RE: UKIP and their band of merry mad men (and women).

I am sorry to harp on but UKIP and anyone that supports them genuinely terrifies me. 

History books have told us repeatedly that when you blame different ethnicities, other countries & homosexuals for your nation's problems then you are a stone's throw away from becoming something nasty. 

UKIP have members that have called for disabled people to be sterilised, UKIP supporters have said  various nasty things about gay people and one ex-UKIP member said that he would support schemes to cure homosexuality. Farage said he wants to move Britain towards an insurance based healthcare system and that women are worth less than men (words to that effect via his stance on maternity pay).

UKIP target foreigners, homosexuals, women, the unemployed and the disabled. They are going for the most vulnerable members of our society. Members that have been fighting for equal rights for centuries. Women still don't get equal pay to men, homosexuals still have to deal with prejudice, the unemployed are people too! (something we forget in a society that values people in accordance to their pay packet) and the disabled have to put up with remarks about how they are "not worth the minimum wage" by the very ministers that are meant to represent them.

How is voting for a bunch of insanely wealthy ex-finance sector workers a vote for change?
How will throwing everyone that doesn't fit into the white-heterosexual nuclear family b/s work for Britain? How will demolishing the NHS and signing everyone up to insurance schemes help the elderly, the sick or YOU?

Don't get me wrong. I think it is absolutely astounding that some passionate patriots have been able to stack crap that high and call it a party leader.

UKIP does not represent the British people.
Farage represents the wealthy white ruling elite.
A vote for UKIP is a vote for patriarchy, for inequality and nastiness in general.


Cheers for reading, 

Have a great week,

Bailey

War is hell. (I did not enjoy the Sainsburys advert)

Hey folks,

Disclaimer:
This is a blog and I am expressing my own personal opinion. This won't make me popular but I once told Mars to go burn itself after advising the public that buying a Mars Bar made me some kind of patriot. I lost a lot of friends on Faceache but what's new.

1. The advert was a piece of art. I am not denying that the whole thing was very well put together but there are areas that companies should not be allowed near and so close after Remembrance & Armistice Day....World War One is one such area that companies should be careful with.

If you haven't guessed already. I did not like Sainsburys using the Christmas Truce in an advert.
The advert was put together in a cinematic and respectable fashion but the content itself and the subject matter that we witnessed is something that should not be used by supermarkets. It strummed my heart strings but the topic is war. The advert was whitewashed. It evaded delving deep into war and why we remember those that fought.

A part of me wonders what the war poets themselves would think about this advert as Vera Brittain, Sasoon and Owen each loathed war being portrayed in any positive light. War is something to be abhorred. Remembered in anger and each of us should fight against the creation of all wars 'lest we wish to found ourselves once again flung onto some fields in the back end of France. (France, Iraq, wherever, the main thing about war is that men in power move the pieces (pieces made of human flesh and of humans that are usually not in power and those families get shattered.)

People were torn to shreds by bullets, land mines removed men from existence (some land mines still do). People were eradicated like some freaking video game and there was no second life for those men.  Soldiers were killed in a brutal, most unforgivable and state-sanctioned fashion. Gas flooded across fields, wiping out life in the way our pesticides dispose of insects. I tend to think about that during the minutes silence. I take solace in the fact that I have never had to face the choice of having to fight (and probably get killed) in some far away place or be put to death by firing squad. I also end up feeling a great shame that our country once forced men to make such harrowing decisions and I am thankful that we have moved on since then.

Entire nations tore entire communities apart so that those men would become soldiers and tear one another apart. Now an advert comes one and we're tearing ourselves apart. We're getting choked up too but in the comfort of our armchair but please bear in mind:

It is an advert.

The majority of adverts are not created out of the goodness of a person's heart. Adverts are created out of the soulless calculation that maybe people will see it, their heart will be moved and the person will become a customer popping into Sainsburys.

