We're all in this together!
So we're told, again and again by the small cohort of wealthy, high-born, privately educated men who run the country.
And before people jump on me for that: I don't know what it's like in the States, but we still have a ruling class. Born to it, across many generations. Educated together with princes and the sons of great industry in the classrooms of ancient schools. The Old School Tie has currency here. Maybe that's why, in the face of the worst recession in living memory, our chancellor has cut the tax burden for the wealthy and reduced assistance for pensioners and the most vulnerable benefits claimants. Time and again they have used that phrase: We're all in this together. Except some of us cannot afford the 200k required to get a 'lunch' with the Prime Minister, to put our case across. Favours to supporters, contracts to friends. Murdoch's bid was all set to be waved through before the phonehacking scandal exploded. All set to wave through a deal for their friends, whilst simultaneously attacking the BBC. When the cabinet member in chanrge of the decision let slip he was anti-Murdoch, he was removed and in his place a new man who owuld supposedly treat the issue with the dispassionate disinterest required for a quasi-judicial decision. Except the person they put in was a staunch supporter of Murdoch. A 'cheerleader' is has bene said. And the meetings and the emails flowed. And now this dispassionate and disinterested party has been shown to be kneedeep in it. Fortunately for him, he had an aide he could throw the blame onto. For now. His position looks very shaky. We're all in this together my Prime Minister told me, echoed by his Chancellor, as they stripped away the help and support needed by cancer patients. Sick for more than a year? Tough, you had your year of sympathy, no more sickness benefit for you. As they stripped away the protections for those in desperate need and farmed the assesment of their health away ftrom their doctor and onto a benefits advisor. As they sripped back the appeal process, because so many refusals were being overturned at appeal. As they stripped away some of the tax credits for pensioners and working parents, as they hyped up the fees for students and as they cut the top rate of income tax for the highest earners. We're all in this together and yet...something isn't quite right. He understands, says the Prime Minister, how people feel. How people are scared, and how people struggle. He understands the need to put food on thetable, to put petrol in the car, to put shoes on their children. He's a family man, after all. We're all in this together, says the man in the Top Hat. Quote:
Meanwhile the Chancellor's proposals for even greater cuts to the benefits system have gone so far they have even drawn criticism from their own Conservative minister for work and pensions: Quote:
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I've seen the effects of the changes to the benefits system. I've had constituents come to me in desparate need. People who are sick and struggling, but whose claims have been rebuffed by an unqualified and unsympathetic assessor. We're all in this together, but we aren't all below the water mark. |
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He understands, he says. But many of us would find his policies more palatable if they came from a place of ignorance. To understand and still act in this way is unforgivable. Quote:
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We're all in this together and the Prime Minister understands. But he won't put the cost of the nation's distress onto his friends, when the poor are able to shoulder so much. |
This, incidentally, is the man currently masterminding swingeing cuts to benefits and public services, whilst easing the tax burden for the highest earners:
http://tankthetories.com/wp-content/...bullingdon.gif George Gideon Oliver Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor, member of the Bullingdon Club, friend to David Cameron and Nat Rothschild, Member of Parliament for Tatton, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, with an estimated personal fortune of £4 million (from a trust fund paid for by his father). |
So how about that Man of the People, Cameron? We're all in this together and he understands what it's like for the common folk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C...litical_career Quote:
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But...that's all just birth. It doesn't necssarily disqualify him from having experienced the rigours of a life unprotected. Quote:
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So...his experience of anything which might be deemed 'the real world' in terms of economic survival seems limited to six months work experience between college and university. He worked hard, very hard. Absolutely earned his place in his party. But he really doesn't understand. And we really aren't all in this together. I just wish, that whilst they're doing what they're doing, what we all knew they'd do, that they'd just get on with it and stop trying to tell us that they feel the same pain, or face the same struggle. |
K. I'll stop now.
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What a great essay! You're so talented.
You guys were much better off when Hugh Grant was your PM. ;) (I watched that movie again Friday night and it made me think of you.) |
The only real difference is that our elite class gets a little more leeway to call themselves self-made, most of the time, and that power tends to hang around only two or three generations rather than for hundreds and hundreds of years. And that most of our elites can stay out of the limelight if they want to, more than those connected to british nobility at least, I think.
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Wow. It's a close tie between Dana and TW for 'The Cellar's shortest poster'.;)
Seriously, a great post. While it's no surprise how coddled politicians with no financial or health care worries can make such decisions, it is instructive as to how coddled some of them were before they got into office. |
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Ahaa! Love that, Blue.
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For clarity by the way, I am not suggesting that their lives have been without trouble or sorrows, or suffering, or fear. David Cameron and his wife suffered probably the harshest pain anybody ever could, when they buried their first child.
But even that becomes tainted when it enters the political arena. Their grief, and their experiences of emergency admissions and sleeping in hospital chairs, and the years of negotiating care for their son. It was offered to us as proof that he could be trusted with the NHS. Safe in his hands he said. Of all things the NHS was close to his heart he said. Die hard leftie and general cynic that I am when it comes to politics, on that claim, and that alone, I believed him. And now general practitioners, consultant specialists and hospital administrators, not best known for their collectivist attitudes, have joined with the nurses and other healthcare workers to condemn the scale of change this government is determined to usher through, and the remaining barriers to complete privatisation are being battered away. Safe in his hands. I dont think so. |
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Listen, kid, we're all in it together.
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There comes a point, doesn't there, where a person has enough money to live more than comfortably, to invest and create and luxuriate in? And beyond that, making even MORE money is rather obscene and irrelevant, except to those without.
So excuse the fuck out of me if I don't sympathize with cutting tax rates on the wealthiest, while reducing benefits to the poor and sick. It's pure greed, plain and simple. The people in charge, elected and otherwise, need to realize that greed will do them (and everyone else) in, eventually. |
EVERYBODY SING! :snapfingerssmilie:
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