Tag Archives: disability benefits

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Diary Blog, 17 March 2025

15 Comments

Morning music

[German 16th Century, Three Couples in a Circle Dance, c. 1515, pen and brown ink with watercolor on laid paper, Rosenwald Collection]

Talking point

She has a point.

As for Goodwin, I recently flagged the possibility, no more, that he might be on the following trajectory— win a by-election (Runcorn & Helsby?) as a Reform UK candidate, take over from Farage the leadership of Reform (with Farage’s support), and then (once Reform has become the largest party in the Commons after the next general election ) become Prime Minister.

It might just happen.

However, as that tweeter “Serena Brown” notes, either the UK becomes again a homogenous society, or it does not. There would be no point in a Reform UK government if it were unwilling to take the steps necessary.

This is not merely about immigration, and certainly not only about that relatively small part of immigration which comes in via the infamous “small boats”. It is about the non-whites already here, who are breeding much faster than the English/British, who themselves are not even reproducing their own numbers.

When we see Reform, we notice that it is ideologically in hock to the Jew-Zionist lobby, and pathetically adherent to Israel and Israeli interests.

Other tweets seen

I have blogged previously about the bad joke that is Shabana Mahmood as “Lord Chancellor” and Secretary of State for Justice— a Pakistani woman whose total legal experience has been a 12-month Bar pupillage (decades ago), followed by a year as a salaried “gopher” at a firm of solicitors. Use the search box on the blog to find out more.

Starmer-stein is not a Labour prime minister (even of the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown type); he is a Labour Friends of Israel prime minister, and that applies, mutatis mutandis, to virtually his entire Cabinet.

Starmer-stein and his Cabinet should face real resistance from the British people.

Meanwhile, Starmer-stein continues to try to play the “world statesman” and would-be war leader, and looks ever-more pathetic as he makes that attempt.

When simply noting the totally obvious sounds radical…

That influx of non-white doctors has another consequence: by reason of the high pay received by doctors in the UK, any offspring are automatically given a better life-chance than most white English/British children. The knock-on result is that more non-whites are going to be placed into the higher socio-economic groups in the UK, thus further weakening our civilized European culture and society.

Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalergi_Plan; https://www.amazon.com.be/-/nl/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi/dp/1913057097.

Exactly. Reform is the last hope of many, but it is also the last chance for the System itself to survive. If Reform is squashed or disappears, we are looking at quite likely civil war, or social war, and the national revolution, down the line. However, if Reform manages to be either the largest or second-largest party after 2028 or 2029, or even in government with a Commons majority, but then fails to take the steps necessary, we shall also be looking at not-unlikely civil/social war.

We must not forget that the Jew-Zionist element is embedded in Reform. One only has to look at the pronouncements of Farage, Tice, and now Goodwin.

Still, at present, Reform UK is the only game in town:

Hopefully, that little bully will be found and prosecuted, but of course his punishment, if any, will be slight, in the present society.

When the law ceases to be respected, or enforced (by reason of weak and/or politicized police, prosecutors, courts), such lawlessness leads, in the end, to the public taking the law into their own hands, and meting out more condign punishment to evildoers.

Not for nothing has “the Bailey” (Central Criminal Court, London) the following inscription on its facade: “Punish the evildoer, and protect the children of the poor“…

I agree, but it may be that Reform has to succeed but then crash and burn before a social-national movement (of any type) can arise.

It will be recalled how warmly Starmer-stein welcomed Farage into the chamber of the House of Commons for the first time.

Russian forces continue to advance on all fronts.

Former MP, member of the House of Lords, Conservative Party member. Quarter-Indian. Scribbles for Daily Telegraph.

Who makes up stupid rules like that anyway? Small-minded people who think that the natural world is not connected with humanity. Glad that those BBC people broke the “rules” laid down.

I often break rules, and feel good about doing so.

…and cretins of that sort (Mark Field, Liz Truss etc) purport to have the right (and ability) to rule over us. Wall. Squad. End.

My question is whether Goodwin himself is going to be the candidate…

If so, the date of the by-election will soon be set, maybe even tomorrow.

“The government says it wants to make significant savings on welfare payments to the disabled and help the disabled into work. The point, say all ministers – led Sir Keir Starmer – is not to harm the disabled, but to free them from a life of dependency. That, they claim, is why this is a truly “Labour” reform — and not just brutal cuts engineered by Rachel Reeves because she needs billions in savings so as not to breach arbitrary, self-imposed fiscal rules on the assessment date of 26 March. Is any of this plausible?

The first thing to say is the point of fiscal rules should be to help focus minds in government about how best to share scarce resources between different important resources. They should not set hard deadlines for making decisions with potentially profound consequences for the lives of millions of people.

We’ve already seen an example of the political dangers of trying to rush through changes to personal independence payments (PIP) and the health related elements of universal credit – because one element that was particularly upsetting to Labour MPs has already been dropped, namely a one year freeze on PIP payments.

But as my colleague Anushka Asthana has been exclusively disclosing for the last ten days, this was only one part of the welfare reform package. The other elements were to restrict entitlement to personal independence payments, while cutting the health-related universal credit payments and recycling those UC savings into an increase in the standard rate of UC. You can see in this the simple story and perhaps simplistic story about welfare payments to the disabled that the government believes and is trying to tell.

First, that hundreds of thousands of people receive cash to help with their living and mobility costs, but don’t “deserve” it.

Second, that the structure of UC payments provides too great an incentive to disabled people to sign themselves off work to get the health-related benefits top up.

Starmer will doubtless take comfort from the fact that – according to polling by the Good Growth Foundation – 60% believe the system provides too much support to people who don’t want to work and 39% think that it’s too easy for people to get benefits who don’t need them. But popular belief does not make it true. And before going further into the nitty gritty, it is worth doing a quick economic reality check. It is a fact that the proportion of British people in employment has fallen since Covid and, unlike many other rich economies, has not recovered to 2019 levels. But the proportion of British people who are working remains high by international standards. According to the OECD, in the third quarter of 2023 the UK ranked fifth in the world, with an employment rate of 74.9%, well ahead of the US for example, and behind only Iceland, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany

Even if it is a laudible ambition to encourage more people into work. The UK’s is not an economy whose failure is that too few people are working. The grotesque failure of the British economy is hardly a mystery.

It is that living standards for those in work have barely increased for more than 15 years and too many of those in work receive too little to pay even for food, energy and other essentials.

