Wednesday, October 20, 2010

People's Budget to Eton's Budget

In 1909, the then Chancellor David Lloyd-George said this:

"This is a war budget. It is for raising money to wage an implacable war against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time, when poverty and the wretchedness and human degredation that always follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests."

He was putting forward what is known to historians as 'The People's Budget'. It put forward increases in taxation, including a land tax, to pay for the foundations of what would become the Welfare State: free school meals, the first pensions, Labour exchange and National Insurance.

As usual the Conservative Party fought to have these tax increases thrown out, using their House of Lords majority to hold off the changes. The land tax was dropped (and has never been re-introduced) but after fighting another general election in 1910 and passing the 1911 Parliament Bill - to prevent the House of Lords using its Tory majority to fend off legislation it didn't like - the Budget was passed.

Today, in 2011 Gideon Osborne, heir to the Baronetcy of Ballentaylor, introduced his CSR. With cuts across the board. He claims these cuts are fair but even a brief look at the figures shows that it is the poor - as a % of their income - who will pay the most for these cuts.

Gideon cried crocodile tears about tough decisions but instead has rattled through a series of macho cuts made without any strategic thought. They're cuts for the sake of cutting. They're cuts to appeal to the Murdoch's and the Dacre's. They're cuts that make the poorest in society pay for the genuine creators of this crisis: banks and bankers.

The Conservative Party supported Labour spending plans until 2008. They supported the light regulation of the banking sector (although they like to pretend now that they did neither of these things). Only once the shit hit the fan did they start to flap demanding cuts straight away, which as a lot of economists have suggested, do nothing to help a stumbling economy. They play fast and loose with figures to make the situation look worst than it is and as a result can justify the first real attempts to undo the welfare state.

One of Lloyd-George's great allies in that 1909 Budget was Winston Churchill. He was then a Liberal and President of the Board of Trade. Yes, Winston Churchill. In a letter written in 1899 he had said:

"Capitalism in the form of Trusts has reached a pitch of power which the old economists never contemplated and which excites my most lively terror. Merchant princes are all very well, but if I have anything to say about it, their kingdom should not be of this world...Up to a certain point combination has bought us nothing but good: but we seem to have reached a period where it threatens nothing but evil."

What would Churchill have made of our present situation, where the reckless behaviour of big banks has led to the punishment of the poor, the disabled and the needy? Where Merchant Princes threaten to up sticks and leave the country whenever any kind of tax rises are aimed in their direction and where people like Murdoch can ensure that there is no real effort made to hold people like Osborne to account?

I write this because politicians don't like us to remember history. To be reminder of their past promises, commitments or failures. I write this because it seems to me that Gideon, Dave and Nick have taken the first steps to undo what Lloyd-George and Winston Churchill put together.

Lloyd-George called his budget a 'war budget'. Gideon's is also a war budget but not on the right enemy. He has taken all the weapon's available to him and concentrated his fire on the easy, less mobile enemy: the poor.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Quote for Today - Gandhi

When I despair I remember that through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they have appeared invincible, but in the end they always fall.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

First They Came for the Gays

What it is it about homosexuality that scares people so much? It scares people so much that it makes bullying people to the point of suicide acceptable. It scares people so much that they can take absolute leave of their senses. It scares people so much that they can deny humanity to gay people and still think that they’re the good guys.

I’ve been reading some comments from politicians in the United States of America that have just astonished me with their shear brutality. Carl Paladino, is a Republican running for the governorship of New York City. Now I know politicians can be dumb. I know they run for the lowest common denominator in order to win votes as standard practice but this idiot (and there is no politer word to be used) says that gay people should not be allowed to teach in schools. This is apparently acceptable.

Swap the word gay in that sentence for black, Hispanic, Catholic or Jewish and see what would happen. If I were to say that based on the Catholic churches record on paedophilia Catholics shouldn’t be allowed to teach what would that make me? Paladino apparently made his comments at a meeting of Orthodox Jews. Now I don’t want to play fast and loose with the Holocaust but wasn’t it the Nazi’s that said that Jews were unfit to teach. Didn’t anyone in that room not immediately think after Paladino had spoken: “That’s wrong. That’s offensive.”

Perhaps they did.

The thing about homophobia though is that it is sanctioned by God and those who believe in God like to use that as an excuse for preaching bile and hatred about other human beings. I suppose that’s one thing you can use your religion for.

The Old Testament God mentions homosexuality a couple of times. Jesus, oddly, never got around to the big lecture of gayness despite its apparent importance. Jesus is quite scathing about divorce though but you never hear too much about that from the right do you. Its gays, gays and more gays.

These people I call Old Testament Christians, who conveniently skip through Jesus’ ministry and focus on the dark, nasty, spiteful and bitter God of the Old Testament. They’ve taken the Bible and made it into an excuse to hate people to the point of murder. They’ve squeezed the ‘love’ out of God in the name of personal prejudice.

So it seems the only acceptable prejudice left is homophobia. Even most racists have been forced to cover their dislike of the unlike with softer language but homophobia is out there, open and acceptable.

Pastor Neimoller’s poem springs to mind here. People often misunderstand – in my opinion – the poem. I did for a long time. I thought it was about the Holocaust but it isn’t. Not really. It is about the mindset that allows Holocausts to happen. It is about looking the other way as civil rights are removed from the not-we until it is our turn and we’ve got nothing left to hold on to.

It seems now that a stand has to be made. I know people braver and closer to the situation than I are already doing so but let us not let the second decade of the 21st century be the decade when ‘first they came for the gays.’