The world's most-read Scottish politics website

Wings Over Scotland


The Prime Minister’s miracle

Posted on April 13, 2010 by

On the face of it, it's a time for national rejoicing. After just 13 years in government, Gordon Brown has suddenly apparently discovered the secret of 100% employment – state jobs for all.

New Labour's latest attack on the voiceless poor is the stunning assertion that after 30 years of millions-long dole queues, it seems there was no need for anyone to be unemployed at all.

If Brown is still PM in three weeks' time, he tells us that New Labour will implement a policy which appears to have gestated more or less overnight – every unemployed person who has been out of work for two years will be offered an unspecified job working for the state.

(This, of course, is an "offer" in the Godfather sense. Refusal will result in the unfortunate claimant having their benefits cut off.)

We're further told that somehow these state-funded vacancies – to be created at a time when both main parties are standing for election on a platform of massive cuts to the public sector, not the wholesale expansion of it  with millions of new state employees – can be conjured from thin air at no cost to the taxpayer. Supposedly this can be achieved from the savings made by not having to pay these newly-employed public sector workers the welfare benefits they're currently receiving.

A fairly substantial number of pretty obvious questions immediately arise from this startling claim.

——————————————————————

1. If creating state jobs doesn't cost anything, why have millions of people been left to rot on benefits for the last 30 years?

2. Similarly, if there have been millions of jobs in need of doing all these years, why weren't they created and advertised, whereupon they'd presumably have been filled by grateful jobseekers without arm-twisting legislation forcing them to? What sort of criminally-negligent incompetents must have been running the country, if there were millions of legitimate jobs needing done, millions of people looking for work, and no expense to the taxpayer involved in putting the two together?

3. If these jobs are entirely funded by savings in welfare expenditure, why are they apparently to last for only 12 months? Why can't they carry on indefinitely?

4. Come to that, if we can suddenly create millions of jobs for the unemployed at no cost, why do they have to hang around being unemployed for two years before they're eligible for one?

5. When similar schemes are proposed, the "jobs" in question are usually menial labour more often associated with the community service orders imposed on criminals – picking litter, cleaning graffiti and the like. Do we actually have enough litter and graffiti in the country to employ another several million people working full 40-hour weeks?

6. And what will we have left to punish minor criminals with? Treadmills? Flogging? Stocks? Or will we set all the unemployed construction workers to building dozens and dozens of new prisons until everyone's in jail?

7. Will we in fact end up having no choice but to employ a million people to spraypaint big cocks on walls and scatter crisp packets in the street, and then another million to follow around after them cleaning up the mess? If so, won't vandals stop being "criminals" and in fact merely be "freelancers"?

8. Whatever jobs we do end up giving the unemployed, what happens to the people currently doing those jobs? Presumably they'll be undercut by the state conscripts, and themselves become unemployed in turn, and then be forced by the state to go out and do the same job for less money.

9. What's going to happen to anyone who DOES refuse to join the state slave battalions and has their benefit cut off? Do we just leave them to starve to death in the street, then have their corpses carried off by the minimum-wage conscript litter-picking squads and their still-warm blood mopped up by the minimum-wage conscript anti-graffiti team?

Or do we have them picked up by minimum-wage conscript ambulance teams, restored to health by minimum-wage conscript nurses and doctors, and then booted onto the streets again?

10. And finally, what will we do with the tens of thousands of Job Centre staff we'll have made unemployed by ending unemployment?

——————————————————————

The true evil, of course, is that Brown doesn't have a pig in a sausage factory's chance of still being PM in a month's time. So all he's doing with this disgusting, desperate attempt to grab a few Mail-reader votes in marginals is setting a tone of contempt for the poor that the Tories will seize on, and thereby triangulate their own position to somewhere even more loathsome. God help the poor if Cameron gets in.

It's absolutely staggering that our useless excuse for a leader managed to deliver this "policy" with a straight face. It seems unlikely that the British electorate has ever had its collective intelligence insulted so brazenly and comprehensively at any previous time in history.

Personally, I blame Carla Lane.

1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. 20 01 14 22:02

    Scotlands Date With Destiny ¦ 18/09/2014 ¦ When it’s horrible being right

5 to “The Prime Minister’s miracle”

  1. 1930s all over again says:

    Spot on again, Stu. This is social poison. I'm not looking forward to how the less pleasant elements in the media runs with this.
    Reminds me of Nazi Germany and the various Communist states attempts to do the same sort of thing through such short-sighted and artificial means. Many desperate tyrants and con men try to fool people with shell games and distractions. We need a real working economy for the long term, not central planning and creepy slave battalion and gulag plans.

    This country is between a rock and a hard place. We will end up with Tweedledee or Tweedledum, but both will lead us all to ruin. If only the majority would realise the folly in choosing between two cheeks of the same arse time and again at elections and instead go a different path. This mess will never get better until then.

    Reply
  2. joncfc says:

    who are you voting for stu?

    Reply
  3. Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

    Beats the heck out of me.

    Reply
  4. Irish Al says:

    You're not exactly spoiled for meaningful choice.

