Tories Put Armed Forces On Zero-Hour Contracts.

Philip Hammond, the Tory Minister for Defence, appeared on the Sunday Politics Show today to explain yet another idiotic Tory scheme designed to save those who support the Tory party from paying any tax. The scheme involves putting Britain's armed forces onto zero-hour contracts under which they will only get paid if they're actually being shot at. What used to be the Territorial Army and is now the so-called "Reserve" will form the backbone of our armed forces. As a scheme to save money, however, it suffers from some very grave shortcomings. Reservists called up for active service will have to leave their real employer in the lurch for the duration. To overcome this Philip Hammond suggests that the employer will have to be compensated by the taxpayer. In other words the pay that used to go to full time service personnel will now find its way into the hands of businessmen. Businessmen, of course, pay as little tax as possible whereas service personnel, like all employed people, have no choice but to pay their taxes. In addition to this home goal the demand that wages to ordinary people create in the economy will be lost as business takes the new public money shoved into its greedy little hands and puts it into various offshore banks. This so-called defence strategy then, far from saving money, is nothing more that yet another scheme to transfer public money to the private sector. In the meantime the defence of this country will be increasingly dependent on volunteers who will be expected to leave their workplaces at the drop of a hat and be shoved into some God-forsaken Third World hellhole to defend an oil industry that is ripping them off at home. Don't you just love neoliberalism? No, me neither.

Philip Hammond Blames The Victims Yet Again.

In an outrageous example of disingenuous Tory twaddle Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, has claimed that those who borrowed money from the banks must shoulder their fair share of the blame for the financial meltdown. Ignoring the fact that the banks have actually been allowed to get away with their criminal behaviour scot-free by this bunch of posh boys and, indeed, have continued to steal money on a multi-national scale, what exactly does he mean? Well, most of the bad debt was associated with property - sub-prime mortgages that were offered to desperate people so they could at least purchase a roof over their heads. The point is, why were they so desperate? Because the banks, believing they were on to a good thing, deliberately forced up property values in order to increase the size of loans and the profits that could be made from this eagerly helped by estate agents and governments who loved the tax returns on all this. As prices skyrocketed ordinary people saw their dream of being home ownners evaporating before their eyes and grew increasingly desperate to get on the property ladder before it was too late. Seduced by mortgages that were easy to get, they clutched at the straw that was offered to them, calculating that if the world economy continued to grow then so would their wages and that the mortgage would become increasingly easy to service. The banks knew this wasn't true but had come up with a wizard wheeze that meant that they at least could avoid the consequencies. They bundled good and bad mortgages together and sold them on, buying other bundles from other banks that they figured weren't as smart as they were. Unfortunately, when the whole rotten dance ground to a halt and the banks examined what they had bought from each other, they discovered that they had all been engaged in the same confidence trick and had happily been shafting each other all along. Nice try Mr.Hammond, but the old Tory trick of blaming the victim won't wash here and is nothing more than sheer hypocrisy.