(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?

Forced Fed Charity?

Now I know I already blogged exactly on this subject a couple of days ago, but I had to append a quick postscript. I was listening to Radio 4 on the commute home today when an odd phrase pricked up my ears. Some totally neutral commentator on the Beeb was talking about the Government's work experience plan and why it was so mean when he said "it's because it's compulsory" that it had attracted such leftist vitriol.

Which I thought was odd. Because you see, it's not.

You don't have to 'claim' unemployment benefits. It isn't compulsory to claim them. You can be unemployed and not claim them. You'll be 60 odd quid a week the poorer but nobody is forcing you. And in that situation you can do whatever you see fit with your non-working week - further education, apprenticeships or create hilarious cat-based YouTube hits in a bid to become wealthy through…well through however one becomes wealthy from just putting things on the internet that people look at.

If you do sign up, however, to unemployment benefits, you sign up to a contract of sorts. From my memories of The Full Monty, I think roughly speaking it says you have to actively look for work and the Government will a) help you and b) give you a small amount of money to keep you alive. All the Government is now doing is adding another rule.

They've decided that you might also have to try some work-experience for the various reasons alluded to in my last post (break the unemployment cycle, gain skills, guaranteed job interview afterwards etc). That's now your side of the contract. They've decided to be given this free money that you may or may not have in part contributed to in previous tax payments, you have to do a little more because the current system is so obviously fucked.

Seems fair to me. If you don't like it, don't claim and save George Osborne another £3,000 a year. Simple as that. Every little helps...

Hypocrisy Experience

No, I'm not blogging about the opportunity to be in the shadow cabinet, specifically being the shadow Chancellor. Today's offering is about job snobbery and the convenient forgetfulness of both the leftstream media and their consumers.

There has been sporadic outrage at the Government work experience programme whereby unemployed people get unpaid (with jobseeker's allowance plus expenses) work experience at signatory firms. They get experience in a line of work and a guaranteed interview for a job at the end of the maximum 4 week spell. In Tesco's case (who have born the brunt of the criticism) there is actually a guaranteed job at the end, performance-dependent. The firms in reply get paid for getting the unemployed into work should they take them on paid (and of course some free work).

I'm really struggling to see the problem. Work experience works. Part of the issue with unemployment is the cycle one falls into. The longer one spends out of work, on average, the less likely people are to ever return to work. People get used to not working and find other things to fill their time thereby deciding they no longer have time for work. Also, confidence and self esteem spirals as joblessness extends. Work experience or just volunteering breaks that cycle. It gets people used to doing a working day. It lets them see they are able to achieve an employable standard. Job-dependent there may also be the chance to gain employment-relevant skills. It gives them face time with employers too.

Now this is not a new idea. It wasn't more than a few months ago that the leftstream media were all too happy to bash those pesky middle class parents who actually want their children to succeed (probably the cause of all the world's evils) when they were securing their kids work experience at various firms. Now the types of employment we are talking about here were probably mainly jobs in finance, accountancy, the legal profession and the like. They are certainly different jobs to stacking shelves at Tesco. But the principle is the same.

Exactly the same.

Apparently it is unfair that middle class folks can get their kids good unpaid work experience. But the same commentators rail against the idea that the Government might do the same for the unemployed of this country. You can't have your cake and eat it. If it is unfair that those with connections can use them to get their children work experience it must be because there is some benefit in unpaid work experience. Which leads me to think the only important difference people are not specifically complaining about but really want to, is the type of job, and this is the crux of the problem.

We as a society have become arrogant. We believe immigrants should sweep the streets, stack the shelves and pull the pints. When they take the jobs we refuse to entertain as options and unemployment rises, we complain that immigrants are stealing our jobs. Newsflash - this country cannot survive without a spectrum of employees. If you cannot find a job of the calibre you think you 'deserve', scale back your ambitions, eat some humble pie and just get a job. Well done the Government for trying to help the unemployed (and 20,000 of those who have taken up the programme are now employed). Work experience works. Probably better than a meeja 'degree'...

University Challenge

The debate about the social make-up of university populations has been doing the rounds since before I  started at university, back in the last millenium. It is still missing the point. The case for the prosecution seems as simple as those who propose it: Rich kids who go to expensive schools make up 7% of the school population but they take up about 50% of the university places. Therefore universities are failing children from poorer backgrounds.

A bulletproof argument; as long as you exchange the word 'universities' for 'state schools'.