    Reply
  5. Dumpster says:

    Is that Ryo Hazuki looking for a job there? Could this whole article be viral marketing for the forthcoming Shenmue 3 I've been dreaming of?

    Reply


Comment - please read this page for comment rules. HTML tags like <i> and <b> are permitted. Use paragraph breaks in long comments. DO NOT SIGN YOUR COMMENTS, either with a name or a slogan. If your comment does not appear immediately, DO NOT REPOST IT. Ignore these rules and I WILL KILL YOU WITH HAMMERS.


  • About

    Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.

    Stats: 6,789 Posts, 1,222,354 Comments

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Categories

  • Tags

  • Recent Comments

    • Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pillars Of Sanity: “lightening rod = lightning rodJul 21, 02:27
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “John Lennon described Bowie as “Rock and Roll in drag”.Jul 21, 02:16
    • Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pillars Of Sanity: “TYPOS: catalytistic = catalystic such as the David Bowie = such as David BowieJul 21, 02:01
    • Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pillars Of Sanity: “WHAT’S GOING ON? “At great turning-points of world-history the relativity of our traditional measures and opinions manifests itself in a…Jul 21, 01:14
    • Willie on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Simple question if I may. Our services are being strangled for lack of funding. Money they say is short. People…Jul 21, 00:23
    • Scot Finlayson on The Pillars Of Sanity: “The white woke middle class uni educated virtue signalers will move on to some other `cause` and fuck that up.Jul 20, 23:32
    • robertkknight on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Karl Marx…”De omnibus dubitandum”. (Doubt everything.) Once upon a time I thought that The National would bring both balance and…Jul 20, 22:59
    • Confused on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Let’s get back to some knockabout trivia – food, energy, water, geopolitics, war, indy-pendence Lot of stories on telly last…Jul 20, 22:05
    • Lorn on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Onlooker: In Germany, at the height of their ‘witch’ madness, men and children were sent to the stake as witches.…Jul 20, 22:04
    • Northcode on The Pillars Of Sanity: “No problem can be solved using the same state of mind – the same level of consciousness – that created…Jul 20, 20:47
    • Alf Baird on The Pillars Of Sanity: ““Scotland’s vast potential for producing renewable energy is being hi-jacked by England” Yes, colonialism is primarily about ‘economic plunder’ (Memmi).…Jul 20, 19:25
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “These women are making a place in history as the biggest threat to women.Jul 20, 19:14
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Bumba. another Uni brat with 2 years work experience at an NHS call centre. That’s 1 year 6 months more…Jul 20, 19:01
    • Dave G on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Do you never bore yourself with the endless “colonial” guff?Jul 20, 18:51
    • Peter Swain on The Pillars Of Sanity: “(off topic – sorry !) An article by Craig Dalzell in the Sunday National points out the danger that Scotland’s…Jul 20, 18:45
    • sarah on The Pillars Of Sanity: “O/T “Support Legal Fees for a Scottish TV Channel” – crowdfunder.co.uk See Grouse Beater’s blog on 15th July “SBC TV…Jul 20, 18:44
    • Onlooker on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Name one man executed for being a witch/warlock/whatever pish. Couldn’t, could you? Always totally ignored over the women tragically murdered.…Jul 20, 18:19
    • Onlooker on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Aye, nae bother, likes. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nhsfife_nhsfifelifechanger-activity-6989148339782963200-BB6uJul 20, 18:14
    • Alf Baird on The Pillars Of Sanity: “The ‘A’ team in charge of Fife NHS, some of whom were also invited here to run St Andrews uni…Jul 20, 17:59
    • Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pillars Of Sanity: “An Edinburgh University webpage has this: ‘The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 1563-1736’ https://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/faq/Jul 20, 17:48
    • sarah on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Thank you for these facts, Robert Mellish. It is appalling that the Scottish Civil Service is officially present – not…Jul 20, 16:16
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Come on Rev when we getting the low down. I’m starting to argue with James…Jul 20, 15:43
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Fair point. How many Scots fill the Westminster corridors.Jul 20, 15:35
    • Alf Baird on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Yes James, this is of course the reality in a colonial society which is run by external interests/values, as pointed…Jul 20, 15:34
    • Lorn on The Pillars Of Sanity: “dearieme: accused ‘witches’ were nearly all women (albeit both men and children were also accused) but they were blameless of…Jul 20, 14:59
    • Lorn on The Pillars Of Sanity: ““The transcripts of NHS Fife’s Kate Searle in particular bring into sharp focus how the NHS became a partisan lynch…Jul 20, 14:44
    • James Cheyne on The Pillars Of Sanity: “Most of the Scottish government executors, advisors and Civil Servants are not born and bred backgrounds, I have just spent…Jul 20, 14:31
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “That’s exactly what is not being said but everyone is thinking. Thanks for that sane, refreshing summary of this evil…Jul 20, 14:09
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “You started so well and descended into ‘ how can I blame the British government for every disaster, crime, theft,…Jul 20, 14:05
    • Mark Beggan on The Pillars Of Sanity: “NHS Fife is digging the biggest of all holes in front of the whole World and the Health secretary plays…Jul 20, 13:32
  • A tall tale



↑ Top