Pretty much every competitor country whose employment rate has recovered to pre-covid levels has higher productivity and higher wages than the UK. Which might tell you that Britain’s problem is not that its benefit system is skewiff but that it’s the labour market itself that is broken, that remunerated toil in Britain delivers inadequate incentives. And by the way, we don’t have a benefit system in the UK that is remotely generous or lavish by international standards.

Research published only last week by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showed that we spend less on welfare as a share of GDP than the average for developed nations.

Also when it comes to the so-called replacement rate – what any unemployed person receives as a proportion of earnings from employment – only the unemployed in Australia and the US receive less.

Unemployment payments are significantly higher everywhere else in Europe, for example.

And another thing. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown, standard universal credit does not cover the costs of basics and essentials, for families or single people. “Ah ha!” you may exclaim, especially if you are the PM or chancellor. Surely this proves that there is a unhealthy incentive in the UC system for any claimant to prove that he or she has “limited capacity for work or work related activity” – to be diagnosed as unfit for work – so that their UC entitlements would go (for a single person) from £400 to £823, a month. But is an extra £106 a week the kind of incentive that would persuade a vulnerable person to permanently shut down their availability for work?

And if it were cut and partly offset by a rise in standard universal credit – which is what Starmer plans – would that persuade the vulnerable person to look for jobs?

That doesn’t feel compelling as an argument – especially in a world where most employers are reluctant to employ disabled people, let alone retain them on their books.

So another concern about the timing of these welfare changes is they come well before the findings of an equally important government review, that by former John Lewis boss Charlie Mayfield about how employers can be helped to retain and hire disabled people. Later this week he will publish his “discovery” document, about why employers struggle to keep in employment those who start to feel unwell, especially those suffering from mental ill-health. However Mayfield is still months away from recommendations.

In other words, it feels cart-before-horse to take cash from the disabled before a new support system is in place for employers to keep on their books those who are struggling.

As for the proposal to increase the threshold for those claiming the PIP, this will have an impact both on new claimants and those in receipt who are subject to review. How many disabled people could see their PIP payments reduced or withdrawn altogether?

Very large numbers indeed, according to the Resolution Foundation if it remains the Treasury’s aim to find net savings of up to £6bn by 2029-30. Louise Murphy of the Foundation estimates that more than 600,000 people, most on low incomes, would lose £675 a month on average.

Obviously this is all still hypothetical. Proper judgement awaits publication of the Liz Kendall’s policy paper tomorrow. But a change in entitlement on that magnitude will generate massive anxieties in those who both receive PIP and may need it in future.

None of this is to argue that any government should ignore the forecast that on current trends the cost of PIP is set to rise by £15bn by 2029 or that large numbers of especially young people are being excluded by disability from the world of work too young. It is to suggest that reforms that could reduce benefit bills in the long run will require large expenditure in the short term on mental health provision, skills, rewiring coaching and job search at the DWP, occupational health support for companies and so on.

A rational approach would see the costs of supporting the disabled rise in the short term. It would be an investment programme, not a cuts programme. With the supposedly all-important fiscal assessment looming, we’ll see if that’s what Starmer , Kendall and Reeves unveil. 2/2“

[Robert Peston]

A long comment, but important.

For me, the answer to all this a a “basic income” system, whereby all citizens (note, citizens, not any African or Afghan or similar just off the boat) get some modest amount of income regardless of any factor such as contribution, need, or “deservedness”.

That would also save vast amounts by enabling the shutdown of 95% of the DWP bureaucracy.

Late music

[“Come with me, and I will show you where the Iron Crosses grow“]

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Diary Blog, 15 March 2025

4 Comments

Morning music

Saturday quiz

Well, for once, political journalist John Rentoul beat me this week, scoring 7/10. I managed only 6/10. I did not know the answers to questions 1, 2, 6, and 7.

Tweets seen

Well, there it is. Pro-Israel, pro-Jewish Lobby mouthpiece Iain Dale, whose income is in the hundreds of thousands, telling others that £30,000 gross per year is OK…typical hypocrisy.

Rentoul obviously thinks that Reform will win the by-election. I should say the same. After all, look at the disaster that is the Starmer-stein government of cretins. “Rachel from Accounts” Reeves, thick and uneducated Angela Rayner, would-be dictator Yvette Cooper, idiotic moneygrubber Liz Kendall, thick Pakistani Shabana Mahmood and, to top it all off, thick-as-two-short-planks David Lammy! (see below)

Putin and Lavrov must laugh their heads off at that idiot (and the rest). Worse even than “Boris”-idiot, Liz Truss etc.

In fact, the surprise in the by-election opinion polling is that almost a third of people in that constituency still intend to vote “Labour” (Labour-label), even though there is nothing, in the present government, of real Labour at all. Just look at what they have done in the past 7+ months, and what they are planning to do. Even 2010-2024 “Conservative” governments were no worse.

I think that I may stick out my neck and predict that the by-election result will probably be 40%-45% Reform, 25%-30% Labour, 10% Conservative, 5% Green, 5% LibDem. Something like that.

True, a date has yet to be set for the by-election, and the mood may change a little, but not in essence (I think).

The Reform candidate will be under intense scrutiny; the System parties will be doing everything they can to discredit that candidate, and dig up damaging material about him (or her, though I would expect the candidate to be a man, in all likelihood). He (or she) had better be squeaky-clean.

It occurs to me that Reform may select Matt Goodwin. It would be a triumphant entry into direct front-line politics for him, and I note how Reform-loyalist his tweets now are.

I may be wrong, but I should not be surprised to see Matt Goodwin emerge, eventually, as leader of Reform. If he can win a Commons seat between now and the next UK General Election, that might see Goodwin actually become Prime Minister. Stranger things have happened.

As a matter of fact, the shorter the time between selection of a Reform candidate and polling day the better, thus giving Labour backroom spinners less time in which to dig up or contrive anything discreditable…

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/mar/15/runcorn-helsby-byelection-big-test-starmer-reform

“Lynne Bennett, 70, voted Labour in July, but this time, she said she would vote Reform, adding: “A lot of our family is going to do the same.”

“I won’t be voting Labour, put it that way,” she said. “And my family [has been] Labour, all our lives.”

[Guardian]

Any former Con voters still thinking of voting Con at the by-election would have to be utterly brainless. The Con candidate has no chance, will probably come only fourth, and may well lose the deposit (i.e. score under 5%). The only way for a Con voter to hit Labour at the by-election is to vote Reform.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/03/14/labour-on-track-lose-runcorn-by-election-to-reform-poll/

More tweets

That tendentious bloody bore and fake “woman” “cosplay”-artiste, Eddie Izzard, should be posted to somewhere obscure, permanently. North Korea sounds about right.