Supermarkets are constantly engaged in price wars and publishing such an advert so close to Armistice day, following on from the poppy exhibition in London and the fact it is the centenary of WW1 is nothing short of a smooth marketing ploy by some pricks in suits. John Lewis had their penguin now Sainsburys has the memory of the war dead. We did not just watch  some mini Dr Who episode, we just witnessed a large corporation dabble with that which should have never been touched. It is bad enough our politicians stand up to talk about the deceased whilst sending soldiers to far flung corners of the globe but now Sainsburys are doing it too? When will it stop? Who will create some heart strumming piece next and then slap on the logo of their company as well? (Answer: Britain First have been doing this the entire time, they are apparently "protecting" poppy sellers.)

Instead of having the profits from the sales going to the Royal British Legion why not just give your money straight to the Royal British Legion.  Alternatively you could donate to other charities that support soldiers and their families.

It was Armistice Day less than a week ago!
Get your hands off of the dead.
If you truly wanted to show support then there are a million ways to do so but slapping your logo on the end of it is shameless self promotion. Another step by corporations into taking things that the public cherish and utilising it to turn a profit. I feel damn nauseous just thinking about.

Kind regards,

Bailey

Thank you for reading.

Dabbling with words. Exhaling an emotion.

Things are not that bad.
We live in a place where things are alright.
There are no bad things happening here tonight.
Maybe somewhere out there a bad thing is going on.
Maybe elsewhere good people have done wrong...
What is "wrong" after bad people decide what is "right"?
That doesn't matter though because I think this is a place where things are alright.

0_o

Out on a Limb. Voting and Tyranny.

The idea of tyranny goes back a long way and this blog has no desire to serve as a history lesson. The key point that I want to get across is that a tyrant is a legal head of state/authority, when they pass legislation it is something we must abide to and destroying tyranny is no easy thing. In some cases simply chopping off a tyrant's head will not undo their actions as tyrants are often the result of a structural problem. (In our case the electoral system is broken).

What does some medieval political theory have to do with modern day Britain? I would argue it has everything to do with the political state of modern day Britain. Human beings have not evolved that drastically over the last few hundred years (Evolution takes a hell of a lot longer). We may understand ourselves more, we may have access to far superior technology but the actual psychology of humanity is something our scientists are still grappling with. That is to say we are still as greedy as ever and our Governments whilst claiming to be representative have continued to dismantle the the very mechanisms that helped our society become more equal. (Education, healthcare, access to legal representation).

This blog is going to deal with the issues of what happens when you vote and whether it makes a difference considering that the system has continually empowered a set of complete self-interested individuals. There is a potential problem that when you vote you  from someone you have in fact empowered someone with no morals, or at least someone with a double standard. Once elected it is difficult to force an MP to stand down and we find ourselves stuck, forced to endure the machinations of madmen that seek to sell it all. A lot of voters have felt betrayed by our current coalition.

I have spoken to many people. A few elderly people informed me that will never vote Lib-Dem after witnessing the Atos assessments and bedroom tax that was essentially created in their name for the sake of austerity. They feel morally outraged that their support was used to legitimise actions that they feel are wrong. One person told me that is like we are marching back to pre-World War II Britain. By abstaining from voting one could argue that you are refusing to legitimise a  party of  tyrants that are seeking to drag us back. However I am arguing that these tyrants will rise regardless of how many do/don't vote.

In Yorkshire a 14% of voters actually turned up. Even with such a low percentage of the electorate turning up, a 14% turnout still counts. A man known as Alan Billings gained the position of Crime Commissioner. Labour's grand victory was given to them by 50% of 14% that bothered to vote. That means just over 7% of the population in South Yorkshire made a decision that affects the other 93%. How can such a vote be truly representative? Yet that vote stands. Alan Billings now holds the post of Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire. As far as I am concerned such a low turnout represents a vote of no-confidence from the people and the entire process needs an urgent overhaul.

Click on these words to learn about Yorkshire

If you voted for either party that is currently a part of the Coalition Government then you have inadvertently supported the cuts in legal aid, you have accidentally enabled the Bedroom Tax to become a thing (whilst it lasts), we enabled people like Ian Duncan Smith to treat the DWP like a China Shop at the World's Most Angry Bull Expo. (This is why a lot of voters have swung to the Greens, UKIP and other alternative parties). Raging bulls aside, the legal cuts have been ruining the lives of many people.

