The News In Shorts

How the news would look if everyone stopped waffling and told the truth.

Tuesday 30 April 2013

Tories Load The Dice.

There is nothing a Tory enjoys more than humiliating those less fortunate than themselves. For the Bullingdon Boys there was nothing more uplifting and satisfying than burning fifty pound notes in front of homeless people. Turning their worst instincts to fund tax cuts for themselves is, therefore, a natural progression for them and if they can make it sound trendy and scientific at the same time so much the better. That is the basis of their latest wheeze - making the unemployed take psychometric tests. No better than astrology or phrenology, psychometric testing is mumbo-jumbo - pseudo-science of the worst kind on a par with that other trendy corporate nonsense, graphology. The unemployed are also told to investigate the "ethos" of companies they might wish to apply to for employment. For those with above average intelligence this is a fairly simple exercise. All you have to do is read the company's mission statement, the corporate sound-bite thought up by the marketing department to give the illusion that they have a soul. Unfortunately many unemployed people never had the benefit of a private education, never attended Oxford, Cambridge or any other university and rarely consider the "ethos" of the company that they are applying to for a shelf-stacking job. Essentially the unemployed are being divided into two groups, with those not middle-class enough to deserve help being ritually humiliated before being deprived of any state support at all. The Tory party prefaced this nasty bit of business with a prolonged propaganda campaign designed to make us all believe that the unemployed are feckless scroungers who deserve our contempt. In fact the Tories are merely teaching us to enjoy their favourite pastimes - pulling the wings off flies and drowning kittens.

Sunday 28 April 2013

How Britain Was Lost On The Playing Fields Of Eton.

Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, once famously observed "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." The inference was that the battle was won because of the dedication and genius of those educated at that school. Of course it was utter nonsense. The battle, like all battles, was won by the guts and sheer bloody-mindedness of the rankers who did the actual fighting rather than sitting on a horse patting each other on the back. And, if not for the timely intervention of the Prussian army commanded by Gebhard von Blücher, the battle would have been lost. Now we have another moron telling us that only those educated at Eton are fit to lead the country. This particular chinless wonder is Jesse Norman, the Tory MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, who has claimed that Eton is better than other schools at teaching "commitment to public service". But, as Mike Griffiths the headteacher of Northampton School for Boys observed, "I have not heard of many old Etonians becoming social workers because they are so wedded to the idea of public service, have you?" No, me neither. What Norman was actually saying is that Eton instills a sense of entitlement in its pupils and a firm belief that only they deserve wealth, titles and nice shiny little gongs for simply doing a job. His further observation that "Things like rhetoric and poetry and public speaking and performance are incredibly important to young people succeeding in life," gave the game away. No mention of work, no mention of effort and no mention of any practical skills. For the Tories its all about the art of the confidence trick and the glib skill of the dodgy car salesman. They are to a man strangers to real work but they certainly know how to talk a good fight. Which is why people still believe that Waterloo "was won on the playing fields of Eton" while the truth is it was won in infantry squares by impoverished boys who played in the back streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester and, dare I say it, Berlin.

Saturday 27 April 2013

Privatisation And Other Fairy Tales.

British politics is largely run on myths and legends. You know the sort of thing - low wages has no effect on demand, taxing rich people returns less revenue, disabled people are all secret Olympic gold medalists, unemployed people are all lazy and feckless. By far the most ridiculous one, however, is that privatised businesses are better and more efficient than publicly-owned industries. This so-called "efficiency" comes with a high price tag as your gas, electricity and travel bills show all too clearly. What has been largely hidden by all governments since 1979 is the added costs we are all paying. Rail privatisation has not only increased prices to eye-watering levels, it now turns out that we are subsidising it to the tune of £1 million per week while they happily pay their shareholders £305 million per year in dividends. Essentially then rail privatisation has turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in diverting money from the public purse into the pockets of the already wealthy. It is not only a rip-off it is fraud on a huge scale - and you are paying for it. This is not surprising since the nation's best orgainised crime syndicate - the Tory party - thought the whole scam up in the first place. The question that then arises is why succeeding Labour governments have failed to do anything about it. Today it was revealed that MP's have access to a "hardship fund" totalling nearly £6 million. How they might fall on hard times is difficult to imagine - especially since they don't pay for anything and fund their property portfolios by shoving their sticky fingers into the public purse. "We are all Thatcherites now," David Cameron told us last week but it would seem that what he was actually saying is that they are all crooks and shysters now. MP's might be out of touch, but they are certainly in touch with their criminal instincts and have absolutely now hesitation in helping themselves to your money - irrespective of whatever colour rosette they wear on election night.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