Thank God for small mercies (Izzard failed to become an MP). Had he succeeded, he would be on TV news constantly.

That pathetic nasty little nobody, Starmer-stein, trying to play the “world statesman” as his own country falls to pieces under his useless premiership…

Ha.

“Mark Lewis Lawyer”

The fallout from Lewis’s negligent and dishonest handling of the defence case in the matter of Wilson v. Mendelsohn, Newbon (deceased), and Cantor continues.

That photo, like others recently posted, is a decade or more out of date. Lewis, now an Israeli citizen supposedly resident in Eilat, Israel, is a shambling wreck in 2025, both physically and mentally.

Mandy Blumenthal and Lewis (they are now married) also conned Kuwait Air out of many many thousands of pounds some years ago by contriving yet another “antisemitism” scam: see https://www.timesofisrael.com/kuwait-air-to-compensate-israeli-for-refusing-to-fly-her-report/.

However, to continue logging one of Lewis’s more recent con-tricks:

See also:

Update re. “Mark Lewis Lawyer”— Questions Are Raised…

Readers wishing further detail should use the blog search box: “Mark Lewis”, James Wilson” etc.

Lewis, reprimanded and fined by the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal in 2018 for his malicious and nasty social media activities, fled to Israel, but maintains a legal foothold in England by reason of his nominal partnership in the small and mainly Jewish law firm known as Patron Law, based in a mews side-street in Notting Hill, West London.

As to one of Lewis’s two now-dissolved marriages, to one-time minor British radio and TV newsreader, Caroline Feraday, that fell apart after a year, in or about 2013 . She initially joined in his Twitter abuse of me, but now (having been financially and physically abused etc by Lewis), is washed-up, “fat and fifty”, and a single mother (Lewis was not the father), living in a small house in a “Nowheresville” Californian scrubland suburb, and working for a local radio station out there. #TenGreenBottles…

Incidentally, Caroline Feraday’s Wikipedia entry (heavily edited by herself) has more holes than a Swiss cheese (and Lewis is not even mentioned in it…).

As James Wilson notes, Lewis should have been struck off the solicitors’ roll years ago. That would only happen, though, if someone such as Wilson were to make an official complaint…

https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor/

#TenGreenBottles (?)

More tweets seen

“Celebrity lawyer” whose only assets in 2018 were, according to his own defence Counsel at the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal, his clothes, a mobility scooter, and a £70 a week private pension. Even his car was being provided for him via the DWP Motability scheme (funded by all those “antisemitic” British taxpayers).

Actually, he did, it seems, also own a flat in Israel at the time, but he seems to have concealed that fact from the Tribunal and, presumably, also from his own Counsel. Dishonest. Unfit.

His record is replete with failures as well as some successes (in easy cases).

Unless Wilson complains to the SRA, that is not going to happen. Perhaps, though, he will make formal complaint.

More tweets

That lady, the ex-wife of an ex-MP (Con), seems to have forgotten the terrible cruelty of the David Cameron-Levita/George Osborne years, 2010-2015, when nasty little jumped-up types such as part-Japanese Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, and the part-Jew “Lord” David Freud, caused such misery, pain, and death to the unemployed, sick, and disabled.

Starmer-stein “Labour”, though, seems to be diving even deeper into the abyss than did the “Conservatives” from 2010-2024 and especially 2010-2015.

The Conservative Party, now “led” (astray?) by a Nigerian woman chancer, is destined to disappear, I think. It now seems to have no natural constituency among the public (even the elderly are abandoning it), and its place in the political matrix seems to be based mainly on the fact that it has been there for nearly 200 years. No obvious “offer” to the people or, in particular, the voters.

I would go much further than that. For one thing, illegal migrant-invaders are only about a twentieth of the current migration invasion, perhaps less. Also, there are, shall I say, other groups that should not exist in the UK.

The Toby Young fake “Free Speech Union” grift-org was penetrated and permeated by the (((you-know-who))) element right from the start. It never said a word in support of a woman who posted amusing satirical songs, mainly about Jews (Alison Chabloz, imprisoned for the same), or in support of a man who gave a speech in Whitehall (Jez Turner, imprisoned for that), or a man who distributed stickers which even the Prosecution at his trial conceded were “not unlawful” (Sam Melia of Patriotic Alternative, imprisoned for that), or a man who ran an Internet “radio” podcast show (Sven Longshanks/James Allchurch, imprisoned for that), or a man who was disbarred for having tweeted 5 tweets, all absolutely true in their content (that was me), or a man convicted of having posted 5 supposedly partly “grossly offensive” blog posts, out of about two thousand (me, again— fined over £700 and forced to attend half a dozen or so pointless meetings with a Probation Service person, though she was very polite and rather charming, so be it).

The Slide of the English Bar and UK Society Continues and Accelerates
Diary Blog, 16 March 2024, including an account of my recent free speech trial and sentencing
Diary Blog, 17 March 2024, including the aftermath of my sentencing hearing

How about making it a “priority”, and indeed a given, to have only real British people in Parliament?

More tweets seen

Politics is the art of the possible, as they say. Reform UK is currently the best chance to destabilize the LibLabCon trick rigged system. Once that is done, enough, social nationalism can emerge properly.

Well, Shabana Mahmood, obviously, is not really British in the full sense, though born in the UK. Pakistani parents, and she lived until age 6 in Taif, Saudi Arabia.

Even leaving that aside, the qualifications of Shabana Mahmood to be mock-“Lord Chancellor” and Secretary of State for Justice are ludicrously lightweight, even for contemporary Britain: a Bar pupillage (traineeship) for 12 months, then a year as a low-paid “gopher” at a firm of solicitors. I do not think that she was even working as a lawyer of any sort between then (2008) and when she was elected as MP in 2010. So, at best, two years, and as the most junior of lawyers…

Talking point

Looks nice. Pretty sure that that hotel did not exist when I lived in the “tri-state region” (1989-1993, on and off). My first wife told me that, as a girl of about 10, which would have been in the mid-1970s, she used to ride her bicycle across to Roosevelt Island. Not sure that I would have allowed my daughter of 10 (if I had one) to do that. Roosevelt Island was fairly derelict then, as far as I know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island]

On the other hand, my own parents used to let me travel into Sydney from where we lived (Mosman/Cremorne) from age 10 or 11 (1967 and the succeeding 2 years) and, when I was aged 12/13, were letting me travel alone by Greyhound bus to Miami, and also walk alone around Acapulco and other places. Perhaps parents and other people now are less secure, more frightened (like society generally).

