Tag Archives: Iain Duncan Smith

animal welfare, basic income, Conservative Friends of Israel, Deadhead MPs, elections, MPs, Party Politics, Uncategorized

Deadhead MPs, An Occasional Series: The Therese Coffey Story

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It will be noted that among the names on the above list is that of Therese Coffey MP [Con, Suffolk Coastal], recently appointed as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The role has been held by deadheads before, idiots such as Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and Esther McVey.

So who is Therese Coffey?

Therese Coffey was born in Lancashire, to parents about whom neither Wikipedia nor her own website say anything at all. She was brought up in Liverpool, according to Wikipedia, which however says that she was at school both at St. Mary’s College, in the small North Wales town of Rhos-on-Sea, and at St. Edward’s College, Liverpool. Both were at the time private Roman Catholic schools. Coffey is a name of Irish origin.

Therese Coffey was awarded a B.A. degree by Oxford University (subject unknown), she having gone up to Somerville College; then (oddly, on the face of it) she acquired a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCL. Therese Coffey is often referred to as “Dr” Therese Coffey.

[Update, 21 May 2020: since writing the above, I have discovered that, while Oxford’s usual Chemistry degree is a 4-year course leading to a Master’s degree (M.Chem), the University does offer other chemistry-related 3-year science degrees

http://admissions.chem.ox.ac.uk/Data/Sites/21/images/mchem-chemistry.pdf.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing]

[Update, 7 September 2022: Wait a minute… it now turns out that Therese Coffey was asked to leave her Oxford college because she was not up to the course academically, and/or failed her exams! See update at foot of this blog post for more]

In England (though not in some other countries, notably Germany) it has always been considered infra dig to use the title “Doctor” unless one is either a medical doctor or some sort of working academic, scientist or clergyman. Unfortunately, there has fairly recently developed in the UK a strange affectation, of people insisting on referring to themselves as “Dr” when all they have is a doctorate in something (other than whatever they do professionally or whatever). So we have “Dr” Julian Lewis MP [Con, New Forest East], who holds a doctorate (D.Phil) in Strategic Studies. Another is “Dr” Louise Raw, “antifa” type prolific on Twitter, who holds a Ph.D. and whose special subject is one particular industrial strike in 1888. Now we also have “Dr” Therese Coffey.

Therese Coffey was awarded her doctorate in chemistry in 1998, at the age of 28. Her own website says that she was at one time a “management accountant”. She worked for Mars, the confectionery company, and for a subsidiary of the same, at which latter she was apparently Finance Director. She also did some work for the BBC. I think that we can assume that Therese Coffey’s non-political career was far from stellar.

Therese Coffey failed to become a Conservative MEP at the EU elections of both 2004 and 2009. She was, however, selected for the Conservative candidature at Suffolk Coastal (despite having been born and brought up in the North West of England, later living in Andover, Hampshire and having no obvious connection with Suffolk or East Anglia).

The expenses claimed by Therese Coffey in her first 6 months as MP were more than double those claimed by MPs in some other nearby seats. She seems to have kept her house and flat in Hampshire, which (it has been said of at least one) are being let.

Therese Coffey was one of the 72 MPs (almost all Conservatives) who both have an income of over £10,000 p.a. from rental property and voted out a bill requiring landlords to ensure that their properties were fit for human habitation! In other words, Therese Coffey is a parasite.

Therese Coffey voted to sell off woodland and forests in public ownership to private interests (the bill was dropped after a huge public outcry).

Therese Coffey has written a position paper recommending that pensioners pay National Insurance. She is a member of the extreme Free Enterprise Group within the Conservative Party.

Therese Coffey has been in favour of both Rupert Murdoch and gambling interests in the past.

Therese Coffey has from time to time bunged her own sister some money out of Parliamentary expenses for work (presumably) done.

