Politics & Religion – A Dangerous Combination

Frank Field MP

Religion ought to be a personal matter, a matter of choice, and although many religions have a lot of commonalities, they also clash on a number of issues.  In the twenty-first century, we are a comparatively liberal society, but it has taken a great deal of work, and much bloodletting, to get us to this point.

I must declare at this juncture that as an atheist I don’t have a religion, but respect people’s right to choose their own faith.  I believe that in a tolerant society that is the way it should be.

Despite having the so-called ‘Spirit Lords’ in the House of Lords, our parliament is, by and large, secular and certainly our laws purport to be.  However, every now and then, religion creeps into the debate.

This is happening at this very moment.  Once again, women’s right to choose to have an abortion is being called into question.  This time it is being rebranded as a “Health Bill”, as women’s “Right to Know”.  Implicit in the proposed Bill, is the accusation that Marie Stopes and similar organisations have counsellors who “promote abortion” to pregnant women and that counselling should be provided by “independent” bodies.  The Guardian has a number of theories about who these “independent” bodies would be.

The two main protagonists behind this latest attempt to change the Abortion Act are the increasingly notorious Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and that well-known ray-of-sunshine, Labour MP Frank Field.  Both of these MPs would probably deny their religious views are behind the Bill but they seem to have taken a great deal of inspiration from the conservative and Christian movement of the USA in the way the Bill has been worded and presented to the House.  Furthermore, some months ago David Cameron already hinted that he would support lowering the legal-limit of the time-period of abortions (there was actually discussion of this during the last Labour government).  Thus, it looks like this time the fundamentalists might win.

Nadine Dorries MP

Am I wrong to think that religion has no place in politics or law-making?  Reason and the facts alone should decide how we are governed, not the chosen faith of individual MPs.  Abortion is a complicated issue and those who seek to simplify it on the basis of what the bible (or other religious text) says, are undermining advances society has made through intellect and tolerance of others.  Because that is as that the root of all of this – not the debate about when ‘life’ starts, nor the state of mind of women after having an abortion.  Marie Stopes and similar charities/non-profit-making organisations acknowledge all of those issues.  This Bill is about people who believe that they have access to some essential “truth” that only they, and others who share their belief, have.

For a woman to have an abortion, it is a hard and drastic decision; something that should be HER decision and not anybody else’s.  Putting more barriers in the way is cruel and inexcusable – no matter how holy the MPs responsible feel they are.

The True Meaning Of The Riots

The most shocking thing about the riots is that they were predictable – even inevitable.

Why?  Well first of all, our governments have ceased to bear any recognition with the people they are supposed to represent.  They hardly seem to try anymore.  In what parallel universe can a front-bench of production-line public-school boys be said to be the representatives of the British people?  There is even just one woman on the front-bench, in a country of at least 50% women.  Not that the opposition can be said to be truly represent the UK either.  Parliament is now made up of a so-called ‘political-class’, most of those in it have no experience of work outside the Westminster bubble and politics.  For some reason, politicians appear to think that this doesn’t matter.  It does and the rest of us know it does.

When asked difficult questions politicians will begin with insincere platitudes and if pressed, they will move onto obfu-speak; some random statistics perhaps, blaming the opposition.  Finally, they will resort to language that only the political elite can possibly understand, full of acronyms, etc.  Politicians should not be allowed to get away with this.  They are supposed to represent you and me.  If they can’t communicate with the general public, they should find another line of work.

The riots actually tell us that our political system is irrelevant to a large number of people in this country.  The fault isn’t with the people, it is with our politicians.  The media tells us that the expenses scandal is to blame for the lack of confidence in politicians, but it goes deeper than that.  Look at parliament, and then look at the people of this country.  There is not even a cosmetic similarity.  This isn’t a democracy and our political system is bankrupt.