One prominent story that I have read involved two parents. The man is earning £34.64  above the threshold to qualify for legal aid. From my own experience, lawyers require a damn sight more than £34.64 per hour. So earning an additional £34.64 won't count for squat when some legal represents cost £150++ per hour.  A judge weighed in on this predicament and said the legal cuts are enabling the state to " to remove a child from the couple while simultaneously failing to provide them with adequate representation". This is the literal embodiment of the phrase "a crying shame". A child is being snatched from the parents and the parents are not even given legal representation. How can our system have any kind of moral integrity when such instances like this are occurring?

Click on these words to learn about the prominent story

Our entire political system is re-writing the books. When the leaders of a country re-write the law to serve themselves and re-write the rules so that you are unable to hold others accountable whilst you are being punished for having the audacity to earn a pittance you no longer live in a fair and equal society. You are living in a tyrannical one where your rights are uncertain as you cannot afford to fight for them. (Courts are expensive when you have no money.)

The odd thing about our state's state of tyranny is that for the most part we will not notice it.  Tyrannical laws are still legally binding and it is not until you hear about how soldiers have to pay the bedroom tax or how a dialysis patient was hit by the bedroom tax that people sort of notice (only a little). You can have immoral legislation (I.E The Bedroom Tax) and the only way to remove a tyrannical piece of legislation is to get into Government and re-write the book again... We think of tyranny being something of the past or a subject that relates to other regions of the planet. Tyranny can appear anywhere and it has been in the U.K for a long time. Thatcher made people angry, Blair made it evident when he took us to war despite the millions screaming against it and now this Coalition reveals it's true hand with idiots like Freud talking about £2 per hour for the disabled.

The big question is: If these tyrants are voted in...why would I want to vote?
Answer: You do not have to vote for them (Labour /Lib Dems / Tories.)
Problem: Our voting system however is bias, weighted in favour of the big three. How will my vote count?

UKIP are capitalising on this "they are all the same mentality" by presenting themselves as the rebels. I have seen UKIP campaign posters that have stated that the big three are all the same. People are angry and UKIP are gaining voters, this means they have seats in Europe and now thanks to Mark Reckless they have a seat in our Parliament. People are quite right to be angry but people that are quick to anger seldom read the fine print. (Myself included). We have to bear in mind that  Farage views himself as Thatcher's white knight. UKIP intend to continue the strip mining of state assets. No one is grasping that yet people have been voting for UKIP.

We can abstain, we can stand back, we can say "No i don't want to tactically support a tyranny" but these men will rise and claim the votes of disaffected. They will spin webs of lies and ensnare this nation again into more of the same old thing. I hope the Greens continue to rise and that they make Labour lurch left in the same way that UKIP forced the Tories into lurching right. Voting can work when enough people vote (See: UKIP & the ensuing media fire storm). If the angry UKIP supporters are out there spreading bile, why are not refusing to pick up the broom and sweep that crap of our streets? If a small percentage in South Yorkshire were able to fight against hate, we have no reason to be sitting on the fence.

Together we are able to hold our tyrants to account. We can occupy and make our anger visible for all to see, we can trash the place and we can blow up Parliament but the problem is structural. The structural problem is that our system lacks accountability, we cast a vote and get stuck with people that are essentially unaccountable until the next election day or until someone calls a copper "Pleb". We must cast off the fear and notions of wasted votes, of political leaders all being the same. They only the same to the extent that they are all human, even Tories are human (trust me I saw one shed tears when someone joined the Labour Party). I believe that even though our system is broken, there is no sense shouting at it from the outside. Only from within can change happen. The welfare state is undergoing a controlled demolition, the explosives were placed there by our elected representatives. I want this devastatingly damning demolition diffused before I see McDonalds running a primary schools as an academy or GPSs working for Virgin (OOPS TOO LATE). Awh heck...

All the damage done over the last few decades was primarily dished out by our elected officials. Private companies nudge them and coerce them but MPs are our legally elected tyrants wielding the authority to rule like a bat and our Welfare state is the piñata. On election day just do something, once everyone has cast their vote and seen it turn to dirt maybe then we will forcibly overthrow the state but until we have all pitched in I sincerely doubt the general population has the balls to pull it off if it struggle to even tick a box. (This is the same cynical outlook that tyrants have, it is why they have attacked the Welfare state and sold off Royal Mail on the cheap. They think no one will go after them and so far they are correct.)

