Bolitics The New Condem Government

[snowychap]

Longish article from the BMJ but worth a read if you've got a few minutes:

The assault on universalism: how to destroy the welfare state.

Christmas is a time to count our blessings, reflecting how they came to be. For people living in England this reflection is more relevant than ever, as the coalition government paves the way for the demise of the welfare state. This statement will be seen by many as reckless scaremongering. The welfare state, not only in Britain but also throughout western Europe, has proved extremely resilient. How could any government bring about such a fundamental change?

To answer this question it is necessary to go back to the 1940s, when Sir William Beveridge called for a national fight against the five “giant evils” of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. His call secured support from across the political spectrum. Although he sat in the House of Commons as a Liberal, his plans were implemented by a Labour government, and continued under successive Conservative ones. The reasons for such wide ranging support varied but, for many ordinary people, the fundamental role of the welfare state was to give them security should their world collapse around them.

There were good reasons to seek security. The British people had just emerged from a war that had shown that, regardless of how high they were on the social ladder, they could fall to the bottom in an instant. The death and destruction of war were not the only threats; a serious illness could blight a family’s prospects. People wanted to be sure that they would not be on their own if disaster struck, and they were prepared to ensure this through taxes and insurance contributions. They were, literally, “all in it together,” accepting rationing of food and fuel to guarantee that in the face of austerity, everyone had access to the essentials.

In the 1970s, the philosopher John Rawls developed this concept into what he called a “theory of justice.” He argued that a fair society was one designed as if from behind a “veil of ignorance,” meaning that class and social forces were removed from policy making. As he put it, behind the veil, “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.” Rawls argued that in such circumstances decision makers would create a society that does not privilege one group over another, as no one can know where they will end up. This uncertainty about the future was a fair approximation of what many people had experienced during the war.

The postwar situation was quite different in the United States, for several reasons. The country emerged from the war with a powerful corporate sector, enriched by military spending, that could shape the political discourse in its own interests. In much of Europe, industry was devastated, and in Germany and the countries it had occupied, many major corporations were tainted by collaboration. However, a crucial and longstanding difference was the role of race in society. In America, the rich could never fall to the bottom of the ladder, because that position was already taken. African Americans faced persistent and widespread discrimination. There was no veil of ignorance. Europeans knew they could go to bed rich and wake up poor, but a rich (and, by extension, white) American could be confident that they would never wake up black.

The consequences are apparent at all levels of American society today. In household surveys, support for welfare among white Americans is influenced by the race of the poor people who live around them: if their neighbours are white they are more inclined to generosity than if their neighbours are African-American. Although inequality is diminishing across ethnic groups (just as it is has risen across classes), the legacy of racial division continues to undermine support for social welfare. In states with a high proportion of African Americans, welfare payments are much less generous (an illustration of the “inverse care law”).

Thus, one concern in explaining this American exceptionalism is that welfare is not seen as insuring one’s family against catastrophe but rather as a payment to people with whom one has little shared identity. In this way, society becomes divided into “deserving” and “undeserving” groups of the poor.

A second difference is that Americans have been much more likely than Europeans to attribute poverty to laziness rather than misfortune (a form of victim blaming). If the rich wish to help the poor they are urged to use philanthropy, encouraged by the tax system and facilitated by a strong religious culture and distrust of the state. However, voluntary giving means that the donors can select the beneficiaries of their largesse, rather than leaving the choice to a democratic system. More than a third of social spending in the US comes from voluntary giving, whereas the comparable figure was less than one tenth in the pre-2004 European Union.

A third factor is the relative absence of a countervailing discourse, reflecting the absence of a strong left wing or trade union voice. The entrenched dominance of the American two party system stymies the development of left wing political parties, while the geographical dispersion of population during the 19th century constrained the ability of a national trade union movement to organise. Industrialised countries with a greater fraction of workers in unions, one indicator of the power of the political left, invest more in social welfare (figure⇓).

