2015
July 10
The future is Wednesday
Hi, minions
I am well aware of the fact that I have not been moaning enough nor been grumpy enough these last few weeks. Lord knows there has been enough to rant on about. The Greek crisis; to be honest they haven’t been the same since they lost their marbles but would we have had pomp and circumstance if he hadn’t nicked them.
Then our eyes popped out as we flew past Pluto and England won a test match. Luckily our captain firmly instilled in his own team the idea that the Aussies were still favourites so we duly let them play like it and they willingly obliged. Wimbledon came and went with hardly any rain and this alone made me realise nothing is as it should be these days.
So, from now on, you, my trusty followers, will be getting a weekly moan and the only question is what day to moan on. I don’t want to ruin your enjoyable weekend; Saturday and Sunday are out. The beginning of the working week is a time when everyone moans while on Thursday and Friday the approaching weekend is a source of a rise in happiness.
The answer then is clear. Wednesday. 22nd July is the start date and if the journalistic qualities of The Sun (news)paper aren’t mentioned, something very dramatic must have happened in the intervening five days.
July 22
Living within your means
I have been rather amused over this last week or so about the number of posts on facebook or twitter that comment on the government’s cost cutting exercise. It would appear that many people think it is okay to live beyond your means, as long as you get everything for free.
This sadly seems to be the state of affairs these days. I firmly believe we must help the poorest in society but I would strongly resent it if I found out, for example, that anyone on benefit had more than one television, more than one car, a tumble dryer or microwave and could afford to eat out regularly. I don’t have these things and I can’t afford a take-away very often.
There has been a trait, and I consider it a danger to society, that young people starting out in life should have everything their parents now have after years of hard work and saving. This was not the case when I was growing up. For a start we had none of these so called labour saving devices. I was 7 before we had a television, 10 before we had a fridge and we had no car from when I was 5 until I was 17.
Herzberg and Maslow may well have had their theories but I don’t think they extended to our modern, must-have, consumer-driven society. Everyone has needs but these days we confuse our wants with our needs. We need food, we need a roof over our heads, we need to be able to learn, we need health care and we need, I would suggest, company, be it family or friends. Ideally we should also have work to occupy us, give us some money to provide those needs ourselves and a little extra so we can begin to obtain those things the previous generation now have.
Now I don’t know how those five needs fit with your five, Mr Maslow, but as dear Abraham passed away in 1970, I will probably never know either. My point, in this rather reasonable moan, is that we should try to live within what we have not what we want. It’s lovely to have luxuries but we don’t need them. If we are to live, as a country, within our means then the poorest should be provided with sufficient income or benefit for their basic needs and encouraged to better themselves but not be given handouts to obtain life’s luxuries. If that involves “means testing”, so be it.
And in case you think I am anti the poor I would go even further. No one, with a family income over £70,000 per annum, should receive free education, free health care or any form of child benefit. Furthermore anyone who has a company pension exceeding this amount should forego any old age pension. Now how much would that save?
July 29
Neither side will get what it thinks it can have.
There is, as I write, a major problem evolving over the number of migrants trying to enter the UK by devious means from Calais. Our politicians are talking, as usual endlessly, of what measures they will take to (a) stop this and (b – presumably when a fails) how they will then deal with it.
I have always thought of myself as a humanist but I no longer think that has too much of a connection to being humanitarian. Politicians can never stop this flow of people because once the tunnel is so tightly controlled, the money grabbers, who got these people here in the first place, will start charging to take them across the Channel by boat and smuggle them into the UK. the south coast will once again become a haven for smugglers but it will be people not whiskey and tobacco that is being brought in
The simple answer is though that these people, from wherever they originate, cannot be allowed to stay in the UK. I am not racist in this view. I don’t care what colour their skin is, what their religion is or where their homeland is. I am, if such a word exists, a demographist and an economist.
We do not have room for these people on our island; we cannot afford these people on our island. They may well work once they get here, they may well work hard but they will be taking a job away from someone in the UK and so, by association, increasing our benefit bill. Now you may say that no UK citizen will fill that job. Okay, fine, stop their benefit. I am all for helping those in need but not helping those who will not contribute to our society. Either way, the benefit bill is reduced, which would not happen if a migrant took the job.
I have heard that we cannot, in some cases, send these people home as they destroy their passports and so, once we find them, there is no trace of their origin. We will never stop people leaving, or trying to leave, a country in which they feel, rightly or wrongly, oppressed. Politicians apparently think they can. We will never stop money grabbers from charging extortionistic amounts to help such people with promises that can never be fulfilled. Politicians may also think they can by rounding up these gangs. This is one problem that cannot be solved at its roots. It needs a solution further along the line; a solution to what will happen to these migrants. The difficulty is what the migrants’ want, as I stated above, cannot happen and what the politicians’ thinks is a solution will not work.
The Pilgrim Fathers, migrants in their own way and oppressed in their own country, had a whole new land to go to; a land unencumbered by laws and benefits. Can one be found for our modern day migrants?