He'll Go Waltzing Matilda Back Home...

Well it has been rather too long, but a wonderful bit of news on Monday inspired me to launch back into the
blogosphere. Trenton Oldfield is being deported. He of Boat Race ruining fame. Good.

Now today's post is not particularly about his barmy political view, but we may as well touch on it. Oldfield decided that elitism is an entirely bad thing, and is fully represented in the annual Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race. One assumes he was protesting against Oxford and Cambridge in general as institutions rather than the sportsmen and the race itself. If the latter were true, I assume that Mr Oldfield was also planning on demonstrating at all the Olympic events last year too. And the final of Countdown. That is because what the Boat Race itself encapsulates is the success of those who have striven. Like the Olympics. Or indeed Countdown. All the participants have dedicated themselves to being better at something than almost everyone else, whether it be rowing, modern pentathlon or getting to 977 in 30 seconds using 3,4,5,7,8 and 9.

They wish to become champions - the elite. In the case of the Boat Race they have scaled two summits simultaneously - that of academia to be be selected to study at world-leading universities and then also to be selected to row in highly competetive crews usually dripping in past, current and future world and Olympic standard athletes. Protesting at this type of elitism is what is making us uncompetitive in the world. It creates sports days where there are prizes for all lest children find out than in life there is a near constant hierarchy in play in one way or another. No, best protect them from the idea that failure is the other side of the coin of success. That'll prepare them nicely for life.

It is too what drives the constant bilous outpouring against the private education system and the Russell Group universities, most notably Oxford and Cambridge. We don't like people doing well and like to confuse equality with equal opportunity. We've been here before. I doubt Oldfield has ever had a look at the admissions system at Oxford or Cambridge, looked at the ways those institutions try to see through results and pick those with the best potential to make use of the education they have to offer them. Very few journalists or politicians have ever bothered themselves with actual investigation here. They tend to look at one statistic - percentage of state vs private admissions and pin all their arguments on that. They conveniently ignore the failures of large swathes of the state system in either encouraging pupils to apply or educating them well enough to stand a fighting chance at selection.

But that's not really the point. The point is that Oldfield broke the law. He knew he was going to break the law. He knew he was going to ruin the race for those competing, who had worked so hard for so long to compete. He knew he would ruin it for the crowds. He knew he would ruin it for the sponsors, who I think have shown enormous restraint in not suing him for every penny he is worth. He knew what he was doing and he knew the potential consequences. So, I was very happy to hear the arrogant moron has had his visa renewal application rejected.

His wife, however, "accused the Government of politicising the immigration process" say the Evening Standard. Nope. You are, love. Read the rules on visas - it appears this country is still able to close its doors to some people it finds not "conducive to the public good" as the Home Office put it. There is an interesting comparison to be made here with our inability to remove convicted criminals from other countries, either EU ones or those outside the EU where they apparently are also not that popular if we sent them back. It's also not the main point here (we've touched on the 'human rights' farcical argument many times before), but probably worth pondering why it isn't always this simple - or more importantly, shouldn't it be.

Her statement is what I found so ridiculous and made me want to blog again. She laments the deportation order; "the impact would be devastating for us and for our child, She will have to spend her first year without her father as it would obviously take time for me to emigrate. The Government want him out and they have given no thought to the consequences of this decision." I would be surprised if the offspring in question makes it into Mensa with the combined genetic idiocy of these two parents. The reigning Countdown champion can probably sleep easy in his or her bed (unless they don't sleep and just stay up all night trying to make a 9 letter word from the word 'carthorse').

This is what we have come to. It seems we have relinquished all responsibility for our actions. It is apparently up to the Government to consider its actions rather than Oldfield to consider the potential fallout from his idiotic behaviour. What total cock. Unfortunately the lady of questionable intelligence is not alone here. Her argument is no different essentially from prisoners who claim that the Government is responsible for stopping them having children after they have been incarcerated for various heinous crimes.

To quote the Iron Lady. No. No. No.

