Economic cleansing

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, John Steinbeck’s masterpiece detailing the plight of the poor was immediately banned. The bigoted and the ignorant, faced with some uncomfortable truth, organised themselves and ceremonially burned the book. Thank goodness those days are long gone.

Even before the coalition government’s wretched Welfare Reform Bill was presented to the House of Lords for scrutiny, heavy weight cabinet ministers trolled into TV and radio studios and blustered that whatever the other place decided, their vindictive bill would carry on regardless when it returned to the Commons. The legitimacy of the House of Lords is, of course, questionable, but when a political party that does not have a majority in the Commons dismisses the last mechanism of accountability, a little bit of democracy dies.

The coalition government has suffered a series of defeats in the Lords but has managed to abolish the social fund, a safety net for those about to starve to death, the denial of support for children with severe disabilities and the eviction of poor people from their homes who do not seem to understand their place in the social order. Millionaire cabinet ministers call this “caring conservatism” as they tuck into a lunch, at tax payers expense, that costs more than a family of four on state benefits receive in a week.

The third and final reading of the bill in the Lords takes place on the last day of January. The coalition government have scheduled that the bill will return to the Commons on the first day of February to be passed into law regardless. Not content with ignoring the Lords and positively tumescent that an opinion poll conducted by the right wing press shows that support for bashing benefit scroungers is a vote winner, our government will save peanuts by continuing to order the chateaubriand, caviare, foie gras and Bollinger. Disability Living Allowance fraud, according to the government’s own figures, is 0.5 per cent. That has resulted in 199 disabled people being taunted as scrounging criminals because of a single fraudster who knows how to play the system. It’s a bit like saying that all multi-national companies and banks avoid paying taxes because a single company is taken out to lunch by Her Majesties Revenue and Customs. Stephen Hester enjoys a lot a lunches.

When an opinion poll empowers a government to harm its people, in sharp contrast to “reforms” to the NHS which everyone but cabinet ministers oppose, you might suspect that a nation is becoming out of control.

The propaganda war has been won and retired Archbishops, hacks who think disability is imagined and every bigoted and ignorant idiot who thinks that needy people are inferior are having a field day in peddling their hatred. For good measure, the Tory coalition announced 40 new Tory peers to avoid any embarrassment in the Lords in future. Another little bit of democracy has died.

Even as the government suffered defeat in the Lords, David Cameron gave a speech telling the European Court of Human Rights to stop “interfering” with his plan to take away the freedoms of his own citizens. Robust legislation protecting health and safety, the rights of trade unions and the duty of care for people with terminal illness will be chucked on the bonfire of bigoted and ignorant dogma. A little bit of democracy has died.

The coalition government are rushing through the imposition of elected mayors and police commissioners. In May, some of our major cities will undertake a referendum to ask if they want a single dictator to rule them and in November another single dictator to govern policing. The current system of local government and police accountability might be flawed, but who wants Ant and Dec running a community? A little bit of democracy has died.

The government, who were not fully elected, once blamed Gordon Brown for the deficit and all the ills of the world. Now they blame disabled people, the poor, Europe, warm weather, cold weather, aliens, bloggers and the man in the moon for the fact that the economy is shrinking and the deficit has actually increased in the nearly two years they have been in power. It seems the only option now is to print more money. Does that sound familiar? Those fortunate enough to be employed will need wheelbarrows to carry their increasingly worthless wages home and are being encouraged to despise the nearest, defenceless available target and focus their rage against the scroungers and the “feckless”, to quote George Carey.

Implicit in all of this are the Liberal Democrats who, for Andy Worhol`s brief 15 minutes of fame, are prepared to whore themselves under Cameron’s whip. Having made a total Rod Liddle of Proportional Representation, it is worth reminding Clegg, Cable and the utterly ridiculous Danny Alexander that Quisling met his fate by firing squad and Marshall Petain died in prison aged 95.

In 1939, when bigoted and ignorant Americans were burning The Grapes of Wrath, far away in Germany, other bigoted and ignorant people were burning something quite different. An awful lot of democracy and people died.

In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream

If you want to know the size of the one that got away, do not ask a fisherman. If you want to know what happened to a copper fish in Walsall Wood, do not ask the Express and Star and if you want to develop creative arts and digital media in Walsall, the last thing you should do is ask a Walsall blogger.