How The Tories Steal Your Money

Iain Duncan Smith, Britain's most successful scrounger, has announced that there are 1 million unemployed people in this country who refuse to work. A terrible indictment of lazy Britain it lacks only one small element - there is not a shred of evidence to support it. Then again the Tories never allow inconvenient facts to get in the way of a good alibi for their own greedy bone idleness. Meanwhile, while we are all lazing about and looking to get something for nothing, the Tories have cornered the market. Michael Gove, for instance, has cobbled together a bunch of his rich mates to work as "advisors" for the Ministry of Education and is paying them over £1,000 per day. Their job is to bully schools into becoming academies but get paid whether they succeed or not while, as an added incentive, they are paid through "personal companies" so they don't have to pay tax. Most of us might well be shocked at this obvious scam but not so our Chancellor, George Osborne, who has personally vetoed tax fraud investigations when they involve his favourite large corporations - that is any corporation that bankrolls the Tory party. Intent of recreating the financial merry-go-round that got us all into this mess in the first place, the Tories were hoist on their petard today however. Their plan to sell off branches of Lloyds Bank to the Co-Op fell apart when the buyers suddenly pulled out of the deal. Their reason? They feel that the Tories have made such a balls up of the economy that they simply can't take the risk - though they couldn't resist also citing the non-existant re-regualtion of the finance sector that the Tories are pretending to impose. Which just goes to show there really is no honour amongst thieves.

Sunday 21 April 2013

Liam Fox Demands More Advantages For Crooks.

Liam Fox has made a call for Cameron to harness the "popularity" of Margaret Thatcher and back "wealth creators". His ideas include lowering taxes for the wealthy and deregulating their activities which, he assures us, will magically release their "entrepenurial energy." In other words the same old self-serving claptrap that has wrecked the world economy over the last 30 years. The real problem is that the majority of the ultra-rich, which are the people that Fox is talking about, are not wealth creators. They are wealth hoarders who are more likley to bury their money in tax-free off shore accounts than invest them in risky business ventures. Few of them are entrepeneurs at all. Most of them use other people's money to gamble on various shady financial deals which deregulation has allowed them to fix through various scams. All this, of course, is par for the course for a Tory but it is worth reminding ourselvers who Dr.Liam Fox actually is. In the 1980's while a student at Glasgow University he resigned from the Glasgow University Union in protest when the Union allowed gay students to join it. Appointed as Minister of Defence in 2010, it quickly came to light that he had fraudulently claimed £22,476 in mortgage interest payments to which he was not entitled and which gave him the dubious distinction of having he largest over-claim on expenses in Parliament. As the Minister for Defence Fox claimed a staggering £19,000 for mobile telephone calls and was found to be claiming expenses for a London flat that he was renting out to someone else. Finally in 2010 he was forced to resign when it was discovered that he had used taxpayers money to fund trips abroad for his friend, Adam Werritty, and that Werritty had been allowed illegal access to sensitive information and to pretend that he was one of Fox's official advisors. In other words Dr Liam Fox is a crook while his call for Cameron to "encourage" so-called "wealth creators" is nothing more than a bid for the legitimisation of his own shady dealings. In other words Fox is a typical Tory seeking to elevate having no principles to the level of a principle.

Saturday 20 April 2013

Neoliberalism Is Dead! Long Live Neoliberalism!