Therese Coffey likes a “rock band” called Muse, it seems. I had never heard of them until now. Her interest in rock music seems bizarre, looking at her photographs and thinking of what can be gleaned of her personality (not very much). She certainly looks more like Patricia Routledge’s portrayal of the retirement-age Lancastrian private eye, Hetty Wainthropp, in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. However, Ms. Coffey’s liking for real ale (she is a member of CAMRA) is rather plausible. In fact, Ms. Coffey is only 47 years old, surprisingly, she having been born in November 1971.

I would have assumed that Therese Coffey is a lesbian, looking at this tank-like, Guinness-drinking, cigar-smoking person who likes football, but there is nothing I have found on the Internet to support such a conclusion directly; and she voted against “gay marriage” (and in that alone I support her, inasmuch as I feel that “civil partnership” provided whatever socio-legal comfort was necessary to deal with the inadequacies of the English law as it was in the previous century).

What disturbs me most about Therese Coffey is not so much what she has said, written and done, though that is bad enough, but what I have not seen from her: I have seen no intellectual curiosity that goes outside the box, for example any discussion of the need for Basic Income; neither have I seen anything else of intellectual interest from her. Admittedly, I have only been looking since her elevation to Cabinet (she was only a non-Cabinet minister earlier in 2019, and before that only one of the Conservative whips, traditionally a role for plodders…). If my view changes, I shall update this article, being by nature fair and just.

Therese Coffey may be the Cabinet minister with the lowest public profile. She is unknown to the general public. How long she will remain in Cabinet, I have no idea. If Boris-Idiot falls, “not long” is my guess. It may be thought unfair to dub someone with qualifications in both chemistry and accountancy a “deadhead”, but from the socio-political point of view I think that she well merits it. At any rate, as MP she is not going away, in that Suffolk Coastal is one of the safest Conservative seats.

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Coastal_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

https://www.theresecoffey.co.uk/about-therese-coffey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_Coffey

https://www.houseofnames.com/coffey-family-crest

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/meet-new-dwp-secretary-who-16912568

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/who-therese-coffey-what-new-20049187

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/09/praise-therese-coffey-single-guinness-drinking-charmingly-outspoken/

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/09/10/therese-coffey-the-worrying-votes-and-views-of-boris-johnsons-latest-right-wing-appointment/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(band)

https://womenalsoknowhistory.com/individual-scholar-page/?pdb=982

https://www.parliament.uk/biographies/commons/dr-julian-lewis/54

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

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/amber-rudd-replacement-work-and-pensions-secretary-therese-coffey-just-nasty

https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/news/suffolk-mp-defends-claiming-more-than-27-000-expenses-1-792686

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-vote-down-law-requiring-landlords-make-their-homes-fit-for-human-habitation-a6809691.html

https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/bye-then-therese-coffey/

She made extra money this way: https://www.speakers4schools.org/speakers/dr-therese-coffey/ (Why am I not surprised at her cupidity?)

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/new-dwp-chief-lfc-fan-16898413

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

Update, 17 September 2019

God, she is a ghastly bitch!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/therese-coffey-minister-uses-cruel-electric-dog-collar-wshlqs85d

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/dwp-chief-therese-coffey-blasted-20083806

Update, 24 October 2019

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/ministers-push-ahead-with-single-face-to-face-assessments-for-disability-benefits/

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/pip-assessor-told-claimant-to-ignore-her-irrelevant-suicide-attempt-then-challenged-her-son-to-a-fight/

Update, 20 May 2020

Update, 6 October 2020

Update, 13 September 2021

The deadhead strikes again, attempting to justify removing £20 per week from some of the poorest in the UK:

Just as well that she does not have the power to give DWP benefits claimants an electric shock via a dog collar…

Update, 6 October 2021

I could comment, but my words would probably be regarded either as “grossly offensive” or as “incitement” to…something or other…

One thing is for sure— standing outside the Conservative Party Conference holding up placards asking for this kind of political criminal to be nicer to people just does not work…

(and what about this?)…

Jesus Christ! Could it get any worse? Do you call for its nurse, or just put it out of its misery?