Starmer-stein is useless, completely idiotic. He has no idea at all…

Starmer, trying to play the “statesman” and “world leader”, is just making himself look even more stupid and even less relevant (or credible).

Bad joke: “When does an umbrella become a funnel?” (Answers on a charred, radioactive fragment of paper, please…).

Late thought

Watched a recent TV drama or thriller called The Au Pair the other day. Set mainly in the Cotswolds, though filmed in Ireland, it was quite good, and had an interesting twist in the plot near the end of the four 1-hour episodes, but —irritatingly— the makers felt the need to shoehorn some West Indians into the story (set in one of the least “diverse” parts of England!); the garden party scene was even more absurd (and even less credible). This country is just so ****** now. Made so, actually, by ill-intentioned individuals and groups.

Late music

[Red Army tank in the Crimea, 1943]

Alt-Right, basic income, Boris Johnson, Conservative Friends of Israel, daily blog, Defence, diary blog, elections, free speech, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Labour Friends of Israel, Matt Goodwin, MPs, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, the Great Reset, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 29 April 2024

33 Comments

Morning music

[painting by Vicente Romero Redondo]

Tweets seen

As one of the 80% or more of Conservative Party MPs who belong to Conservative Friends of Israel, Mel Stride is a spokesman for Israel.

As to the renewed attack on disability benefits, desperate clutching at straws by a government trying to appeal to people who know nothing, read the Sun, Star etc, and who might be persuaded to vote Conservative as a result of all this kefuffle.

I doubt whether it will work. People in all sorts of conditions of life want rid of this government and its venal, ignorant MPs, and are just waiting for the opportunity to put their “X” in any box but the one marked “Conservative Party”.

This contrived storm around disability benefits is also designed to deflect attention from the renewed slaughter in Gaza.

While there is a section of the UK electorate easily fooled by rhetoric against State benefits generally, those voters are mainly those already intending to vote Con at GE 2024; probably already within the Con “core vote” bloc which is about 20% of the entire electorate. That 20% can probably be characterized broadly as “over 65, retired, owner-occupiers, living in Southern England”.

Using the Electoral Calculus website, the most recent opinion polling indicates that, after GE 2024, the number of Con Party MPs might well be below 50. This contrived storm is a desperate attempt to seize back the initiative; I doubt that it will work.

“Ay, there’s the rub“… “Labour”-label is no real alternative, just a different set of freeloading, “Friends of Israel” puppets.

Mel Stride is the latest in a long line of smug, entitled yet completely ignorant MPs pronouncing on such questions.

A few tweets, or a blog post, will not wipe the smug and self-satisfied smile off the mug of a creature of his sort, and the state of free speech is such that I cannot really say what might.

I happened to see an old Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee vampire film yesterday. When it comes to most MPs, certainly most MPs on the “Conservative” benches, my feeling is similar to that of Peter Cushing and others “driving the point home” in such a film…

I myself do not receive any disability benefits, but understand the issues. How is it that a Cabinet minister with specific responsibility for those issues seems to be so lacking, both in knowledge of them, and in both reason and compassion?

Basic Income is obviously the way forward.

More tweets seen

Huge numbers of people (in my opinion, far greater than the number who favour Labour-label) want to stamp on and wipe out the “Conservative” Party. I am one of them.

If only 14% of the voters were actually to vote that way at GE 2024 (with Labour on a notional 45%, LibDems 10%, Reform UK 15% and Greens 7%), the result would be the Cons left with just 7 MPs! (Labour 541, LibDems 53, SNP 26, Greens 2). https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html.

Interesting. I think that those figures need nuance here and there, though: for example, the supposed “Serbians” in Germany may well really be not Serbs but Gypsies from Serbia. The same goes for supposed “Romanians” in that table.

I believe that military people refer to such methods (boobytrapping cans of food etc with explosives or poison) as “technical attack”.

When dealing with such as the IRA in the 1970s, or the ZANLA terrorists in the Rhodesia of the same period, it might have been justified (in rural areas where arms dumps or support stores were found), but surely not when applied as a form of terrorism on an urbanized civilian population.

I have seen the usual Jew-Zionist lawyers arguing narrow legalistic points about whether what the Israeli Jews are doing in Palestine and particularly in Gaza is “genocide” or not. The reality is that this is at least a quasi-genocide. If it falls slightly short of a fully-delineated, legally-rubberstamped “genocide”, that is really only of academic interest.

Incidentally, Jews wanted to destroy the German people in the 1940s. That was why the atomic scientists, almost all of whom were Jews, developed the first atom bomb. They did so despite there having been a small theoretical possibility that the first full test would set alight Earth’s atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth.

The atom bombs were designed to be dropped on Berlin and other German cities, not Japanese ones. Those working on them were willing to accept that much of Central Europe might be devastated and irradiated.

Ironically, the terrible and devastating defeat of the German Reich in the Spring of 1945 saved Germany and much of Central Europe generally from atomic devastation.

The Morgenthau Plan was another quasi-genocidal strategy, suggested by a Jew highly-placed in the F.D. Roosevelt administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Jr.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan (“An investigation by Herbert Hoover concluded the plan was unworkable, and would result in up to 25 million Germans dying from starvation“).

More tweets

Yes, he did. I once knew a woman in the private security industry, and she told me (about 5 years after the event) that people directly involved in the case had told her that Madeley certainly did it. Hearsay twice over, admittedly, but plausible all the same.

(I should add that, actually, Madeley never denied having taken the Champagne; he denied that he had any dishonest intent).

Why he did it, God knows. Excitement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Madeley#Personal_life.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/04/richard.madeley.memoir

There are many cases where a famous person, famous as an individual or because a member of a famous family, has been acquitted in circumstances where a not-famous person would have been convicted. One, remembered from my time in the USA was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kennedy_Smith. Guilty, in my opinion. but acquitted.

Another? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Salmond_sexual_harassment_scandal.

Late tweets seen

[“that which the Israelis are doing is ethnic cleansing”]

Anyone who supports Israeli war crimes, or the Jewish-Zionist lobby in the West, should be ashamed. That especially applies to those in official positions at all levels.

A Jew, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Blinken.

In fact, one of his grandparents was a prominent early supporter of Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Blinken#Early_life_and_education.

