In the former Soviet Union, people used to joke: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.
But in Britain for many people the situation has become: “There’s no point working as they still pay us”.
Many jobs are interesting, intellectually satisfying and fulfil important social and financial needs. But many are not – they’re repetitive, boring, unsatisfying and often badly paid.
Unemployment in Britain is officially around 5.2%. That’s about 1.78 million people. But I think we all know these figures are nonsense. Approximately 9.1 to 9.4 million working-age people (aged 16–64) in the UK are economically inactive—meaning they are not working and not looking for work. This group includes students, those with long-term sickness, and people with caring responsibilities, representing roughly 21-22% of the working-age population. Of these more than 9 million, 2.8 million people are inactive due to health conditions, a 40% rise since 2019 and a figure which increases by thousands every week.
So real unemployment is probably at least 4.58 million – over 13% – but most likely even higher than that.
When we work, we are engaging in a trade – we’re selling our time and (hopefully) skills for money. Usually this is in the expectation that this money will allow us to buy a property, maybe start a family and live a reasonably productive life. But, if there is no hope of most jobs providing such things, why would many people want to work?
Buying a home has become an unaffordable luxury for many millions however hard they work:
And those who can’t afford to buy are being crucified by rents rising mush faster than wages:
Meanwhile those at the top seem to be grabbing ever more of our wealth:
With some company bosses being paid extraordinary amounts:
Looking at this situation, many people may feel all the cards are stacked against them.
Then when you add in the fact that benefits can pay more than full-time work, millions would be making a rational choice to just decide that it’s not worth bothering to go out to work.
At least one million people are now out of work and claiming overlapping sickness and housing benefits alongside Personal Independence Payment (PIP), according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), following a surge in claims for mental health conditions.
The think tank warns that the rising tide of welfare dependency is being felt most acutely among young people, with almost one million under 25s now out of work or training. Recent CSJ research revealed that by 2026 there will be more than a £2,500 gap between earnings and combined benefit income. A full time worker on the National Living Wage (NLW) is expected to earn £22,500 after paying income tax and national insurance. By comparison, an economically inactive claimant on Universal Credit (UC) for ill health with the average housing benefit and Personal Independence Payment (PIP) would receive an income of around £25,000, rising to £27,500 for those awarded PIP’s highest rate.
And that’s just a brief glance at why we’re becoming a “There’s no point working as they still pay us”. country.
This may be fun for a while. But it inevitably leads to national bankruptcy. Time to get in the popcorn and a few beers.
Well, you won’t see this reported on the BBC or in any of the British mainstream media. A Florida senator has just issued a short video branding our great Prime Minister “a spineless coward”.
And while we’re on the subject of stories being carefully ignored/avoided by the British mainstream media, I propose that you go on to YouTube and search for Simon Webb’s ‘History Debunked’ videos. Most people probably aren’t aware that the trial of some young Ukrainian gentlemen started at the Old Bailey a couple of days ago. Simon Webb’s ‘History Debunked’ channel seems to be the only media reporting on the progress of the trial. I wonder why the trial has not been covered on the BBC and in the UK mainstream media? Surely they’re not trying to gaslight us?
In this blog, I attach a link to a 4-minute video talk given by the son of the former Shah of Iran. I realise that the former Shah wasn’t a terribly nice chap and not the kind of person you’d invite home to meet your mum and dad. After all, he rather liked having his secret police arresting, torturing and killing political opponents. But his son, Reza Pahlavi, seems like a decent sort and is probably the only figure who can help oversee the transition of Iran from an Islamic hell-hole to a modern democracy if the crazed mad mullahs and the IRGC can be overthrown.
I noticed a BBC report a few days ago in which the BBC correspondent claimed to be interviewing ‘ordinary Iranians’. Of course, all those interviewed said that they were against the war and that Donald Trump and the Americans were to blame. What the BBC didn’t mention was that, if those interviewed failed to declare their undying support for the mad mullahs and IRGC, they would be arrested, tried and hanged. The thought of a hangman’s noose is an excellent way to encourage loyalty.