Update, 6 September 2022

Well, whether you call it “the irony of fate”, a concatenation of unexpected events, or just madness, Therese Coffey has not only survived the fall of “Boris”-idiot, and stayed in Cabinet, but has been effectively promoted to two new positions— Secretary of State for Health, and Deputy Prime Minister.

It seems that —unknown to me until today— Therese Coffey and the —it seems strange to use the words— new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, are rather friendly. I suppose that, in that snake pit, Liz Truss would rather have a few friends around her rather than potential backstabbers who might, however, actually be competent at the jobs occupied.

The Twitterati have not been kind:

As I noted, impliedly, in my blog assessment of Therese Coffey of three years ago, the keywords are callousness and incompetence.

https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1566188227760979977?s=20&t=fcWT6CzhbvLO_b8PDPizHw

So there it is. Those who follow my blog, or read it regularly, will know or perhaps can guess what I think (inter alia, that tweeting, blogging, or complaining and protesting, will not rid our country of incompetent, corrupt, or evil politicians). Let’s leave it there…

Update, 7 September 2002

Wait a minute… it now turns out that Therese Coffey was asked to leave her Oxford college because either she was not up to the course academically, and/or failed her exams.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/07/therese-coffey-had-to-leave-oxford-university-but-made-it-to-deputy-pm

So how did she get even a BA degree from Somerville? Or is that a total fabrication, like Iain Dunce Duncan Smith’s notoriously fake CV? Other MPs also have faked or partly-faked CVs.

To my mind, Therese Coffey warrants further and deeper investigation. She may be, or may have been, involved in other fakery, fabrication and/or fraud.

Still, it seems now, more than ever, that she fully deserves the title “deadhead“.

Update, 21 September 2022

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11234871/Health-Secretary-Therese-Coffey-end-8am-Glastonbury-esque-scramble-GP-appointments.html

Update, 4 October 2022

Conservative Party Conference 2022:

Well, there they are— the stupid and ignorant “ho”, Liz Truss, already living on borrowed time as (and merely posing as) Prime Minister, and equally-ridiculous “Secretary of State for Health”, Therese Coffey.

The completely decadent and broken (and Jew-Zionist dominated) British political system, 2022, in a single photograph.

Update, 12 October 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/11/therese-coffey-says-nurses-will-not-get-higher-pay-offer-as-strikes-loom

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/11/therese-coffey-to-drop-smoking-action-plan-insiders-say

https://twitter.com/proeurovegan/status/1579723776207749120?s=20&t=ilxm3f5QkAMcsrfIdcNDeg

Well, I have pointed out, repeatedly, on the blog, that critical words (tweeting, blogging etc) cannot deal with the Therese Coffey type.

https://twitter.com/mjtward19/status/1579778439523217409?s=20&t=ilxm3f5QkAMcsrfIdcNDeg

One wonders about the psychology of Therese Coffey, looking at her, and looking at the state of her. A fat and ugly woman, prematurely aged, who gets drunk, spills beer over herself, and smokes cigars while doing it. “Multiple frustrations” would be my armchair psychologist diagnosis.

What does it say about our system of “democracy”, and our system of MP and ministerial selection, that a ghastly and quite possibly evil woman of that sort can become, by a series of “chance” events, a Deputy Prime Minister?

The same goes, of course, for the stupid and ignorant “ho” presently posing as Prime Minister.

https://twitter.com/JohnDav54466583/status/1579943034309206018?s=20&t=ilxm3f5QkAMcsrfIdcNDeg

Interesting, but not surprising. My assessment of the bitch, from 2019, implied as much.

Had one not seen what has been going on in the governance of Britain since at least 2010, one would perhaps be surprised that someone as totally inadequate, dim, and also amoral as Therese Coffey could ever climb higher than the backbenches.

Look at the bitch! Look at her friend and boss, “ho” Truss, too. They are both embarrassments to this country, as are woolly-head Kwarteng and half-caste thicko James Cleverly.