Association between unionisation and social welfare in the year 2007 in 29 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Source: authors’ calculations using OECD 2011 data. Public social welfare expenditure includes funds in healthcare, old age support, incapacity related support, survivorship benefits, unemployment and active labour market programmes, housing support, and other social policy areas. R=0.53, P=0.0027

Understanding where the money comes from is only half the picture of the welfare system. The final main difference between the United States and Europe relates to what the wealthy get back from the state. This is much less in the US than in Europe. In every area the US is less generous; from education, to healthcare, to unemployment benefits. On average, the US invests about $3170 (£2031; €2370) per person less than would be expected if it were a member of the pre-2004 European Union, given its national income (authors’ calculations). In other words, the state is not there to help the rich and, in many respects, it is doing less than ever—for example, by disinvesting in public universities. Thus, the state does not offer a system of mutual security. Instead it provides a basic safety net, albeit an increasingly threadbare one. The advantage of the American system, if you are rich, is that you can pay much less in taxes. Indeed, the low tax/low welfare system is so skewed that a billionaire will pay a much smaller proportion of income in taxes than the poorest paid workers, so that effectively the poor are subsidising the rich.

By contrast, in Scandinavia, taxes are high but, in return, the rich obtain a comprehensive package of high quality benefits either free or at minimal cost, including child care, healthcare, social care, and university education. There is a clear trade-off: you pay higher taxes but you get more back in return (as well as living in a more harmonious, safer society).

So for those who wish to destroy the European model of welfare state, the structural weaknesses of social welfare in the United States offer an attractive model. First, create an identifiable group of undeserving poor. Second, create a system in which the rich see little benefit flowing back to them from their taxes. Third, diminish the role of trade unions, portraying them as pursuing the narrow interests of their members rather than, as is actually the case, recognising that high rates of trade union membership have historically benefited the general population. Finally, as Reagan did when cutting welfare in the 1980s, do so in a way that attracts as little attention as possible, putting in place policies whose implications are unclear and whose effects will only be seen in the future. All these strategies can be seen in the UK today.

The tabloid press, much of it owned by multi-millionaires, is at the forefront of the first approach. Each day they fill their pages with accounts of people “milking the system.” By constant repetition they create new forms of word association, constructing a cultural underclass. “Welfare” is invariably associated with “scroungers.” “Bogus” invariably describes “asylum seekers.” They accept that there is a group of deserving poor, whose situation has arisen from “genuine misfortune” (which seemingly excludes refugees caught up in wars), but when these groups appear in their pages it is because they have been let down by the state, which is devoting its efforts to the undeserving. And as a growing body of research shows, this continuous diet of hate does make a difference.

Such vilification of the undeserving poor is not new. What is changing in the United Kingdom is the progressive exclusion of the middle classes from the welfare state through incremental erosion of universal benefits. The logic is appealing, but highly divisive: Why should the state pay for those who can afford to pay for themselves? Why should “ordinary working people” pay for “middle class benefits”? The economic crisis has given the government a once in a lifetime opportunity. As Naomi Klein has described in many different situations, those opposed to the welfare state never waste a good crisis. The deficit must be reduced, and so, one by one, benefits are removed and groups are pitted against each other, as the interests of the middle class in the welfare state wither away.

The first cut was to universal child benefit. This has been paid to all mothers, regardless of family income. It recognised the importance of children to society as a whole, not just to an individual family. It was also cheap, simple to administer, and free from anomalies. The government will now restrict child benefits to anyone in a family where one person is a higher rate tax payer. The problems were apparent from the start. A family with four children and two wage earners, each earning just below the higher rate tax threshold, would earn a total of up to £84 950 per year, supplemented by child benefit of £3146. A similar sized family in which only one parent worked but earned just over the tax threshold, at £42 475, would get nothing. If that parent was a widower, they would lose a further £5077 Widowed Parent’s Allowance, which is linked to child benefit, resulting in an 18% drop in income. Only a saint would avoid asking why they pay their taxes at all in such circumstances.

The next thing to go was affordable university education. This was more difficult. The government first had to make the case that a university education was mainly a personal benefit, rather than a societal one. Graduates could expect higher incomes, on average, so they should pay for the privilege. The contribution they would make to society, as doctors, teachers, social workers, or in myriad other ways counted for nothing. The government argued that publicly funded education was unaffordable, yet the new system will be more expensive than what it replaced. But this is viewed as a price worth paying to remove a universal benefit. Moreover, students faced with years of personal debt know that some of their fees are being used to provide bursaries for poorer students. It is easy to see how, as they struggle to pay back their debt, this generation may also ask why they are paying taxes.