This is a country where the Human Rights Act is under debate.  Does this make any sense?  If a person is against the human-rights of another human-being that person ought to be ashamed and should lack all credibility, but instead they are taken seriously.  The minimum-wage is also being undermined and phased-out.  In any decent society this should be unthinkable and, in fact, by this stage we ought to have a living-wage in the UK.  The clue is in the title LIVING-wage.  We all have the right to earn a living, not a mere subsistence.

While we have politicians and corporations debating whether we should have rights, let alone be paid a decent wage, we are force-fed advertising and ‘reality’ shows, often simultaneously.   We are encouraged to live like celebrities even if very few of us can afford it.  I, for instance, have never owned a car and don’t really want to, but am often led to believe that this makes me less of a person.  We are all led to believe that this we are deficient in some way if we don’t own the latest luxury item.  How are people who are marginalised anyway meant to feel about this?

We live in a culture that now values possessions way more than community.  Our politicians and our media constantly emphasise the importance of “consumer spending” and “economic growth” above everything else.  There is little mention of how we return hope to people who have been abandoned by politics (and everybody else) for decades.

What amazes me is that supposedly intelligent people are blaming ‘liberal’ attitudes for the riots.  Neo-liberal more like.  In a throwaway culture that respects nothing but greed, possessions, labels and consumerism, is it any wonder that people feel they have a right to take what they want?  They have witnessed their so-called betters doing it for as long as they remember.

And as for shock.  The thing that most shocked me about the riots is that many people who I used to respect started to label people as ‘thugs’ and ‘worthless’ – something I’m used to hearing from those I’ve been fighting against all my life.

Time To Explode That Time-worn Myth

There are many myths that have now become accepted truisms but one of the most damaging is that there are some people who “simply don’t want to work”.  It has become such an accepted point-of-view that it is now not only de rigeur Tory policy, trumped up by the right-wing media, but it has also been embraced by the Labour Party.

My problem with this is that it is reactionary, not constructed according to intellect but instead motivated by appeasing the media and public bigotry.  It is a policy that ignores that real cause of unemployment, the misery and poverty of expectations that it causes.  It avoids the reality of multi-generational unemployment, demonstrates no depth of analysis and in many ways does not even qualify as policy at all.  Why not address the needs of the needs of those who trapped in multi-generational unemployment by consulting those people affected by it, rather than adopting a sanctimonious and disapproving stance – Iain Duncan Smith style – and cynically manipulating the issue.

The public debate now surrounding the Murdoch Empire should not be perceived as any sign that politicians will cease to be led by attitudes whipped up by the right-wing media.  Politicians are aware that they are communicating through a 24-hour rolling news culture; this has been exemplified by the current government which often announces policies before they have been fully formulated and is forced to u-turn on them within days.  In the case of this government’s education and NHS policies that is to the better, but let’s not forget Tony Blair’s infamous suggestion that people guilty of anti-social behaviour ought to be frog-marched to cash-machines – not much thought went into that either.

The riots have prompted a free-for-all about attitudes towards those “who don’t want to work” and precious few people seem to be asking why.  The government tell us that there are plenty of jobs available but not very clear about what kind of work it is, and where the employment opportunities are.  Furthermore, what about those currently employed in public services who are about to made unemployed?  There is a real danger that this will lead to even more widespread multi-generational unemployment in some parts of the country.  Certainly I am not convinced by the government’s reassurance that the private sector will fill the void.

It is time that we abandoned this myth that some people don’t want to work and provided more adequate opportunities and social justice for people, before we all end up on the scrap-heap.

David Cameron’s Big Society Con Trick

Yes. We are expected to sacrifice ourselves for the wealthy... again.

The voluntary sector has always managed to function despite interference by government – particularly Conservative administrations.  David Cameron’s vocal support for the sector is only matched by his will to undermine it.

He and in his colleagues the coalition deliberately ignore the fact that such drastic cuts will result in the closing down of places where voluntary work is carried out, for example; libraries, day centres, and community centres.   Those who most benefit from the voluntary sector will be the hardest hit.  The disabled and the elderly, for example, will be further isolated at a time when they are overwhelmingly financially squeezed.