It is not for the Government to consider your circumstances and how being deported or imprisoned might be a touch inconvenient. It is for you to realise this potential ramification and decide not to break the law. You put yourself in this situation, Trenton, with your misguided sense of self importance. You reap what you sow. I might also point out that he must have known this was likely, yet still decided to have a child well after his arrest, knowing this very situation might occur. It has nothing to do with the Government's (completely correct) decision, and everything to do with Oldfield's (totally stupid) one.

We must stand up for responsibilities over rights. Cases like this just illustrate how far we have fallen as a society, how selfish, irresponsible and lazy we are. Everything is about what can you do for me, what am I owed and putting the responsibility for all your actions on others. We must stop pandering to it. You broke the law? Enjoy prison - if your man tadpoles are all dried up when you get out, perhaps you should have thought of that first. You want 10 kids? Pay for them yourself - because I sure as hell can't afford that decision so I'm buggered if I should pay for you to absolve all responsibility. You want to stay in our country? Obey the rules - it shouldn't be too much to ask.

Oh, and it's (9x7x5x3)+(8x4) and 'orchestra'. Took me an hour and a half...

The Limited Benefit of Children...

I've been storing up a follow-up post on the issue of child benefit - much of my previous work is here. I'll do it quickly because I don't see the point of repeating everything ad infinitum. The crux of the matter is whilst you have a right to have as many children as your body will allow (note that it is not a  right to have a perfectly functioning body, including reproductive ability), should the state (by which we mean the taxpayer) pay for all kids you wish to produce?

This is the argument raised last week by IDS with the proposal of the two child limit on benefits. There are various caveats, exemptions and anomalies to consider. Not least, the limit of two is one just being proposed as an idea. It is likely that it would only affect newcomers, grandparenting in those already beyond the threshold. I could imagine complications when talking about families with multiple parents - whose kids count, who gets the money etc. Triplets are rare but you can see the problem they might raise. Nobody says this would be easy. Nobody says it would bring in a vast amount of money either. The point that IDS is trying to make (and will probably fail to knowing the Tory party's failure to score open-goal policy wins and the predictable left wing media hysteria) is that the Big Society is about fairness, about responsibility, about one's own actions, not just about how much you can take.

I'm, as you'd expect, with him on this. And so should almost everyone. The majority of people in the country work, pay taxes and to one extent or other, budget their money. Asking them for support for a policy that asks for those being given free money (and welfare is just that) to have to live within their means like they do, or do something in return should be an easy win. This could be limiting to £20,000 net the contribution to rent (which the average worker on about £26,000 gross could never afford) gratis from the Government. Or it could be asking those claiming unemployment benefit to do some voluntary work to break the unemployment cycle and put them on a path to work. Or it could be asking them to pay for their own children if they want to have lots.

But the country is apparently not all behind this rather sensible idea. Nope - and you may forgive my lack of surprise - I heard on Any Questions on Radio 4 quite the opposite. It turns out this policy is one designed to give children cancer. And to force them to spend time with Jimmy Savile. Or something like that. I definitely came away from the programme with the idea this was a deliberately cruel policy designed solely to punish children. Cock. A load of it.

The argument put forward (and raucously applauded by the bus loads of morons the BBC source for an audience) by Dr Katherine Rake of the Family and Parenting Institute was that cuts in child benefits are unfair because they fall disproportionately on the poor. Yup. Because rich people don't generally get welfare; poorer people do. They just pay for it. It is the exact argument used by Nick Clegg and any of his lefty loon pals in the Labour or Lib Dems when any cut of any size or shape is devised which might remove one penny from the purse of someone who is of a financially lower status. They always say "same old Tories, looking to take it first from the poorest, and never from the richest", or to use his favourite phrase "from those with the broadest shoulders".

What Nick et al never mention is that those with the broadest shoulders are already paying a lot. We have started with them. It's called progressive taxation. Those with broad shoulders are paying massive truckloads of money. Dr Rake, and countless others like her, maintain that taking money away from welfare is de facto taking money away from poor children. Yes. To an extent. But it doesn't mean any cut in welfare is punishing children. Poor people often have children. Like rich people. And all the people in between. If you make any cut in welfare you are removing money from many families with children. This simple and obvious fact cannot be allowed to be trotted out as if it is proof that all welfare cuts are evil just because naturally the parents of some children will have been given less money. An increase in the top rate of tax was not touted as a punishment on the children of wealthier homes - but money was being removed (even worse than just less given, surely) from the homes of children. Child cruelty no? Of course not. Just selective lefty bullshit about which children matter and where cuts 'fall'.

