Headline to an article in today’s Times, by one Suzy Jagger, describing Nat Rothschild’s witness against Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, in the story of rich blokes carving up the world between themselves while swanning around on a big boat on the med that’s rapidly becoming known as 3 poofs and a Piano-gate Yacht-gate Carry On Up Corfu, or at least it is by me.
A witness with impeccable Wall Street credentials.
Wahahaha. ‘Impeccable Wall St credentials.’ Ms Jagger, you slay me.
And is it just me, or is Deripaska a dead ringer for Ben Miller’s Russian oligarch on Armstrong and Miller?
From his interview with Socialist Unity:
Here in Britain, the local government experience has been squeezed right out. Everyone leaves university, works in some PR firm or as a researcher for a MP, and the first experience they have of managing anything is when they find they are a Cabinet Minister or a Prime Minister. So I watched Blair and Brown and everybody, except for Blunkett and Dobson and Chris Smith, who’d had strong local government experience – all these people learning and making the sort of mistakes that I made when I was a councillor in Lambeth my 20s, but on the national stage. Blair would honestly say to you that he spent his first term as Prime Minister learning how to do the job. That’s a luxury. Boris is now spending his first term as Mayor learning how to do the job. This is a luxury that you really can’t indulge. It is really only in Britain with this obsessive centralised state, that you’ve got to be Prime Minister, or virtually nothing else is worth doing. It has got worse under New Labour; in Mrs Thatcher’s time, being a Cabinet Minister you had a real air of responsibility, and were left to get on with it.
The simple fact that few if any people in Nu Labour have had any experience in the real world outside of public school -> Uni -> think tank -> cabinet minister has been a persistent theme on this blog, especially pursued by my co-blogger Palau.
It’s good to see Ken Livingstone agreeing with us. A whole generation of Labour politicians, as well as their competitors in the Lib Dems and Tories have never worked a proper job, but always been in the kind of political bubble where even if you fail you can expect a cushy job somewhere out of the sight of the public to be wheeled back in when needed.
Their entire lives they’ve been able to talk themselves out of any bad situation, either through glib manipulation or blunt rejection (not for nought is “I do not accept that” the standard phrase of a Labour minister confronted with unpleasant facts) to the point where many seem to genuinely believe their words have the power to not just hide, but reshape reality. Hence the idea that to solve a problem, you only need to make a law about it and the torrent of legislation unleashed by Labour since 1997. Everytime their laws turn out not to solve a problem, they make more. It’s a systemic, but deliberate failing in Labour, one now unfortunately emulated by the other parties.
Says The Mail on Sunday:
With undertakers unable to extend credit, some poor families are having to wait more than two months before receiving government help paying for funerals, the weekly tabloid said.
Bereaved families can apply to the Department for Work and Pensions if they can prove they are receiving state benefit payments and cannot afford to foot the bill.
Around 27,000 people per year receive cash for funerals from the DWP’s Social Fund, totalling 46 million pounds (78 million dollars, 58 million euros).
Where’s the outrage over this national disgrace? Where is the indignation about Britain having become such a third world nation it cannot even afford timely funerals for its decenthardworkingfamilies? The tabloids are quick to predict doom and gloom whenever a strike does even so much as mildly inconvience a sub-editor, with warnings about a return to the “Winter of discontent” when “the dead were left unburied”, but this time? Not so much. You’d think waiting times of more than two months rate more than just a small article in the Mail on sunday when the largely fictitious accounts of the late seventies are still trotted out as dire warnings thirty years later, but nary a peep.
But then this doesn’t concern the comfortable middle classes, as they all have decent insurance for this. And if it doesn’t happen to the middle classes, it doesn’t exist. People who are so irresponsible as to work a job on which they can’t even afford their own funeral have only themselves to blame. They should’ve become merchant bankers erm stock broker erm estate agent never mind…
But still, 46 million pounds to pay for 27,000 funerals? That’s some 1700 pounds per funeral. Not exactly cheap, is it?
Justin has an idea for what Gordon Brown could do to really rally the markets since bribing stock brokers with sweets hasn’t worked:
If the FTSE share index is not up by 200 points at 1pm, he will promise, five upmarket cars will be chosen at random from underground car parks in the City and fed into the mobile car crushers. At the same time, the artillery teams will reduce five randomly chosen houses in the broker belt to rubble.