There is an additional affront to the intelligence of the British people in all of this.  The government claim that they are handing back power to the community, helping us control our own destiny; quite how we going to manage this with even less resources allocated to local authorities is deliberately unclear.  Furthermore, the more impoverished the community, the least financial resources given to it.  This is cynical in the extreme and ideological in its motivation.

The Conservatives have never believed in the Welfare State, the NHS or any of the reforms made by the post-war consensus, something that the Thatcher government was the first to break away from.  Margaret Thatcher was fond of espousing that the UK should return to “Victorian Values”, conveniently forgetting that such values resulted in workhouses, debtor’s prisons and child labour.   It is logical to conclude that the Cameron government are an extension of such Thatcherism and certainly this is reflected in their policy-making.  David Cameron doesn’t want to create a Big Society; he simply wants to shrink the state.

The local authorities in the most deprived areas of the UK are more often than not Labour controlled (proportionally, their budgets are cut the greatest).  They will not be able to function with such limited resources and this is already having devastating effect.  The coalition will blame these local authorities for any failures.  And what will happen when voluntary organisations are so cash strapped they can no longer function?  They will be also judged as failures and sold off to private companies.  That is David Cameron’s Big Society.  Big Profit-making for a small society of wealthy elitists.

Grotesque Governance

Not all in this - least of all together

This is one of the grotesque periods in modern political British history. 

Am I being a bit over the top?  Well consider the following:  The rallying cry of this government from its offset has been to proclaim that “we’re all in this together” as it begins to dismantle the British welfare state, the NHS and state education all under the cover of paying off the deficit.  These white, very wealthy males (and all but a few of them fall into this category) have rarely, if ever, depended on the state for anything and so therefore have very little understanding of the value of the state.  This makes them the exception rather than the rule.  To watch David Cameron on the Andrew Marr show yesterday still repeating the lie of “we’re all in this together” is absolutely grotesque. 

Too many members of this government share the same very narrow background of public/private school and Oxbridge university and this is why I feel that in order to prevent such a government achieving power again it is time that ‘public’ (really?) and private education needs to be banned once and for all.  Do the children of relatively wealthy parents deserve better education than others?  Surely the answer has to be no.  It merely leads to elitism, something this government displays in its cavalier attitude during every parliamentary debate.   Public schools are notorious for promoting the “born to lead” scenario and this has no place in a democracy; it bears more relation to feudalism.  Furthermore how can equality of opportunity ever flourish while these institutions still remain, making a mockery of the whole concept.

I truly hope that this government is an anomaly and that Cameron and his ilk will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history, but unfortunately this is very much a British government and could genuinely only happen here.  By holding on to such remnants of the past like the Royal family, the House of Lords, public schools, Oxbridge etc, we remain captives of our history and are doomed to keep making the same mistakes over and over, all the time expecting different results.   This is one of the definitions of insanity.  Is it about time we stopped?

A Home, Not Just A House

Some friends of mine, like many other people in the UK, are finding it hard to buy their first home.  In some ways this makes me feel guilty because my wife and I were lucky enough to buy our home just before house prices began to go stratospheric. 

Nevertheless, there is problem with the British psyche I think; all over the world people spend most of their lives in rented property and think nothing of it, but here we feel we must own the roof over our heads and are quite often made to feel inadequate if we don’t.  My father used to call rent “dead money” which is a bit of a cliché, but like most clichés it has more than a sliver of truth in it.  Rent is very much dead money, unless one is charging it.

There has been much furore recently, generated by the coalition, regarding people receiving lots of housing benefit.  The general dialogue being used by the Conservatives at this moment uses their twisted definition of ‘fairness’.  David Cameron furrows his brow and tells us that it is unfair the “hard-working families” are unable to afford to buy houses while those are on benefits are living in rented accommodation that “hard-working people could only dream of living in” (I’m paraphrasing him here).  This is being used an excuse to put a 10% cap on claimant’s housing benefit if they are still claiming it after a year.  This will inevitably cause much unnecessary grief and hardship to many families, whom often (through no fault of their own) are unable to better their circumstances.  Nor does it take into account the fact that people’s circumstances can dramatically change owing to unforeseen events, such as bereavement, divorce, and so on.