For years the darlings of the left (often Oxbridge-educated following either private or grammar schooling) have lambasted universities, the Russell Group especially and in particular Oxbridge. They accuse them of snobbery, of elitism, of social and financial exclusion. In their eyes the universities are entirely to blame for the underrepresentation of those schooled by the state (and supposedly therefore poor and underprivileged) at university.

It appears it has never crossed the minds of these people, like Prof Les Ebdon (Vince Cable's proposed candidate for the Office of Fair Access), that the raw product might not be up to scratch. It never occurred to them that the reason the 7% do so well is that their school system works and that the one schooling the 93% doesn't. They don't suppose that it might be the fault of those failing to adequately prepare students for university application rather than those whose job it is to judge the relative strengths of all candidates for the process.

Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but I think this is rather arse about face. If a school turns out badly educated kids after years in charge of their tutelage, I imagine they have a pretty high degree of accountability for that failing. If they tested those children on day 1 of kindergarten and found they weren't all that sharp, I think it would be rather unfair to blame the school. They haven't been responsible for the standard of education up until that point - the parents have. By the same token, if there is a poor education standard among graduates, the universities certainly take some of the blame. Why anyone thinks that the failings of those applying to those universities could ever be their fault is genuinely beyond me.

It all smacks of the politics of class envy. The uncomfortable truth is that the state system has failed, despite billions of pounds of investment, to replicate the success of the private or grammar systems. It's a failing that belongs to both major parties. Unfortunately, neither has any particularly good ideas about how to go about fixing it, nor any real desire to let it be known this is really all the fault of those in charge of the system. It is far easier, especially today where the court of public opinion rides roughshod over contracts, facts, or just plain common sense, to shift the blame.

It is the easy course to blame the wealthy parents who selfishly try to do the best for their children - whether by paying for a good education or by buying a house in a catchment area for a good grammar school. It is easy to accuse the snobbish (presumably because the bricks are old) universities for failing to attract disadvantaged applicants. The statistics don't look good - but only because we don't look at them in detail; lies, damn lies and all that...

Universities should not be instruments of social engineering. They can though, use their discretion to mitigate against lower academic results where intellectual promise is evident but good schooling is not. And they do. Actually bother yourself to investigate what universities now do to try to better understand who the best applicants are. The key though, is the word 'best'. Yes they have leeway to accept those who have attained lower grades and regularly do, but only when they think that student is better than one with higher grades and good schooling.

Enormous amounts of time, money and effort goes into attracting university applications from all walks of life. Very intelligent people then spend a long time deliberating over which applicants are the best and should be offered places. Ultimately though, for all the mitigation and for all the effort to encourage applications from poorer areas of society, their job is to take the best. In many cases the state has simply put them at such a disadvantage by delivering a desperately inferior level of education that they will be unable to make the grade. This is why we don't have 93% state-educated university populations.

The only thing penalties for missing quotas can do is financially punish blameless universities for the failure of schools or force them to avoid that cost by admitting worse candidates. The outcome is all downside for tertiary education and for this country. Doctoring the numbers as enforcing quotas will do does everyone a disservice as the increased number at university from poorer backgrounds will just mask the continued failing of the state system. Fighting quotas and getting the public to understand where the blame lies for the public/private imbalance in their populations; this is the great University Challenge.

Liberal Sentences?

Now I admit I was among the first to cheer when anti-Coalition cabinet member Chris Huhne 'resigned' from his post as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The man is a buffoon. His barking views have too long plagued the Coalition as this moron continually briefed against his own cabinet.

Perhaps his actions have been attempts at Liberal point scoring seeing as his party now languish in the single digits in terms of popularity, or maybe early movements to depose Nick Clegg after the nigh on inevitable 2015 election disaster.

Either way, he's gone. Which is great. But something about this schadenfreude feels wrong. As much as I'd like to see Chris Huhne gone from politics on a fairly permanent basis (he will certainly almost lose Eastleigh, but will inevitably pop up in a Lib Dem 'safe seat' if such a thing exists), I cannot abide by the potential sentence both he and his estranged wife, Vicky Price face. For colluding in the evil deception that is pretending someone else was doing the speeding, they could face life in prison.

I'm sure I don't need to go into any depth on my views on speed cameras. Suffice to say I'm not a fan and think the insistence on their mass installation is more to do with revenue than road safety. It's lazy statistic and money driven policing. However, I think we must have something wrong when shifting 3 penalty points onto someone else can attract the same penalty as murder.