Update, 23 October 2022

Update, 23 February 2023

The bitch’s latest disgusting statements:

https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1628766463958872067?s=20

https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1628765898663251978?s=20

Update, 21 May 2023

Indian money-juggler Rishi Sunak may now have taken over as bad-joke “Prime Minister”, but Therese Coffey has survived in Cabinet, unbelievably, and still sits there, stupid, incompetent, but immovable…

5 July 2024

At long last, the horrible woman has been binned by the voters, though narrowly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Coastal_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s

basic income, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

When Almost Everyone Says to a Government in Office, “Just GO!”

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Background

Today I happened to see the Daily Mirror report (link below, at foot of post) about a 9-year-old girl who telephoned a charity begging for help, even offering to work, in order to save her family. This was not in some ragged part of the former Soviet Union, not in Latin America, not (to be rhetorical) in the Britain of the workhouse and Ebenezer Scrooge, but that of Britain in 2018.

The Conservative Party seems to be relying on effluxion of time to disguise what it (and to a lesser extent, Blair-Brown Labour) has done in the past 20 years and especially since 2010 when the Con Coalition took power. However, the fact is that millions of people have been degraded, insulted, even killed or forced to suicide by the hugely expensive and ill-conceived “welfare” “reforms” of Iain Dunce Duncan Smith. He and those guilty with him, have not as yet faced popular justice. Perhaps some form of justice will in the end catch up with him, and Esther McVey and Danny Alexander, and David Gauke, and the Jew “lord” Freud etc.

Then we have Brexit, which I (for social national revolutionary reasons) favour. The present government has proven itself incompetent in respect of that, too.

Armed forces: scarcely functioning, thousands of experienced officers and other ranks made redundant, so that, now that few want to join what was the TA (now, The Reserves), the government is forced to open Army recruitment widely to those from Commonwealth countries who may never even have visited the UK.

NHS: plainly in managed decline.

Immigration: scarcely slowing.

Housing: far too expensive and, in the private rented sector, the hunting ground of buy-to-let parasites.

A future for the young: where is it?

Wherever one looks, the present government has failed miserably, along with its predecessors of the past 8 years. Labour looks scarcely better, true, and has even decided to keep the pathetic Universal Credit scheme if elected, but in a general election, an incompetent government is still at a disadvantage vis a vis an incompetent Opposition.

Labour is no longer unelectable

It was said for years that “Labour is unelectable” under Corbyn, a strange statement in view of the fact that Brown and Miliband also both failed to make it electable. The idea seems to be that Labour has to appeal to the middle of the road floating voters to be electable, and that Corbyn does not appeal to that voter. I do not think that the misnamed “Conservatives” can rely on that. Many of the Corbyn-Labour policies do have Middle England appeal: strict rail regulation or even renationalization, strict controls on utility company bills, making large transnational enterprises pay decent tax. These and other policies speak to those forgotten Middle England voters. Labour has not quite thrown the poor under a bus, but its focus is certainly now on winning over the vital marginal seats. It has recently supported Phillip Hammond’s tax plans on the basis that Labour plans to hit the wealthiest 5% (in income terms) and not, say, the most affluent 10%, 20% or 50%.

The Conservatives have demonized the poor, especially but not only the non-working poor. The Con Party is now more than ever the party only of the wealthy few, the buy to let parasites, the Jews too (95% of whom have deserted Labour since Corbyn took over), the wealthy London foreign cosmopolitans of various types etc.

As to the traditional Conservative Party Middle England vote, that is ebbing away. The reasons are clear: the “middle classes”, at least at the lower end, are sinking, and the Government is letting them drown. A cartoon from a few years ago made the point.

b-cisxdiqaa7qj_-jpg-large

On the above facts, it is more than likely that the Conservatives will not be the largest party after the next General Election. The Conservative vote shrinks with every passing month. There is a sense that, as with the 1990s Conservatives, the present Theresa May government has outstayed its welcome so that almost everyone is saying “GO!”.