Most people who have lived in rented accommodation know that it is their landlords who are abusing the housing benefits system.  Many of them charge extortionate rent for very poor housing in very deprived areas (often crime-ridden) knowing full well that the rent will be paid via housing benefit.  They set their prices accordingly (at the maximum allowed).  What makes this situation even worse is that many of these landlords don’t even live in the UK, therefore don’t pay their taxes here.  Will the coalition target them?  I think not.

Regarding house prices, I don’t have the answer and I wish I did.  One thing’s for certain, if more are built then surely the prices must go down.  The coalition point to the fact that New Labour didn’t build enough new council houses while in office.  This is a typically disingenuous argument because the Conservatives are completely aware that it was their administration that sold off most of the available council houses during the Thatcher/Major years.  They would also have been the first to criticise any attempts Labour might have made at new council house construction with complaints about over-spending and building on the UK’s ‘green-belt’ (this indeed happened when John Prescott made such proposals).

One of the main problems can be found in the language used.  The Conservatives speak of ‘property’ and ‘houses’ (that is, capital), whereas those who originally built council-houses as part of the welfare state understood that they were building homes.  Those on the centre-left need to re-focus the debate to re-establish the purpose of such homes, to ensure that the Conservatives are not allowed to begin asset-stripping them as they did in the Thatcher/Major years.

The Deficit Myth

George Osborne’s comprehensive spending review of Wednesday 20th October 2010 demonstrated that this government is hell-bent on destroying the Welfare State. 

 There is plenty of evidence to support this; for instance, the aggressive shrinking of the public sector, the £87bn of funding cuts, the cancellation of many important (Labour) initiatives and the cuts to benefits.  Furthermore, they are going to deliberately make many families homeless. 

For a supposed coalition, this government is more Tory than Thatcher ever dreamed of being.  They are belligerently targeting those least able to carry the burden of the deficit, for example; the poor, those on lower/middle incomes, welfare, the disabled – even women and children.  Most commentators agree on this.  None of this was present in either the Conservative manifesto, nor was it indicated in that of Liberal Democrats.  Who voted for this?

The coalition’s constant use of the deficit to excuse utterly irresponsible policy-making is objectionable and the argument of there being “no choice” is unacceptable.  The Attlee government of post-war Britain had a greater deficit to contend with but still managed to start the Welfare State and the NHS, thus the only conclusion one can reach is that the Osborne budget is ideologically driven and to argue otherwise is disingenuous. 

The government’s general line is that the last Labour government created the deficit and are now offering no solutions in how to deal with it.  The very fact that the deficit was caused by the worldwide banking crisis, which began on Wall Street but sent most economies into a tail-spin seemed to escape the Conservative’s notice  (it was in all in the newspapers and on the television).  They also seemed overlook the fact that Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling made sure that the economy was beginning to improve again under Labour.  During all of that time the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats voted with the Labour government and so I imagine they must have agreed with what they were doing.  Were they lying then, or are they lying now? 

Of course the ever-opportunistic George Osborne has been quick to accept the credit for the growth during the last two-quarters (the recently announced 0.8% of the last quarter), but it will be interesting to see if this is maintained following the frankly stupid cuts he announced last week.  Yes, I do mean ‘stupid’.

