If you do not work you shall not eat

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

According to information that is going through media outlets apparently the latest attitude of the Tory Party is that people who do not work shall also not eat (and, as far as some reports state, this may include children).

We have known ever since Thatcher that the Tories want to bring “Victorian values” back to the country but that it was going to include those measures very few have only foreseen. By now it would appear it is not just Victorian values but Old Testament values and ways.

It is no wonder that they are seen as the “Nasty Party” and do deserve this image and description to the T. Very few of their Members of Parliament ever as much as stand up for the common man and woman in the street and the environment.

They only seem to be interested in giving as much support to the 1%, the ones that gave the country, and the world, the Great Recession in the first place.

And the successors, as they believe themselves to be, of the Whigs, the Liberal Democrats, who would not understand, it would appear, since they are in the coalition with the Tories, what liberalism actually means, appear to be happily allowing it to happen.

Under this Con-Dem coalition Britain is beginning to slip back towards not just the Victorian era but much further back towards around the Middle Ages if we are not careful.

Given only half a chance the debtors' prisons and workhouses will be back in no time and we are already headed for government slavery. Feeding the homeless is already being outlawed and they are also intending to make rough sleeping a crime. In other words being homeless is becoming a crime in Britain and not just in Britain alone. Other European Union countries are walking the same road right now also.

© 2013

The unemployed to be forced to do unpaid work

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

People in the UK who are receiving benefit whilst being unemployed will be forced to do full-time unpaid work according to recent leaks to the media.

The unemployed will have to do unpaid full time work or lose their benefits, in a bid to reduce the amount spent on the jobless.

Under proposals especially people who have been out of work for a long time will be expected to earn their benefits by working for firms unpaid or in the community.

While it has been suggested adopting a new US-style ‘work for the dole’ scheme will help to reduce Britain’s large benefits bill this appears to be more “Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnamen” as in Germany before World War Two for the unemployed which were repeated in Germany after the German Democratic Republic had been annexed in the last decade of the last century.

It is expected that those who fail to find jobs through the Government’s main back to work scheme – the Work Program – will have to work for their payments, sources have said.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, is reported to have said: “It’s not acceptable for people to expect to live a life on benefits if they’re able to work.” But people in the Department for Work and Pensions described the reports as "pure speculation". However, they did not deny that the plans are being considered by ministers.

Mr Duncan Smith added: “The welfare state rightly provides a safety net for those out of work. But in return, jobseekers must do everything they can to get into work, that’s only fair.”

A report published by Policy Exchange, a think tank, suggests the Government should pilot the scheme for specific jobseekers, particularly those who fail to find a job through the Work Program after two years of support.

Policy Exchange also suggested older jobseekers, who have not had a job for six months should be included, as should those under 25 with little or no work experience.

The Government has already carried out pilot schemes which suggest some claimants would choose losing their benefits over doing unpaid work.

This workfare scheme, as operated in the USA, could be very serious also for those that are in work as companies and especially hard-pressed local authorities could use this to do away with permanent staff, replacing them with free workers from the lines of the unemployed.

The problem is, the way I see it, as to what work they are going to do? Either we are going to end up with people losing jobs so that the unpaid workers (slaves) can be used or they have to invent work for them. The unemployed will also not get any minimum wage; they will only receive the benefits that they have been getting until now. I can see this being used to undermine workers' rights and wages. In addition to this it will be much like what was done in Germany under Hitler to get the unemployed into work, building roads and digging ditches by hand.

The Tories have always had, at least ever since Thatcher, wanted to get Britain back to “Victorian values”. Thatcher did not complete succeed in this venture so Cameron & Co. are trying to make sure it happens. In fact, the aim seems to be to go back further than the Victorian era even. Almost to the Middle Ages seem to be their target with debtors' prisons and workhouses.

© 2013

The Big Society

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The coalition government in Britain under the Cameron-Clegg leadership is talking about the “Big Society” all the time ever since they formed the government after the general election in 2010.

I do not say that they were elected to govern as neither of the parties got a real workable majority, but that is a different issue.

Talk about the “Big Society” is increasing more and more in the beginning of 2011 as the government is cutting is cutting back services on a national and local level due to spending cuts and the attempt of tackling the deficit in the national coffers. The Cameron-Clegg coalition hopes that volunteers will step into the breach here where government services will no longer provide. And this in a country where successive governments have always treated the people as imbeciles and children.

Successive British governments have always detested empowering the people of the country, be this in creating their own habitats and homes or in running their own affairs. And on top of that all comes that the inherent secrecy culture in the UK governed by the Official Secrets Act 1911 Section 2 which is used as a blanket to cover everything possible that should never have been included.

So, what am I saying, you ask?

Personally I will have to be really convinced that what I am hearing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, say on this matter is also what he actually thinks and means. Britain just has a bad track record of empowering the grassroots regardless of what party has been in power. This is why I am so very sceptic here as far as this “Big Society” idea of his goes.

