David Cameron's message from the cosmos: IDS to use unemployed as sandbags

VIDEO: David Cameron's cabinet contemplating a mighty wind.

David Cameron's karma runs over his dogma in biblical fashion. Rain, floods, blizzards, storms, and a mighty wind have ravaged these isles, and vast swathes of Britain have been under water for weeks. Cutbacks and cessation of dredging under all governments in recent years have only added to the misery.

Imagine being immersed in raw sewage, not being able to use the loo, and not being dry since new year.

All we need is a plague of frogs, water-borne pestilence and war and we'll have a full set.

Aprés Cameron, le deluge.

Now that the Tory heartland has been hit with Thames waters drowning the playing fields of Eton and lapping at Windsor Castle, His Smugness has had to show his thought-free visage on the scene.

Never have we felt so relieved to have been too skint to buy our idealised riverfront home with parking for boat at the end of the lawn. If it weren't for the innocent civilians losing their homes and living (it's not all bourgeoisie doing the suffering), some might class this as divine punishment for cruelty, callousness and greed on the part of those Tory voters in the Stockbroker Belt who thought they were immune from "austerity".

In his Hunter wellies and Barbour jacket, Cameron did his damnedest to ensure that immunity continues and promised his flooded bredren that money will be no object. Yet the widespread horrors of rising poverty and homelessness elicit no such generous response.

In the Tory hierarchy of need, what's highest? Evicted due to slashed benefits or flooded out? Cameron and the devil take the hindmost.

The Tories are under pressure from their even more right-wingnuts to take the money not just from Britons in poverty but to raid the aid budget for the world's poorest to keep his voters happy. Expect an intravenous treasury fix straight into DFS and Heals to replace all those soggy sofas but heaven forfend that food and medicine should be sent abroad.

He's probably hoping we'll all forget, not only the broken promises of a greener nation, but that the Tories and UKIP voted in the European Parliament against measures to protect against flooding.

The Guardian says:

The Royal Institute of British Architects estimates that 1.5% of the UK is at risk from direct flooding from the sea and about 7% of the country is likely to flood at least once a century from rivers. It says about 1.7m homes and 130,000 commercial properties are at risk from river or coastal flooding in England alone, and the effects of flooding and managing flood risk cost the country about £2.2bn a year, compared with the less than £1bn spent on flood protection and management.

These events are also a dire warning against privatisation. Can you imagine G4S handling this emergency? Yes, it could be worse.

Will Cameron succeed in stealing even more from the poor in order to throw money at his flooded voters? Will IDS use the unemployed as sandbags?

Does this spell the end for the greediest, most shortsighted "anything for a fast buck" government we've seen since WWII? And that includes Thatcher. We can only hope so.

What the Tory bottom-feeders and their Lib Dem low life human shield have done so far

Let's have a quick Tory tally this Easter weekend in case they come to bury bad news, not raise it. How's it going with the Ancien Regime and are we having fun yet?

Ever since they assumed power with the help of their Renfield Lib Dem crew, the unelected Tories have nicked from grannies, pasty-eaters, poor families, children, rough sleepers, college kids and the arts, while continuing to hack away at the NHS ... but they have cut their own taxes. O brave new world that has such people, innit! Noble George Osborne, Boris Johnson et al.

This holiday weekend, we learn that London Mayor Boris Johnson skimmed £5.3mn from the homeless budget, no-one knows what for or where it is.

Not content with raids on pensions and the Granny Tax, plans are afoot to tax pensioners at source in Granny Tax II — this time it's personal. Thus, a weekly pension of £107 miraculously turns into £86.

In a bit of a blur off the top of my head: Arts Council budget has been cut by 30 percent. The EMA £30 per week to college kids has gone. Cuts to services means that youth workers' jobs have been lost. Everything is going up in price despite corporate profits being at a 50-year high. Supermarkets have been caught diddling the public. A world-leading forensic lab has gone.

Anyone still bleating about anarchist Trenton Oldfield should really STFU and focus on where we all are right now because if you can weigh all this up and it's Oldfield's protest that makes you reach for your gun, then you have not been paying attention. Swallow the red pill because the thieving elite in charge is dismantling British society before our eyes.

There's no moral or intellectual content to Tory policy: money-making for their mates is all. Everything's up for grabs like the Russian cowboys' carve-up of state assets in the 1990s.

Not that I'm letting Labour off the hook, not when Tony and Cherie Blair (along with former health minister Alan Milburn) have their paws all over NHS privatisation. And certainly not when Jack Straw did what we all know he did on behalf of their Bush government friends and sent British subjects into rendition hell.

We are being run by some rather unpleasant people.

Wall Street protesters on Brooklyn Bridge give hope

This is impressive — and long overdue. Some 700 have been arrested. How many bankers who caused the crisis have been even looked at sternly by the authorities?

