This week Gideon held aloft his little red bag, probably containing a piece of paper saying ‘ha ha ha’, and spent just over an hour in the Commons letting the country know how he was going to shaft it. He also seemed to have appropriated the term ‘working people’ from somewhere and when he said it, so steadfastly and so resolutely, he wanted it to be aimed at the working class. His budget was not aimed at his rich friends. Like they care about child benefit or working tax credits or student maintenance grants! He wanted to make out that the Tory party are a people party. He wanted to make out that the deficit the UK owes was a result of overspending by the population and therefore the working population had to pay for it. He doesn’t attack irresponsible lenders, he doesn’t really attack the genuine big-time tax evaders and he certainly doesn’t attack the banks. Because there are less of them. The money he will rake in as a result of penalising the people who have no clue as to the figures of the deficit, the people who are the backbone of this country, is clearly much more than what he would receive if he tried to get Philip Green to cough up what he owes.
I get there is a deficit. And I get that we need to sort it out. But this isn’t the way. Scrapping student maintenance grants for the poorest students? Permitting a further rise in tuition fees, in line with inflation? What did the students do that was so wrong to warrant this? Got pissed one too many times and were disorderly in the street? Said aloud that they knew all about existential theory whilst getting their mate to sit round a bonfire with them and play Ed Sheeran songs on an old guitar? Tried to jump the train one too many times? Seriously, students? Haven’t they taken a big enough kicking? Do you want there to be future brains in this country? Because who knows where the next Nobel prize winner or Prime Minister for that matter, might come from. Maybe not from a country pile in Surrey or an Italianate villa in Holland Park. They might be from a council estate in Hackney or a two up, two down next door to a boarded up shop in County Durham.
People who voted Tory in the last election did so for two reasons.
One, they thought they were buying into something good, something upwardly mobile but had no idea what was actually lurking behind the corner.
The other, they don’t give a shit about poor people and don’t understand the benefits system and simply hate the word benefits because it makes them think of lazy poor people who smoke and do not know what contraception is. The word benefits has been so demonised by the press that unless you are on Benefits Street and you broadcast it to all and sundry, it is almost an embarrassment to admit you need them to survive. Too many people think disability benefit is being handed out to those who aren’t really disabled or unfit to work. If you are on the dole you must be a deadbeat loser. If you need housing benefit, you are one up from a tramp, taking bricks and mortar that could otherwise be bulldozed to make way for really expensive housing, or simply just taking bricks and mortar when a cardboard box will do. If you take working tax credits, you clearly don’t work hard enough. And if you need your child benefit for anything other than siphoning it off and putting it into a bank account, then you are a bad parent and the introduction of no child benefit for the third child will stop you from having any more children because we want to be like China.
Give me strength.
Oh, and David Cameron said in the live television debate in Leeds in the run-up to the election, when questioned by David Dimbleby over child benefit, that it was going to remain unchanged. Gideon confirmed this week, the contrary. There you have it. An outright lie, something the Tories have reneged upon, something they said they wouldn’t do, and now have done. So, they got voted in and formed a government on 8th May, and just a day over two months later, a lie came to light. The only good thing about it is that it proves my entire point about starting this blog, and I do not have to eat my hat.
Let the battle commence now for a new tenant in No 10. It might be around four years and 10 months away, but the time is now.
*walks away smugly from computer, happy in the knowledge that aforementioned hat can stay on head and not be served on dinner plate*
iwilleatmyhat 