Thursday 27 December 2012

I so agree

I am a strong Guardian supporter, especially when Zoe Williams expounded on the state of the Nation, sorry I mean the Government, sorry I mean the Coalition.

1. Burning our future: energy futures are so insecure that they are the only way to steal a march on the rest of the world is to frack our own land to within an inch of habitability, and then sell the gas to, rem, the rest of the world. What's the point of investing in fuel that goes against carbon targets? Why not spend the money on renewables, to the public good?

2. Benefits: has this been rendered unaffordable by twin evils of fraud and worklessness? How can benefits be responsible for a debt that was made from bank bailouts, how can fraud (0.7%!) have made up any dent in it? What have workless generations to do with it, less than 1% of households have two generations that never worked.

3. Housing benefit: is this yesterday's luxury? Do people just have to get used to paying the same money for the same squalid conditions - only with more overcrowding?

4. Education: is this in a crisis, so much that the best way to tackle it is to hand over control to people that know nothing about it, well meaning parents and sponsors?

5. The NHS: is it inefficient (?) and unaffordable (?), and will become inexorably more so as population ages? And the only way to handle that is to outsource it to people who want to profit from it. Why introduce private companies into the NHS when it is clear that outsourcing (old people's homes, waste management, trains, children's homes, asylum-seeker dispersal, Olympic security…) shows that these companies just drive costs up, do not innovate, operate as cabals and constantly look for way to cut wages and maximise profits?

6. Austerity: how can it be that the country's problems can be cured by more austerity, which caused the problem in the first place? Banks just sucked capital out of society, and left us nothing but higher prices, less jobs and big debts.

We are not all screwed! We are being screwed by poor government in favour only of political power and position - votes they call it.

We need to tackle real problems, face to face: housing is an opportunity, tax is just and must be collected, the NHS is the best in the world (or it was…). To govern is not to control a nation of crooks, it is to encourage a nation of honest, industrious people with natural resources coming coming out of our ears.

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