Neoliberalism is as dead as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It died when the banks collpased in 2008, taking the world economy with them. After 30 years of pass the parcel, profits that never existed and a property bubble based on bad debt, the whole rotten edifice that the greedy, the smug, the self-satisfed and the idiotic had erected for their own benefit came crashing down. The truth of that was self-evident - everyone could see it and you had to be a fool not see what it all meant. In Iceland the people staged a democratic revolution, arrested the bankers and their poliical allies, told the IMF to go spin on it, created a new constitution and then set about rebuilding their shattered country and economy. In Britain the greedy, the smug, the self-satisfied and the idiotic managed, with the help of a turncoat LibDem party, to slip through the back door of 10 Downing Street and seize the reins of power. Looking at the lessons that the crash of 2008 taught us, David Cameron and George Osborne decided that the best thing to do was to recreate the whole rotten thing all over again and, what's more, they decided that the poor should pay for it so the wealthy could keep their offshore bank accounts safe. The utter insanity of this soon became evident and it wasn't long before even the IMF was calling on Osborne to ease austerity. Every policy that the Tories have inflicted on the country since 2010 have been specifically designed to protect the wealthy against the consequencies of their own greed and stupidity. Every policy has been designed to make the poor pay for their mistakes. The truth of this is glaringly obvious when Osborne's plan for reviving the mortgage market is scrutinised. It is designed to recreate the property bubble that got us into this mess int the first place. It is designed to increase house prices and does nothing to aid first time buyers. A one-eyed moron can see that the way to get Britain out of recession is to build affordable housing so that supply catches up with demand and prices fall to a point where first-time buyers can afford them once again. Cameron and Osborne are not morons - they are simply greedy, smug and self-satisfied while their blindness is entirely willful. What is undeniably plain is that this country needs more of the same like it needs a hole in its collective head and needs Cameron and Osborne like it needs the Plague.

Friday 19 April 2013

Was Cameron Right? Are We All Stupid Now?

Cameron's observation at Margaret Thatcher's funeral that "We're all Thatcherites now" caused a storm of contoversy this week. Labour leaders grew red in the face, blustered and muttered "How dare you"! To demonstrate his adherence to a more socialist view of the economy Ed Milliband swung into action and told supporters in South Shields today that a future Labour government couldn't promise to repeal the bedroom tax. He was also at great pains to distance himself from those on the left who had celebrated Thatcher's death telling them that "I think we need to conduct our politics in a respectful way." Prseumably he was talking about the respect that the Tories have shown the people of this country over the last three years which has included such respectful policies as viliifying the disabled, reintroducing slavery for the unemployed, rewarding criminals with bonuses and state honours and stealing the NHS. Austerity, it would seem, is here to stay whether the electorate vote for the right, the left or the centre. In that sense Cameron was quite correct, except the "we" he referred to was the political elite. The rest of us have our doubts and it seems we have good cause. George Osborne's austerity policy, it turns out, was based on an influential 2010 economic study that seemed to show that a national debt of more than 90% of GDP causes an economy to contract. Unfortunately it now appears that the authors of the study, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, made a slight mathematical mistake and instead a national debt of 90% actually leads to a growth rate of 2.2%. This highlights two interesting characteristics of neoliberal economists - they can't count and they are completely ignorant of history. The fact that nations cannot cut their way out of recession was proved quite conclusively during the 1930's and, despite neoliberal efforts to pretend that the 1930's never happened, they actually did. So, when Cameron said "We're all Thatcherites now" what he was actually saying is "We're all as stupid as she was now."

Wednesday 17 April 2013

The Tories £10 million Party Political Broadcast.

The Tory party showed its respect for Margaret Thatcher today by turning her funeral into a £10 million three ring circus paid for by the taxpayer. Former colleagues who had queued up to stab her in the back in 1990 now queued up to tell us what a wonderful person she was. Chief amongst those was Cecil Parkinson - a man so two-faced that even his wife and mistress couldn't trust him. According to him she was the kindest person he ever knew and one who always "had time for the little people." Far from the "Iron Lady" of popular myth she was in fact a complete softy who cried bitter tears over the problems of her country. She was, to sum up the eulogising about her today, a complete saint whose every waking moment was spent worrying about the welfare of her people. Unfortunately for most of us "her people" seemed to consist almost entirely of distressed millionaires, foreign dictators and those eager to acquire valuable national assets at knock-down prices. "We are all Thatcherites now," David Cameron told us hopefully, relieved, one must assume, that the funeral diverted attention away from the latest rise in the unemployment figures and a warning from the IMF that George Osborne's insane austerity programme was undermining economic recovery. It seems a pity that, while Margaret Thatcher was such a saintly genius, we got her evil and less intelligent twin sister as our Prime Minister and that her successors seem to have listened to the wrong one.

Monday 15 April 2013

The Bizarre World Of Right-Wing Politics.