I think I have also heard several BBC contributors refer to the IRGC as the “Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps” rather than the real title – “The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps“. This is quire a subtle way of the BBC’s quisling, Islamophiliac, Israel-hating garbage gaslighting us. The BBC may be trying to make it look like the murderous, corrupt IRGC are some kind of patriotic Iranian military force rather than an oppressive, fanatical and dangerous bunch of terrorists.
But the real problem with almost all western media reporting of the Iran conflict is probably Trump Derangement Syndrome. The media constantly claims that Trump has blundered, that Trump has started a “forever war” (it has only been going about 7 weeks), that the IRGC are winning etc etc etc. Our media seems to have brushed aside the slaughter of 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 or more innocent protestors in the streets of Iran’s cities and in hospitals because, when you loathe Trump (as most of our media do), the massacre of so many innocent Iranians is not something you wish to focus on.
Anyway, here’s Reza Pahlavi expressing his fury at the biased way western journalists are reporting the Iran conflict:
Most of us are probably fed up hearing about all the shenanigans around the appointment of Britain’s most honest and popular Lord, the Mandelson thing, as UK ambassador to Washington by Britain’s most honest and most popular prime minister – ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer. So, I won’t mention anything about this in today’s blog. Here’s something rather different.
Britain seems to have become the world’s welfare state – a welfare state with a country attached rather than a country with a welfare system
Approximately 46.7% of UK households pay more in taxes (direct and indirect) than they receive in benefits and public services, according to 2024 Office for National Statistics (ONS) data. Conversely, 53.3% of individuals live in households that are net recipients—receiving more in benefits, such as NHS care and education, than they contribute.
Income Concentration: Income tax is heavily concentrated among top earners. The top 10% of taxpayers contribute over 60% of total income tax receipts.
Top 1% Impact: The top 1% of UK taxpayers contribute around 33% of the total income tax collected
As of early 2026, approximately 9.1 to 9.3 million people aged 16 to 64 in the UK are “economically inactive,” meaning they are not in work and not looking for work. This represents a rate of roughly 21% of the working-age population.
What’s worse is that Labour are deliberately making this situation worse by:
increasing benefits for the skivers while increasing taxes on the strivers
blocking any attempts to reduce the rate of increase in the billions paid out in benefits
importing up to 50,000 pieces of largely uneducated, often unemployable, often rape-obsessed, often criminal pieces of Third-world garbage across the Channel each year by giving them more incentives than any other country to come to Britain – free hotels, free food, free money, free phones, free healthcare, free dentistry, free everything
Estimates for the lifetime cost of an “illegal migrant” to the British taxpayer vary significantly based on the assumptions made about their status (e.g., if they remain undocumented or are later granted amnesty) and their employment status.
Undocumented/Processing Phase Costs:
The Home Officehas estimated that supporting a single asylum seeker while their claim is processed for four years costs approximately £106,000.
Current daily costs for asylum accommodation (largely hotels) have been reported at roughly £6 million per day, or over £4 million per day for housing specifically, leading to an estimated £15.3 billion over the 10 years between 2019 and 2029.
Long-Term/Lifetime Impact Estimates:
Migration Watch UK Estimate: A 2010 report by Migration Watch UK estimated that if an illegal immigrant were granted amnesty (regularized), their net lifetime cost to the state would range from £220,000 for a single working person (though most of them will never work) to over £1 million for an unemployed family with two children.
But I expect most of us know that when you include all the social breakdown, trouble and criminality caused by our Third-world friends, the real costs of these people (parasites?) being in our country is much higher than these figures suggest.
Even the British government recognises that the present situation cannot continue. A government website tells us:
The UK asylum system is broken. The numbers arriving on small boats in 2022 exceeded 45,700, a 60% increase on the 28,500 who arrived in 2021..
These journeys are unnecessary, as those making these crossings are coming from safe countries, such as France, where they could have claimed asylum.
More recently, we have seen large numbers of people making these journeys who are from well-established safe countries, where it is clear they are not at risk of persecution.
It’s not fair that those coming to the UK with the intention of becoming economic migrants are able to exploit our asylum system, which should be prioritising those whose lives are genuinely at risk.
It’s also not fair on the British taxpayer. The current broken asylum system currently costs the UK some £3 billion a year and rising, including nearly £6 million a day on hotel accommodation.