“So we are now in a different situation. We’re looking at Ukraine. Russia, in the last two and a half years has built up an enormously powerful and successful force. This is battle hardened, well-equipped, well-led, well-trained, highly disciplined.

The Ukrainian force has been annihilated. They’ve lost over 600,000 dead on the battlefield. There’s nothing left. The place is falling apart. And most of the money you were talking about will never get there. It’s simply sent through the washing machine over to defense and then to the defense industries, and then the donations flow back to the hill. So it doesn’t, you know, it’s not a question that we’re sending 60 billion and putting it into Zelensky’s hands now.

Now Zelensky and his friends will profit, no doubt about it. Let’s not kid ourselves. They’ll get some of it. How much? Who knows? I mean, this is the most corrupt country in the world. This is a country that has missing children, probably at this point in the hundreds of thousands. Prostitution, out of control. I mean, you’re talking about criminality on a scale that we in the west can’t even begin to imagine. It’s a tragedy. It’s the worst of all possible outcomes. The Ukrainian nation has been destroyed. Why? Because it’s mortgaged to our vanity.

In the west, Russia must be taught a lesson. Russia must be destroyed. Putin must be removed. Really? Why? Well, because we’ve decided that we want to strip Russia of its resources. So we turned Ukraine into a battering ram designed to stab Russia in the heart. The Russians woke up, not completely, but at the last minute, and decided, well, we probably should intervene here and stop what’s happening and signal just how serious this is, in our estimation. So they did, and they found out it’s much worse than we thought.

The force is much larger, much better trained. It has much more equipment. This is a far more serious problem. And as a result, they had to step back, establish a defense, build up their forces, and now they’re moving, and they’re going to finish the job.

Finish the job means everything from Odessa up to Kharkov is back in Russian hands. And those areas are originally Russian anyway, as has been pointed out. Your question is, what happens to the rest of the country that is west of the Dnieper River, this rump, Ukraine, and I think it’s going to become a giant demilitarized zone, a DMZ, similar to what we have between north and South Korea. There will be nothing there. There won’t be any fighting forces of any kind. And the Ukrainians can live there. And they may have some form of administration, but they’re not going to be permitted to ever again present a direct threat to Russia.

You pointed to the CIA stations and laboratories inside Ukraine. The Russians have overrun those. They know what’s there. They know what we’ve been trying to do. They know that we’ve been experimenting biologically with various weapons that could be used against them. This is insanity. And it was never necessary.

No one in the United States supported that. No one in the United States was consulted. So what do they do? They lie. They create a narrative. Russia is a revanchist nation. Russia is the Soviet Union reborn. We must stop it and defend democracy. That’s all crap. That’s nothing to do with any of it. And of course, Kiev is not a democratic state. Zelensky is not a democratic leader. He makes Stalin look good. So he’s going to go out of business. He’s going to vanish here over the next 30 to 60 days.

Whether he succumbs to whatever the Ukrainians decide to do with him on the ground, I don’t know. I’m sure that his foreign mercenaries that are surrounding him, special ops types from the United States and Britain and other countries, will do everything they can to keep him alive. But at some point, even they may abandon him. But the narrative persists because the media is an arm of the government.

This is very similar to what Noam Chomsky wrote about during Vietnam. Manufactured consent creates the illusion that this is something we all want. No, we didn’t want it. We didn’t ask anybody to open the borders. We did not ask for millions of people that we don’t know and know nothing about to come into the United States. And what do we do with millions of people who can’t find work? Especially if we go into the serious financial crisis that every sane person on the planet is predicting is coming.

What else can we say? I wish I could paint a positive picture.“

[Colonel Douglas MacGregor].

I agree with most of that. The Colonel has repeated pretty much what I have said on the blog, for 2 years, should happen.

Kiev-regime Ukraine— a shambolic, brutal, corrupt, Jew-Zionist-ruled dictatorship. It has to go.

Late music

Alt-Right, animal welfare, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, daily blog, diary blog, elections, free speech, historical, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Matt Goodwin, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, Rishi Sunak, Russia and Russian relations, society, Starmer, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 23 November 2023

8 Comments

Morning music

[painting by Volegov]

Tweets seen

“JUST IN: President Barack Obama’s former National Security Council advisor has been arrested after he stalked and spewed Islamophobic slurs at a NYC halal cart worker.

Stuart Seldowitz was charged with aggravated harassment, a hate crime and stalking after he threatened to deport a worker to Egypt. He also suggested he would have the worker’s parents tortured and asked if the worker “r*pes his daughter like Muhammad.”

He is facing a total of 5 counts. Seldowitz released a very weak apology saying he regrets that “the whole thing happened.” “I did have an argument with a food vendor. It is quite possible that it’s me. I mean, I’ve not seen the video, but I believe it’s probably me.” “If I had to do it all over again, I would not have raised the religious aspect.”

He also was caught on camera harassing a Russian. (first video below) What a terrible person.”

Jew, of course: see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Seldowitz.

Look at his career. Look at what he did at the State Department. No wonder that, in US-Israel relations, “the tail wags the dog”. “They” have infiltrated deeply into key areas of Federal Government— State Department, CIA, Justice Department etc.

I myself have been harassed and stalked for a decade by a pack of Zionist Jews but, instead of said Jews getting arrested and charged etc, I was the one finally charged (on trumped-up charges of having put “grossly offensive” cartoons and remarks on this blog). Very recently convicted, I may appeal in or after February 2024.

Notice how that Jew, Seldowitz, smiles almost at random, like a faulty machine with crossed wires. A trait I have noticed in the past.

The Jew’s comment about the Egyptian Mukhabarat (secret police) breaking fingers sent a bit of a chill down my spine, though I have to admit that they were reasonably polite when I myself was “not” arrested in Egypt 25 years ago: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/03/07/when-i-was-not-arrested-in-egypt/.

https://twitter.com/Campb37345Maree/status/1727469214997319795

Madeleine Albright. Jewish origins, though disguised by her parents; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright#Early_life_and_career.

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More tweets seen

That alone should damn and destroy the “government” of the Indian money-juggler, Sunak.

More importantly, how can our society even be maintained as it is now (let alone improved) when a million blacks and browns (the vast majority), and many quite “primitive”, enter the UK in a single year? The fact that a couple of hundred thousand individuals (many of them anyway either Brits emigrating, or Australians etc returning home) leave in the same year changes nothing, essentially.

This affects housing (overloaded), education (overloaded), social benefits and pay (the value of both lessened or just destroyed), transport (overloaded) and the actual average IQ-level of the country (lowered via the numbers of persons from relatively-low-IQ national and sub-racial groups invading the UK).