The poorest 10% will mostly vote Labour anyway. The wealthiest 5% (and probably 15%) will mostly vote Conservative whatever. The bulk of workers in the middle are the battlefield, and one which Labour looks increasingly likely to win.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/universal-credit-girl-forced-beg-13546259

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/universal-credit-people-are-being-pitchforked-into-poverty_uk_5bdc7c7ae4b01ffb1d01f672?utm_hp_ref=uk-homepage&ncid=fcbklnkukhpmg00000001&guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvLzM0dkk5OE05aTM&guce_referrer_cs=ffONymDD0om9x8VezJud7A

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/iain-duncan-smith-claimed-breakfast-1810086

Deadhead MPs, elections, MPs, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

System MPs In The UK Parliament–Mediocrity (At Best)

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I was moved to write today because of a TV programme which I did not in fact see but which has been widely reported. On BBC1 Question Time, a “Conservative” MP, one Ross Thomson [Con, Aberdeen South], was put in his place by Kezia Dugdale, the former leader of Scottish Labour. Thomson had been claiming that the simplistic Universal Credit idea thought up by (incredibly thick) Iain Dunce Duncan Smith MP would “get people off benefits and into work”. Kezia Dugdale had to point out that, so far, 37% of people receiving Universal Credit are in fact employed (but underpaid). Thomson just ignored the facts and ploughed on, a characteristic of, especially, “Conservative” MPs of recent years (Priti Patel is another egregious example).

Reading the above, I was impelled to look up this Ross Thomson. I found that the little twerp (now 31) only ever worked outside politics for 2-3 years, which he spent working for Debenhams stores and in a call centre. Once he stepped onto the “politics” gravytrain in 2012 and at age 25 (as Aberdeen local councillor, then MSP, then MP), he gave up trying to (pretending to) make a living in the more usual way.

His Question Time humiliator, Kezia Dugdale, was herself only employed on the political fringe (as a campaign manager etc) for a while before becoming a full-time politico (finishing as disastrous leader of Scottish Labour: the System looks after its own— she is now a columnist for the Scottish Daily Record newspaper). It goes beyond the scope of this blog post to muse overlong as to why so many women in frontline UK politics are lesbians.

The above thoughts led on to my wondering, not for the first time, why mediocrity rules in UK politics. Indeed, to be merely mediocre at Westminster is to be winning! Most MPs and “peers” do not even achieve mediocrity but are disastrously poor in every way.

The main problem stems from the First Past The Post voting system, which was fine in the 19th Century —simple policies and issues, uneducated voters, clear party divisions— but is simply out of date and not fit for purpose today. In 21st Century Britain, someone can be pro-animal welfare, anti-mass immigration, for private enterprise but pro-State control or regulation of utilities and transport. For which party does that voter vote? Conservative? Labour? Green? UKIP? LibDem? The one-size-fits-all politics is not our reality any more.

Furthermore, the FPTP voting system means that, once the MP is in a seat, it is almost impossible to dislodge that person.

Then there is the selection procedure, which varies from party to party, but which (even in a supposedly non-System party such as the now-finished UKIP) excludes anyone thought “racist”, “anti-Semitic” etc. Also, it is to be noted that some of the worst MPs have come out of restricted shortlists such as the Conservative Party “A” List. Even so, the sheer lack of quality of Westminster candidates now is staggering. Take some fairly random examples that have caught my attention over the past few years:

  • Justin Tomlinson [Con, North Swindon]: a comprehensive school, followed by Oxford Brookes University (the old Oxford Poly), where he obtained a bog-standard “business” degree. After that, he managed a small nightclub in Swindon, Wiltshire, bearing the name “Eros”(!) as well as (according to his own CV…) operating “a small marketing business” and serving on the local council; elected MP 2010.
  • Louise Mensch [Con, Corby 2010-2012], a scribbler (in the past) of braindead “chick-lit” “novels”, who was placed on the Con “A” List by David Cameron-Levita. The people of Corby, her new seat, were sold a pup. She was a poor constituency MP and was accused, while on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, of being in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch (who later employed her as a columnist). She had to admit, belatedly, to have been an abuser of hard drugs which “had messed with her head”, one possible reason why she was and is known as someone who frequently gets even basic historical and political facts wrong. Resigned as MP in 2012 after about 18 months in the position and moved to New York (domicile of her Jewish American second husband), where she failed in various internet activities and was employed for a while as “columnist” for the UK Sun “newspaper” before eventually being dismissed or at any rate not retained.