These recent assaults on universal programmes are just the start. Ministers have made it clear that they see railways, which since privatisation have required much greater public subsidies, as “rich man’s toy”. We are fed statistics showing that those who travel by train tend to earn above average income, so fares must rise above inflation. Of course, the reason (we are told) that the privatised railways are by far the most expensive in Europe is not because their shareholders are making excessive profits from what is in effect a state guaranteed monopoly but rather because of restrictive practices by trade unions, an argument that helps to erode support for them even further. Why should the ordinary commuter pay taxes to support this undeserving workforce as well as ever increasing fares?

The Mirrlees Review on the tax system, commissioned by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has highlighted what it sees as an anomaly, whereby many of life’s necessities, such as food, as well as things that make life a bit more civilised, such as books, are free from value added tax. It argues that this universal policy should be redressed and, if it causes hardship, then the poor (although it admittedly does not preface this with “undeserving” but by now most readers will get the message) should receive subsidies to help them. Once again, the ordinary shopper will ask why they should be paying taxes.

The direction of travel should now be clear. More and more, the middle classes will ask why they are paying into a system that gives them little back. The idea that the state is an insurance system, from which they can benefit if they are in need, is steadily eroded. Even the word “insurance” will be taken out in chancellor George Osborne’s plans to merge national insurance with taxation. There will be ever greater reductions in the funding, and inevitably the quality, of those remaining services used by the middle classes, such as primary and secondary education and healthcare, persuading them that they would be better off seeking private options. Public services will become like public hospitals in the United States, a service for the poor. As Richard Titmuss famously said, a “service for the poor” inevitably becomes “a poor service,” as the vocal and politically active middle class abandon the system. The ground rules are already being laid in healthcare, as the health secretary has sought to weaken his responsibility for a comprehensive health system. At some stage in the future any vestigial safeguards could disappear and commissioning consortiums, by then funded from personalised budgets, would become, in effect, insurance companies, with all sorts of ways to limit whom they enrol and what they cover.

Who benefits from this progressive degradation of the welfare state? Obviously not the lower classes. But nor do the middle classes, as the new, complex, and individualised systems are more expensive than what existed previously, often of poorer quality, and invariably far more complicated. The real beneficiaries are the very rich, who no longer have to pay for services they never used anyway.

Will the British people allow the welfare state to be dismantled? Not yet. But the situation could easily change. The experience of the United States shows how easily people can be persuaded to vote against their own economic interests. By visualising the stark reality of the future that may lie ahead of us we may be forced to challenge our own complacency. In this way, we can only try to emulate the “spirit of Christmas yet to come” in Dickens’ Christmas Carol and hope that we will have the same happy result.

[peterms]

Excellent piece.

For those who don't have time for the full article, these three paras might be worth a glance.

So for those who wish to destroy the European model of welfare state, the structural weaknesses of social welfare in the United States offer an attractive model. First, create an identifiable group of undeserving poor. Second, create a system in which the rich see little benefit flowing back to them from their taxes. Third, diminish the role of trade unions, portraying them as pursuing the narrow interests of their members rather than, as is actually the case, recognising that high rates of trade union membership have historically benefited the general population. Finally, as Reagan did when cutting welfare in the 1980s, do so in a way that attracts as little attention as possible, putting in place policies whose implications are unclear and whose effects will only be seen in the future. All these strategies can be seen in the UK today.

The tabloid press, much of it owned by multi-millionaires, is at the forefront of the first approach. Each day they fill their pages with accounts of people “milking the system.” By constant repetition they create new forms of word association, constructing a cultural underclass. “Welfare” is invariably associated with “scroungers.” “Bogus” invariably describes “asylum seekers.” They accept that there is a group of deserving poor, whose situation has arisen from “genuine misfortune” (which seemingly excludes refugees caught up in wars), but when these groups appear in their pages it is because they have been let down by the state, which is devoting its efforts to the undeserving. And as a growing body of research shows, this continuous diet of hate does make a difference.

Such vilification of the undeserving poor is not new. What is changing in the United Kingdom is the progressive exclusion of the middle classes from the welfare state through incremental erosion of universal benefits. The logic is appealing, but highly divisive: Why should the state pay for those who can afford to pay for themselves? Why should “ordinary working people” pay for “middle class benefits”? The economic crisis has given the government a once in a lifetime opportunity. As Naomi Klein has described in many different situations, those opposed to the welfare state never waste a good crisis. The deficit must be reduced, and so, one by one, benefits are removed and groups are pitted against each other, as the interests of the middle class in the welfare state wither away.

