Tis the Season to be Hateful
- December 28, 2013
- by
- Matt
Some years ago I read that Charles Dickens would pay tramps to sit outside his house on Christmas Day, so that he and his carousing guests could enjoy the cosy domestic pleasures of the Victorian hearth even more, by contrasting it with the poverty and deprivation just outside his front door.
I’ve never discovered whether that story is true or not, but British society does something similar every year when the homeless suddenly become a subject worthy of media attention in the lead up to Christmas.
Judging from the almost ritualistic way that the homeless will...
Lord Freud and Foodbanks: a Parable for Our Times
- December 13, 2013
- by
- Matt
Even by the dire standards set by the government, the Under-Secretary for Work and Pensions Lord David Freud, or Baron Freud of Eastry is a nasty piece of work. Freud is Sigmund Freud’s great grandson, and the Great Man’s humanist genes have clearly not filtered down to this callous apparatchik and Ian Duncan-Smith’s...
Cameron Explains Why Less is Always More
- November 13, 2013
- by
- Matt
Back in 2010, when this nightmare government came to power, David Cameron insisted that austerity was a temporary response to the national emergency of ‘the deficit’ in a time of generalised economic crisis caused by the Coalition’s predecessors.
We were told lots of other things as well: that the Coalition’s cabinet of millionaires was moved by...
The Coalition’s Theatre of Cruelty
- October 02, 2013
- by
- Matt
Even amongst the strange collection of reactionary gargoyles in the Coalition, ‘Communities Minister’ Eric Pickles is a special case. Like a horrible fusion of Dickensian villain, Toad of Toad Hall and one of the Aliens in Toy Story, this hard-faced, glassy-eyed heap of blubber emanates a combination of dimness, callousness and malice that...
Europe, Golden Dawn and the Murder of an Anti-Fascist
- September 21, 2013
- by
- Matt
When the lords of austerity look down on the world from their parliaments and glass-fronted offices, they often look on the bright side. Poverty, food kitchens, unemployment, the destruction of jobs and pensions, cuts in health and education, ‘social unrest’ – none of these things bother them too much as long as...
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