“2016 369,000

2017 270,000

2018 285,000

2019 275,000

2020 374,000

2021 456,000

2022 745,000 (revised up)

2023 672,000

Source: Oxford Observatory/ONS.”

Do not forget that those are net figures. The vast majority of entrants are blacks and browns etc. A large proportion of those leaving are either white people such as Australians, New Zealanders etc returning home, or (real) British people emigrating. The true demographic picture is therefore even more disastrous than appears superficially.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-nightmare-scenario.

Pretty much what I and others (BNP, Nick Griffin, Andrew Brons, the National Front, the British Movement etc, right back to the 1950s and Colin Jordan) have been saying for about 60 years (in my case since the 1970s).

We have been laughed at, violently opposed, frozen out of expressing our views and suggested policies (via the msm and, in more recent times, social media and Internet generally). Many have lost jobs and/or professional status. We have even been convicted (as in my own case this very month) on trumped-up charges.

I feel, however, that our time may be coming. Then, watch out.

When I testified at my own trial last Friday, I was asked by Crown Counsel as to whether the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan is “a conspiracy theory“. My answer was that it is not.

Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Austrian/half-Japanese, wrote a book outlining his plan. Today, you only have to look around you to see the practical application of it: Europe invaded by non-Europeans. Not repeat not some kind of accident. The aim? A mixed-race population, eventually, and ruled by a partly though not wholly Jewish ruling stratum.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalergi_Plan; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi; and https://ia600401.us.archive.org/21/items/PracticalIdealism-EnglishTranslation/Practical%20Idealism%20%E2%80%93%20English%20Translation.pdf.

Anyone my age (67) can see clearly the demographic difference between the UK in, say, the 1960s, 1970s, even 1990s, and the UK of 2023.

Look at the replies. Mostly angry at what has happened and what is still, every single day, happening.

One or two made an especially good point— that such polls also include the views of persons from what are still called ethnic minorities. If they were excluded, the results would be even more striking.

As usual, though, Goodwin does not focus on the groups mainly responsible for funnelling immigrants into Europe. “They” are not mentioned…

The (((influence))) in the UK is just ridiculous now. Look at how, for 24 or 48 hours, the Israeli flag was projected —by Sunak’s order, or the order of “those” behind him— onto 10 Downing Street recently. Pure supremacism.

Late tweets

Late music

Alt-Right, animal welfare, daily blog, Defence, diary blog, historical revisionism, Matt Goodwin, Russia and Russian relations, society, The Great Replacement, the Great Reset

Diary Blog, 20 November 2023

37 Comments

Afternoon music

Tweets seen

The Ukraine of the present Kiev regime is an object lesson in how “certain influences” can degrade and destroy a whole society within a few years, though in the case of Ukraine it had already been gradually degrading since at least 1989. The process accelerated after 2014.

That whole thing (policy, propaganda, intrusive snooping, “assessments” etc, and for both physical and mental sufferers) is a kind of macabre Roman circus for the “moronic masses” who read the tabloid newspapers. Labour under Jewish-lobby puppet Starmer seems even more likely to go further down that path than the “dead man walking” Conservative Party.

The mantra continues to be “get work, get work“, when paid work now, in the UK, for many, not only pays poorly (not enough to live on even modestly) but is not far removed from effective economic serfdom.

I should add that the above does not affect me personally— I have not had to suffer such bureaucratic tortures (much) in the past, and now at age 67 I have been a “State Pensioner” for a year or so, albeit that I get rather little in money terms, having been overseas for a good chunk of my adult life.

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More tweets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola.

I have to agree. Certainly every Old Etonian I myself have ever encountered has been a nitwit.

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/10/18/the-swedish-sickness-contaminating-the-rest-of-europe-what-is-it/.

Late music

Alt-Right, animal welfare, Bealtaine Cottage, daily blog, David Morgan, diary blog, environment, free speech, historical, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Labour Friends of Israel, MPs, Party Politics, permaculture, prepping, Reminiscences and Musings, Rishi Sunak, Russia and Russian relations, society, Starmer, The Great Replacement, the Great Reset, Uncategorized, white flight, wildlife

Diary Blog, 18 November 2023

37 Comments

Morning music

[Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire]

Announcement

As announced yesterday, the magistrates’ court trial to which I was made subject went badly for me. I cannot blog about that at present.

I am presently due to be sentenced at the end of January, or in February, of 2024. After that, I have 15 working days, i.e. three weeks, in which to serve any Notice of Appeal. Any appeal hearing, before a Circuit Judge (sitting with two magistrate-assessors), would be a complete rehearing, which would probably not happen until the Autumn of 2024, perhaps not until 2025.

I shall decide in February 2024, post-sentencing, whether I shall appeal.

Saturday quiz

Well, a poor score this week, a mere 4/10; I see that John Rentoul scored similarly. I knew the answers only to questions 2, 3, 4, and 7.

From the newspapers

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/24778179/moment-teen-kills-army-veteran-bus-station/.

“SHOCKING CCTV footage shows the moment a teenage boy killed an 82-year-old Army veteran with a single punch.

Omar Moumeche, who was 16 at the time, attacked Dennis Clarke at Derby bus station after the veteran told off his friends for messing about on an escalator.

The pensioner suffered a fractured skull as well as a bleed on the brain and died in hospital nine days after the assault on May 6, 2021.

Moumeche, now 18, was found guilty of manslaughter in July, with the judge sentencing the killer yob to two years in youth detention at Derby Crown Court today.

No further action was taken against two other teenage boys who were arrested at the time in connection with the attack.”

[The Sun]

[the defendant]

“Omar Moumeche“? So… Algerian, presumably. Why is he even here? Why is his family here?

Life certainly is cheap in Britain’s wonderful new “diverse” multikulti paradise…

Imagine what this country will be like in another 30 or 50 years. I am actually glad that I shall not be here to see it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12763583/Care-home-nailed-window-shut-stop-holding-Mums-hand-ex-BBC-star.html

Thus Britain, through the gradual acceptance of stupid “laws” and “rules” (invalid and/or misinterpreted) becomes a multikulti and “biosecurity” “poundland” police state.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12764141/Man-alive-EXECUTED-Death-Row-Alabama-failing-lethal-injection.html

“The only man alive who can tell you what it is like to be EXECUTED after three Death Row staff in Alabama spent 90 agonising minutes trying – and failing – to give him a lethal injection.”

