Amongst the many obnoxious lies put about by the coalition is the claim that “We’re all in this together”, which is embellished by their other parrot cry of “the rich are being hit harder than the poor”. This is obvious nonsense because the poorer you are, the less discretionary spending you have.
Let’s take an example. Compare the position of a banker with an income of £2 million a year against a hospital porter earning £15,000. Assume they are both single. If the banker finds his tax bill rises from 40% to 50% tax , he will still take home around £1 million. It will make no meaningful difference to the way he lives. If the porter finds his tax bill increased by 5% he will lose around £500 taking into account his personal tax allowance. That would have a significant effect on his life.
The message is simple: the richer you are, the less you will be affected; the poorer you are, the more you will be affected.
The coalition’s behaviour is all the more obnoxious because of the background of its leaders. These are men and women who are at best genuinely rich and at worst comfortably off. In the case of the three most dominant players – Cameron (NuTory Boy); Osborne (OldTory Boy) and Clegg (leader of the Party for Adolescents) – all have backgrounds which have handed them the lives of rich men on a plate through the accident of birth. They are also firmly in the mould of modern professional politicians, being able between the three of them to muster a meagre 10 years of employment outside of politics, and that is stretching it.
Cameron was born into a family which has extensive connections with the financial world, his father being a senior partner at the stockbrokers Panmure Gordon. His great-great grandfather Emile Levita, a German-Jewish financier who obtained British citizenship in 1871, was the director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. Cameron’s great-great grandmother, was a descendant of the wealthy Danish Jewish Rée family.
Educated at Eton and Oxford, he Joined the Conservative Research Department straight after Oxford. In 1994 he left to become Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications, a media company which won the ITV franchise for weekday TV. He left Carlton in 2001 and was elected an MP in that year. The journalist Simon Heffer describes his seven years with Carlton as Cameron being employed as “a PR spiv”. It does seem rather odd that a man without any background in the media should have been appointed to a senior media post at the age of 28. Perhaps this was a case of not what you know but who you know.
Osborne comes from the an Anglo-Irish family which was part of the old Ascendency in Ireland. He is heir to a baronetcy. His father co-founded the fabric and wallpaper firm Osborne & Little He was educated at St Paul’s School and Oxford. Coming down from Oxford in 1994 he joined Conservative Research Department and remained employed by the Tory Party until his election in 2001.
Clegg’s father is Nicholas Clegg, chairman of United Trust Bank. He has various Ukrainian, Russian and German strains in his not too distant ancestry. His wife is Spanish. Clegg was educated at Westminster School, Cambridge, the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Bruges. Something of a professional student. He spent a gap year as a ski instructor, had a summer working as a junior in an Helsinki bank and had some short lived work in the media both at home and abroad. In reality, his working career, if it can be called that, did not start until he was 27 when he obtained a post with the European Commission. He became an MEP in 1999, which lasted until 2004, and an MP in 2005 between leaving the European Parliament and becoming an MP, he became a partner of a political lobbying firm, GPlus.
As can be seen, these are people who will never have known any anxiety about where the next pounds was coming from; never had to fret over putting a roof over their family’s heads; never known any insecurity about the future. Yet now they dare to inflict upon those who do know such fears a disproportionate burden of greater poverty, poverty resulting from the reckless incompetence of politicians in allowing bankers and their ilk to behave as the chose and the unrestrained selfishness of the bankers and their ilk who became caricatures of the rootless capitalist. It is also a savage irony that these creatures should bleat on about the wonders of private enterprise when they have so little experience of it.
The massive void between the likes of these people and the public can be seen in the decision to increase the foreign Aid budget by 40% at a time when so much has been cut which will affect the people they are supposed to represent, namely, the British. The Aid budget will soon exceed £9 billion a year. That £9 billion alone would have funded the cuts in child benefit and provided the money to engage in what is sorely needed, a massive programme of council house building.
Living In A Madhouse 