[ender4]

interesting article (the 3 paragraphs). will have to read the whole thing later.

[Chindie]

Are we using this as the general tit for tat party line toeing (thank you Mike) thread?

Because...

Shadow Health Minister Diane Abbott has apologised for comments she made on Twitter, amid claims they were racist.

She said she had not meant to generalise when she wrote: ''White people love playing 'divide & rule'".

It was a response to criticism of media use of "black community leaders" after the Stephen Lawrence murder trial.

One Tory MP called for her to be sacked. Labour's Chuka Umunna said party leader Ed Miliband had told Ms Abbott her remarks were "unacceptable".

In a statement, Ms Abbott said: "I apologise for any offence caused."

"I understand people have interpreted my comments as making generalisations about white people," she said.

"I do not believe in doing that."

Ms Abbott, the first black woman to be elected as an MP, had earlier tweeted that her remark had been "taken out of context".

A screen grab of the Twitter conversation Ms Abbott's comments were made as part of a Twitter conversation

Shadow Business Secretary Mr Umunna told the BBC: "Ed Miliband has spoken to her this morning and made it very clear in no uncertain terms that the contents of the tweet were unacceptable.

"If Diane believed the words as they were expressed and she had not apologised then Ed Miliband would obviously have taken the requisite action.

"For us as politicians, Twitter is a very useful tool to communicate with people, but it has its perils."

In a statement, the Labour Party said: "We disagree with Diane's tweet.

"It is wrong to make sweeping generalisations about any race, creed, or culture.

"The Labour Party has always campaigned against such behaviour - and so has Diane Abbott."

The original remark from Ms Abbott was a reaction to a conversation on Twitter about media coverage in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence murder trial to a woman who complained about the use of "black community leaders" in the media.

'Freedom of speech'

The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP, who stood for Labour leader in the 2010 contest, remarked: "White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their game" followed by "#tacticasoldascolonialism" - a way Twitter users flag up keywords and topics.

She added: "Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better".

The comments sparked much criticism from other Twitter users and she updated her page later to say: "Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th Century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters."

But Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi told BBC Radio 5live her comments were "intolerable".

"This is racism," he said.

"If this was a white member of Parliament saying that all black people want to do bad things to us he would have resigned within the hour or be sacked.

"For a shadow minister to hold these sort of views is intolerable, it is wrong, she needs to go."

However another Conservative MP, Robert Halfon disagreed.

He tweeted: "The right should know better than to get all PC re @HackneyAbbott - disagree strongly, but let voters decide. Freedom of speech & all that."

Deputy Minister Nick Clegg said Ms Abbott's comments on twitter were a "stupid and crass generalisation" and that she should apologise and explain her remarks.

Link

[mjmooney]

Line TOE-ing, BTW.

[Chindie]

I often get confused which, I went for that one first but was unsure.

[LondonLax]

I think she deserves an 8 match ban!

[Awol]

Diane Abbott talking shit again. Not exactly unusual behaviour for her, is it?

[Chindie]

It's a fair point, Awol

[PauloBarnesi]

Good Old Diane. Sent her son to a top private school as the local schools weren’t good enough.

[kidlewis]

her and Suarez must get on great.

[tonyh29]

I don't mind Abbott (she voted against ID cards for one) and I think that she is prepared to stand up and give minorities a voice is a good thing ... it would be a shame to see her hounded out over these comments ... even if they are not isolated ( see comments about "Posh white boys" and "blue eyed Finnish nurses" .... the only thing I will criticise her for is for using twitter to have public "private" conversations

personally I think Labours spin doctors are driving it and making it an issue to deflect from Lord Glasmans comments today where he claimed Labour has “no strategy, no narrative and little energy” and "Labour shows “no signs of winning the economic argument” while Gordon Brown supporters “seem stuck in defending Labour’s record in the wrong ways”.

[meregreen]

Longish article from the BMJ but worth a read if you've got a few minutes....[snip]

Tory b###stards will try to use this bankers recession to implement a long term dismantling of the welfare state. They really are dreadful people. God help our country and our children if they succeed.

[tonyh29]

Tory b###stards will try to use this bankers recession to implement a long term dismantling of the welfare state.