LouiseMenschDrugging

  • Liz Kendall MP [Lab, Leicester West]. On paper well-qualified to be an MP, the reality is that this woman is as thick as two short planks, as her appearances on BBC This Week have made painfully obvious. Pro-Israel to the hilt (possibly part-Jewish), her 4.5% vote in the Labour leadership contest made her a laughing stock.
  • Iain Duncan Smith MP [Con, Chingford]: this part-Japanese serial liar and obvious sociopath has managed to parlay a sub-par secondary education (at “secondary modern” and Merchant Navy schools) and six years as a (surely mis-gazetted?) Guards officer (where he stuck at Lieutenant) into becoming an MP and, in time, Cabinet Minister! His faked CV (claiming degrees from the University of Perugia and the so-called “Dunchurch School of Management”) became notorious only after he had become politically prominent. His cretinous attempts to “reform” the “welfare” system have led to administrative chaos, dishonesty (flowing from the top…) and misery for millions. A stupid, greedy and evil man.
  • Diane Abbott [Lab, Hackney North and Stoke Newington]: Jamaican; somehow got into Cambridge University, where she scraped a degree in History. Less than two years as fast-track trainee at the Home Office (obviously unable to hack it), then a “race relations officer” for the then NCCL; then she did some researcher and press jobs for a few years. A ghastly woman: pro-abortion, a moneygrubber, expenses blodger and freeloader, openly anti-white. Now quite possibly Home Secretary of a Corbyn-Labour government!DKWRQw3WsAIEnNI

I could list dozens, possibly hundreds, of other examples. The fact is that 90% of the House of Commons could be removed with no negative effect on anyone but those purged. The contrary, in fact.

Notes

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bbc-question-time-clash-tory-13406586

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Election_results

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/12_december/19/newsnight_ids_cv.shtml

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

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

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

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

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

Addendum 20 October 2018

…and look at this one, a near (?) mental case

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_O%27Mara

Update, 7 December 2018

More about the aforesaid little twerp (Ross Thomson MP)

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeen/1624720/aberdeen-mp-ross-thomson-tricked-by-underhanded-yet-blindingly-obvious-tv-prank/

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/3582471/ross-thomson-tory-mp-instantgrammes-drugs-channel-4/

see also

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/12/02/troop-cartload-barrel-or-family/

Update, 23 December 2020

Ross Thomson is no longer an MP. The reasons are elucidated here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Thomson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations

A Labour MP, Paul Sweeney (who lost his seat in the 2019 General Election) claimed in November 2019 (rather suspiciously, a full year after the alleged event) that in 2018 he had been sexually assaulted by Thomson in a bar within the Palace of Westminster.

Thomson denied the charge and was later cleared by the Commons Standards Committee, but in the meantime his local Conservative Party chairman refused to sign Thomson’s nomination papers. This meant that he could not stand as a Conservative candidate.

In the event, the short-notice Conservative Party candidate was beaten soundly by the SNP candidate at the 2019 General Election.

Thomson has since returned to what seems to be complete obscurity.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-54731242

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/former-labour-mp-lodges-appeal-23153724

basic income, ethnostate, immigration, Reminiscences and Musings, society, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Use and Abuse of the UK Welfare State

2 Comments

I am in favour of the Welfare State, in principle, but that just begs the question. Even the Iain Dunce Duncan Smiths and Esther McVeys of this world go that far, at least in public utterances. The devil really is in the detail here.

