Seems there’s nothing “austerity” can’t do if it tries. The news is pretty straightforward — austerity is driving people to desperation in Britain. Food charities are doing what welfare and low wages can’t do.
There’s nothing particularly unusual in this situation in historical terms. If you read Trevelyan’s English Social History, the creation of poverty alongside great wealth is nothing new. In some eras, there were people living in rooms, whole families, with family living areas demarked by chalk lines on the floor. Presumably that’s what the new austerity measures are hoping to achieve.
Socially, poverty is a norm, in English history, but it’s usually an economic story, not a matter of government policy. The government, in fact, denies that its welfare cuts are in any way responsible for the new poor. The related BBC article also says that devolving some of the welfare system to Wales would “help reduce poverty”. It doesn’t say for whom, or why poverty would suddenly cease to exist on that basis. In fact, it would simply move the cost centres somewhere else, off the English figures.
It should also be pointed out that the current government isn’t the only one to have put in cuts to welfare. The BBC has a list of articles on welfare cuts going back to Tony Blair, and a lot of articles on “no further cuts” in its history. Apparently everyone in the top income brackets in the UK is quite happy to go along with cuts to welfare for the poor, just not welfare for the rich.
The government gives a figure of £94 billion for “working age benefits”. If all of this is sounding a bit subhuman to anyone who can actually read and write and do basic arithmetic, there’s a chart to reassure you. Like most government figures, interpretations are a raffle. According to the UK Treasury, 24.5 percent of public spending is on “welfare”. Other interpretations take the numbers from 12 percent to 57 prcent, depending on which source you believe, or want to believe.
Facts, those tactless things, tend to differ. The fact that people are sufficiently desperate to put such demand on food banks is enough to deliver a figure of 10 million meals, including 3.7 million to children, issued in the last year, backed up by a significant increase in underweight children starting school in 2015.
Government policy — A few comparisons, and great British traditions
It’s interesting to note that welfare cuts, unlike the Dolphin Square, Panama Papers, and bank scandals, went through Westminster without much more than a groan from those who understood them. Those scandals, however, have been consistently stonewalled, while the public hits the wall on a more or less annual basis with love and kisses from Parliament.
Most foreigners don’t know the traditional side of destroying quality of life in the UK, so here’s a potted history of recent times in which Westminster, like Washington, has singlehandedly created and selflessly maintained both historical and new disasters for the nation:
• The near total destruction of an entire generation in World War 1 for no reason at all.
• Nearly losing World War 2 in the first year.
• Singapore, 1942.
• Thoughtfully ending the war with massive national debts and remaining on rationing for over a decade.
• Pollution to the point of effectively gassing the entire country, prior to the Clean Air Act in 1951.
• Bank scandals.
• Lloyds scandals.
• The annihilation of British industries during the Thatcher years.
• Dolphin Square child sex scandal, in which kids allegedly died or were molested by a virtual dictionary of senior government members and officials, and about nothing much is being said in current news. Other pedophile stories in the UK invariably also die off after some publicity, too.
Understanding these lovable British situations requires a little cultural explanation: This is where the British class war is actually fought, and has been fought, for centuries. Forget the snide comments, the soap boxes, and self-righteous politicians. It’s fought in the actual attempted murder or dispossession of British citizens by legislation, incompetence, pig-ignorance, or an enchanting mix of these factors. It’s trench warfare — entrenched idiots vs entrenched poverty.
This is a war in which the only winners are the non-combatants. The original upper class was demolished by World War 1. The beneficiaries were the middle class brokers and middlemen who demolished it. They, in turn, were overrun by the post-World War 2 generation of sleazy, even more primitive, “corporation men” who successfully guided Britain to almost total national oblivion through the postwar years, quite literally from a super power to the breadline.
Ironically, they’ve almost managed to return Britain to the state of the old “workhouse economy” of the late 19th century, in just a few decades. This is Britain, as made by Uriah Heep- A senile but smug rest home for snivelling, grovelling, ingratiating, chimp-like mediocrities who live their stupid little lives in unearned privilege while millions starve for generations.
Exactly how the UK is expected to continue to exist in the face of this endless slide to lower and lower standards of quality of life is unclear. Perhaps reclassifying the British economy as a game show would help?
…Or is pretending to be a real country becoming too much of an intellectual strain for the super-brains? Could it be that the mighty minds of Westminster have been overworked, and destroying the nation is being done to make them feel better? It would explain the last century or so, rather convincingly.
I would remind those of actual British ancestry that people like these are for treading on, not reasoning with. There’s no reason for the existence in public office of people whose only obvious role is to ensure total failure. If the UK requires additional morons, they’re not hard to find. Remove these scum. Find a few high school kids to solve the problems in their spare time. It’ll be cheaper, neater, and at least up to date.