There are some days when you'd be forgiven for thinking that the world has suddenly turned upside down. The reason for this feeling, unfortunately, is that it is often true in the bizarre reality that is Toryworld. We are constantly being bombarded by opposing and mutually exclusive "facts". While there are two million unemployed in the country, half of whom are under 24, and controlling immigration is a right-wing fetish, we are now being told by the "Telegraph" that retirement age should be increased to 70 because we have a shortage of workers. In a country in which homelessness is on the rise and is about to get worse and where young people are completely shut out of the housing market because of house prices and a shortage of supply, the Tories are moving heaven and earth to increase those same house prices. In an economy all but destroyed by privatisation, low wages and deregulation the Tories want more privatisation, pass laws to create "a more flexible workforce" and look to deregulate ever more industries while rewarding those who break existing if weak laws with ever-growing bonuses. This is the strange world where less money in consumers pockets has no effect on demand, taxing rich people at higher levels returns less money to the Exchequer, houses stand empty and abandoned while homelessness is on the rise, criminal bankers are rewarded with bigger bonuses and better tax breaks and a £10 million state-funded funeral for a widely loathed ex-Prime Minister whose own children are worth millions is better value for money than funding a hospital. This is "having your cake and eat it" politics, a "heads I win, tail you lose" political philosophy in which the Tories provide themselves with a plaster for every sore. This is what naked greed and selfishness looks like when elevated to the level of policy.

Sunday 14 April 2013

Why The Tories Think They Must Govern.

Liberty is a slippery thing it would seem. It is especially so if you happen to suffer from Toryism. To a Tory freedom is about being free to be as greedy as you like. Rich people have to be free - poor people have to be "governed". There has been much talk this week because of the death of Margaret Thatcher that Britain was becoming "ungovernable" in the 1970's. What the Tories mean by this, apparently, is that ordinary working people were becoming far too vocal in their demands to be treated with respect. This was bad for two reasons. First it meant that the Tories, always in love with their own voices, were finding it increasingly difficult to dominate all discussion and debate. Secondly, being treated with respect meant that ordinary people might get paid what they are worth for the jobs they do. This was bad for business. Company executives and shareholders were finding it increasingly difficult to get their hands on as much money as possible and it had to stop. Thatcher, therefore, decided to smash the Unions, set Britain "free" and make it "governable" once again. And it all went swimmingly. The Unions were smashed. Wages were forced down. Prices were forced up. Public industries were stolen from the people and given to various corporate criminals. Britain became "governable" once more. Now it is the corporate world that is ungovernable and you would think, therefore, that the government would take action to bring it to heel again. Unfortunately not. When Tories talk about Britain being "ungovernable" they mean that ordinary people have to lose their freedom so that the Tories and their mates can be free to steal, scrounge and appropriate whatever they can get their sticky fingers on. Business for them cannot be "ungovernable" because rich people have a divine right to be as nasty and vicious as they like. You only have to look at Margaret Thatcher and her unspeakable family to see that business is business and why it is important to them that you must be "governed". Now the rich are free and the poor are once again being governed while the economy, starved of the demand it needs to thrive, is plumbing new depths. So the next time a Tory starts pontificating about "freedom" you'll know what he or she are actually talking about.

Saturday 13 April 2013

Thatcher Insults The Country One Final Time.

Some of you may have noticed that Margaret Thatcher died this week. The Tories immediately turned to plan B which involved rewriting history, loud claims that she "saved the nation", ignoring all evidence that she was widely loathed and demanding that everyone should show respect. Unfortunately respect for others, alive or dead, was not one of Margaret Thatcher's strongest attributes and it's something that the present Tory party has no concept of at all. The criticism that has been heaped upon her was certainly no worse than that heaped on Michael Foot by the Tories when he died. Despite this various dough-faced Tories have lectured us all that her memory should be respected on the basis that she was a "conviction politician." So was Bin Laden. Can you imagine defending him on the basis that "you might not agree with his policies, but you have to respect his achievements"? Having been told that she saved the nation from - well us basically - do the Tories really believe that we should celebrate the growing divide between the haves and the have nots that she so assiduoulsy encouraged? It was she who set the bankers free to rob us all, privatised publicly-owned industries so they could pick our pockets and gave us the freedom to be as poor as she wanted us to be. Now, as a final insult to the people of Britain, we find out that her £6 million mansion in London was actually owned by a shadowy off-shore company and that, therefore, there will be no inheritance tax to pay. What else could we expect? It is a mean and shabby end to a mean and shabby life.

Thursday 11 April 2013

Thatcher To Get A Socialist Funeral.

