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By  David Craig, on July 22nd, 2013 As the Coalition makes a few feeble efforts to slow the rise in benefits spending, we’re getting all the predictable howls of protest from the professional handwringers at the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent. So, who is right? Are all benefits claimants good, honest, highly-educated people who would like nothing other than a job? Or are there at least a million lazy, pig-ignorant, idle skivers amongst the benefits-supported masses?
Almost a quarter of all government spending goes on benefits – £166bn a year. Of this around £74bn is for paying the state pension. The rest – £92bn – goes on various benefits to the unemployed and the low paid. But how can we tell whether these benefits are going to people who deserve them?
Well, here’s a first clue. In the years from 1997 (New Labour being elected) till the 2007/8 financial crash, benefits spending went up at the same time as GDP. This meant that during the Brown Boom, ever more people were claiming ever more in benefits (click on chart to see more clearly)
Of course, the opposite should have happened. As the economy grew, benefits spending should have fallen. But the problem was that of the 2 million or so new jobs created during the Brown Boom, at least 1.77 million went to foreigners, because 1.77 million Brits couldn’t be bothered to work or couldn’t be bothered to get the education that would make them fit for work.
But there’s a conundrum here. During the Brown Boom, according to official statistics unemployment fell. So the benefits bill should have also fallen. Why didn’t it? Well, here’s clue as to how our leaders manipulate the figures to lie to us. At the same time as unemployment seemed (according to our lying leaders) to be falling, the numbers claiming incapacity benefits shot up (click on chart to see more clearly)
Yup. To hide rising levels of unemployment, both Conservative and New Labour governments pushed about 1,500,000 people, many of whom were capable of work, onto incapacity benefits so they would not show up on the unemployment figures. When Brown claimed there were more people in work than ever before, he wasn’t exactly lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth either. Too many new jobs went to foreigners, while the real levels of unemployment amongst British people were hidden by allowing so many to sign on as being unable to work.
While we should feel every sympathy for those who have lost their jobs since the 2007/8 crash, these two charts suggest that we might be justified in thinking that many of those who didn’t find jobs during the Brown Boom were just ignorant or lazy scroungers.
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By David Craig, on July 21st, 2013 Hopefully most people realise that most/all politicians lie most/all of the time. But it can be difficult to prove they’re lying. For a start, by putting pressure on obsequious, career-focused civil servants, politicians can control the information we are given. And even when the information is available, it often requires a fair bit of forensic analysis to expose the lies.
Here’s just one example of New Labour lies I found while writing SQUANDERED. In 1997, applications for asylum were running at about 30,000 a year. By 1999, they had more than doubled to over 70,000 a year. In 2002, aware of public concern, Britain’s most accomplished liar, Tony Blair, pledged to halve the number of asylum seekers and, sure enough by 2006 the number dropped to around 23,000 (click on chart to see Blair’s lies more clearly)
What Blair’s government didn’t mention was a massive increase in citizenships granted to foreigners (see chart). In order to make it look like they were reducing the number of asylum seekers, Blair’s government started throwing British passports around like confetti. When immigrants were being given passports so freely, they didn’t need to claim asylum – hence the almost miraculous drop in asylum seekers.
So, what lies are we being given by Coalition politicians? Last week we got the whopper about the £9bn 2012 Olympics having generated £10bn for Britain. Total garbage of course. We’re also getting plenty of lies about supposed Man-Made Global Warming. Having signed up to the new Global Warming religion, our leaders find themselves trapped by their own stupidity and forced to continue with energy policies that are destroying British jobs and wrecking our economy.
There are plenty of lies about the EU. No politician and no grovelingly-sycophantic journalist has felt it necessary to admit that unpopular policies like legalising single-sex marriage and privatising the Royal Mail (at a cost to us taxpayers of around £9bn), have been forced on us by the EU.
Then there’s immigration. Our leaders claim they can’t predict how many Romanians and Bulgarians will come to Britain after restrictions are lifted in January 2014. Yet more lies. Spain and Italy have fewer restrictions and there are about 920,000 Romanians and 170,000 Bulgarians in Spain. In Italy there are about 997,000 Romanians and over 70,000 Bulgarians. Britain has much more generous benefits and more jobs than Spain or Italy, So the absolute minimum number that will be moving here will be well over one million. Probably it will be closer to two million.
Knowing that a tsunami of immigration is going to hit us next year, our leaders are once again producing reports claiming immigration is good for Britain as we supposedly need more young immigrants to support our ageing population. Let’s test that – unemployment amongst Romanians and Bulgarians in Spain is 36.4% – that’s about 396,760 immigrants who are unemployed. So we can expect somewhere in the region of 400,000 Romanians and Bulgarians to be claiming benefits for housing, council tax and unemployment here in Britain. That will probably cost us about £200m a week – £10bn a year. (There are already more than 140,000 here, many of them claiming benefits, in spite of supposed restrictions) It’s a pity our leaders haven’t bothered to give us these figures either.
So, what can we expect from our masters from now to the next election and far beyond? Lies, more lies and even more lies.
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By David Craig, on July 20th, 2013 Just as our greedy, lying, lazy, expenses-fiddling MPs head off for their well-paid 8-weeks summer holidays, the Government has issued a report claiming that the 2012 Olympics came in on budget at around £9bn and (conveniently for our leaders) produced £10bn in benefits for Britain. The worry is that some people might be stupid enough to believe them.
Here are the figures for the original Olympics bid – the bid that was accepted by the International Olympics Committee (IOC) when the Games were awarded to London.
According to this, the Games should “only” have cost around £4bn and we taxpayers would “only” have to pay about £1.8bn of this. A bargain?
But once London was awarded the Games, the “budget” was quickly changed:
The total cost had suddenly more than doubled to over £9bn and the taxpayers’ share more than tripled to over £7bn. A cynic might have concluded that the original figures were just a bunch of lies cobbled together to win the Games and that those behind the figures knew all along that they were lies.
As for the supposed £10bn in benefits for Britain. Well, I seem to remember that during the Olympics, London hotels were slashing their prices in a desperate attempt to attract visitors and restaurants were unusually empty – knowing the Olympics were on, hundreds of thousands of tourists stayed away. And while Cameron and Coe and Boris Johnson were gabbing on yesterday about the tremendous benefits from their Olympics, sad old Vince Cable admitted that the whole report was a “marketing exercise” aka a load of bollocks.
Oh, and here’s a picture of the very rich Mr Coe. Having spent £9bn of our money on the London Olympics, he may well become the next head of the IOC. A cynic might conclude that the London Olympics really were a very expensive (for us) job application for him:
By David Craig, on July 19th, 2013 The OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has just come out with a report claiming that Britain needs about 140,000 immigrants a year. The OBR is a supposedly “independent” body, costing us more than £2m a year, which conveniently always predicts the economy is growing just as Chancellor Osborne produces his fanciful budgets. And every single OBR forecast has been laughably and predictably over-optimistic.
Well, now as Britain faces a tidal wave (or even tsunami) of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria, the OBR has (conveniently for our leaders) produced a report full of supposed “facts” and “figures” supposedly “proving” we need more, not less immigration.
One chart in the OBR propaganda/report (delete as appropriate) pretends to show that old people cost us lots of money (click on chart to see more clearly)
Another “useful” chart laughably claims that the higher immigration is, the lower our future national debt will be (click on chart to see more clearly)
The OBR report implausibly claims: “Our sensitivity analysis shows that overall migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of the public finances over our 50 year horizon. Under our central assumption of 140,000 annual net inward migration from 2016 the public sector net debt to GDP ratio reaches 99% by 2062-63, while assuming zero gross migration increases the net debt to GDP ratio to over 174%”.
Well, that’s alright then. Open up the borders and let them all in.
But could it be that the OBR report is just a little biased? Or even a bunch of lies?
Here are just a few counter arguments:
– Old people work for longer and are healthier for longer. So the OBR projections of the cost of an ageing population are plain wrong
– Immigration has led to an increase in criminality – a third of all crime suspects arrested in London last year were foreign nationals, according to new police figures. Just over 72,500 foreigners were held by the Metropolitan Police and questioned about crimes ranging from fraud to murder.
– We’re going to need an awful lot of new houses, schools, hospitals and prisons to cope with a new wave of immigration. Where are we going to find the money to build and staff them?
– Unemployment is much higher amongst certain immigrant groups than it is amongst the ethnic British population and the desire to work is much lower (click on chart to see more clearly)
No doubt the head of the useless, politically-correct, sycophantically-obedient OBR, Mr Robert Chote, will get a nice big bonus this year for grovelingly doing his masters’ bidding. But as for the OBR’s forecasts and reports – you can either use them for lighting the barbecue during the “wash-out summer” forecast by the equally useless Met Office or else just chuck them in the garbage.
(A wonderful day yesterday – am amazing two people bought copies of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED – I’m £5 less poor – yippee!)
By David Craig, on July 18th, 2013 This was Paul Steane before he went into a NHS hospital for a minor operation:
Unfortunately for Paul Steane his local hospital was the George Eliot Hospital (GEH). The GEH is one of the hospitals a recent report classed as one of the worst in England for excess death rates.
Shortly after being discharged, Paul suffered Acute Renal Failure (from dehydration – not being given enough water to drink) and had to be readmitted. He was probably discharged too early because the hospital was “hot-bedding” – getting patients out as fast as possible to free up beds to meet government targets on A&E waiting times.
Then followed a series of further blunders. To save his life, surgeons had to cut open his throat and insert a tracheotomy (a tube put into his throat so he could breathe):
Because he wasn’t looked after properly, he developed a blood clot and his feet became rotten from lack of blood flow:
So he had to have a leg amputated.
Finally, in constant pain and unable to walk, talk or breathe properly, Paul Steane took his own life to free his family from the burden of having to look after him.
The GEH denied any responsibility for Paul’s suffering. But a nurse, outraged at how the family were being lied to, sent Paul’s wife, Amanda, a copy of a blood test done just before Paul was first discharged, The blood test showed clearly that Paul was about to suffer Acute Renal Failure and should never have been discharged.
The GEH first claimed that no blood test had been done on Paul on the day of his discharge, so there were no indications that anything might go wrong. When Amanda showed this incriminating blood test result to the GEH, it claimed the results had been lost and fought for years to deny the catastrophic series of blunders which led to Paul Steane’s death. When the GEH finally admitted liability, all those involved were promoted out of trouble and one key figure in the scandal may soon end up in a very senior NHS position.
This whole horrific story of negligence, lies and cover-ups is described in horrific detail in a book I published WHO CARES? by Amanda Steane. At the time (2007) a Sunday Times journalist was interested in covering the story. But apparently their editor said it wasn’t important – pity really, many thousands of lives could have been saved if that editor had realised the scale of the disaster in the NHS.
Since Paul killed himself, tens of thousands of patients have died unnecessarily in our filthy slaughterhouse hospitals and not a single person has been fired and not a single person has been prosecuted.
If anything like this had happened in a private hospital, our politicians would be screaming for those responsible to be punished. But when it’s the NHS, incompetence, dishonesty and blundering are always rewarded with promotion.
By David Craig, on July 17th, 2013 As Michael Gove tries to improve our children’s education and our teachers complain about every change made (however small) and plan protests and strikes over their pay and pensions, we might want to ask whether our teachers are giving us value for money.
There’s a study conducted by the OECD comparing children’s educational achievement – the PISA study. Over 500,000 children in more than 57 countries take part. According to this study, the UK’s performance has declined every year since 2000 (click on chart to see more clearly)
In Reading we’ve gone from 7th to 25th: in Maths from 8th to 28th: and in Science from 4th to 16th.
When the 2000 results came out, the then Education Secretary Estelle Morris seemed pretty chuffed and claimed the PISA results showed British schools were “world beaters”. As Britain’s results got worse and worse and then even worse, Labour, the BBC and of course the teachers’ newspaper the Guardian, have continually tried to trash the PISA findings by claiming they are “riddled with errors”, “inconsistent” and “misleading”. I rather doubt these accusations would have been made if the PISA results had suggested Britain’s educational performance was improving.
It’s true that there are other international studies of educational levels and that different studies can come up with different results. But if you look at the PISA tables, you’ll see that those countries with the best educational results tend to be those which are most successful economically.
Of course, teachers only bear part of the responsibility for the shameful underperformance of our schools. Parents who fail to discipline their children and fail to inculcate in them the importance of education must also take a large part of the blame.
But as Britain continues to slip further and further down compared to other countries, perhaps our ever-complaining strike-happy teachers should look at their own results and conclude “should do better”.
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By David Craig, on July 16th, 2013 Apparently there was some kind of Marxist/Socialist Festival in London at the weekend. Journalists from the Times and Telegraph went to the festival, saw that the few attendees were mostly rather sad-looking 60-year-old, sandal-wearing former hippies and wrote articles about how Marxism/Socialism was a spent force in Britain.
But these journalists may have completely missed the point. The Marxists and Socialists aren’t at these festivals – they are busy lucratively running many of the institutions that have power over us.
Let’s start with the EU. The president of the EU commission, Barosso, was one of the leaders of the underground Maoist MRPP (Reorganising Movement of the Proletariat Party, later PCTP/MRPP, Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat).
The EU is not run by the European Parliament. All new laws come from directives issued by unelected commissioners (or Komissars as they used to be called in Soviet Russia). Former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev is credited with having once said “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to recreate the Soviet Union in Western Europe“. As for the European Parliament – 623 out of 736 MEPs belong to leftist parties.
In Britain, whole areas of public life are dominated by people with Marxist/Socialist backgrounds and views.
The BBC (once known as the Blair broadcasting Corporation) has long since abandoned any attempt to be politically neutral and has spent the last decade enriching its top executives while ridiculing anybody who dared suggest that allowing over 5 million immigrants into crowded bankrupt Britain was not a good idea and anybody who dared question the new religion of Man-Made Global Warming. And now the BBC is actively campaigning against government plans to put an incredibly generous £26,000 per year cap on benefits.
The widely loathed £270,000-a year chief executive of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1967 after graduation, and remained a member of the party until 1983. This one-time radical, who used to regard political honours as elitist symbols of bourgeoisie government, was happy to be knighted in 2010. As a former communist, Sir David clearly knows what’s best for us and seems to have been awfully close to some of the worst scandals and cover-ups in the NHS’s history.
The Met Office seems to have become a branch of the Labour Party and has long since lost any credibility due to its increasingly contorted efforts to blame everything – hot weather, cold weather, wet weather, dry weather – on the myth of Man-Made Global Warming so beloved by Ed Miliband who brought us the catastrophe of the Climate Change Act which has pushed up energy costs and destroyed tens of thousands of British jobs.
Our politicised police seem to spend more time persecuting and prosecuting people for political incorrectness than they do catching the people who commit the ever-increasing number of burglaries – up from 651,000 in 2009/10 to 745,000 in 2010/11 – a rise of 14.4%.
And in Academia, left-wing views are the accepted norm. For example, Britain’s top neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, recently said: “climate change can only end in disaster”. This is clearly complete and utter balderdash. But people like her get away with unfounded garbage like this because nobody dares question the new left-wing orthodoxies.
A reader of a national newspaper recently commented: “The real genuine and truly dangerous Marxists hold top positions in the establishment and are paid gigantic amounts of money by the state. They go about their work in the CPS/civil service/MOD/quango land/DECC/NHS and a hundred other places in secret.”
Seeing what is happening in our society, many people might be inclined to agree.
(Sadly, for me, nobody seems to have bought a copy of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED for the last few days. Oh well, at least I’ll have plenty of copies to burn on the fire this winter to keep me warm)
By David Craig, on July 15th, 2013 I don’t know whether the Royal Mail should be privatised or not. But what I do know is that nobody is being honest about why the privatisation is going ahead. So, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Cable, Miliband, Balls and the rest of the garbage who rule us (or want to rule us) are lying to us by not telling us that EU directives are forcing this privatisation. If we’re going to have a debate about flogging off the Royal Mail, it should be an honest debate where our leaders admit why the sale is happening – EU directives.
So, what can we do? We know that, if the Royal Mail is privatised, services will be cut and tens of thousands of jobs will go. But it seems that none of the Royal Mail staff or unions know that it is their EU masters that are threatening their jobs. Perhaps we should tell them? I was therefore wondering if some readers could ask their postmen for their personal email address and send them the following email (or just print out the two posts mentioned in the links below and give them to your postman as one reader did this morning):
Subject: How EU directives are forcing Britain to sell off the Royal Mail
Clearly you know about the Government’s plan to sell off the Royal Mail. The likely result will be cuts in services and perhaps 20,000 or more job losses over the next few years.
Have you wondered why the Royal Mail is being sold off? And have you wondered why the Labour Party is not protesting against the sale?
This is because the reason for the Royal Mail being sold is that EU directives are forcing the Government to privatise the Royal Mail https://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/5875 But our leaders (Coalition and Labour) are terrified of Royal Mail workers finding out about this as this would lead to a backlash against the EU and a huge surge in support for UKIP.
When France was told to sell off their postal service, La Poste, they told the EU to get stuffed https://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/5889
But Britain’s EU-subservient leaders have grovelingly agreed to do what their EU masters tell them. And Labour say and do nothing.
The EU is about to destroy our mail service and destroy many of your jobs. You and your union should be protesting about this EU interference in British affairs.
Please pass this email on to other postal workers.
By David Craig, on July 14th, 2013 Hopefully you’re all enjoying the good weather, so I’ll keep it short today.
Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Cable, Miliband, Balls and the rest of our EU-subservient politicians will never admit to the electorate just how much of what they do is on instruction from Brussels, like same-sex marriages and the privatisation of Royal Mail (and possibly the £60bn Hs2 train white elephant).
In those countries where privatisation of postal services has already taken place there has been a reduction in service. The splendid response of France to the EU’s directives on selling their postal services (La Poste) was to agree to privatise La Poste provided any purchaser gave the same service as the state and took over all pension responsibilities. Bearing in mind that France is 674,843 km2 – more than twice the size of the UK at 243,610 km2 – and the huge pension liabilities of La Poste, the usual suspects for buying La Poste (TNT, DHL, FedEx and vulture venture capitalists) all ran a kilometre or two in the opposite direction.
But in Britain, our useless, EU-subservient politicians grovelingly agreed to their EU masters’ demands. Sadly for our quisling leaders, the Royal Mail was unsaleable as its pension fund had £28bn in assets but £37bn in liabilities (and growing by the day). So, our lying, thieving scumbag politicians dumped all the assets and liabilities of the Royal Mail’s pension fund onto British taxpayers – costing us at least £9bn (and most probably much more). However, this left the Royal Mail in a condition whereby it could be sold off to satisfy our EU bosses.
Our lying, thieving politicians will claim that selling the Royal Mail is a “good deal for taxpayers” or something like that. This is a £9bn (growing by day) lie.
By David Craig, on July 13th, 2013 While our national debt shoots up by £120bn a year, while immigrants swarm into the country to live well in Benefits Britain, while religious and racial tensions threaten our communities, our leaders seem to spend much of their time on policies that have nothing to do with the serious problems facing the country. First there was same sex marriage (SSM), now it’s the privatisation of the Royal Mail. But why have these issues become priorities for the Government?
As I pointed out in a previous blog https://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/5210 the real reason Britain and France were rushing to legalise SSM was because of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. But our leaders never mentioned this as they knew if people understood the real reason for SSM legislation, there would be a massive surge in support for UKIP.
And now we have the privatisation of the Royal Mail. Why? To comply with a series of EU directives on the liberalisation of the European postal services market
https://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/post/legislation/index_en.htm
“The purpose of Community policy in the postal sector is to complete the internal market for postal services and to ensure, through an appropriate regulatory framework, that efficient, reliable and good-quality postal services are available throughout the European Union to all its citizens at affordable prices. The importance of postal services both for the economic prosperity and social well-being and cohesion of the EU make this a priority area for Community action”
Originally EU directives allowed countries to keep basic letter delivery, what the EU called “reserved areas”, out of the private sector. But Directive 2008/6/EC amended the initial Postal Directive (97/67/EC) as amended by Directive 2002/39/EC by defining 2010, and for some Member States 2012, as a final step in the process of gradual market opening.
“According to the Directive, Member States must abolish any remaining reserved areas by 2010, with the possibility for some Member States to postpone full market opening by two further years as a maximum”.
So there you have it – by 2012 at the latest, our Government had to start the process of selling off the Royal Mail to comply with EU directives.
Cameron knows this, Cable knows this, Clegg knows this – but none of them will admit this as they’re afraid this would encourage people into the arms of UKIP.
As for Labour – why aren’t they screaming out about the glorious Royal Mail being flogged off? Why aren’t Labour protesting about how many postal union workers will lose their jobs as a result of privatisation? You guessed it. Labour too, being EU stooges, don’t want us to know the real reason for selling the Royal Mail as postal union members would be furious if they knew their jobs were being sacrificed to satisfy the whims of our masters in Brussels.
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