I call his ideas stupid because that’s what they are.  If you put ½ million people out-of-work deliberately you should have more of an idea about where they are going to find re-employment other than a vague idea like “it will come from the private sector”.  The government has not provided satisfactory evidence to substantiate this claim.  Won’t these people– who will at least for a time be unemployed – be claiming benefits?  They will certainly not be paying taxes.  If they unlucky enough to be unemployed for over a year their housing-benefit will be slashed, so the odds are they’ll be out on the street – which includes their children.  Won’t this lead to crime?  Don’t we need more police to deal with such crime?  It worries me that most of us in the public are asking questions like these but we have a government that seems incapable of asking them.  It’s almost as if they announce such measures willy-nilly and don’t bother editing their own thoughts.

What about the rise in VAT?  I know it will discourage me from buying more goods and I can hardly imagine such a measure to be a boon to retailers or manufacturers either.  Will people be rushing out to buy more consumables with 20% value-added-tax on them?  I think the answer to that is pretty obvious when one also bears in mind the fact that most people have had their wages frozen, will lose their jobs and inflation is rising (didn’t that happen under previous Conservative administrations?).

Of course, some readers will dismiss all of this because I’m a member of the Labour Party and a socialist too, but I think that when one proposes policies one ought to think of their consequences.  I’m not an economist but even I can see that George Osborne hasn’t thought his plans through and nor have his colleagues.

You Don’t Need No Education

I had the privilege of attending university as a mature student, prior to that much of my education came via my own huge appetite for books.  There was much attention paid by the previous Labour government directed at encouraging more people to attend university – famously the aim was 50% – and to a large extent the party achieved a great deal through that policy.  Certainly many more people attended universities from a far wider variety of backgrounds than ever before. 

I personally know many graduates whose families are proud of their achievements.   Many were the first of their families to have attended a university let alone graduate from one.  Such achievements set precedents in a person’s family which lead to ever greater educational achievement.  One graduate in a family can encourage others to take the plunge, since it proves that educational attainment is possible despite a sometimes poor experience in education at the beginning of one’s life.

It can sometime hard for people from a more advantaged background to appreciate the importance of this, since educational achievement is often taken for granted.  Neither my mother or my father went onto further education, let alone higher education, they simply didn’t have the opportunity.  My mother was offered a place at highly esteemed local institution (Mabel Fletcher’s) but was unable to take it, whilst my father, despite being highly intelligent also, failed his eleven-plus, despite being entered for it from the age of eight-years-old.  Both were sent out to work by their families as soon as they were old enough – their families simply couldn’t afford delaying it.  My father went onto take an apprenticeship in maintenance engineering and became a highly skilled engineer.

In education there has been a lot of debate over the past twenty-years (or more) about the UK skills shortage.  The most famous influential report to address this was Leitch’s.  In that he identified that the UK has a staggering problem with illiteracy and innumeracy, and stressed that the UK must focus on creating ‘World Class Skills’ in the UK.  Leitch emphasised that in order for the UK to be competitive people should be ‘up-skilled’ to attain a target of Level 2 (GCSE) skills.  At the time, Leitch’s report was welcomed by the Labour government who then went onto to introduce many (some would say way too many) initiatives to enable this to happen.  Peter Mandelson much later headed an initiative to reach on Level 3 targets.

The operative word in all of this was of course was targets.  The consequence of an emphasis on targets is that it creates an artificial approach to teaching and learning, since sometimes the very activity of learning is unquantifiable.  Educators and students understand this but bureaucrats don’t.

Of course, the new Conservative government, like all Conservative governments before them make a great deal of noise about being very anti-bureaucracy.  The problem of course is that they are also very anti-education, at least for ordinary people and marginalised groups.  Much as the Labour government was way too over-keen on paper-work, at least there was a well-meaning intent present in their education policy.

My worry regarding education in the near future is the cuts.  The Conservatives talk about wanting to make the UK competitive but fail to understand that in order to be competitive the people of the UK need to be skilled.  Education begins at school and if investment is taken away from schools this makes the UK less competitive.  Governmental removal of financial help from community education (often the first step back into education for out-of-work people) further downgrades the UK skills status. The government cuts to college funding, often a source of vocational training today, are destroying the UK economy.  Put up financial barriers between ordinary people and further/higher education and the UK’s economy will inevitably suffer.