We cannot continue, year on year, with this inexorable rise in the number of illegal arrivals adding unacceptable pressures on our health, housing, educational and welfare services.
But what is the British government doing about this catastrophe? Nothing, nada, zilch, zero. In fact, the British government seems intent on encouraging this Third-world invasion. We’re told race replacement is just a crazed conspiracy theory even though White British will be a minority in their own country by 2050 to 2060.
Of course, honest Sir Keir, that brave and noble knight of the realm, claims he is “smashing the gangs” and “stopping the boats”. But noble Sir Keir has never been known for his honesty.
I’m sure you’ll all fondly remember Darren “they’re mostly women and children” Jones. In a June 2025 Question Time programme, honest Mr Jones said (according to the BBC): “And when you see that the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women… you have got to take note.”
The actual figures at the time were (according to the BBC):
“In the first three months of 2025, there were 6,420 small boat arrivals where the age and sex of the person was recorded, according to Home Office figures. Of these, 81% (5,183) were adult men. In the same period, of the 531 child arrivals (aged 17 and under), 427 of them were male and 104 female. There is no further age breakdown, so we don’t know how many babies were amongst them.”
Of course, what the BBC didn’t mention was that many of the supposed under-17 children were actually men in their twenties just claiming to be children. So probably more than the BBC’s reported 81% were actually men?
So Mr Jones’s claim that “the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women” seems to be contradicted by the evidence.
Anyway, honest Mr Jones is in the news again today. Mr Jones apparently told MPs yesterday that a ‘leak inquiry” was underway to find out who told the Guardian newspaper that the Mandelcreature had failed security vetting.
I’m confused. I believe it was in September 2025 – over six months ago – that a journalist from The Independent newspaper sent this message to a contact in government:
This was followed by an article in The Independent about Mandelthing failing the security vetting.
So the Mandelmonster vetting failure was already in the public domain over half a year ago – over half a year before the Guardian ran the story.
Of course, it’s probable that the Independent article was based on rumour and in the last week or so someone leaked more details about the security vetting failure to the Guardian thus confirming what The Independent suspected.
So perhaps Monsieur Jones should have launched his leak inquiry six months ago into the leak to The Independent rather than waiting for last week’s Guardian article. It’s all very confusing.
Moreover, if The Independent knew about Mandelperson’s security vetting failure more than six months ago, it is (to use Starmer’s own word) “incredible” that Starmer now claims he only found out about this last week. Maybe Starmer’s claim of being left in the dark is even beyond “incredible”. Maybe Starmer’s claim to have only found out about the security vetting problem last week is unbelievable, inconceivable, unimaginable, implausible?
As for Mr Jones’s leak inquiry – that really seems to be a case of shooting the messenger.
As for Starmer, he really seems to have the ‘reverse Midas touch’: The opposite of the “Midas touch” (turning everything to gold/success) is the reverse Midas touch, also known as the Sadim touch (Midas spelled backward). This phrase describes someone who consistently turns valuable or successful ventures into failures, losses, or worthless situations:
I’m embarrassed to say that I watched (IMHO) slimey sleazeball Starmer’s weasel-worded squirming in the Commons yesterday over what he knew and (claimed) he didn’t know about the Mandelson security vetting debacle.
I hate to say it, but I thought (IMHO) Slimeball Starmer did a pretty good job. Let me briefly explain why.
There are many models of decision-making. A very basic one is that with any decision there is the process and the context. To give a stupid example: The captain of an oil tanker may decide to sail through the Strait of Hormuz and his ship gets sunk by the Americans or the Islamists. The captain could say that he followed the process – he sailed at the right speed, he stayed in the correct shipping lane and so on. However, the context was that there was a not insignificant war going on so it wasn’t so smart to sail there at that time.
What Starmer did brilliantly (IMHO) was bore MPs to tears with an excruciatingly detailed description of the process which was followed during the Mandelson appointment while totally avoiding the context. The process consisted of all the detailed discussions and letters and memos and suchlike. This bogged down his critics so that many MPs’ questions ended up being what the Finns call – “point fucking” – banging on and on about small details while totally missing the main issue.