[Daily Mail]

The U.S. Constitution is a bad joke in most respects. Here is one example. The 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment“. Then look at what has been found to be not “cruel and unusual,” such as these ghastly lethal injection executions and, of course, the classic one, the electric chair, which can take several minutes and may fry someone alive, in effect.

The U.S. Constitution, looked upon by most Americans as if holy writ, when in fact it was just a document cobbled together by a bunch of freemasons (many of them), partly (it is said) in a New York City tavern.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt8-4-9-10/ALDE_00000975/.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#Botched_executions.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12762433/four-million-kardashian-style-surrey-mansion-scotland-yard-notorious-corrupt-commander.html

Another symptom of the rot in plain sight now in our society.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12763029/gang-thugs-kick-punch-police-officer-McDonalds-Kingston-London.html

…and again…even more “diversity”. How wonderful…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12763249/migrants-dover-channel-crossing-rwanda-unlawful.html

“A total of 356 asylum seekers were intercepted by Border Force officials from seven boats and escorted into Dover, Kent, throughout the day.”

[Daily Mail].

…and still they come. Migrant-invaders. Migration-invasion.

Tweets seen

The wrongheadedness of the “austerity” drive since 2010, which badly damaged the UK economy, especially in the years 2010-2015, but was sold to the unthinking British people as “necessary”.

That was a long time ago. The world is now overpopulated, and particularly with non-Europeans. A reduction of the world’s population to about 10% of what it is now is very desirable, but of course the remaining population has to be mainly ethnically European.

Talking point

More tweets

I do not know the details of the case, but the penalties do seem extremely heavy, just speaking generally.

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2021/01/19/diary-blog-including-thoughts-about-prepping-on-the-individual-level/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2021/02/03/diary-blog-3-february-2021-including-more-thoughts-about-prepping/.

“You carry in your blood the holy inheritance of your
fathers and forefathers. You do not know those who
have vanished in endless ranks into the darkness of the
past. But they all live in you and walk in your blood upon
the earth that consumed them in battle and toil and in
which their bodies have long decayed.

Your blood is therefore something holy. In it your parents gave you not only a body, but your nature. To deny your blood is to deny yourself. No one can
change it. But each decides to grow the good that one has
inherited and suppress the bad. Each is also given will
and courage.

You do not have only the right, but also the duty to pass
your blood on to your children, for you are a member of
the chain of generations that reaches from the past into
eternity, and this link of the chain that you represent
must do its part so that the chain is never broken.

But if your blood has traits that will make your children
unhappy and burdens to the state, then you have the
heroic duty to be the last. The blood is the carrier of life. You carry in it the secret of creation itself. Your blood is holy, for in it God’s will
lives.”

[SS Verlag: material for instruction of the Hitlerjugend]

[SS-men take their sacred oath at midnight, Munich, 1940s]
The Tide is Coming In: Reflections on the Possible End of Our Present Civilization and What Might Follow

More tweets

https://twitter.com/Bucker1743914/status/1725941154653306929

If I am not mistaken, that is the India/Pakistan border. Both sides indulge in military march theatricals, a strange macho posturing performance.

“They” can never be believed.

Late music

Campaign Against AntiSemitism, daily blog, Defence, diary blog, free speech, historical, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Party Politics, Rishi Sunak, Russia and Russian relations, Starmer, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 14 August 2023

8 Comments

Morning music

[Odeonsplatz: watercolour of a Munich street scene, circa 1913, by Adolf Hitler]

Battles past

When I was a victim of a malicious Zionist complaint…
The Slide of the English Bar and UK Society Continues and Accelerates
Diary Blog, 15 January 2022, including an outline of the failure of the latest Jew-Zionist attempt to prosecute me

From the newspapers

B&Q apologises after books on ‘White Supremacy’ spotted in radiator advert

The System and its entourage of “woke” idiots is very fragile. Even a picture of the cover of a book is enough to trigger a panic.

Tweets seen

Unless a nuclear missile lands on Kiev one day.

So the “Conservative” Party has now alienated the” “young” generally (maybe 90% of those under 30), the working families, the unemployed, most voters under 60, both those who support “refugees” incoming and also those who do not want more migrant-invaders, those renting properties because unable to buy, those wanting clean rivers and other environmental improvements, and now those who are sick and/or disabled and who are not already anti-Con.

Many, perhaps most, of those getting disability benefits are over 60, i.e. the only demographic until recently still supporting the Conservative Party.

The trend of things electoral seems to be that the hard core of Conservative Party support for the expected 2024 General Election will be persons over 60 who 1. have no opinion either way about the migration invasion, who 2. are homeowners without any mortgage obligation, who 3. are not short of money, 4. who do not receive any State benefits at all (beyond the State Pension itself), and 5. who do not object to a government (at Cabinet level) largely composed of non-whites.

There is at least a possibility that Sunak will suspend the Triple Lock on State pensions, as he did when Chancellor. As I predicted on the blog at the time, that first decision cut away the bedrock of pensioner electoral support for (and trust in) the Conservative Party; the fall in Con Party fortunes dates from that time a couple of years ago.

I begin to think that Sunak will be lucky to keep even 20% of the popular vote, though I still see Labour as not offering anything much to the British people (and, after all, Starmer’s policies are not, in reality, going to be much different to those of Sunak).

I should think that, despite the fact that the Sunak government is doomed, the next election in terms of seats will be decided by many voters making their decision in the final days of the campaign.

https://www.itv.com/news/2023-08-13/could-disability-benefits-be-the-target-of-treasury-spending-cuts.

More tweets seen

I did not know that he was still around; I recall reading his book, Coup d’Etat, around 1978. Some British Army fellow “borrowed” it, and I was unable to get it back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Luttwak; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%89tat:_A_Practical_Handbook

It is a notorious fact that armies and states often prepare to fight the last war, the war already fought. In 1939, Poland collapsed within 5 weeks after powerful German forces invaded from the west, indeed from west, north, and south simultaneously on and after 1 September 1939.

The Polish forces were hopelessly outmanouvered and outgunnned. They withdrew to the southeast, only to be outplayed when Soviet forces invaded from the easterly direction on 17 September 1939. Faced with attacks from all sides, the Poles had no choice but to surrender de facto by 6 October 1939, though there never was a formal surrender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland.

Notoriously, the Poles, in one famous engagement, made a hopeless cavalry charge against the latest German tanks. The Germans were fighting (as it turned out) the Second World War, whereas the Poles were using the tactics not even of the First World War but of the 19th Century.