If we double the welfare bill overnight (to about £400 billion, or what would then be about 1/2 of all spending) and then took a single pound off, that cut would fall 'disproportionately' on poor families. That fact does not make it a bad policy decision. It is simply because they receive the benefits that others have generally paid for. How they use that money is up to them. There is generally more than enough of it there to keep children fit and well. Just because some people will misuse their handouts and thus punish their own children does not mean we should never decrease the amount of money we give them (see this argument over state-aid for the poor children of nuclear-equipped and space-age countries). It is a senseless argument that the left are yet to confront. Mainly because the right seem to be struggling to make them do so and put it in the right terms.

Cutting one's coat according to one's cloth means adjusting what you spend based on what you can afford. Both Dr Rake and Charles Clarke mentioned they agree with the policy, but when asked how they pay for the Labour-induced deficit, they predictably trot out the same old leftie mantra of not properly defending ourselves by not renewing our nuclear deterrent, or raising more taxes from their favourite golden goose - 'the rich'. This is not cutting one's coat according to one's cloth. The point is that we are spending too much. We need to cut spending. We need to cut spending. WE NEED TO CUT SPENDING. This is CUTTING one's coat appropriately.

We do not have enough money (cloth) as a Government to pay for everything we currently have chosen to spend it on. We clearly have no chance of overnight increasing our tax take by 15-20% to match our spending 'requirements'. So we need to decrease what we spend (our coat). Welfare is a fucking enormous bill. The biggest in fact. It was never intended in its present form even by the most left wing supporters of its creation. It must be reduced. It is costing every working person in this country nearly 1/3 of all the money they hand to the Government in taxation. It is as unhelpful as it is disingenuous of the Opposition (inside the Coalition and outside) to suggest that it shouldn't be reduced - and their reasoning of "not punishing poor children" is as incorrect as it is corrosive.

What is being proposed is a move towards a sensible, affordable rebalancing where welfare stops being a comfortable lifestyle choice. The sooner the Tories can properly explain to the population of this country that cutting one's coat according to one's cloth is about budgeting what to do with what you reasonably have rather than about working out where you can get more money to pay for unaffordable idealogically-driven policies, the sooner we might have a chance of returning to being a country of producers, not just receivers.

(They Want to) Live in a House, a Very Big House in the Country...

This will be a quick one as I've already spelled out my thought on this subject before (here and most particularly here). You may have noticed yesterday an article about a particularly large family wanting "a bigger house in the countryside". I found a snippet in the Torygraph, but unsurprisingly the Daily Hate Mail also covered it among others.

Have a read (here) - it's genuinely astounding.

Two things here. First off, council houses or those which one rents and pays for with housing benefit should be sanitary. This is perhaps not true of the house in question. I don't, nor should any sane person, think families should live in squalor. People deserve to be put in safe housing, just not palaces. Thought I'd park that before I get onto the main point. Which is…

WTF!?

I find the idea genuinely incredible that you can just keep squeezing out kids and demand someone else pays for them. Amazing. We are such a sodding soft touch. If you think I'm being mean cast your eyes over these stats:

£12,000 family income from paid work (the boyfriend and perhaps father to some or all children)
£30,000 in benefits and allowances (albeit including disability allowance for an epileptic child which will and should go untouched under new reforms)
9 children, 10th arriving in 6 months

So, that's an income of £42,000. What do they do with it - let's ask mum…

"Money is not tight; we survive well on what we have. As soon as we come back from our summer holiday, we start putting money away for Christmas"

Brilliant. Of course my and your taxes should pay for summer holidays for super-sized families. That's what welfare is for - enough to get by, as long as by 'get by' you mean go on fucking holidays and have a sodding massive collection of toys (see pics with Hate Mail link).

