If nearly four million people are on sickness and disability benefits, then they have my deepest sympathy. "Joint pain"? I have extreme and worsening arthritic pain, constantly day and night, from the top of my neck to the tips of my fingers and toes. I must have had it for 10 years, and I have had another nasty physical health condition for longer.
Times without number, all the way to appeal, I have been turned down for any sickness or disability benefit. If that many people can get such payments, then good luck to them, and Britain clearly has a very, very, very serious public health crisis that would not be helped by any return to the Cabinet of Yvette Copper, the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment. Rachel Reeves is also our blood enemy.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Funny, they only have "very, very serious public health crises" in countries with absurd welfare states that have huge working-age populations sitting on benefits. In Manchester, there are 40,000 job vacancies being offered yet unemployment is at 18%. Over four million British people languish on sickness and disability benefits while we bring in hundreds of thousands of foreigners from countries that don't pay millions of their people not to work, in order to do the jobs our people won't do.
ReplyDeleteWe've sacrificed our own nation by opening our borders to the world, all for a welfare state.
To which most people would reply, "Well worth it." If you do not spontaneously define Britain as the Welfare State in general and the National Health Service in particular, then you are not culturally British.
DeleteYou are probably grew up between Darkest Peru and the utterly eccentric world of a 1980s boarding school. Or you are one of those immigrants who heavily populate the right-wing thinktank circuit, trying, with brief "success", to run Britain without ever having sought British nationality.
A United Ireland now turns on how to keep up the welfare spending in Northern Ireland, and especially the sacrosanct NHS. That is the definition of Britishness according to the Unionist electorate. Scottish independence always has turned on that. And it always will.
People only get ill where there's a welfare state?
DeleteThey truly believe this. That it creates the demand. Yes, really.
DeleteIf you do not spontaneously define Britain as the Welfare State in general and the National Health Service in particular, then you are not culturally British
ReplyDeleteTears of laughter at this. Britain is defined by a failed health system that produces the worst outcomes in the developed world such that no other country has ever emulated it, and a welfare state that keeps our working age population idle is “culturally British”?
They are both the signs of a nation that is finished, as Peter Hitchens says. Neither institution existed when millions of young men volunteered to fight for our country in two world wars and they understand what it was to be culturally British” and what they were fighting to defend more than anyone alive today.
Even he wasn't born that long ago. When the votes of those young men did in fact swing it for Attlee while the War was still going on. The knew what they were fighting for.
DeleteAs for the rest of your comment, boilerplate stuff from the International Right, which prefers not to think about the real Britain because it finds it so disappointing. Have you ever even been here?
“They knew what they were fighting for”
ReplyDeleteThe men of World War One and Two weren’t fighting for something that didn’t exist at the time.
And whose existence has coincided with our rapid decline as a Great Power and as a nation.
Has it? Very few people would agree with you about that. Britain is a never-ending source of disappointment to the International Right, the immigration that we really could do without it. Its hangers on in the British media are the only commentators who might fairly be said to want to turn Britain into somewhere else, although not into a Christian country, which would require immigration beyond anything that had previously been imagined.
DeleteThere are only two people alive in Britain who were alive at the end of the First World War, and they were both little girls at the time. Extremely few people have any adult memory of the Second World War, either. But what is incontrovertible is that those who were still fighting it voted overwhelmingly and decisively, not only for everything that the Attlee Government went on to do, but also for a manifesto that included the following:
"The Bank of England with its financial powers must be brought under public ownership, and the operations of the other banks harmonised with industrial needs [my emphasis]."
"Labour believes in land nationalisation and will work towards it."
"We must consolidate in peace the great war-time association of the British Commonwealth with the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. Let it not be forgotten that in the years leading up to the war the Tories were so scared of Russia that they missed the chance to establish a partnership which might well have prevented the war."
They knew what they were fighting for. And so do we, because they voted for it.
You’ve unintentionally made me laugh out loud and you don’t even know why. David Lindsay really thinks millions of working class British men volunteered to sign up in answer to Lord Kitchener’s call in 1914-three times more than he asked for-to fight for the NHS and the welfare state?
ReplyDeleteThat’s probably what much of the ahistorical Left really believes. Since many “comprehensive school” history lessons start after World War Two and teach nothing before it.
Bless.
DeleteFour million working age people paid to be idle while we import millions to do their work and an expensive health system that produces among the worst health outcomes in the developed world is hardly a source of national pride. It’s an embarrassment. East European migrants are far harder working and better educated than the lazy ignorant British products of a welfare state and comprehensive schools.
ReplyDeleteThe end of World War Two heralded Britain’s inexorable decline as a Great Power and a nation. Long before we had a welfare state or an NHS we controlled over three quarters of the Earth’s surface and two thirds of its trade and an English pound was worth 12 Swiss francs. That was the Britain millions signed up to fight for in 1914 and 1939. It’s not a coincidence that we lost our international prowess since the era of comprehensive schools, and mass welfarism.
Nobody would sign up to fight for this.
People do.
DeleteDuring the two World Wars, they had to be conscripted.