Scrolling on to 2023, we see the Polish Army more powerful than it has been for centuries, but its strength lies in armour, and in numbers. Second World War strengths. The Russians may or may not be able to equal that, not without general mobilization, but Russia also has well over 6,000 nuclear weapons of various kinds, mostly missiles. Nuclear missiles (etc) against tanks?

The old Soviet Union also had “suitcase bombs”, capable of destroying city centres to a diameter of perhaps two miles. Does Russia have a similar programme now? I do not know, but would not bet against it.

What is disturbing at present is that, even more than in 1939, the war drums are beating far louder than the plaintive cries for peace.

Not just in Poland and Ukraine, but across the world, especially in the USA and UK, and in the EU.

It is a warning, “a shot across the bow”. The fastest, most advanced Russian missiles, with nuclear warheads, cannot be intercepted at present. Stop fuelling the Kiev regime, stop getting entangled in war with Russia.

Late tweets seen

Late music

[Paris in the early 1940s, and under German occupation]
basic income, immigration, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Basic Income and the Welfare State– some ideas and reminiscences

3 Comments

Overview

At various times in history, there was either no social welfare system at all, or one which depended on spontaneous or systemized charity: individual alms-giving in the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other traditions; more organized supply of food, shelter or money as in the ancient Roman dole, Renaissance attempts at poor relief and the cheerless “workhouses” of 19thC England (which in fact continued in places in some form or another until the Second World War and the emergence of the postwar Welfare State).

It is a matter for historical debate whether organized “welfare” in Europe started with the mediaeval Roman Catholic church or in the 19thC with Bismarck, who set up in Prussia and then in the unified Germany a system not unlike those which emerged later in other European countries (eg in the UK under Lloyd George) and further afield: for example, Uruguay had one of the most generous “welfare” (social security) systems in the world until it collapsed in the 1970s under the weight of its expense.

However, the Roman Catholic and other religious and other non-State providers of “welfare” rarely give out money. They supply, variously, food, shelter, often educational and medical help.

The more modern “welfare” systems, eg in the UK, were based on the idea of social insurance: during a working lifetime, you paid in; in periods of unemployment, disability, sickness, old age, you were paid out. In the UK, this has become largely notional. Some tax is still designated as “National Insurance” payment but of course is just an extra type of income tax, fed straight into central funds and not in any way ringfenced.

Some anecdotal evidence

Like many people of my age (b. 1956) in the UK, I had to request State assistance occasionally in the past. This is or was far more common than generally supposed. The writer J.K. Rowling, now supposedly worth £100 million, has described how only the more generous –compared to today– social security of the 1990s enabled her to sit in cafes (partly to keep warm) with her baby, and to write the stories that not much later became Harry Potter. More egregiously, the vampire of Britain’s social security system, Iain Duncan Smith, has admitted that he claimed social security after having left the Army (ignominiously, having only achieved the rank of lieutenant after six years). In fact, Smith, or as he prefers to be known, Duncan Smith (the Duncan not being part of his original surname), claimed social security under false pretences, making him a hypocrite as well as what Australians apparently call a “dole blodger” and (as seen in the scandal of his fake CV and Parliamentary expenses) a fraud.

Certainly, there are those who abuse the social security system. In the past, that was far more common, because the almost Stasi level of control and surveillance that now exists for claimants in Britain had not then been put into place. The system was itself less punitive, less quick to demand impossible levels of enthusiasm for what is now and vulgarly called “jobseeking”.

I knew one woman, a citizen of the Soviet Union, who, having run away from her husband in New Zealand, came to the UK and claimed social security (including disability benefits). How could this happen? Well, her ex-husband, though resident in New Zealand, had a British passport (was British citizen) and had the right to reside in the UK. That meant that his estranged wife could do likewise, even though she had no other connection with the UK and had never even landed there! In fact, that woman never had a job (beyond odd occasional part-time jobs teaching Russian conversation at evening classes). She was supplied with monies for being slightly disabled (kidneys), monies for not having a job, monies for having two children of school age. She was also supplied with free housing. I encountered that person in 1981. She was, I heard, still collecting from the “British taxpayer” in 1996 and is almost certainly still collecting (now State Pension too!) in 2017…All monies legally-obtained, without fraud of any kind.

Another case. A young man (in the mid-1990s), from a very affluent family, who, nonetheless, was “unemployed” and so received whatever unemployment benefit was called then, as well as Housing Benefit for the large flat he occupied in Marylebone, London. In fact, the flat was owned (under cloak of a private company) by the young man’s mother (who lived in Surrey), while the young man had his own freelance work as both a designer and a male model. In this case, there certainly was some kind of dishonesty, both on the part of the young man and his mother. I doubt that they could do the same today, but I last heard of them over 20 years ago, so do not know.

The above two examples seem to show abuse of a system, but here is another case from the 1990s; less obvious, less easy to judge: a single mother of a school-age child, she about 40-y-o, with no relevant educational qualifications. This lady had a small, indeed micro, informal business, making coffee and selling home-made sandwiches to the ladies having their hair done at a large London hairdressing salon. A “Trotter’s Traders” enterprise (“no income tax, no VAT” etc…). About £200 profit on a good week, but more usually less. Not enough to live on, even then, paying Central London rent. That lady was getting State benefits as a single mother; she was getting Housing Benefit too. Now it could be said that she was “defrauding” the State, but her earned income was not enough to live on without State help. Had she given up her private work, the State would have saved nothing, the economy generally would have suffered from her not earning and spending, she and her son would have suffered considerably.

Basic Income

For me, the answer to the above lies in Basic Income, a certain amount paid to every citizen (nb. not to everyone just off the boat, or those who have walked through the Channel Tunnel). The level at which it is set will be, inevitably, contentious. Some will end up with less than under the existing system of State benefits etc. However, it has the merit of certainty. Everyone knows that x-amount will be paid weekly or monthly; those over a certain (to be decided) income can have the Basic Income payment clawed back via the tax system. It may be that everyone should also get free local transport.

The benefits of Basic Income are several. Every citizen will have the basic wherewithal of life: food, shelter, transport etc, without being forced to jump through hoops, without being bullied or snooped upon. The State will save vast amounts on administration, salaries of penpushers, maintenance of useless and expensive buildings such as those called (another vulgarity) “jobcentres”. There will be little scope for fraud and deception, because everyone under a certain income will get the same amount. If society wants to provide the disabled, sick etc with more than the basic amount, then an assessment programme (decent, honest, not cruel, unlike the existing ones) can be put into place for that.

This is obviously the way to go.