What does mum think about the situation? "I want a bigger house with somewhere for the kids to play; somewhere with a garden. This house isn't big enough for us." Well stop having fucking kids you can't fucking afford you feckless scrounger. I think we'd all like a bigger house but some of us in this country still think you have to earn them. And having a functioning uterus is not 'earning'.

We as a society perpetuate this ridiculous situation. Because there will always be support for people like this there is no disincentive. It's like giving aid to India's poor children because its Government prefers to have a space programme than deal with its widespread poverty. As long as you take care of the essentials, you teach people they don't need to. What is required is tough love. Unfortunately the problem is only getting worse and the world is getting poorer per capita with an increasing population.

A robust welfare and social services system might be deeply unpopular (or the lefty media would portray it as if it was unpopular in the eyes of all - like the generally supported welfare cap) but make total sense. You cap benefits and say crack on. Have as many kids as you like, but we're only paying up to a certain amount. As mum says "it's not about getting more money; if we didn't cope we wouldn't have kids". Or more to the point, I will keep having kids because I will always be able to cope due to the ever increasing handouts correlative to children produced...

The ability to have children is not a blank cheque. You will have to share rooms - most people did as children at some point and don't consider they were in 'poverty'. You'll probably have to cut down on holidays, or shock, horror, not go on holiday. That's your choice. Kids are expensive. If you want more, earn more, like the rest of us. If it gets to the point where you cannot support your children on your capped income, they get taken away from you. The children do not suffer.

Remaining in a house of such negativity and greed will cause them to suffer far more. Odds on most of those children will be jobless for most or all of their lives. They will mimic the life they have seen their parents have and society accept (I appreciate the boyfriend does have a job which is certainly better than the situation in many totally workless houses in similar situations). That is unfortunately the way it goes - check your stats; worklessness breeds worklessness. Patronising them just perpetuates the cycle and reinforces it as a viable way of life. Society has to change. This has to be an unacceptable way of living, as it was viewed not 50 years ago. How did we come to this?

Life in the Slow Lane

An easy Saturday blog to try to ease myself back into the blogosphere. Having been silent for a month or so, there's a fair bit on which to catch up. I suppose I could probably launch into a spiel about welfare in general. We might talk about the underlying issues with our system. There were two things that used to encourage people not to live on benefits. The first was the stigma attached to permanently living off the state. The second was that welfare payments were generous enough to keep your head above water but not generous enough for anyone to consider it a good enough life to choose not to try to make even a few more pounds, even if it meant seeing their kids less of having to get out of bed before The Jeremy Kyle Show.

The fact that people choose not to work tells us both these previous factors now no longer apply. People are happy to not work and be seen not to work. Life is clearly comfortable enough without having to work. There is too a disgustingly large proportion of society who believe these handouts are 'owed' to them (read 'entitlements' rather than 'benefits'). The reality is they are the largess of a generous state doling out hard-earned taxpayer pounds. But that would get me too angry to enjoy my weekend, so we'll move on.

We could talk about housing benefit and the cap, or the most often relevant factor, the biological ability to have children and the apparently God-given right this gives people to have them housed wherever they wish by the state. But not only have we already 'discussed' this here, here and here, and nothing has changed since (except finding out the £26,000 cap is actually post-tax, meaning one can 'earn' the equivalent of a £35,000 wage under the cap by doing diddly squat), but it will also make me too angry to enjoy my weekend.

Incidentally note how when there is public vitriol directed towards someone rich, say Stephen Hester, all the media talk about his pre-tax bonus (£963,000), but when discussing the evil Tories' plans to bankrupt hard-not-working families, they talk about the post-tax amount (£26,000). Probably a mistake - they couldn't have meant to compare like to unlike and present it as inequality. Definitely not intentionally misleading to suit the sensationalist headlines. They wouldn't do that. Dicks.

Or I could talk about the obsession with relating the average wage to what a man earns who controls an enormous, multi-billion pound company with tens of thousands of employees. Now you can argue all you like about whether or not the bonus recently awarded to the RBS chief executive is a reward for failure (though remember he came in after the balls up to sort it out). What is certainly true is that he has a right to whatever the remuneration committee decide to award. They set the criteria. They decide. Shareholders, even those approaching 90% shareholders don't get a vote. So less willy waving please, Ed Milliwho, with your farcical "If I was Prime Minister, I'd bally well stop them paying that capitalist pig etc..." daydream.

