a favour...
...but anyway she wouldn't have it...and the upshot of the story is that she confided in us her downright serious desire to go down number ten and chuck a brick through margaret thatcher's front window...
...and i sincerely suspect that she would have had a similar reaction to the "bedroom-tax" were she around today...
...sadly, she passed-away some years back...in an aylesbury nursing-home as it happens...which was situated on the swanbourne side of town...and was laid to rest in the buckinghamshire countryside...not so very far from iain duncan smith's two-million-quid rural bolthole...
...and given her commitment to the cause, i wouldn't be surprised if she came back and relocated an antique tudor brick, from some dusty corner of duncan smith's privileged pile, directly to his living room...
...put-it-this-way, it wouldn't be me wot done it...coz i'm much too comfy sitting here, in me gargantuan garfield slippers, serenely smokin' away in me state-subsidized urban bedsit...
@armchair anarchist
...you dropped your subjunctives there in the tenth paragraph mate, but don't fret...i don't think that's taxable, yet...
...but returning to the sorry case of iain durbrain smith, i hear on the grapevine that he's not a very bright feller academically...so i sincerely hope he's done his sums vis-à-vis the electoral effect this poverty-punishing policy will have on his constituency...
...just a thought, but smith's country seat might end-up being all he's left with if he get's a hole ripped out the arse of his parliamentary one...
oh what is all this silly fuss about? surely it can't be so very difficult to save twenty pounds a week...?
why not...err...
...let these benefit-claiming people forgo just one afternoon-tea at the ritz every fortnight.
iain duncan smith is not attacking the welfare-state on ideological grounds or even out of concern for public finances - what irks him is that so many members of the hitherto ignorant british public have taken the opportunity, whilst unemployed, to educate and inform themselves as to the hypocrisy and evil which resides unchecked and uncapped within our country's shamelessly exploitative ruling establishment; this is what happens when the nation's intelligence services, state education system and media conspire to pull the wool so far over people's eyes that they are mentally and emotionally suffocated.
half-right raining r...
the welfare-state, like the social justice afforded by equality legislation, is but a sticking-plaster covering up the open societal wounds of repression and industrial-scale exploitation by britain's powerful elite; the conservatives want to remove the wound-dressing, yet have no intention of rooting out the evil which caused the original injury - and the socialists, knowing by rote their rôle in the grand scheme of choreographically fudged enlightenment, will forever conveniently forget to reverse any anti-socially-motivated policy implemented by the conservatives, in favour of dutifully maintaining the status quo.
tonight, on the local-london-news, i noticed an item about a family which preserved the former bedroom of their dead 10-year-old boy as a shrine - not an uncommon circumstance, i believe; now, fair enough, if someone was sleeping on the streets due this all-too-human sentimentality, i could understand the government wishing to intervene in some way, but to the best of my knowledge this is not actually the case, and the financial penalty which the family is bound to incur under the new bedroom-tax-rules seems over-harsh and petty in my opinion; what really struck me however was the tiny box-size of the room in question - i honestly reckon iain duncan smith's lav is probably accommodated in a more generous space; i'm reminded of the time when i was a van-courier, and together with my step-son, once delivered a hefty consignment of files to a lawyer's house in the country - we were duly directed to unload the job into the nursery, and were somewhat bemused to discover that this children's play-room was equal in capacity to the two-bedroomed council-flat which housed our own entire family of seven; good-luck to those affluent and industrious guys, say i - they were renovating an old vicarage, if i recall the situation correctly - but please, please, please would iain duncan smith mind awfully butting out of poorer folk's business.
yep, the 'ching' in chingford just about sums up duncan spiv's political philosophy - like his views or loath them, at least, everyone knew that his predecessor, norman "knucklehead" tebbit, was a conviction conservative politician who came from a solid working-class family, learned a highly-skilled and economically-contributive trade, and understood personally the problems associated with hoiking oneself out of poverty.
i can't tell whether this reproduction of betsy duncan smith's diary entries is for real (if it's not, then the legal editor who wrote it is lost to political satire), but the thought of this ineffectual gun-obsessed lunatic and his acidicly-snotty sloane-ranger wife being in charge of working-class welfare is absolutely horrifying.
may i just mention that i'm sorry to learn that betsy duncan smith has in recent years had to undergo (presumably private) treatment for breast-cancer, and i sincerely hope she's made a full recovery - but given their complete political callousness towards the more common-born in our society, it's frankly quite an uphill struggle to believe that the duncan smiths would ever reciprocate such sentiments outside their own select social circle.
may i also add something here spark up? right:
on the very important issue of conservative members of parliament being in other sorts of political party that people have been electing, i mean this is a very shocking story, it is completely unacceptable, and the speaker of the house of commons has said there is no reason to believe that any coalition politician currently elected to the house of parliament is unsafe or a danger to public health...