The main issue was the context – namely Mandelson’s history of what some cynics might consider to be rather dodgy dealings:
being forced to resign twice from government
the extraordinary coincidence of the EU cutting tariffs on Russian aluminium at the same time as Mandelson was EU Trade Commissioner and friendly with a Russian aluminium billionaire
Petey Mandelson allegedly (but not proven) sharing confidential details of government policy with one or more of his banking chums
the main and possibly most lucrative clients of Mandelson’s advisory business being close to the Chinese Communist Party and jolly Mr Putin’s Russian regime
and, of course, Mandelson’s ‘friendship’ with billionaire that nice Mr Epstein
Pattern Recognition is a process in which we use multiple senses in order to make decisions. As we go through our day, our brain’s pattern recognition abilities help us recognise certain objects and situations. Without these abilities, it would be impossible to make progress, as we’d be living in a kind of Groundhog Day, where everything we encounter would appear completely new, over and over, and would therefore need to be learned and understood each time.
With Mandelson even the most modest use of Pattern Recognition would have screamed that Mandelson was a wrong ‘un. The adorable Diane Abbott was the MP who came closest to asking how on earth Starmer could have seriously considered making someone with Mandelson’s back story Britain’s ambassador to the USA. But every time an MP got near to this issue, Starmer just batted it away by saying something like “I made the wrong decision and I apologise for that“. Unfortunately no MP tried to probe the question as to why Starmer even considered Mandelson and whether someone (Monsieur Blair, par exemple?) told Starmer to appoint Mandelson. This would have been a much more interesting line of questioning.
So, by taking on his enemies on ground where he was strongest – boring detail after detail after detail of the process followed, pedantic lawyer Starmer managed to drag his critics into a kind of ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ kind of argument. Moreover, by claiming he had now changed the process of appointing and vetting ambassadors, Starmer had already disarmed most of his critics.
Conclusion: Britain’s worst ever prime minister lives on and, by focusing only on the details of the process rather than the context, has dumbfounded all those who claimed he would have to resign.
I imagine we’re all getting the popcorn in as we wait for Starmer to explain how:
he knew nothing about Mandelson failing the security vetting
furious he is that nobody told him Mandelson failed the security vetting
he intends to improve the security vetting process to ensure such a failure never happens again
etc etc blether blether etc etc
So many clever people have opined about the current scandal, that I would never presume to know more than them. So I just wanted to use this short blog to suggest a few weasel-worded excuses the (IMHO) slimeball, lying PoS Starmer and his sycophantic apologists will come up with.
Vetting process is confidential: One is likely to be that the vetting process is confidential and the department(s) doing the vetting is/are forbidden by confidentiality rules from sharing the details of the vetting with government ministers. It is true that the details of what is discovered during the vetting process is confidential. However, the result of the vetting process – whether the individual being vetted passed or failed – is not confidential and, for such an important position as Ambassador to the USA, should have been communicated to the relevant government ministers – then Foreign Secretary Calamity Lammy and, of course, (IMHO) lying slimeball Starmer.
No minister was told Mandelson had failed: This a good weasel-worded excuse. It may be true that no government minister was directly informed by the department doing the vetting that Mandelson had failed the security vetting. But more probably this information was passed on to people in Lammy’s and Starmer’s offices. Whether they then communicated this to their political masters we’ll never know. But I think we can guess.
There will be much more weasel-wording in Starmer’s ‘explanation’ about what actually happened when he speaks in the Commons on Monday. In fact, maybe we should all play “Starmer Weasel-Word Bingo”? This consists of writing down all the weasel-worded excuses we think Starmer and his apologists are likely to use and then the person who guesses the most weasel-worded excuses correctly wins a prize – a visit to an Arsenal football match with Sir Keir himself, tickets provided by Lord Alibaba.
To cheer us up, here’s another (IMHO) brilliant YouTube AI video:
There has been much noise and fury about the Mandelson appointment as UK ambassador to the USA. And now people are questioning whether Starmer lied to Parliament and to the British people about what he did or didn’t know.
I think I can answer that question quite simply with this very short YouTube video from a press conference Starmer gave several months before the latest Mandelson debacle.
In this news conference Starmer claims that Mandelson passed the security vetting process. So, what Starmer said in this short video clip is untrue. It is a lie. It is a very big lie. It is a Brobdingnaghanian-sized lie.