I am also concerned that it will be (i) done in a rather top down approach of “we need you to do this” and (ii) that those volunteers will be, intended, primarily, to run charity versions of what were government services.

Not that, probably, there is anything wrong with the latter in some fields, say in citizen advice, after school facilities for kids, and such. In fact, there are, more than likely, masses of services that would be better run by charities and volunteers, in both care, etc., and value for money.

Volunteers are, in general, enthusiastic as regards to what they do and highly motivated and care for the task; not something that could be said of every government worker in general. Many of the latter are just there, it would seem, to draw their salary and that's it. Clock in in the morning and out at night and home.

I am not saying that the “Big Society” idea and concept is bad. On the contrary! I think it is more than time that the people did get away from the notion that the government has to do everything for them.

In the centuries past when government was far away people did just that and they also looked out for one another. That's what community was and is all about. Over the last century or so, however, government has become ever bigger and ever more pervasive and invasive and people abdicated responsibility to the governments, local and central for this and that, in the same way that the abdicated and delegated the upbringing of their children to the state in the form of the school system. People have come to look to the state to do for everything short of wiping their behinds.

When a neighborhood is, say, full of litter residents immediately complain to the council and demand that that is immediately cleaned and cleared. This litter is down to everyone who live in that neighborhood and thus should be the responsibility of the residents but such a thought would, in today's society, never enter their minds. “That's what we pay our taxes for,” is the usual outcry.

The grass verges in our roads needs cutting, they say, never even even considering that all they'd need to to is to take their mower to the verge in the front of their homes when they cut the lawn. Some do, I admit, but the great majority just scream at the council.

It is these little things that anyone could do, and would do, if but someone would start is and set the ball rolling that make a neighborhood a community.

The one thing that bothers me with David Cameron's “Big Society” idea is that it is government putting it forwards and it was not conceived at the grassroots level of society and could, therefore, be seen as a means for government to band aid the cuts.

What worries me, aside from the afore, is that despite all the rhetoric from Cameron and Clegg, the “Big Society” will not really empower communities and individuals to do things in their way and to do the things that are neede where the people live.

Real empowerment of people is something the British government has always been afraid of as it would mean people actually doing and being able to do things for themselves without government having the control.

If this is going to happen and they really want it then I guess the fires have gone out in hell and winter has arrived down there. I find that about as likely as Silvio Berlusconi becoming a communist.

Can you just imagine the people of the UK running their own affairs. This is a total anathema to the modern state and is something that politicians detest because it undermines their power and control over the people.

It would be really nice if we could reduce the state and its interference in our lives to what it really only should be but I am not about to hold my breath. Blue may suit me by way of color for clothing and such but not in face.

In addition to the state relinquishing the power that should not be its I am hard pressed to see the majority of the subjects of Her Majesty to actually do things for themselves, even if they had the “right” to do so, and for their community and for society as a whole.

Most are way too much in this “entitlement society” mode believing that they are entitled to this and that as a right and that they have to do nothing for themselves. After all, they say, we pay our taxes so therefore we are entitled to this all.

The idea of the “Big Society” – I just wish Cameron & Co had chosen a better term – have been implemented for years already in “alternative” communities up and down the country and around the globe and in so-called Transition Towns. It can be done but it cannot be decreed from the top like the “solidarity” idea in former Soviet Russia and the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), for instance, though, to a great degree it did work, the “solidarity” thing, I mean. Many people of the former German Democratic Republic hunger back to that now.

Despite the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), etc., the GDR had a sense of community, it would seem, in most places, even in blocks of housing, and people looked after each other. I put this also down to the fact that there was no “keeping up with the Joneses” going on as things were, basically, all the same, and theoretically, everyone only could have the basic stuff that could be bought. Not that that always worked and was thus but... I digressed.

While, as I have said, I do like the very concept of the “Big Society” of empowering the people I have serious reservations that (i) this is going to work by having Whitehall tell us and (ii) that people believe that the state is there to do everything for them and that it is what they pay taxes for.

The point is that we should be (allowed to be) doing things for ourselves and not expect the state to do everything for us. But there are two sides here as well in that government has been telling us all the time to look to the “authorities” to do everything for us and the other one that, as I have said already, because they pay taxes, they are entitled to have everything done for them by the state.

The idea of the “Big Society”, sorry about the name, I didn't coin it, and the things it is supposed to achieve, I think, is good and the aims are great but I am not sure as to, and that is what I have been trying to say here, whether the government can get the people enthused about it.

If it would have been something that had originated in a broad demand from grassroots level then my scepticism would be less to nonexistent but as it comes, more or less from the top down and seen to primarily address the existing charities and such, I do not think that the people will follow. I hope I am wrong, but...

© 2011