the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There appeared a slew of stories in a number of newspapers recently, all on the same day,  all on the same subject and all, curiously enough, having the same opinion on it. 

If one were cynical, one might imagine that an enterprising charity might have drafted a press release written is such a way that when it came across an editors desk, all they had to was grab the nearest journalist, thrust the press release at them and bellow ‘Give me 800 words now!’

A press release that urged Plonker to do something, which in this case would involve him reversing a reversal. In July last year he said the wouldn’t scrap the two child benefit cap introduced by the Tories in 2017, but now that Labour is in power there are renewed calls upon on him to do so.

As the ‘Guardian’ put it ‘Pressure grows on Labour to scrap two-child benefit cap with 1.6m youngsters affected’, which omitted to point out that the pressure is coming from other newspapers. Newspapers which in turn seemed to have strongly influenced by the same press release.

Probably a press release from the Resolution Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Group, as they both feature prominently in stories that appeared in ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Independent’, ’The Daily Mirror’, and both the ‘Sky News’ and ‘BBC News’ websites. They all quote the same statistics, all of them either copy and paste passages of the press release into their article wholesale or change bits here and there and most quote one or more of the same politicians saying the same thing.

Here’s the new work and pensions secretary, Mint-Cake, “We will work to give every child the best start in life by delivering our manifesto commitment to implement an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty.” Really? How ‘ambitious’ can any ‘strategy’ to reduce child poverty actually be if that ‘strategy’ lacks the ‘ambition’ to tackle the systemic and cultural forces that have created it. Namely, feckless parents and decades of successive governments subsidising the low wages paid to some of them by their employers.

 I mean, I understand how blaming the Tories for everything will be the default setting for Labour for the entirety of their time in government. All incoming governments do this, and whilst it might have some plausibility in other cases, a brief reminder of the facts of this one suggest otherwise.

Basically, introduced in April 2017 the cap prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after that date. It wasn’t suddenly announced in the March of that year, but instead as part of the 2015 budget, with the implications made abundantly clear and with advance waring given. So as I see it, it isn’t really the government that is pushing children into poverty. If parents on benefits conceived a third child after July 2016 and choose not to abort it or put it up for adoption, well they’re to blame. Or am I missing something?

One of the most quoted statistics quoted in most of the articles was this one. ‘A total of 1.6 million children – equivalent to one in nine of all UK children – were affected by the policy last year, an increase of 100,000, the latest statistics show, while 59% of the 450,000 households hit had at least one parent in work.’

This underlines one of my points, how exactly is it the governments fault if the feckless feckers keep on being feckless? How is there an increase? How exactly can any of this be fairly held to be the governments fault? Well, in one way it kinda can. Employers know that they can get away with paying low wages to their employees because they know that government subsidies allow them to do this. 

What else are ‘Working Tax Credits’ other than a massive bung to employers? One way or another, the British state has been doing this since 1971, and whilst the names of the bung might change, a bung is still a bung. And because this bung is bunged in with other bungs and called Universal Credit, the exact cost of this bung is hard to work out. But last year, Universal Credit bung cost us is £80.9 billions.

So if Mint-Cake had said something along the lines of ‘Yes, I know it initially looks like a simple problem to solve, but it isn’t. We need a cross party consensus and long term commitment to ending the age of government bailouts to employers who pay low wages. The work on agreeing that consensus starts now. It won’t be easy. But the sooner we start, the sooner we get it finished.’ Then yes, she’d have a ‘strategy’ and yes, it’d have ambition.

But simply blaming the the Tories? Nah!

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Football is one of the greatest games in the world. It is. Any game that can be played at its simplest level by three players, two jumpers and one ball has a simplicity that transcends the current carnival of capitalism it has now become. The latest show ends tonight in Germany, but where there’s money there’ll always be people wanting to make it. Women’s football is either another advance for equality or just a cynical attempt to make even more money from the expiration of a previously untapped revenue steam.

I was in my school football team, not the 1st XI but the 2nd XI and the sheer joy of playing is something mere words can’t express. But soon after I stopped playing it, I realised that I could never be just a spectator, watching other people having the fun I wasn’t. It’d be like watching two people having sex,. Young, handsome and incredibly lithe people, not two wrinkles, obviously.

Hearing people discuss it is even worse. The detail that the television pundits go into is alarming. The analysis, the competing opinions and forensic discussion of the frankly irrelevant becomes mind numbing after a while. And where was a similar level of expertise to help make sense of the recent general election? 

Plonker got a largely free ride from the media about what exactly his plans were. There was no sustained examination about any of the promises he made, no proper scrutiny of what life under a Labour government would mean for the average Briton and no challenging him about the impact of pursuing a transition to Net Zero might have on the cost of living crisis.

Because watching 22 grown men kicking a ball about was more important, and in the first two weeks at least, over 10 hours of this irrelevance was broadcast a day.

I’m not sure which makes me angrier; the fact that broadcasters do this or the fact that the public doesn’t have any problem with them doing it

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Because if there had have been decades of proper scrutiny and analysis of the various political choices this country had been offered, then we’d possibly have a more politically aware public than we do now. 

One that has the both the skills and willingness to critically evaluate what they’re told. Not to be the bullshat. Certainly not a public that is easily distracted by television game-shows, cookery contests, property porn and anything with the word ‘celebrity’ in it. This creates a culture wherein politics is much rather left to politicians and all the public does is occasionally complain when things turn to shit. 

I mean a public that didn’t believe that simply lifting the two child benefit cap would do any good whatsoever. Apart from allowing Plonker and Mint-Cake to appear to be doing something to alleviate child poverty. Had we such a public, one used to knowing that everything is interconnected, one that is aware that not not only do the dots exist, the wherewithal to join them up and to be aware of the fact that some dots will always remain invisible, then this travesty could not happen.

Low paid jobs, zero hour contracts and the ‘gig’ economy can only happen when a system of government subsidies that allows employers to do this. The irony is that as the workers earn less, so the less tax they pay, which means that out of that reduced tax revenue the government picks up the tab. Meanwhile the very companies and corporations that benefit from these subsidies also benefits from a shockingly malleable tax system. So we’re fucked at both ends.

 But we want cheap food, we want next day delivery, we want shiny, we want easy answers and we want more Gary Hamas.

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