As it is, the Government suggested it shouldn't be over £1 million, and it wasn't. Do remember though, that in finance, a bonus is a part of the wage structure. I think few people outside this industry understand this. They imagine that their basic pay forms the same part of their remuneration package as the basic pay of someone in the financial industry, when that is far from the truth. Therefore they struggle to understand bonuses being paid almost as a standard.

It is a better comparison to think of those in financial services as similar to car salesman who get a basic plus a commission-based bonus rather than it be equivalent to just handing a bonus to a guy who earns a set salary at the Home Office, the NHS or B&Q. The salesman still gets a 'bonus' from his commissions in a crap year of selling cars where he was massively under target. It's just less, and added to his basic is essentially his wage. It is just a different way of paying people. So if people could stop demanding individuals give up what is part of their pay when they have nothing but a share price in a company they do not begin to understand to go on as evidence, that'd be super.

Now concern over whether the total remuneration across the sector is a bit high, or a lot high, I can certainly understand. I just don't get going after one man. Incidentally, what did the no.2 at RBS get? It seems you don't suffer public scrutiny unless you're the CEO. It all just seems a little childish, and smacks of the politics of envy. By all means talk about boardroom pay, but go about it like envious hordes and you lose all credibility. So we definitely won't discuss that today either.

Or we could talk about the crackpots at anti-monarchist organisation, Republic, who think it is illegal to get school children to cook for the Queen. In their eyes, one can only do this if you also have an equal amount of time devoted to anti-Monarchical study. Celebrating a 60 year reign of a Monarch by cooking her chicken á la turkey twizzlers is clearly too political. We wouldn't like to nail our colours to the mast and say this is what we as a country are and believe in lest you upset a minority of window lickers. By similar thinking you should also teach as much guerrilla- and anarchist-based politics as democracy in any discussions about Government. And probably give equal lesson time for learning about Satanists as for learning about the baby Jee. What a bunch of cocks. So we shan't discuss that either.

No, after that brief introduction, covering several of the topics I will not be covering today, I shall move onto the small Saturday nag. Wouldn't it be nice if caravans (or anyone who chooses to travel at 10-20 mph below all speed limits) pulled over every once in a while and stopped wasting our lives? Or even just stopped flashing you when you legally overtake them as if you have just emasculated them by  shagging their wife and weeing in their favourite slippers? It's just whilst I know the speed limit is a limit and not a target, you'd think it'd be nice if they peeked in their wing mirrors from time to time. If you're reading this and you're one of them, the 35 car tailback behind you is not a bunch of like-minded people queueing up to read your hilarious real ale-based humorous bumper sticker. They're just people whose lives you are holding up.

Perhaps we could have a rule: If you're a caravan, you have to go round all roundabouts twice to allow people behind to overtake. Or maybe we could have enforced lay-bys. Or we could just be allowed to mount missiles to our bonnets like James Bond. I shall be honest, I haven't thought these policies through totally to the finish, but I think there's enough to form a working group. Maybe we could get Republic to come up with some ideas - they clearly have a lot of spare time on their hands.

Screaming Along at 36,000 Feet

Well I'm back, but not in necessarily the fashion I had envisaged. Not fashion in clothing terms, you understand - I dutifully turned up in 4 degree London in Del Monte-esque pastel linens - but in terms of how enjoyable a return it was. You see, as good as my book was, or the fact that I hadn't seen any of the in-flight films before (don't try to watch 127 hours when eating lunch; beef stew and self-amputation don't mix well), it was quite a painful flight. Why, you ask? Because as always, as it seems I am fated to be on every flight until the end of time, I sat within very easy earshot of Damien the Devil Child.