The greatest resource of any economy or business is the people in it.  This is the first lesson that one learns in economics and this government’s policies spectacularly fail to pay heed to that fact.   It utterly baffles me why the government cannot understand the logic of this argument.  Perhaps it is owing to the educationally privileged backgrounds of the front-bench, or maybe it is simply that they are intellectually incapable of understanding it.  Personally, I believe that they just choose to ignore it.  Whatever the case, we are heading into disastrous territory if Government educational policies aren’t reviewed.

Who Are The Real Class Warriors?

During the General Election, David Cameron accused Gordon Brown of using the language of the class war.  What has emerged since is that there are two sides to class war.

Personally I think that it is only natural that a government with a front-bench mostly composed of white, upper-middle class males have a lot to prove.  Certainly the government doesn’t in the slightest bit resemble society in the twenty-first century.  Surely it is only right and fitting that there should be an open debate about how they can claim to accurately represent the people of the UK.

I wouldn’t bring this up but the government’s policies seem to indicate that they are engaged in a class-war against anybody who has to work for a living:

1)  Want your kids to go to university?  Sorry, they can’t because you can’t afford it.

2)  Want Child Benefit?  Sorry you can’t have it because we, as millionaires, have decided that you have too much money.

3)  Want a decent school for your children to go to?  Sorry, tough luck unless you pay for it.

4)  Where’s that school you were promised?  Michael Gove doesn’t think your children are important enough.

5)  Want disability benefit? Sorry, you’re not disabled enough.

6)  Can’t find a job?  Tough luck, you live in the North.

7)  Where are your public services?  Sorry you live in a part of the country that didn’t vote for us.

8)  Want to keep your job? Hard luck, you work in the unprofitable public-sector and/or it contributes nothing to the GDP.

9)  Want to keep that roof over your head?  Sorry, we’re going to sell off your council house.

10) The NHS?  We’ve decided that Labour wasted money on it and it’s no longer practical.

The list goes on. 

My feeling is that, who are these people to treat the electorate this way?  Add all of these policies to the right-wing and misleading language of ‘benefit cheats’ and ‘illegals’, and their true aims are clear.  This is revenge for their 13 year exile from Government – it is as petty and spiteful as that.  For that reason, we need to remove this government from office – and mark my words we will in 5 years.  Once we succeed in that we have to make sure these anachronistic con-artists are never allowed in government again, and this time we need to do the job correctly.

David Cameron’s Weird Definition Of ‘Fairness’

The English language is odd isn’t it?  People learning it for the first time often refer to its pit-falls, the fact that the spelling of words is not intuitive and even that the meanings of them can be different depending on their context.  Even though I have lived in the UK all of my life, I can often find the English language confusing.

For instance, I often wonder if people who attend public schools use different dictionaries to the rest of us.  Is there such a thing as an Etonian Dictionary, for example?  The reason I’ve begun to think there might be is that I became utterly dumbfounded by David Cameron’s definition of the word ‘fair’ this week.  It is certainly not a definition that I am aware of, and everybody I have asked about it doesn’t seem to recognise it either.

Right-wing people often do this.  They go out of their way to alter the meanings of words without due consultation with the rest of us.  People have written a great deal of academic work about neo-con Donald Rumsfeld doing that with his use of terminology like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘friendly fire’, but you’d expect an egregious monster like him to behave in that way.  David Cameron – a self-proclaimed patriot standing in front of a union-jack – should have more respect for the English language.

Cameron seems to be trying to convince us that ‘fairness’ means that only those who are hard-working deserve any standard of living at all.  His belief is that ‘the poor’ can be split into two definable groups; those who work for little money and those who are unwilling to work but receive a little bit more money from benefits.  The problem with this half-baked concept – if indeed it has ever been baked at all – is that it doesn’t really stand up to any close scrutiny.

