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Tuesday 15 March 2016

178. Children of the Damned.


Why does government hate young people?

For eye watering student debt -thanks Clegg.

For PFI in the NHS allowing public health funds to be channelled into private bank accounts undermining the service for future generations - thanks Blair – oh and for global instability as well.

For weak financial regulation which helped bring about financial collapse, the repercussions of which we won’t see the end of any time soon - thanks every administration since 1979.

And for the growth of zero hours contracts, the unceasing attacks on the welfare state, effectual abandonment of the idea of a secure pension plus the ever disappearing retirement age etc. - thanks Osborne.

[Watch Osborne’s latest budget tomorrow. I absolutely guarantee there will be more pulling-up-the-ladder leaving the under 35s flailing in a land of unaffordable rents, Neverland mortgages, debt, poor job security and a flimsier welfare system while the comfortably off stay – comfortably off.]

In fact you’d be hard pushed to find social legislation of any significance since Thatcher that doesn’t damage the prospects of upcoming generation.

House ownership is at an all-time low and those lucky enough to get a foothold are juggling student debt as well as mortgage debt. It’s a wonder the increasingly high suicide rate is not higher. Certainly the numbers of young homeless, homeless families and homeless ex-servicemen is a barely hidden scandal and personal debt has gone nuclear.

‘Build more houses’ goes up the eternal cry – usually from those with a home (or homes) of their own. Where? The easy line, we-don’t-have-enough-houses, is only partly true. Yes, as part of the on-going UK jumble sale, social housing has been obliterated. However, in the same way that we hear, innovate-to-create-higher-crop-yield, as a solution to world hunger, these false prophets neatly step over the obvious hurdle which is unfair distribution – or GREED to put it in easy biblical terms. There is currently enough food on the planet to feed everyone. It is imbalanced distribution, waste and corruption that fails us. Equally with some imagination and a lot less greed we could house many more people. Those with huge properties or more than one home get off lightly as things like the infamous council tax favour the wealthy as do the very low interest rates. Unfortunate, poor and disabled tenants who have more space than the government decrees they require, are maliciously penalised with the notorious bedroom tax or left at the mercy of Rachman landlords.

From Pharaoh and Herod to Blair and Cameron there seems to be a non-too subtle grinding down of the following generation. Not their own kids obviously – just everyone else’s.

Just what is it that turns those who’ve had every advantage of a post WWII West into the mean, spiteful, youth-averse, gits who rule? Thatcher may have been famous for taking free school milk from the mouths of primary school children “Thatcher, Thatcher - milk snatcher” but subsequent leaders also seem intent on obliterating the future for those below them.

It makes the government seem like the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it really is pretty shitty.

Ok – I know young people are self-obsessed and smell and listen to awful music and think it’s time well spent posting online pictures of what they had for breakfast but this is not fair.

Is it because some adults forget they were young? Maybe they had disturbed childhoods and don’t see why others should be happy (the current crop of boarding school brats?)

It’s morally wrong (yes I am banging on about morals again – how old fashioned am I?)

If government fails year on year to tackle tax loopholes that let their pals off paying their dues in the country they derive so much benefit from thus degrading the economy, public services, education , health, infrastructure - that government is morally in debt to the ones who will be left in the fiscal wasteland.

If the food industries are not tackled when they fill their produce with crap for profit so we have record numbers of obese children with diabetes, is the government not culpable?

Then the elite (and the media) non-too-subtly pick the easy fall guys – ooh look – it’s the scary migrants. And a handful of morons pick up that baton and run with it. (See this week’s cartoon – click on the orange Amanda Baker top right)

I was lucky enough to grow up in Britain’s socially responsible age when if you were bright enough you could do a degree without incurring life obliterating debt. The health service was reliable and you didn’t have to spend half your free time online to privatised utility companies trying to work out which one was ripping you off the most.

This shower of bastards – and their predecessors –systematically dismantled the post war dream. The shame is that the majority of them benefited from what was bequeathed to us by a generation stripped of their pride by the experience of world war.

Maybe the Child Snatcher is too kind an analogy. These leaders are more like the blind voracious monster from Pan’s Labyrinth.
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Thanks for reading and yes – copy and pass around the cartoon if you like.