Be very, very afraid

I’m always frustrated when people defend not voting or not taking an interest in the political system by claiming that all politicians are the same. I’ve never believed that they are. I am convinced there are some of them driven purely by altruistic political belief and are not just there to line their pockets. I hope I’m right.

Last week’s report on the Hillsborough disaster frightened me probably more than most of the ‘revelations’ of the past few years. It seemed to me that ‘corruption’ in public life had spread further than many imagined in a way that was quite insidious and fascist in nature, and, it started with Thatcher as I’d often suspected. It made me realise that politics is still riddled with vested interest and corruption and it permeates all levels. The ‘Establishment’ rules like it has always ruled. Very often the ‘Establishment’ is made up from a smallish number of families and interlopers, all public school educated and hell bent on preserving the status quo. They fight tooth and nail to keep what they have. They play dirty. Very, very dirty.

Perhaps it is time to just kick everybody out from top to bottom and start all over again?

Camel goes through eye of needle shock!

As you age it becomes very tempting to inhabit the past. I try not to. I try to be forward thinking. Progressive even. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn from the past. As long as we don’t view that past through rose-tinted spectacles that is. It can be argued with some confidence that the 1960s were a golden age in the UK. Sgt Pepper was released on my twelfth birthday. It was the decade that working classes flexed their muscles and many broke free from the chains that bound them. It was a decade when many working people experienced a relative affluence that could only have been previously dreamed of. Our family did. It was a decade of major innovation and thought. So many of the thoughts on equality and respect came to the fore during the 60s. We had, in modern terms, a progressive Labour government. And with that came high rates of tax for high income earners. Sadly Thatcher blew a lot of the good away, and given half a chance this fucking Tory government will do the rest.

I don’t buy this nonsense about how you need to pay obscenely high wages to attract the right sort of people, or that taxes need to be kept low so as not to de-incentivise or drive talent abroad. It is all capitalist spin and bollocks. If you control excessively high pay and people go elsewhere so what? Plenty more very apt people to take their place. British industry and commerce is littered with over-paid ignorant shits who operate in a poor or mediocre fashion. It is a total myth that they are somehow special. Most of them aren’t. Excessive pay is way out of control and the only people who can stop it, apart from the perpetrators are the government. Shareholders won’t. In the main shareholders are either in the same ‘fat-cat’ boat or they have been neutered by the system.

Today’s announcement of the RBS chief Stephen Hester's £963,000 bonus is an insult to all those suffering up and down the land. This is public money we are talking about. Tax-payers money. Tax that thing that every man, woman, child and hermaphrodite contribute to. Robert Peston has been “...reliably told that they feared Mr Hester and much of the board would have quit, if the payment had been vetoed by the government as the majority shareholder.” So? Let the selfish bastards resign. Good riddance I say. We are talking about the sort of people and their ilk that are responsible for the ‘high-pay’ culture and the ‘persecution of the average person’ culture that we find ourselves in. Let’s enforce extreme pay restraint at the top and cull the parasitic and obese leeches that have caused us all these financial woes. We’ll be all the fitter financially for it. All we need is the courage.

The wages of sin

For every £1 million that is paid to some fat-cat executive you could employ 40 people at £25,000, 50 people at £20,000 or 66.6 at £15,000. If you raise the wage rate from the minimum wage (£6.08) to a living wage (£7.20) it would cost, per person, £1.12 per hour, which is £44.80 for a 40 hour week, or £2329.60 per annum. For every £1 million that is paid to some fat-cat executive 429 people could benefit from an increase from a minimum to a living wage. Now I realise that a living wage is still far from ideal and that any company that is serious about their business would pay more but it would be an improvement on what many have now.

Now I realise that the above is an oversimplification and that the costs of employing people are not directly proportional to their salary but it is accurate enough to highlight how unbalanced and unfair most businesses attitude to wages and staffing are, in that one person’s wage can be so high that it is the equivalent to 40, 50 or several hundred people’s wages put together.

Do bankers, footballers and multi-million pound earning captains of industry et al actually work any harder than the poor soul on minimum wage working as a cleaner care assistant or other equally valuable job? I think we know the answer to that, don’t we?

The minimum wage should be a living wage!

The living wage:
"An idea whose time has come"- David Cameron

Are we all totally fucking mad in this country?

Yesterday the BBC reported that “Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has claimed £535,000 of taxpayers' money over the last five years, government records have shown.” She is not alone of course, other ex-PMs are at it as well, milking the expenses scam that John Major set up when he was in office. Thatcher’s claims are particularly galling because of what she did to this country and its people, bringing large swathes of the population to their knees. It’s as if our noses are being rubbed in it! I don’t actually have a problem with ex-PMs claiming expenses in principle, like I don’t have a problem with MPs claiming expenses, as long as they are fair and reasonable, but £535,000 over five years is taking the piss big time. I suppose it’s a case of once an evil cow, always an evil cow.

As if that wasn’t bad enough we awoke this morning to the news that “Pay for the directors of the UK's top businesses rose 50% over the past year, a pay research company has said.” Whilst most of us have suffered minimal pay rises or none at all, which has effectively eroded our real income, company bosses have been dipping into their proverbial tills with gay abandon. Thanks to the recklessness by the financial institutions of the world we are in a recession, profits are down, companies are making thousands redundant and yet company directors see fit to up their pay by an obscene amount. It is immoral. But not only that, it doesn’t make good business sense either; there is no logic in upping the pay of those that are measured by results when they are currently not performing. Just remember every £1Million of bonus paid out to some festering fat-cat could pay the wages of 50+ people; food for thought.

These are just two examples of nest feathering at their most offensive. The rich and powerful are raping and pillaging this nation. The majority of us aren’t filthy rich. The majority of us don’t hold public office. The power and wealth in this country is held be an elite few. And, we allow that!

Yes, we allow it. We must be mad to do so. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Ultimately it is us, the majority, who hold the real power. We just need to wake up and exercise that power.

Oh yes, now, what was that ConDem motto again? Oh, that’s right, “we’re all in this together”. Like fuck we are!