Hence the importance of Tuesday’s remarkable intervention by Labour’s welfare spokesman, Liam Byrne. In a Guardian article designed to anticipate this year’s 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report, which founded the post-war welfare state, Byrne made a very brave admission: something has gone horribly wrong with William Beveridge’s brainchild, which is in need of urgent surgery.

Byrne does not say so explicitly, but his article amounts to a belated acceptance that Iain Duncan Smith’s programme of radical welfare reform is fully justified. Labour has come to accept Duncan Smith’s profound insight that welfare payments can trap people in poverty, rather than offer them a hand out of it, thus forcing generations of families into dependence on the state.

taken from a rather biased source , but then since when did people act impartially in this thread :winkold:

[snowychap]

Liam Byrne is a Thatcherite cocksucker.

[peterms]

taken from a rather biased source , but then since when did people act impartially in this thread :winkold:

What a very strange article. Oborne wrote something a couple of months ago which was quite good, but he seems to have had a relapse. Or perhaps it's meant as a rally-the-troops piece, or possibly an act of penance for his earlier piece which was roundly assaulted by his readership; he might be trailing a series of reactionary imbecilities to placate his readers and his editor.

He trundles out the old lie that government spending created the recession. He can't have been listening to Mr Osborne, whose own autumn statement frankly admitted (despite the trashy rhetoric Osborne feeds the faithful)

The UK economy is recovering from the biggest financial crisis in generations. Prior to the crisis, underlying competitiveness fell and economic growth was driven by unsustainable levels of debt, with the UK seeing the greatest expansion in debt of all the world’s major economies over the last decade. As a result, the UK experienced the deepest recession of any major economy except Japan...

In other words, private debt, the explosion of which and its consequences have been discussed on the economics thread. As we all know, government debt was stable or falling until the private-debt-fuelled crisis hit. But this seems to elude Mr Oborne's understanding.

He tells us that Blair was a conservative in all but name (correct), that he ruined the country, and that the labour party espouses conservative policies, which are the right ones. Just a touch confused there, I think. He seems to be arguing against himself. Which is it to be? Is Blair a tory who led a government which ruined the country? Are the labour party's policies (indistinguishable from those of the Balir/Brown era, sadly) conservative ones? Is this really what Mr O wants to argue? It's incoherent, internally inconsistent, ranting.

He says that he has it on good authority that half the labour party membership are teachers; that Gove is taking on the teaching unions and the educational establishment; that Stephen Twigg as his opposite number agrees with him; and that he is bringing the labour party with him. So the entrenched vested interests he rails against are colluding with the attacks being made on themselves? He seems not to notice the nonsensical nature of his own argument.

What a pity. His earlier article made me think there was hope for him. He seems to have retreated up the wibbling arse of mainstream tory thought. Oh well.

[snowychap]

Authoritarianism and free-market orthodoxy in Liam Byrne's welfare ideas

It is reassuring to hear that Liam Byrne is "on the side of people who work hard and do the right thing". There aren't many in politics who are willing to say that. Rarer still is Byrne's recent bid to occupy the "centre ground". But mark where the centre ground lies.

The last Labour government, he suggests, "got it wrong … on immigration, on welfare, on control of banks". So it is on welfare that Byrne now seeks to map an agenda for a centrist Labour opposition.

Though opposing some cuts to disability benefits, he favours "reform" to reduce welfare spending. The solitary concrete proposal in this respect is to make the receipt of benefits, after a period of time, conditional upon attendance at a work or training centre: workfare, in other words. Yet, it is less the policy specifics than the ideological language framing his intervention that is arresting. He complains of soaring benefit costs, but blames this on social behaviour being skewed by the welfare state. Idleness and dependency on "unearned" income are the problem. This admixture of authoritarianism and free-market orthodoxy is very Thatcherite.

Byrne has form. He was elected in 2004 in a byelection in Birmingham Hodge Hill, following a campaign, managed by Tom Watson, whose disgrace notes were a pledge to "smash teen gangs" and stop benefits for "failed asylum seekers". The broad thrust of it was that Labour was "tough" and "on your side", while the Liberal Democrat opponents were "wimps" and on the side of asylum seekers and criminals. Byrne was elected, though Labour's electoral bloc was cut from 64% to 37%.