...but this isn't really about public safety, it's about effective party labelling and proper political practice and obviously people will be very angry to find out that they have been electing horse-arses, dogs, and rats when they thought they were electing human-beings...and as i say this is completely unacceptable. thank you.
ok ya, if all goes to-plan in the next general election and hubby gets the promotion to dirty racist war-mongering bastard that he most thoroughly deserves, we are thinking about upsizing a teeny-weeny bit...
...well...err...ya, i've got my eye on an attractive little bijou detached property just down the road actually...it's called err...mentmore towers i believe...
@buckshot bonnie
'ello 'ello ello...
so what do we 'ave 'ere then...?
...a nutty local dignitary who can't stop playing with firearms...
...a mysterious old aristo father-in-law known as "the commander"...
...a seriously wacky trigger-happy wife...
...and people 'aving ardent affairs left-right-and-centre...
...sounds suspiciously to me like a plot from midsomer murders, don't you think, delroy...?
...in fact the series was most probably inspired by this loopy-lot and the dodgy goings-on in their seemingly sleepy little village...
...time to go 'round, beat some bushes, and observe what nasty creepy-crawlies come a slithering out, methinks...?
well actually sir...if you'll forgive me...
...i've been concentrating my investigations more on the vatican...and the strange case of the suddenly retiring pope...
...you see, it seems that yesterday morning, his holiness just upped and packed his bags, stopping only to book a one-way ticket to the bahamas...
...i can't say i blame the old codger, at his age, of course...
...but as you can imagine, there are already wild rumours circulating amongst the congregation...
...primarily concerning the possibility that he may have been caught with his hand in the papal offertory plate...
...or even in flagrante delicto with a busty blue-eyed blonde...
...but obviously i'm not one to pay any mind to idle sacrilegious gossip, sir.
no of course not delroy, quite right too.
...now let's get down to more serious business, eh?
...so where's the local pub then, sergeant? the tipsy hen, isn't it called...?
...or there again, maybe not...what with the place's notoriously rough reputation and all that...i think i'll give it a miss...
...wouldn't be seen within a million miles of it frankly...
...err...let's go sink one 'round the old hs2 over at waddesdon...
...i hear they do a great pint of rural ravager, you know...
...just the ticket i reckon.
@doctored democracy
oh dear...yes, very interesting...acting in their official capacity as the clinging parasitic counter-weight to right-wing repression and exploitation, the socialists have attracted enough brain-punch to stop the conservatives dead in their tracks on any given may-day of their choosing, but never do so because they'd find themselves out of a job and on iain duncan smidge's wonder-fucking work-programme in two motivational shakes of his mean magic schtick; the cia pay the lefties to dive after a few tepidly competitive rounds of shadow-boxing, their mental-fists wrapped copiously in mitigating cotton-wool, it seems - what a match of moral-feather-weights. oh god, how very depressing.
hi there steve,
we're told there's some on the far-left would give the tory-boys a good fight...ok, so they're not camped-up by the cia like most of the head-lining politicians, but even they're still power-pawns-in-arms of the old eastside gangs - they're hardly freelancers; it's all well-rigged mate, it's 1984, '69 or whatever over-and-over again - the same streets have been front-lines for donkey's years and it's in none of their interests to tread on the opposition's turfs except for the odd televized factional contest on special pre-arranged occasions when a few under-performers like smidge are sacrificed just so as to keep up the charade of ongoing rivalry.
i tell you it's all a fix - even snooker's been sold to the chinese now, hell knows how some sharp card pulled that one off...
heeey, what's the betting that, for his sins, dunce-cap smith gets moved sideways to overseas aid...
...it'd be poetic penance, except he'd probably start sending billions over to south africa to ensure that disingenuous whites didn't fall below the fucking-stinking-rich-line.
@sergeant delroy
in order to correct the misleading information contained within the above comment, i would like to release the following statement:
"in recognition of his good-works, his holiness will, upon resignation, be confined to a nunnery for the rest of his natural days; the cardinals have conferred, and perceive no moral objection to his holiness receiving this form of ecclesiastical pension, on the basis that he has saved-up for it all his life; this holy church, being more progressive than other faiths, believes that those prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of giving everything in the service of god, deserve in return, to reap a portion of their heavenly reward, before death rather than after".
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