Having fallen from around 400,000 civil servants at the start of 2009 to about 390,000 by 2016, the number of civil servants has shot up to 554,000 by December 2025 according to some reports. That’s a massive 42% increase.
Let’s assume that the average civil servant costs us say £50,000 a year including salary, office costs, national insurance payments, generous expenses and other benefits. Note that I haven’t included pension costs. As far as I understand, the only public sector pension scheme where there is real money is the Local Government pension scheme. All other public-sector pensions will be paid through taxation. So, in addition to that actual cost of 164,000 extra civil servants, we face paying tens of billions in the future so our civil servants can enjoy comfortable, guaranteed, inflation-protected golden years. For civil servants, their golden years will really be golden due to our generosity.
Anyway, just taking my proposed figure of £50,000 per extra civil servant, that means we are now paying about £8.2 billion per year more for 164,000 more civil servants than we did nine years ago.
Yet, in spite of the massive increase in the number of civil servants and their cost, nothing in Britain seems to work. Our education system, our health service, our military, our state administration, our immigration controls and our government all seem to be collapsing.
You’ll all have heard of “The Peter Principle”:
Hopefully, you’ll all also have heard of Parkinson’s Law:
Parkinson derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service. He gave, as examples, the growth in the size of the British Admiralty and Colonial Office even though the numbers of, respectively, their ships and colonies were declining. He expressed this as “The number of workers within public administration tends to grow regardless of the amount of work to be done”. And he suggested that any public sector organisation will increase by around 5% to 6% a year as managers build up their own local empires to justify ever-increasing budgets for their areas of responsibility.
Here’s a chart I produced for my 2009 book “Fleeced” based on Parkinson’s work studying the growth in bureaucrats at the Admiralty while the number of ships and sailors plumeted:
If we look at what happened in the British civil service in the nine years between 2016 and 2025, we see an increase in staffing of 42% – about 4.7% a year. That’s fairly close to Parkinson’s predicted 5% to 6% a year.
So why are ever more civil servants achieving ever less? The answer is, of course:
The Peter Principle where tens of thousands of civil servants are being automatically promoted to their level of incompetence
Parkinson’s Law which states that managers will always seek to expand their own little empires leading to growth of the organisation 5% to 6% a year regardless of the quantity of work (if any) to be done.
I suspect there is yet one more reason our public sector is so utterly useless – DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality or Equity or whatever). Instead of hiring the best candidates, our civil service is hiring useless, lazy, incompetent and often utterly corrupt people based on their skin colour, sexual identity, religion and ethnicity. Many of these DIE hires will originate from countries where pointless bureaucracy and widespread corruption are a way of life. After all, if the RAF is turning away the best candidates to be pilots because they are white, heterosexual males, I shudder to think of the ‘quality’ and morality of those being hired by the civil service.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves used her spring statement in March 2025 to announce that Civil Service running costs would be reduced by 15% by the end of the decade.
However, at the same time ministers have committed to increasing the proportion of civil servants working in digital and data roles, supposedly “creating a workforce fit for the future”. The project delivery and digital, data and technology (DDaT) professions in our civil service, for example, have expanded by 224% and 199% respectively since 2010. Dear Rachel, increases of 224% and 199% do not constitute a reduction in civil service running costs.
Since Starmer’s Labour came to power, the number civil servants has increased by more than 8,000. So, if you’re expecting civil service numbers and costs to fall like Rachel promised, don’t hold your breath. Here, as in every other action it takes, the Labour government is doing precisely the opposite of what it claims to be doing:
Putting British interests first yet allowing a Third-World invasion of our country
Protecting free speech yet imprisoning people for social media posts
Prioritising economic growth yet raising taxes so much that they are driving Britain into recession
Giving Britain energy security yet blocking all development of North Sea oil and gas fields
Supporting working people yet putting up their taxes to pay for the uneducated and unemployable multi-cultural invaders and to increase benefits for the nine million or so who would rather stay at home watching Netflix or suchlike than go to work
etc etc etc
Here’s a lady who has sussed out how ‘wonderful’ the Starmer government actually is:
David Craig, on April 30th, 2026