More specifically, the tenor of his latest intervention fits into a wider Labour strategy of articulating a politics of the "squeezed middle". In Miliband's bland cadences, this sounds anodyne. But, in fact, it is a strategy taken over directly from rightwing populism. To understand this, one need only revisit the rightist backlash against social democracy and New Deal liberalism. This had a racist component, visible in the seemingly evanescent campaigns of Enoch Powell and George Wallace. But race wasn't all there was to it, and the techniques of populist mobilisation continued to be deployed long after these two had passed into obscurity.

Rightwing populism is not merely transparently "representative": rather it seeks to create the division that it articulates. Societies divided along multiple lines are simplified into a dichotomy between "the people" and its other. The working class is redivided into the hard-working taxpayer and the slothful undeserving poor, with the former subsumed into the "people", the latter into its other. The people are then construed as a "middle" whose sovereignty has been abused by bureaucrats, tax-avoiding plutocrats, criminals, protesters and clamourous minorities alike. Thus, Wallace complained that "middle America" was squeezed between the "silk-stocking crowd" and the poor and criminal.

The "middle", thus defined, is a depthless discursive entity: "the people" supposedly bracketed by the term share little by way of work, culture, housing, education or daily experience. They are united only by what they oppose. Nonetheless, this type of appeal would underpin Ronald Reagan's attempt to forge a Republican majority. In the same way, Powellism would pass into mainstream politics in the form of Thatcherism, which championed a squeezed "middle England" of hard workers against a bossy state and the grasping poor: a form of politics characterised by Stuart Hall as "authoritarian populism". Since then, capturing the "centre ground" has often meant genuflecting to an incorrigibly reactionary "middle".

Byrne's "middle" is one that despises welfare recipients, immigrants and bankers with equal force. Like that of Wallace and Thatcher, his "middle" comprises the "productive" members of society opposed to the "unproductive", the parasites living on "unearned" income. Of course, Byrne is not simply a Thatcherite, much less a Powellite. It is sensible to assume that his articulation of rightwing populism is a conscious strategy intended to maintain social democracy as a viable electoral bloc in the coming decades. And purely on the basis of opinion polling, it may be tempting to believe that he has a correct, if ruthless, instinct.

Yet, what Labour says shapes the ideological terrain in which it works. New Labour's triangulations ended up reinforcing rightwing beliefs and drove public opinion sharply to the right over the last decade. The major beneficiary of this has not been Labour, far less the constituencies that Labour ostensibly exists to serve. In the long run, it has reinforced the breakdown of party identity: far from moulding a "people" with solid social democratic instincts, it has enhanced the fragmentation of the electorate into localised geographical or sectional enclaves. Labour's strategy is a gift to the right, and particularly to any fire-breathing rightist that can occupy the Tory leadership after the weak Cameron interregnum.

[drat01]

Typical crass comments from "Flashman" Cameron re Tourettes - he really is a nasty little shit

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

We really do live in desperately dull times.

Why can't we have some interesting politicians with some actual balls (oh, not Ed, thank you very much) to stand up for their convictions? I mean, how many times do we see and hear politicians toe the party line, or be so annoyingly obtuse in interviews. Just grow a **** pair and be a representitive of the people. If we wanted some clueless muppets in charge of our country, we'd stage a coup and place the chuckle brothers in the top job. At least then, when they sit and do their 'to me, to you' routine we can get a few laughs out of it, rather than going further into debt.

Why don't people have strongly held beliefs anymore? Or has it turned out that everyone lives in this bubble of comfort and apathy, and for anyone to spoil that just wouldn't be cricket?

C'mon now, I can even see Paxman's desperate longing to interview Boris every week just for shits and giggles, as opposed to the automotons that get wheeled out to him to spew a few numbers and stats pulled from Camerons seemingly infinite arsehole to support what those chaps are doing, or the equally dire opposition who get wheeled out to say they really do have beliefs and the lack of a manifesto has nothing to do with their leader being, well, like a child told to play Joseph in the nativity play, only for him to suffer terrible stage fright and **** all his lines up.

No, they are all detestable and thoroughly useless at doing what is best for the people. They work for us. The Banks work for us. Someone tell them this.

/end.

That's my rant for 2012.

[Awol]

Typical crass comments from "Flashman" Cameron re Tourettes

Indeed, anyone with tourettes will rightly be mortified at the comparison.