British Workers Are Getting Poorer While Criminals Get Richer.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has announced that wages in Britain have fallen further than at any time since records began. The main reason, they have suggested, is that workers have courageously taken pay freezes and even pay cuts to prevent widespread unemployment. If true that is very laudible - though most workers would probably say that they were never given any choice in the matter. One thing that they have failed to mention, however, is that shrinking wage packets is something that is confined only to certain people - more often than not in the public sector - while others have seen their wages soar. No prizes for guessing who's money has increased over the last few years - its the bankers and fatcat executives heading industries that were once owned publicly but have been stolen by the Tories and given to their already rich mates. While this is certainly grossly unfair given the role that bankers had in causing the latest economic slump and the role that executives have had in robbing ordinary people blind, it is also disastrous as far as recovering from recession is concerned. Lower wages means less demand in the economy and less demand means a continuation of the recession. Its not rocket science, though the Tories would like you to think it is. Nor is it difficult to understand why the Tories have taken the measures they have. There is only so much money to go around and they are determined that they and their rich mates will get more than their fair share at the expense of the rest of us and that we, not them, will pay for the economic disaster that they caused. Essentially the country is being mugged in broad daylight by a bunch of criminals who are actually proud of what they are doing.

The Great Confidence Trick Continues.

The face above is the face of the neoliberal capitalist system that has shattered the world economy and revealed itself as little better than a criminal conspiracy. Yesterday George Osborne delivered his fourth budget in defence of this unjust and unworkable system. Apart from 1p off beer and the new £10,000 tax threshold, which will benefit the rich just as much as the poor, there was little in it for ordinary people. While the poor are being taxed for having too many bedrooms, the rich are being given the opportunity to buy second homes with interest free government loans. This will "revitalise" the housing market Osborne tells us, but it is a measure designed only to support the sagging value of his own property portfolio. That nothing has changed and cannot change as long as the Tories warm their oversized backsides on the government benches is demonstrated by two facts that Osborne might not wish to discuss but are true nonetheless. The first fact is that Barclays Bank, at a time when they are being fined £290 million for the criminal manipulation of the Libor and Euribor rates, have given £39 million in bonuses to just nine executives. The criminals are rewarding themselves for getting away with it even as their customers have to pay the fines for their crimes. The second fact is that the government's drive against tax avoidance has raised the staggeringly small sum of just £20 million pounds per year. How could cracking down on tax avoidance produce such meagre returns? To begin with the real tax avoiders, the multi-nationals, have been almost totally ignored while HMRC concentrated on plumbers, tutors and ice cream vendors. This is what Osborne has been concentrating his efforts on behind the scenes - defending the banks and protecting the multi-nationals. While the rest of us are being squeezed for every penny Osborne and his rich mates are cashing in. The Tories think they have a right to govern but have no idea as to what their obligations to their country actually are. They are criminals in league with even bigger criminals and we, the people, are not their responsibility, we are their victims.

It's Not Easy Being A Tory.

Life as a Tory has never been easy. You have to be prepared to be so nasty that real human beings can't stand to be in the same room as you. Most Tories can cope with that because the rewards - a chance to be as nasty and vicious as you like, scrounging from the public purse and the overwheening sense of entitlement - are so, well, rewarding. But what makes life almost unbearable as a Tory is that you also have to be completely incompetent. Not the simple bumbling incompetence that marks out the moron, but the truly mind-numbing and totally brainless incompetence that marks out the true Tory. This week has seen some outstanding examples of classic Tory incompetence. Ian Duncan Smith has finally discovered that his nasty little scheme to make benefits unavailable to those who actually need them cannot be implimented because the science fiction IT programmes he hoped could be developed are sadly impossible. Worse yet he has now found out that his cherished "bedroom tax" is so vicious that it can't even pass muster by the legal profession - people who regularly run laboratory mazes on the basis that there are some things that even rats won't do. David Cameron, meanwhile, has discovered that food banks, unlike many Tory policy wheezes, are not so easy to hide from the public, while his plan to flog off the NHS while nobody was looking has been spotted after all. Then, to add insult to injury, Tory opposition to capping banker's bonuses has been scuppered by EU leaders who do have some idea what the word "fair" actually means. Fortunately for the rest of us the Tories are now busily engaged in the pastime that eclipses even their lust for damaging the country - stabbing each other in the back. Cameron's days seem to be numbered, happily so are those of the Tory party in general.