The mainstream media does not help matters. It has essentially thrown in the towel when it comes to investigative journalism but there are plenty of writers out there. Scriptonite Daily and Another Angry Voice are two prime examples.

Scriptonite Daily 
Another Angry Voice (AAV)

Both are exceptionally better writers than myself and they tend to be up to their eyeballs in evidence.
The system is broken but unless you plan to physically overthrow the state, you must instead become a part of it and just like the Alien facehugger in Alien...well you know the rest. But instead of alien chestburster, you get equality, fair pay for women, all that jazz we've been fighting for and seeing little of.

If we do not get involved we will continue to see people elected into positions of power with a mere 7% of the vote. 7%,,,

Bear in mind that Boris Johnson thinks that trade union strikes should only go ahead if 50% of the union members turn up to vote.



Thank you for reading,

Have a great week,

The Common Sense Eccentric

RE: The Bedrock of British Society.

Hey folks,

These blogs represent un-planned writings where I draw from sources and put words onto a page. I re-structure the writing after completing the blog but in comparison to the work I created whilst writing in academia they are not well structured. I hope you find them informative on some level, or at least I help people realise the importance of the welfare state. 

As we all know, I am an insanely boring man that likes to obsess over politics, the future and the present lack of everything. I am currently resting in a chair that has long since lost it's cushion, my leg goes dead every few minutes if I do not move. 

Our welfare state was meant to provide a bedrock and from it would grow educators, nurses, professionals, people that after being given some support, they would grow into productive members of our society.

Instead we have a Government that will sell those people via the Workfare scheme. Instead of providing people with support, we have given them shackles. Claimants are being told to do X for a company otherwise they will lose their "benefits". I must be adamantly clear that when someone says the word "benefit" they are playing a game with your brain. We all love the word "benefit" as it means something good, an added bonus. Therefore when we are told that unemployed people are given "benefit", that phrase invokes a sense of rage from people that work for a living and to be frank, earn bugger all for their work as their company are DELIBERATELY underpaying staff.

The Department of Work and Pensions does not hand out benefits. They try their damnedest to restrict how much money is spent on welfare by sending people on never-ending assessments. The housing "benefit" form is 29 pages ¬____¬ Some claimants are given less money than there are pages in the  form. You may only be granted £20 towards your rent and this is after having some bureaucrat comb through every detail of your personal finances. 

Without the support of the welfare state I would have never have gone to university, school, to the doctors or elsewhere. My family would have been unable to flee from where we once were and these words may have never been written.   I view it as a "benefit" of living in a society that is compassionate, not a benefit of having the audacity to be poor, sick, disabled, unemployed or even a woman (because women are still fighting for equality and the welfare state picks up the tab when employers fail to pay women a decent wage too). A lot of men are not being paid a living wage either and the Welfare state supports them too if they are not overwhelmed by the anger of having a full-time job and still not earning enough to pay for rent.

Essentially our welfare state provides a floor for people to stand on when they have fallen through the cracks and into the horrifying dark void that is poverty, illness and ignorance. It was intended to enable people to move on. The Workfare scheme however demands that people work to receive their welfare payments instead of providing them with an actual job. There are people like Lord Freud that said disabled people are not really worth the minimum, he mentioned that they deserve around £2 an hour! How is one meant to stand tall when shackled into a system that tells you to work for peanuts or freeze in the cold?

You might work your entire life and think that you are safe but I ask you, how many have heard about elderly people lacking enough money to get fuel this winter? How many of you are human and will have the damn audacity to live long enough to claim your pension? (This is called a "straw man argument where writers or commentators or even leaders ask an outrageous question designed to get you angry, watch out for it!) The answer is "I don't intend to die in the next five days Bailey, I intend to live old enough to get that free bus pass damn it! What can I do?

There are people out there trying to dismantle the Welfare state and a good chunk of them are Members of Parliament that have been elected. If you think voting changes nothing why not given it a go anyway? Because it'll change nothing right? So what have you got to lose?

