Tax Credits & Welfare: A bite-sized recent history

Osbo yesterday, as a bobby looks on with envy at him showing off his massive crayola box set.

Blair, 1997: we've got some ideas about welfare, thats more than those clowns in the bory's have in any case.

Public, 1997: Let's hear them. 

Public, 2003: we are still waiting; why not raise the threshold in line with inflation?

Brown, 2003: oh right...naw won't do that; I'm gonna take ever increasing piles of your cash and give some back to labour voters in deprived areas who have the time to fill out a convoluted multi-page form stating why you deserve it. I'm also going to increase the budget of HMRC past that of our standing army. I'm sure they'll manage it with the same focus and efficiency they do collecting debts from big business on money owed.

Public, 2003: that sounds like a shit idea. We'll take it.

Brown, May 2010: do you know that increase in tax threshold thing? Let's talk about it...

Public, May 2010: too late. bye now.

Brown, May 2010: awe...

Osbo t'Clown, first budget: right then, under duress from my Lib Dumb colleagues who I'm obliged to listen to due to the coalition agreement, here is some more of your money not being taken away in the first place (or as I used to dub it: "my mate Lord Fondleboys champers fund").

Public: YES! GET IN!

Osbo T'Clown, 2015 GE: YES! GET IN! Lib Dumbs get in the sea with ya!

Lib Dumbs, 2015 GE: Awe...

Public: yeah; Milliband? Really? Urgh...

Osbo, t'Clown, post-2015 GE: BTW public, I'm taking your tax credits. Peace out (2-fingered victory salute follows as he backs in to heavily fortified #11.)

Public: like f**k you are.

Osbo t'Clown: pretty much am, but it's OK I'll be raising your tax threshold to meet less than half the drop, so long as you aren't on minimum wage or unemployed or anything you'll be fine.

Public: like. f**k...

Cameron: 'hm hum...'

Osbo t'Clown: apparently I'm not doing that...for now...

Adam Smith Institute, Oct 2015(and me, pretty much for a decade or longer): why not a negative income tax? That way you can abolish your massively convoluted welfare system, abolish the DWP and recognise true hard work and determination in the tax system while remaining a progressive force for good?

Osbo t'Clown: sounds complicated, and I heard reducing government departments somewhere in there, so naw.

Me: but, but, you could abolish an entire government department: the admin savings alone for the DWP's £170Bn budget would be enough to give everyone a massive tax break; with all benefits folded into a simplified tax system the poorest would get a great deal too, all with fewer wage-takers needed!

Obso t'Clown: yeah. still no.

Me, pretty much continually: cretins, the lot of ye'.

The Derpuous Circle

...and then there's this cleft. (Raheem, not Bahar, who has been summarily dealt with elsewhere)

No one is for a minute saying this daft bint shouldn't be hoisted upon her own petard (a term historically related to the misfiring of seige munitions used to destroy rampart defences in revolutionary France, killing the ordinance man in the process), only that the banal, asinine assertions of her ilk are really starting to be shown for what they are: banal, asinine assertions, espoused by losers and maybe the rules designed to protect us all from incendiary calls to arms are a little overzealous.

I would rather have hate speach, racism and unsavoury types espousing all kinds of things in plain site so that we can easily tag and manage them, either through intelligence or through...intelligence. The number of losers on the web following this kind of idiot are VANISHINGLY small and mainly promoted by an echochamber of idiocy on social media designed to echo sentiments of such losers (I'm looking at you Twitter); we never see the very quick and powerful dispatch of their stupid ideas post-utterance but they are there, convincing the likes of joe-public to do the right thing, ditch their twitter ribbons and unfollow these cretins.

No Little Man

This was not a hatchet job of Farage - Sarah Montague quite fairly asked if Suzanne Evans was right in her belief that Farage was viewed as a divisive figure in politics; he then went on to moan about the landslide european election win in which UKIP convinced less than 1 in 10 of the available voting public to back his party in milking the eurestablishment teat for another 5 years and just how horrible the Bory's really area.

Having wrong-footed the entirety of the last election and the concomitant public opinion and with a little under 2 years to go he now goes on to claim that UKIP are planning on doing...."something, something, something...migrants are bad...we will wholeheartedly support...one of the candidate organisation to lead the #EUNo campaign" (or the "leave" campaign as it will now be known). Could he be more specific about who he wants to lead the leave campaign? "I haven't the foggiest"... I'm not convinced and I doubt anymore than the 1 in 10 will be too.

Now Master Kassam is now wrong-footing what needs to happen to "thwart" bad press with a BBC "watchdog" and a "bias hotline"; rather than address reasonable criticism yet again proving that the only thing worth reading on Not-so-Breitbart is Nero. His entire rhetoric is akin to my 6 year old daughter complaining that her cheeky 3 year old sister punched her then ran off; there is little that can be done to prevent a toddler being a sociopathic asshole and less so about thwarting it again in the future when there will inevitably be another ruckus; moaning at your enemies and the hand you are dealt won't solve anything and certainly not win you sympathy where you need it - the voting public. It just enforces the view of a bully picking on a whinging child, and by the time it is dealt with, if it ever is, the campaign will be long over,

As has been pointed out elsewhere, ad nauseum, the winning strategy will be to take the high ground; to appear less crazy than the opposition and laugh off their criticism and their overzealous focus on the minutiae of boring statistical and fiscal arguments; you aren't marching to New Jerusalem, you are marching to the door of a customs union and a place on stage of a wider global world. A strategy of whinging and voyeuristic obsession with bias in an organisation known for it's bias will help not one jot; laughing your ass off when the "stay" opponents for a seat at the kiddies table of Little Europe when you point out you want your rightful place with the adults as Global Britain is a winning strategy; looking conciliatory when they warm up the tired old 80s trope about "fax democracy" Britain and you point out that as one of the biggest economies in the world we would be doing the faxing, if we weren't already on email having thrown the fax machine along with all the spice girls CDs and global technicolor tshirts in the shed.

So can we please stop this?