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'.

So says Chicago trade unonist Clancy Segal in the Guardian today. And he is totally right.

So appalling is the onslaught of capital on labour that even the police have joined the 600 protesters occupying the State Capitol building, while outside thousands of workers brave the freezing conditions in sleeping bags.

Clancy Segal writes:

This assault is essentially an ambush of the working middle class. It is openly financed by Big Money, like the hard-right multibillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who also fund – courtesy of the US supreme court's Citizens United decision – the Tea Party groups that supply anti-labour's ideological storm troopers. ... it comes as no surprise when Jeffrey Cox, Indiana's deputy attorney general, calls Wisconsin public sector workers "thugs" against whom he advocates deadly force. "Use live ammunition," he tweeted.

The fight is on. I'm going to my council's budget protest in Camden tonight to demand they do what their voters and ordinary people across the world are donig at the moment: represent us and fight back. Do not do their dirty work for them.

In Hackney, six councillors have signed a letter against the cuts. They write:

Some think we should protest - and wait for the next election. Our view is that we cannot wait until the damage is done. Nobody voted to privatise the NHS or make our communities pay for the bankers’ crisis. The government has no mandate. The bankers’ greed caused the crisis - they and their rich friends should pay for it through targeted taxes and a crack down on the tax loopholes used by millionaires and big corporations. As Labour Councillors, along with supporters of the Labour Representation Committee, we support a campaign to defeat the policies of this government through public protest, opposition and defiance. ... We would like to see local Councils across London leading the charge and refusing to adopt cuts budgets as a result of government enforced policies and producing a Needs Budgets to show what should be funded.

It's not without a little pride that I read the Wisconsin movement was inspired by the UK Uncut actions. Well done, guys and gals.

Wisconsin and Hackney are drawing on the power unleashed in recent events in the Middle East and picked up by UK Uncut. Carry on, you are doing this for us and we are there with you.

Ferdinand Mount's 'Orwell on the Oligarchs' lecture: how George would have loved the Tory cuts

Well, I saw this coming a mile off. I knew that Ferdinand Mount was a novelist, Sunday Times columnist, Thatcher-era Tory grandee and former TLS editor when I heard him deliver his talk on 'Orwell and the Oligarchs' last night at the annual George Orwell Memorial Lecture hosted by Birkbeck. However, I had no idea he was also a cousin of David Cameron's Mum and a former baronet, yet I still managed to guess, about ten minutes in, on which side his fois gras was buttered.

More sophisticated than John Lloyd, whose carefully selected quotes at last week's talk on Orwell and Russia skewed Orwell into a hater of all things socialist rather than someone opposed to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution, Ferdy knew how to get his audience on board.

He began well enough with the bleedin' obvious crowd-pleasing observation that the new oligarchs of business are having a larf with their pay. Directors are trousering hundreds of times the average pay of their own workers and Ferdy laid out how it's done with satirical aplomb.

Remuneration for boards of directors is out of control and has little to do with worth, stitched up by "mutual admiration societies" of executives and non-executives, leading to widescale looting and pillaging.

He highlighted the case of US company Household, bought by HSBC for £9 billion and which turned out to be an aggressive lender in the sub-prime market. Its inevitable fall was one of the first examples of collapse leading to the recession.

And yet ...

Building up to a full head of steam, he pleaded for self-examination, pointing out that while Marx and others in the leftist pantheon were willing to tear the mask off others, they failed to fully introspect themselves. And so Ferdy showed us how to do it, generously allowing himself the assumption that his way was the straight and narrow, pursued with enviable crystal clarity.

Thus Ferdy took us from George Orwell's critique of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and through to his own conclusion. Burnham, according to my Lovely Companion, made the rightward trek from Trotskyist to "ferocious right-wing-conservative". But he didn't travel far enough to the right for Ferdy, who detected a residual Trotskyism in Burnham's analysis that "capitalism was doomed". The state would take over, he warned, and rentier private capital would be smashed rather than retain any place in business. Orwell disagreed, foreseeing a trajectory towards an oligarchy where bankers and managers displaced scientists and productive talent, snatching a disproportionate share of the rewards. Power would be concentrated in fewer hands at the top and, indeed, Britain now has one of the most concentrated power elites in Europe.

And how does this destructive state of affairs manifest?

Not in the rich and powerful who make up the oligarchy: the upper classes salting away their cash in tax havens, dominating the media, and sucking out all the wealth with devil-take-the-hindmost gusto, apparently. Not in the smashing up our arts, culture and education and returning us to Victorian levels of poverty.