Revolutions will not happen over night and votes on their own will not change things. The rise of UKIP has gotten the Tories worked up about immigration like never before. I feel that we young folks have the power to swing it the other way. We cannot enable the older adults  that sold off OUR bloody council houses to get their own way again. ('cause how many 20 year olds have a mortgage? What's that?  HOUSES TOO EXPENSIVE?  There were these things called council houses but the last generation sold them. They voted for a woman that said she would sell them on the cheap. Honest. Voting helped them acquire a cheap house and screw with the markets. Ask your parents :D )

Russell Brand hasn't got a bloody clue. He has access to a remarkably spectacular and most verbose vocabulary that sometimes stupefies myself into silence. However Brand has failed to address the intrinsically pervasively  invasive nature that is our societies acceptance of apathy. Apathy that has become so imperative for the continuation of consumerist society because when we are sad we buy something, when we are happy we buy something and when we are outraged we do something. Usually people buy something. 

Naturally Brand would avoid tackling such an issue like apathy head on as the man needs to sell books, tickets and head out on tours so our media empowers him to speak and share words for as Brand himself admits, he does not lead the revolution. Brand's outrage generates a lot of hype but that is because he grants the young instantaneous sanctification via anger, he reaffirms the stigma held by older generations which is "young people are most amusing" by advising them about how doing nothing is more ideal than doing something. As we live in a society that prefers people to be apathetic than angry or involved with politics, you find yourself (someone anxious about talking to others about politics) listening to an appealing message as Brand says we need a revolution but y'know don't bother voting.

Votes enable politicians to carry out the misguided will of the people. A will that is cultivated via a bias media hell bent on selling us half the story. 

The great problem with Brand's idea is that people are still voting and the people that vote tend to be choose those that seek to destroy the welfare state. (Update: In 2015 the British public elected the Conservative party. I dislike being right.) People are voting UKIP. (In 2015 UKIP received 3.9 million vote). UKIP appear to love British values but if you talk to a few behind closed doors one can easily uncover that they want to flog the NHS, punish single mothers and one Councillor blamed gay people for having the power to change the weather.

 The Welfare State was created for politicians represent the will of a nation and when the people chose to elect those that suggested the creation of a welfare state, the people of Britain found themselves with a welfare state. When the people of Britain wanted to see unions weakened for the sake of economic stability and for the ability to buy a council house on the cheap, they chose to elect a Government that promised to do just that. The media told us to hate people on benefits and following  the lies of how we live in "bankrupt Britain" the people chose...nothing. We had a hung Parliament but the Coalition stepped up and did attacked poor people anyway because bankers are usually able to afford decent lawyers. Our Government is not as brave as the Icelandic one.

I understand why people do not want to vote. No one willingly voted Liberal hoping to see the Tories get in. No one voted Labour and expected Saddam to be swinging from a noose whilst Iraq burned to the ground. No one voted Thatcher and expected unemployment to reach a point that it decimated communities.  
All of that is our fault for failing to remain eternally vigilant whilst living in an age tyranny.*  

The welfare state is being dismantled. We can stop this. We can be the generation to say "No". What is Britishness? Well at one point it was about creating a nation where people could not worry about ignorance, hunger, poverty and sickness. I want to see us bring those ideals back into the forefront.

I have now found myself employed and again I feel urged to persuade people that the Welfare state is something worth protecting. That means protecting the NHS, free education, social security (pensions, disability payments, "benefits".) and hopefully council housing if we haven't sold the last lot off to a subsidiary of a larger housing association.  

I like this web page. It is a decent webpage and yes it is a GCSE webpage but it explains things in bitesize chunks. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/welfarestaterev1.shtml

Please think twice and support the welfare state.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.
This was Bailey's blog.

If you want to see more...scroll down. 


*The problem with voting is that whomever wins the election is given the legitimacy to rule however legitimacy to rule is bad for the country when those ruling it have no moral integrity. To rule without any moral integrity is to rule as a tyrant. Tyrants are able to pass legislation that is legally binding but morally bankrupt and in the end a country will suffer for it. 

Whilst we lack an alternative voting structure I feel we cannot simply give into apathy. I will probably throw my vote at the Greens because austerity can go to hell.