There are large communities throughout the UK where unemployment has become the norm over three generations.  The origins of this began during the Thatcher years when those communities were deindustrialised.  Ask any Conservative supporter about this and they’ll tell you their heroine did this because those industries were running at a loss and had to be swept away to make the UK more competitive.  Even if one accepts this argument (and I certainly don’t) those industries were not replaced with anything economically viable and therefore there are no employment opportunities in those communities.

If Conservative MPs made some effort to understand the challenges that one faces in such communities I might have some respect for their opinions on the matter but they don’t (and if anybody mentions the Iain Duncan Smith paper I’ll get annoyed).  Imagine if your grand-parents were made redundant and have spent the rest of his/her demoralised life on benefits.  Then imagine that your parents, too, have been unable to find employment – when they have it has been on government training schemes. Consequently, you have spent your entire life in a household where there was never enough money and never any hope of the situation improving.  Imagine the pressure in such a home.  On top of all of this, you then leave school and find yourself in precisely the same situation as your grandparents and your parents.  There are no employment prospects anywhere in your local area.  Firstly, would you feel there was any point in learning anything in school?  Would you feel there was any point in looking for employment if everybody you know is unemployed and living their lives on benefits?  Is any of this ‘fair’?

Are you then expected to put a hold on your life?  Are you expected to carry on living with your parents, never having a home of your own, never settling down with anybody and having children?  Is that ‘fair’?

Areas where this is the case have many social problems because of it.  Traditional socialisation models don’t happen because young people continue to hang around with the same peer group as they did during their time at school. The workplace fulfilled a vital role, one would learn from adults who become role-models and in the absence of such a workplace, the behaviour of the school-yard is unchecked and it can often spill over into the community.

After eighteen years of Conservative rule the problems became deeply ingrained in such communities.  Despite New Labour’s thirteen year tenure in office the administration never quite managed to undo the damage done during those years.  Is it any wonder when one examines the scale of the damage?  Industries that had taken scores of years to grow were allowed to wither and die during ten years or less.  As a direct consequence of this, the UK became over-reliant on the financial sector and look where that has led us…

Cameron’s attitude is disturbing for many reasons.  He has reawakened the phrase ‘the undeserving poor’ with all its dangerous connotations.  It certainly pleases the likes of The Daily Mail, and the coalition seem to delight in using the same language as such papers; benefit scroungers, etc.  An example of this is the government’s new proposal to cap benefits, to allegedly make sure that those on benefits aren’t receiving more money than those who are working.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the government that wages may be too low rather than benefits being too high. 

Not only that, but there is an even stranger component to Cameron’s argument.  To illustrate this he has used the standard media-cartoon of families with something like fifteen children.  This evokes images of the kinds of unfortunate people Jeremy Kyle undoubtedly trawls council-estates to find (Kyle even hosted a fringe-event, which speaks volumes about this government).  Cameron’s argument seems to be that people shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford it.  This is a typically rather stupid thing to say since it avoids issues like divorce, bereavement, redundancy and domestic violence – all of which can happen to anybody without much warning.  This is particularly insulting in light of the Camerons’ own flaunting of their new-born baby before the conference started.  Who are the government to tell people how many children the public can and can’t have?  Aren’t the Tories supposed to be the supporters of ‘the family’ (as long as it conforms to the ‘traditional’ model of course) and don’t they talk about individual freedom all the time?  There isn’t much ‘fairness’ going on here.

Even if one accepts Cameron’s argument and agrees that people shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford them, it is difficult to defend capping the benefits of those that do.  A policy like this would punish only children, and it’s not as if they had any say in the matter.  The Conservatives have been critical of Labour’s actually rather good record on child-poverty – surely even they should realise that capping benefits would make matters infinitely worse.  Again, is that fair?

I suggest that David Cameron should invest in a new dictionary and throw that Old Etonian one away.  It really isn’t doing him any favours and is simply making him sound like a retired colonel during Dickens’ most prolific of periods.  The only one who is ‘undeserving’ is him, to be honest.  He doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister.