The lazy are always with us
My blogs may be a little less frequent over August but today I woke to find the right wing press foaming at the mouth again, 13 years in power and angrier every day.
This time they are fuming about the long term ill, the unemployed and the early retirees, who apparently are all shirkers, idle liars and frauds who need nothing more than a good kick up the backside because they are stealing money from the hard working majority and ruining the economy, again.
You might think that after 43 years of “get on your bike”, and 13 years of benefits cuts even the dimmest commentator might have realised that the cause may lie elsewhere. If not, one can but admire the resilience and determination of the lazy.
Political discourse by the right wing is now reduced to the level of Barbara Woodhouse, the posh dog trainer of the 80’s. She was once on Question Time or some other such show and proclaimed during the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War that there were plenty of jobs and the unemployed were just lazy.
How and why people suddenly got “lazy” in their millions when the economy was being throttled by monetarism, whole industries destroyed and they were being thrown out of work in the tens of thousands every week, was never explained.
But somehow recessions make people lazy, in huge numbers. How strange!
40 years on and Mrs Woodhouse could be a leader writer at the Times or the Telegraph, a respected commentator from a Tufton St. “think tank” or a Tory MP of the more moderate kind.
But funnily enough the ill go back to work when they are cured and the NHS is not curing them. Meanwhile the education and training system produces millions of almost unemployable people every year and low paid jobs which people cannot survive on therefore abound. While those who have built up some property and pension wealth leave work as soon as they can.
Spending more on health and education would pay huge returns. It is one of the many areas where slashing state spending does immense damage to private enterprise. But it is always cheaper and easier to just blame the poor.
The government it seems is the one getting lazier and lazier.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media