Foodbanks? Fwah fwah, Doleys Should Just Spend less On Booze

In what I like to call a 'dick move' (stop me if I'm getting too technical), Liam Watson, Chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Future* or, as I like to say, "Young Privileged Wankers Gang", made something of a booboo when he tweeted that Food banks are only needed because doleys spend all of their money getting pissed. His source? Apparently he sees doleys in his local pub. 

Let me explain something. I have been unemployed twice, both times after the companies I worked for went into administration. Living in a pretty bad city for employment, and with no money to move elsewhere, it took me 18 months to find work the first time, during which I was on Jobseeker's Allowance. Here's the thing. I don't drink much, and not at all unless it's bought for me when I have no money; I don't smoke; I don't do drugs. In fact, I don't really have any vices, and my main expenditure was having to pay extra for my rent (because I have my kids 3 nights a week, I technically don't count as having children, so I had to subsidise my housing benefit payments for having an extra bedroom), having to pay for the internet and mobile phone (which I needed for finding work and being available to answer in case an interview cropped up). yet, despite this, I still ended up in a position where I was sometimes having to choose whether to pay a water or electricity bill or buy food for the next month. I ended up having a prepaid electricity meter installed because of this, and it was only through the generosity of family members in taking me shopping from time to time, and my girlfriend letting me eat at her house every so often, that I didn't need to use a food bank. I massively appreciate what they did for me. 

To make matters even more hilarious in this comedy of arrogance, Wavey Dave Cameron defended himself in Prime Minister's Questions on the subject of food banks when Labour MP Dave Watts asked if he was afraid to go to a food bank to see the heartless Britain he was creating. He claimed that food banks were needed because of Labour, and there had been one in his constituency for 5 years.Turns out it was bollocks, as the food bank there is only just over a year old. OOPS. This is almost as good as the "When I was campaigning I met a black man once..." stuff from before the election. Good fact checking, Dave, nice to see that you know what's going on with the poor in your own constituency.

So, Liam, food banks are very much needed in this Britain that your idols have created. They are essential to even families who are working, because your chums love the idea of keeping people poor even in employment - maybe it reminds them of the good old days when they could just ride around the manor hanging peasants who worked every day just to stay alive. But then I suppose it's hard to see over the edge of privilege when you can't even drag your fat arse off the sofa of luxury.

* I do love it when stories like this break, because it reminds us all how noxious Young Conservatives are. We should all remember that this is what Conservatives actually think, before they learn to don the mask of acceptability and become electable. This is the detestable arrogant disdain with which they view poor people. Mark it well, reader, because that disdain lurks behind every face you see in the government. They just hide it better.

Why Tories Claim To Be About The Family yet Seem To Hate It

Whenever there is a Tory government, we get to hear lots of soundbites from ministers on the subject of 'the family' and how they are bending over backwards to be 'family-friendly', and yet anybody with functioning eyes and a working brain can see that the policies they enact seem to be wholly at odds with this claim. Let's take, for instance, the recent words of Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, where he (somewhat arbitrarily) decided that children don't go to school enough, and announced that he would like to see shorter school holidays and longer school hours. Apparently this would be 'family-friendly'. What he really means is employer-friendly. 

You see, businesscunts have been getting on the governments case about this annoying problem that many of their workforce have; children. They make their workers late for work sometimes, and occasionally they take time off when one of them is sick, and they always want to take their holiday leave over summer and Easter and Xmas, and it is all damned inconvenient for business. That these laughable, sad fuckwits haven't quite worked out that children are actually the continuation of the human race rather than an annoyance along the lines of Athlete's Foot is bad enough; that they genuinely believe that their employees are mindless drones who exist to do nothing but serve is pretty fucking appalling; but the idea that Gove thinks that he is helping the family with these proposals requires Escher-esque mind-bending feats of cognitive dissonance that I just can't even start to understand. Or I couldn't, until it finally clicked with me that it is because our views on 'family' are radically different.

Most of us think of family as a place where your mum and dad, or mum or dad, or mums or dads bring you up and care for you and take you to the seaside every so often and play with your Lego with you, and feed you nice Sunday lunches, and put elastoplasts on your knee when you fall and kiss it better for you, and take you to school and pick you up, and tuck you in at night. For most of us, family is synonymous with love, however flawed the personalities of the people in those families might be. 

But our government is filled with public schoolboys from wealthy backgrounds. We have to remember that for them, family is a cold place, with nannies being paid to spoon feed you, whilst mother and father are too busy working or swanning off to one of the other houses for the weekend, to which you're not invited; where those remote parents pack you up and send you off to live in a school where you are subjected to some kind of horrific Lord of the Flies-esque social experiment that involves horrendous bullying, humiliation and ridicule, where you can't even escape from it at the end of the day and if you did ring home, whichever cold and remote parent answered would tell you it's nonsense and that you should just pull your socks up and get on with it. Meals are cooked by the help, and fed with all the warmth of a Siberian winter. So when people like Gove start talking about sending your children away for longer, and says that this is 'family friendly', to him it really is, because that's the way his chums in the cabinet see the family.