Now I may be the only person to blog about this particular flight, but I can all but guarantee almost every reader will have had a flight pretty much ruined by a screaming child, and there were at least 100 fellow passengers in my position yesterday. I am also not talking about the briefly screaming child. This baby screamed for at least 7 of the 8 hours of flight. Like it was being murdered. Really painfully murdered. Again and again. In fact, whilst we're on the subject, so horrific were the screams that they would have made those of the subjects of the Spanish Inquisition pale into insignificance as slight grumblings about the cleanliness of the ablutions provided. Now you might suggest that this baby was the 1, the 5, the 10% that simply won't stop crying whatever happens and I am being unfair. If that was my only flight ruined by a screaming child I might agree. But I have taken a few hundred flights, 95% ruined by screaming children, and I refuse to believe that the same percentage of no-matter-how-hard-I-try-it-won't-stop-screaming children always end up on my flights. So this post is about all of the flights, not just yesterday's VS 672 row 42 seats C-F. You know who you are, though.

So, babies scream. We know this. Also, they generally don't like flying. We know this too. Even I know this, and I have no children. They often don't like new surroundings. They don't know how to clear their ears to deal with the pressure differentials involved with climbing and descending. Sometimes they are ill too. So, this rather comes down to the parents. With toddlers and young children, you have similar problems, and also boredom thrown in to boot.

I shall make my point clear. If you take you children anywhere you have a duty to try to control them and not let them shout the house down or run wild and ruin everyone else's day. Whether this be screaming babies or riotous toddlers, your friend's house, a church, a restaurant, or an aeroplane, this is one of the many jobs of the parents. They may not always realise this, because whilst you need a Government licence to fish or watch below average television, you don't need one to procreate. I won't get into that one now, but you have all seen parents happy to let their children do as they will, spoiling it for everyone else. Now one would hope that at least some parents would be mortified if they were in a nice restaurant and their child screamed to high heaven for the entire meal, or spent the main course kicking the crap out of someone else's chair. They would have essentially ruined the, let us modestly say £100 per table, meals of anyone in earshot.  Why does this mentality seem to disappear when every single seat costs £500-£1000 on a plane?

I know you can't take them outside, as much as it was tempting to suggest it at 36,000 feet, but you have to do something. This comes in several parts, most of which I was aware of anecdotally but is also easily available online for example. Maybe ask your parents - they probably had children. If you know your baby is uncomfortable in the crappy cots airlines provide, buy an extra seat and take their car seat - they tend to know this means sleep time. Book flights that are most likely to tally with their sleep times. If they are ill, have all the required medicine for them, and if possible some nice soporific stuff like Calpol. Don't feed them just before you get on the flight, because getting them to feed on climb and descent will equalise their ears as they swallow. For toddlers, sweets to suck on during climb and descent work for the equalisation. For boredom, bring games, colouring-in, whatever floats their boat. Now these measures might take a bit of preparation and effort on the part of parents, and even cost them a bit of money. But remember parents, we didn't choose to have your child. You did.

My final point is one I hope I will stick to in years to come as and when I am karmically blessed with the noisiest travelling babies on earth. It is, even if you can't do anything, if you already have the car seat, have timed the feeds, have given them enough drugs to put Courtney Love under and are comforting them from here to Timbuktu, and the babies are still crying or if the children apparently no longer like their toys and have finished their colouring in  … make it obvious you are trying to shut them up. Worse even than the screaming yesterday, was watching the satisfied parents who have got used to tuning out the noise, enjoying their flights whilst everyone else suffered.

Maybe when the revolution comes, and I am made King, there will be family sections at the rear of the planes (much like when there used to be smoking sections - it may be my memory doing me a disservice but I distinctly remember Iberia having smoking and non-smoking divided by the central aisle thus making it all smoking after the left turn out of Heathrow). Now that is probably unfair to the many parents who have well-behaved children and who manage their babies as well as one can, but at the moment it seems policy is to spread the misery as evenly as possible throughout the plane. This policy would though make the standing area at the back a handy screaming-only place for soothing the not-so-happy youngsters, and maximise the joy by compressing the sorrow in a wonderfully utilitarian way. Not sure Unite would be so happy, but then again, they won't be until their waitresses and waiters are paid more than the pilots. Of course, if I'm King, I probably won't have to turn right when I get on the plane. Someone else will have to answer this one for me - do they have screaming children in First Class?