In keeping with the new socialism for rich people Margaret Thatcher will be buried at the expense of the country. While the rest of us get untrammeled capitalism the privileged have once more dipped into the public purse to fund yet another jamboree for themselves. While MP's stuff their pockets with expenses, bankers trouser millions from the public purse, so-called entrepeneurs help themselves to our taxes for running industries stolen from us and the rich avoid paying tax, Margaret Thatcher will get a publicly funded funeral so her kids can keep their money. Didn't she have an insurance policy with the Co-Op for funeral expenses? Apparently not. Hopefully they'll put her under a very large rock so she can't get out again, but there's no guarantee. There is already talk about erecting a statue to her, perhaps on the famous unoccupied fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The News in Shorts would suggest somewhere a little higher to avoid scrap metal thieves with a sense of humour. The question is would £10 million be too much to see the back of her? How many useful people such as doctors and nurses or teachers or even refuge collectors be funded for £10 million? Anyone of them would be better value than her.

Monday 8 April 2013

Thatcher Is Dead.

Margaret Thatcher is dead. The woman who killed the idea of Britain, destroyed entire communities, let loose greed as a political philosophy and hated the British people so much she sold them down the river is dead. Francois Mitterand was so apalled with her that he described her as having "the eyes of Caligula." The pity of it all was that the British voters did not see it and voted her into power three times. It was she that unleashed the neoliberal economic insanity on Britain, destroyed its industry and hung our entire economic future on the financial industry peg. Now, thirty years later, we can all see how well that went. Was she evil or just mad? In fact she was neither, just a narrow minded ideologue who chose to believe an economic thesis that provided the necessary alibi for the greedy, smug and self-satisfied. The best that can be said of her is that she was a deeply stupid woman who truly believed that a national economy was just like a household budget. So stupid was she that she championed the Poll Tax, the most deeply idiotic and politically caghanded policy since the Middle Ages. Margaret Thatcher is dead - but George Osborne isn't and he is still flogging the same dead horse that Margaret Thatcher introduced as a gelding in 1979. Margaret Thatcher id dead - its time to put a stake through the heart of her idiotic economic theories once and for all. Margaret Thatcher is dead and its time to bury her with as little fanfare as possible.

Saturday 6 April 2013

Iain Duncan Smith: "I Defrauded The Benefit System."

Iain Duncan Smith, the most successful scrounger in Britain today, has admitted in writing that he once defrauded the benefit system. Claiming that he lived illegally in a bedsit with his wife when he was unemployed, it seems it didn't occur to him that this must also mean that he hadn't declared her income when he made his claim. While we are supposed to believe that he lived on the breadline while married to the daughter of a Lord, he is also telling us all that the only way to survive a Tory government is by lying and defrauding the state. No wonder he's so obsessed with benefit fraud - he knows all about it. It would seem then that IDS was no stranger to larceny when he plundered the public purse to pay his wife as his "Diary Secretary" when he was leader of the Tory party. Not only is he a thief and a serial fraudster, he is also terminally stupid. While this is about par for the course for a Tory, you have to wonder how long it will be until Cameron "reluctantly" accepts his resignation. And, after that, can we look forward to his prosecution for benefit fraud?

Bankers Rewarded For Criminal Activity.

The three criminals who ran HBOS but still like to pretend that they were real bankers have been rewarded today with a nice tax cut courtesy of the Tory party. Even though the Banking Standards Commission says regulators should consider barring Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson from future banking jobs, the men themselves are too busy counting their bonuses to give a damn. Responsible for losses amounting to more then £40 billion, the Tory party has decided that they need more money to make them feel better while poor people are facing cuts both to wages and benefits and are facing the prospect of soon being homeless. We asked George Osbore, mainly responsible for this shockingly unfair outcome, for a comment; "We feel sorry for people like Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson whose only crime was that they got caught. Up until 2008 they were able to disguise their criminal activities as normal banking and no one would have been any the wiser if it wasn't for a bit of bad luck. When you compare what they were doing to the crimes of the poor it is only fair that they should be rewarded. While they were merely stealing money - which is what they are trained to do - the poor are all just like Mick Philpott. They all have 17 children, have never worked a day in their lives and murder their children at the drop of a hat. That is why unfortunate millionaires have to be rewarded not matter how incompetent they are while the poor have to be beaten into submission. It's only fair, there's no alternative, we're all in this together etc etc." As a matter of interest we also asked the Chancellor why he parks in disabled spaces wherever he goes; "Because I can. My only regret is that there aren't any disabled people to actually park on. While they lie crushed and bleeding beneath my Landrover's tyres they could then polish my wheel trims. It's about time they did a day's work."