Now don't get a hard-on over this. I'm not saying it's not breaking the law. It is. But we have a proportional judicial system whereby we measure how bad each crime is and attribute to that crime a punishment in proportion. I feel the 'Eastleigh 3 point shuffle' is pretty low down that scale.

At the other end of the scale is planning to blow up the London Stock Exchange with its concomitant structural damage, economic damage and most importantly, mass murder. You probably agree. Yet Huhne might go to prison for life (of course he won't, but that's where the parameters are set) for getting his then-wife to take 3 points and the radical extremists (take that pleonasm, PC BBC) who plotted to kill half of London will likely be back out on the streets (no doubt totally rehabilitated because there's no religious extremism in prison) in little over 6 years.

Is it just me or have we got this slightly back to front? There's definitely something wrong with that sentence...

Bonus Culture Club

Today's post is some slightly delayed comment on a story from last week. It concerns greedy individuals holding their employers to ransom demanding a bonus for simply doing their jobs. Nope, not bankers. No Stephen Hester in sight. No Mr Fred Goodwin. Who then? Who thinks that they should be paid on top of their generous salaries a bonus just for turning up?

If you're struggling to work out to which story I'm referring, perhaps I should reword it. Who thinks they should be paid on top of their generous salaries a bonus for not going on strike? Yup, you got it - the sanctimonious moron Bob Crow and his merry band of lazy bastards, the RMT. Not satisfied with an average wage of £50,000 for sitting still operating one binary control (for 35 hours a week, with 8 weeks annual leave), the RMT is demanding its tube drivers be bribed to not go on strike during the Olympics. What a bunch of belters.

The fact that they get paid double the minimum wage for a job perhaps unsurpassed anywhere on earth for its simplicity is in itself an oddity. Remember that wage when you next see the RMT striking, demanding higher pay in a recession for its "hard-pressed, hard-working members". The little boy in the picture above can at least decide to turn the train left into his mother's ankles or to drive it into a sleeping cat on his right. Tube drivers have 'go forwards' on rails and 'stop'. I'm pretty sure even the doors are automatic. Anyway, enough maligning of the noble profession of tube driving. Onto the specifics of the non-strike bribe…

Because London is hosting the Olympics, there will be a couple of extra people coming to town and this might require a slightly better than normal service in quality and quantity. Because they are working longer shifts they have already been given an extra £1200. Okay. But to guarantee they won't strike (always the last resort clearly, not just the first bargaining chip on the table by an unscrupulous, greedy, lazy leadership - we've been here before) they want a bribe. No point calling it anything else. It's a bribe.

And the Government have already quietly offered them about an extra £500 mainly made up of £20 per shift extra. Now that in itself is sickening; demanding more money because for 1 month of the year, the work might be slightly harder. I think it fair to say that workers in department stores the country over have to work harder in the run-up to Christmas when more people use their stores. But they still work their 9-5 or whatever the shift. And they do it for the same wage as in June. Why? Because it's a yearly salary. Yup, sometimes work is harder, sometimes it's easier. As an office worker, you don't get paid more because you didn't get to go on Facebook as much at work but actually had to do your job.

But even better, the RMT have refused this unwarranted offer of a bribe. Nope, they say it isn't enough and because it's based on having to work longer hours during the Olympics, their members who are on leave or sick won't benefit. Yes, you heard that right. Bob Crow thinks it would be unfair for those who don't even do the apparently harder work to miss out on the bribe to not go on strike just because of the simple technicality that they aren't doing any of the work anyway. Presumably they'll be busy attending the overpriced games seeing as they can definitely afford it on their salaries.

Worth finishing with a comparison methinks. The military will have nearly 15000 soldiers, sailors and airmen working on security flat out over the Olympics. Are they getting a bonus for the many extra hours they will have to work like the £1200 bung for tube drivers? Nope, same yearly salary. Will they demand a bonus on top of that to not go on strike thereby totally fucking the Olympics in the ass? Nope again. Because not only do the not have the right to strike, if they had it I'm sure they wouldn't use it. Because therein you can still find some Britons with a sense of duty and selflessness who will be proud to play their part. There is one bonus for them though that I forgot to mention - to ensure sufficient staffing, they've all had their leave cancelled.

Enjoy the Olympics. Just cycle or walk. London Fucking Underground.

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.