The famous economist, Milton Friedman, once said that you can have open borders, and you can have a welfare state, but you cannot have both. That it is even necessary to posit that shows how far the more socialist-minded people in the UK (and elsewhere in Northern Europe) have travelled from reality. Many “refugees welcome” dimwits actually believe that an almost endless number of “refugees” or others can enter the UK without affecting State benefits and services (as well as road and rail congestion etc). This seems to be based on the idea that the immigrants will work, pay taxes, in short become normal citizens or quasi-citizens. Angela Merkel thought the same, only to find that most “refugees” were

  • incapable of any but the most basic work (such as fruit-picking) because of their linguistic and/or educational levels;
  • unwilling, in many cases, to work, in a situation where the State provides free accommodation, free utilities, free transport for some, free food for some, as well as pocket money on quite a generous level.

CgFqWSRXEAICTlz

The UK does not provide social security (or, in our new Americanized speech, “welfare”) benefits on the generous scale offered by Germany or Scandinavia etc, but the fundamentals are similar.

A personal story: when I was much much younger, in my early twenties, I became acquainted, via a lady I then knew, with a friend of hers (more accurately a woman who had attached herself to her like a limpet). Now this other woman was not British in any sense except that she had married a New Zealander who had (presumably because taken there from the UK as a child) a British passport. The woman was in fact a Jewess from Moscow, who had somehow got to know the New Zealander while he was on a holiday trip to the Soviet Union. We need not examine motives and reasons, but that couple married and went to live in New Zealand. They had two children. After about four or five years, the woman left her husband, left New Zealand and flew to the UK.

When I met the woman in question, I believe that she had been in the UK for a couple of years. She washed-up in Downham, an obscure suburb in South-East London, where the local council provided her with a council flat. I have no exact idea of what other benefits she was granted, but they would have included child benefit and some form of income support. She never had to work, though at first she did a couple of evenings a week teaching Russian at some place or other which I forget (possibly Morley College in Westminster Bridge Road, or the City Literary Institute in Drury Lane, both of which adult education centres I myself frequented at the time).

Scroll on a few years. This “Russian” Jewish woman, with no real connection to the UK at all had been given a quite decent house with gardens in Grove Park, a better part of the same borough. She had been impelled to move, apparently, by a visit from her father, a nuclear scientist (which sounds impressive, but the Soviet Union had legions of them) who had told her that she would have a better flat were she to return to Moscow! Of course, there she would have had to work…anyway, I visited the new house once (out of duty rather than choice)  and so saw it, despite being not much liked by the woman. The woman had been diagnosed with a kidney complaint (though I never saw her looking unwell) and so no doubt managed to claim some form of incapacity or disability benefit; and had also acquired a car (almost certainly also funded by the State). In addition to all of that, the woman and her children also had all the usual UK benefits of free education and health. I do not think that she bothered to do much work after that, maybe a little part-time teaching or occasional low-level interpreting.

Now it might be said, perhaps especially by people more naturally drawn to socialism than capitalism, that she was entitled to these things because lawfully resident in the UK. Perhaps, but look at it from the wider point of view: she had never contributed anything to the UK, just taken. The small part-time jobs here and there can be discounted as having been de minimis. She leeched off the UK’s people since about 1979 and, the last I heard (a couple of years ago), that situation remained unchanged, probably to this day. In fact, she would now be “entitled” to a State pension and Pension Credit. Call it 40 years of being a millstone round the neck of the British Welfare State.

Now multiply the above by millions, the millions of often completely useless people from the backward hordes imported into the UK for decades. For example, it is reported that only 20% of the huge numbers of Somalis in the UK (how? why?) are employed at all.

I repeat, I do favour a decent Welfare State, but it can only exist if

a. the economy can support it;

b. it is not swamped.

The above two conditions really come down to the same thing now, or very nearly so.

For me, the answer to the work and income challenges of robotics, computerization, Internet shopping, AI etc is the Basic Income concept, but Basic Income, like the existing Welfare State, will decline and may fail unless it is restricted to those who are at the very least, genuine citizens.

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basic income, immigration, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Basic Income and the Welfare State– some ideas and reminiscences

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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.