Tuesday 2 April 2013

Is Iain Duncan Smith A "Stunt"?

Iain Duncan Smith, described by his closest friends as "a smug, self-satisfied and arrogant moron with no redeeming features", has today described a petition to make him prove that he can live on £53 per week as a "stunt". Claiming that he had once had to live on unemployment benefit, he conveniently forgot to add that he had already married his wife Betsy at the time and that she just happened to be an heiress and the eldest daughter of the 5th Baron Cottesloe of Swanbourne and Harwick. Nor did he mention that she was paid a suspiciously large amount of money from the public purse as his "Diary Secretary" while he was leader of the Tory Party. He now lives in a £2 million mansion in Buckinghamshire given to him by his father-in-law, earns £134,565 a year and drives a morgan worth £80,000. A dedicated scrounger who has lived off the public purse for most of his working life and is not above a little larceny when he can get away with it, this freeloader is now taking great delight in making poor people even poorer while he boasts endlessly about his Christian principles. In other words he's a typical Tory.

Tories To Scrap Minimum Wage.

The Tory party has come up with yet another creative way to flatten the British economy even further. Their latest idiotic idea is freeze or even scrap the minimum wage so they can suck even more demand out of the economy. This ingenious method of kickstarting economic activity, unkown to anyone with even a GCSE in Economics or with a single working brain cell, has been suggested by the Department of Business. We asked a spokesman from the Department for an outline of their thinking; "Thinking? Oh, we didn't actually do any of that. We believe that thinking is an overrated method for decision-making. What we did was discuss what we would like the world to be like and pretend that if we do something really unexpected, not to mention stupid, then everything will miraculously improve. We believe that demand is on old-fashioned concept that should be replaced by wishful thinking. The basic idea is that if we can completely destroy the economy then there will be no need for wealthy people to pay any tax at all. The only problem we have is finding a way to stay wealthy as the economy collpases around our ears. We believe this can be achieved by flogging off the NHS and by investing the money in a new business concept called Soylant Green. We had the idea during the recent food scandal. If people don't even know when they are eating horsemeat, then how will they know they are eating their own poor relations and neighbours? Imagine a world in which the sick, instead of being parked in a hospital at taxpayers expense, are instead sent straight to a food processing plant where they can make a valuable contribution to society. This is just another example of the courageous Tory Party making much-needed tough decisions. Leading economists have recently warned that the capitalist economy is in danger of eating itself. Our solution is to eat the poor instead. I'm sure you'll agree that there's simply no alternative."

Monday 1 April 2013

The Tories Create A Wasteland And Call It "Fair".

The three men pictured above - Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron and Gideon (George) Osborne - are paid from the public purse, pay as little tax as possible, live in houses paid for by you and me, claim for food, mortgages, booze, utilities, furniture and even Sky TV on their expenses. By any definition of the word these men are scroungers of breathtaking ability. Today these men have begun a pogrom against the poor hiding behind a slogan that equates the word "fair" with the word "wealthy." If you are wealthy, like them, and are dedictaed to scrounging from the state you are protected. If you are poor and forced to live off benefits even when you have a job you will be thrown to the wolves. If you are wealthy like HM Queen, live off the state and have thousands of spare bedrooms you will remain untouched. If you are an MP and have a two-bedroomed apartment in London paid for by you and me you will remain untouched. If you are widow whose children have left home, you will have your housing benefit cut and, if you can't make up the difference, you will be thrown onto the street. If you have a dialysis machine in a spare bedroom to keep you alive, you will have your benefits cut and, if you can't pay, you and your machine will be thrown onto the street. If you are a millionaire, especially if you bankroll the Tory party, you will get a tax cut today worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and, if you are a banker, you will be allowed to plunder the business for "bonuses". But if you have the sheer cheek to work in a low paid job, courtesy of the "flexible workforce" laws in Britain, you will see your tax credits cut while your tax bill, levied indirectly through the price of petrol, utilities and the new "bedroom tax", are all set to rise. This is the true face of "We're all in this together." This is the true face of Cameron's "Big Society". This is the Tory definition of "fair". They will see people in this country starve even as they put their hand in the till and fill their bottomless pockets with public money. They are scroungers, pure and simple.