We should pity them, and if it weren't for the fact that they are trying to destroy our country with their policies, I would. As it is, I fucking hate the twisted, emotionally underdeveloped cunts.

Christian Values, Davey Cameron and Dead Atheists

I see that Davey has begun the attempt to try to use religion as a crutch for his broken, bleeding coalition government. It needs a crutch. After the way they have mismanaged the economy, we will be lucky if Britain doesn't crash and burn like Greece or Iceland before the next election. Top economists all over the world are worriedly watching the UK's stagnating economy that, under labour, was at least showing some signs of life. Now, it seems to be about as dead as Kim Jong-Il, without the added bonus of leaving a legacy of things it has looked at to amuse future generations.Their attacks on the NHS and disability benefits are making more and more people rise up in anger and disgust, and the few voters Cameron managed to woo into voting Tory (let's not forget they only made it into power by the skidmarks in Davey's pants and through Clegg's Betrayal) are reacting in horror at the things this party of overprivileged amateurs are doing to the economy and to the people of this country. Dave should be trying hard to appeal to those few voters, because frankly, trying to bend over backwards to keep The City happy might make him some wealthy billionaire friends, but it won't win him another election.

So, given this immense clusterfuck of a government, no wonder that he is trying a new tactic to win over the British public. let's appeal to people's Christian values, and say that this is a Christian country and that we need to embrace these values in order to halt our slow moral decline.

Did I miss something? Where is this moral decline of which he speaks? Is it in the press, where odious individuals like Kelvin Mackenzie and Paul McMullan think that it is quite acceptable to hack missing children's mobile phones and then point the finger at the paper that uncovered this, claiming that they got the story slightly wrong? Where it is considered that privacy is evil and the only people who want privacy are paedophiles (McMullan's actual words, out of his actual mouth, at the Leveson inquiry)? Or is it in the banks, where a handful of people even now still walk home with millions of pounds after almost destroying the world's economy and being bailed out to the tune of £40 odd billion by the taxpayers? Where their big bosses like bob Diamond say that it's time for the banks to stop apologising now and carry on awarding themselves millions in bonuses like they did before? Or is it in government itself, where the Coalition is forcing genuinely disabled people to look for unsuitable work, and thus thrust them into poverty when they cannot do that work and don't attend an interview and end up with their benefits sanctioned?

Well, good news everyone! Cameron is going to champion Christian values! That means charity - the disabled will get their disability allowance back, people won't be forced to work for their meagre benefits, thousands of families won't lose their tax credits, overpaid MPs with private wealth in the millions of pounds (like most of the cabinet) will start paying their own mortgages instead of getting the taxpayer to pay for them, the NHS won't be broken up and privatised in order to, Scrooge-like, make a profit out of people's suffering and illness, and Gideon will start donating some of his trust fund to the poor. Then comes goodwill to all; the government will crack down on the press who distort, misrepresent and blatantly lie in order to create sensationalist stories (who can forget Jan Moir's unfounded bullshit about the death of Stephen Gateley?), and it will itself stop spewing bile towards the unemployed and single mothers and start reaching out to them in that very Christian spirit of loving neighbours and wotnot.

And the big one, the Christian value I always liked because it was such a socialist attitude, the denying of riches. Yes, in the stories, Jesus once got super pissed that bankers were lending money in the church and threw an angry so mad that he turned their tables and sent the money flying everywhere. He also said something about putting camels in a blender and passing water through the eye of a needle or some such, but I'm not sure how that fits in. The point is, Jesus was not happy with wealth. The love of money, the Bible claims, is the root of all evil, and to that end Jesus apparently urged people to give what they had and be rich in humanity instead. How's that one going to turn out, Davey? How's the party who exist pretty much solely to profit the 1% and themselves going to translate Christ's values on wealth and greed? Will we see a maximum wage limit to stop private sector fat cats bleeding profits into obscene paypackets and bonuses? Are we going to see the bankers finally brought to heel with a Tobin tax to help the country fill the deficit partly caused by bailing them out in the first place? Will there be a clampdown on the multi-billion pound tax avoidance industry so prevalent in the City?

Of course not. And how offensive is Cameron's assertion that Britain is a Christian country going to be to the millions of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and atheists who live here too, who were quite happy with the whole multicultural thing we had going on? People will defend his saying this, but think about this; if Cameron had replace the word "Christian" with the word "white", how shitty would his speech have sounded then? Not to mention that his statement is factually inaccurate - a YouGov poll recently asked people if they were religious. Only 29% said yes. A Christian country, Davey? I don't think so. A secular, cynical country that is steadily throwing off the shackles of blind faith and religious ignorance and intolerance. That is a country to be more proud of, isn't it?

In other news, atheism lost one of it's most well known voices, Christopher Hitchens. To be honest, I don't get it. He always seemed to me to be a supercilious, sneering pseudo-intellectual misogynist and Iraq war apologist. Atheism can do without poster boys like Hitchens.