According to Ferdy, it is centralised government that is the Big Bad. After all that preamble, with one bound banking and business were suddenly off the hook and out of the equation, while the "thickening networks of controls" and "gigantism" were doing the damage. The Department of Education, f'rinstance, imposed its power on all aspects of education. What's more, municipal housing equates not with putting a roof over the heads of our citizens but with the loss of freedom for the tenants.

He harked back wistfully to a time of individual freedom before financial controls and regulations became oppressive. We all like to relive our glory days, and Ferdy's would have been around 1982-3 when he was a member of Margaret Thatcher's inner sanctum and heartthrob Ronald Reagan was dismantling US financial controls with the results we are still feeling today.

Ferdy wittered on about the virtues of the coalition government. Theirs is true liberalism, don'tcha know, an "apprehension of oligarchy concentrated in too few hands" aiming at a "devolved, plural, liberal" system without central government telling the little people what to do. The policy of Tory cuts, backed by the LibDems, is "the result of genuine dialogue designed to put right what's gone wrong." A "refreshing" "surfacing impulse to examine and put right the oligarchy".

Thus a banking crisis is turned into a crisis of public services. See what he did there?

It was fitting that this lecture should have been held in Senate House, the architectural inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

Such was the tortured logic of the argument that the purpose of the lecture appeared to be to give succour to the Bullingdon bullies and legitimise the coalition government's savage policies. Do these guys sit down over dinner and work out a strategy for deceiving the public via the various media organs and propaganda outlets? Or does this stuff spring fully-formed like Minerva from heads hard-wired to work in self-serving concert? As Orwell wrote, you don't need a beaten dog when well-trained ones will do just as well.

The surreal lurch from a deserved castigation of the greed and corruption of the elite — Ferdy's peers — into an attack on our public services, and everything that made this country a pleasure, was bizarre to behold. If this is the best the right-wing intelligentsia can offer, pack them off to the dreaded Media Studies they loathe so much where perhaps they will learn to make their propagandising a teensy tad less transparent.

Birkbeck's invitation was a truly generous and charitable act, providing Mount's threadbare intellectual cast-off with home and shelter. Ferdinand Mount should be grateful that the great man himself was not in the house to offer the drily stinging rebuttal which some of us were aching to hear.

At close of play, Orwell may have been Mounted, but he certainly wasn't stuffed.

Gauche asks what sort of state is it that Labour wants?

Video: Ferdinand Mount's George Orwell Memorial Lecture, "Orwell and the Oligarchs".

Richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here

Tory cuts: How to solve the crisis in one easy move

Here's a wise and wonderful post from someone's Facebook I noted last month.

HOW TO SOLVE THE CRISIS IN ONE EASY MOVE

A report in the Independent shows that the richest 1,000 people in the UK could pay off the whole of the £159 billion public deficit tomorrow, just from the profits they have made last year out of the economic crisis.
The collective wealth of the country's 1,000 richest people rose 30% last year in the wake of the economic crisis.
Their combined wealth rose by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, the biggest annual increase in the 22-year history of the Sunday Times rich list.

Sadly, I can't find the report but if anyone can shed further light, it would be most appreciated.

Sunday Times rich list here.

George Monbiot on the Tories seeing this as a long-awaited opportunity.

UPDATE: I'd also like to point out that the left has been worse than fucking useless. Where is the debate? It's been business as usual for these phonies. One demo on the day of the cuts and one at the weekend? A bit late, don't you think? The "leaders" of the left want all the glory and will do none of the slog to ensure there's been a challenge in the media, so the government and the right-wing argument has set like concrete in the minds of the public. YOU DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO SET THE AGENDA!

Thanks to Bilus for the link to this report on taxing the rich to settle the deficit.

How the richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here

Tory cuts: How to solve the crisis in one easy move

Here's a wise and wonderful post from someone's Facebook I noted last month.

HOW TO SOLVE THE CRISIS IN ONE EASY MOVE

A report in the Independent shows that the richest 1,000 people in the UK could pay off the whole of the £159 billion public deficit tomorrow, just from the profits they have made last year out of the economic crisis.
The collective wealth of the country's 1,000 richest people rose 30% last year in the wake of the economic crisis.
Their combined wealth rose by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, the biggest annual increase in the 22-year history of the Sunday Times rich list.

Sadly, I can't find the report but if anyone can shed further light, it would be most appreciated.

Sunday Times rich list here.

George Monbiot on the Tories seeing this as a long-awaited opportunity.

UPDATE: I'd also like to point out that the left has been worse than fucking useless. Where is the debate? It's been business as usual for these phonies. One demo on the day of the cuts and one at the weekend? A bit late, don't you think? The "leaders" of the left want all the glory and will do none of the slog to ensure there's been a challenge in the media, so the government and the right-wing argument has set like concrete in the minds of the public. YOU DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO SET THE AGENDA!

Thanks to Bilus for the link to this report on taxing the rich to settle the deficit.

How the richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here