Once again our local rag, the Express and Star, has shamelessly plundered the work of the sage of the northern wastes, the redoubtable Brownhills Bob. Bob broke the story of a wonderful addition to a publicly funded artwork on Thursday. The E&S ran the story on Saturday and not content with leaving the source of the scoop uncredited, again either distorted or ignored the facts of a rather inconsequential column filler.

The rather amusing jolly jape was described as theft and vandalism and a quick phone call to to “rent-a-gob” Mike Bird produced a pitiful attempt at humour that once again brought the borough into disrepute. Tory councillors up for re-election in May must wince with toe-curling embarrassment every time the glorious leader opens his mouth.

Interestingly, Friday brought a thought-provoking blog post from councillor Ian Shires, leader of Walsall Liberal Democrats and chair of the council’s Regeneration Scrutiny and Performance Panel. He asked how growth in creative arts and the digital sector can be stimulated. The good and the great were summoned to give evidence to the scrutiny panel including Wolverhampton University, Walsall College, Forest Arts Centre, the New Art Gallery, the council’s creative development team, the Vine Trust, the Church at Junction 10, the heads of libraries and arts and the Custard Factory. All agreed that there is huge potential within Walsall for the development of creative arts and digital media.

But where were the local and somewhat expert practitioners in social media? Perhaps they are to be served up as a golden beef wellington boot covered in custard at a later meeting. The council’s own web presence is, to be honest, really rather poor. The home page is barely navigable and the Twitter output is both banal and patronising and is regularly outdone by people producing blog posts and tweets in real time and with a greater degree of accuracy than the releases from the press office spoon feeding good news stories to the Express and Star.

Nothing moves in Walsall without it turning up on Twitter. Road closures, fallen trees, fires, closed schools, unemptied bins, speeding gritter lorries, bread for sale on Mellish Road, curry kits and golden wellies rotating gracefully over a canal hit cyberspace faster than a frown from Sigourney Weaver. With the one exception of what you are reading now, which is merely a collection of bizarre ramblings of a deranged alcoholic derelict, Walsall bloggers tend to post heartfelt, well informed and usually accurate articles, unlike the Express and Star.

As this humble blog knows only too well, anything that rings untrue or is hypocritical is carefully analysed, seized upon and then torn apart by erudite, well reasoned comments and tweets. Social media is a two-way street that has produced a vibrant internet community in Walsall that is the envy of larger towns and even cities. Friends from beyond our borders who know nothing of Walsall report following local bloggers not just for the entertainment value of the ranting, but also for the diversity of local history, wildlife, sport and even the perspective of the local boys in blue. They do this by accessing The YamYam, itself no stranger to being plundered by the dying printed media for stories without any acknowledgement. See this weeks Sunday Mercury.

This and many other blogs have long sung the praises of The YamYam. Its publisher, the tireless Mark Blackstock, has created a network that brings together all the diversity of opinion in Walsall and, more importantly, throws in sections on local business and arts and crafts. If the Regeneration Scrutiny and Performance Panel wish to explore ways of developing the creative arts and digital sector, they would do well to summon Mr Blackstock and listen to someone who has already done it.

We were recently told that the council has increased spending on communications to £800K plus a year. There have been some improvements, particularly live tweets coming out of the last meeting of full council and more councillors are using Twitter. But remember that some time ago we were promised live streams from council meetings so that we could judge for ourselves the antics of our elected representatives. The equipment was bought and installed and is now gathering dust. Wanting to know what is going on in Walsall, people tend to make the impartial YamYam the first port of call rather than the impenetrable council site. Perhaps the councillors on the scrutiny panel should ask if £800K plus is getting the message across and if it represents value for money. The digital economy, like public art should not simply be a tick box exercise on a council`s to do list.

In 1998, to celebrate their team reaching the cup final, fans of Newcastle United dressed the Angel of the North in a huge Alan Shearer replica shirt. The artist, Anthony Gormley was said to be delighted at the stunt as it showed that local people had taken the piece to their hearts even if they still insist on calling the statue the Gateshead flasher. Those that hung the boot on the Walsall Wood angler are to be congratulated. Ask the residents around Dulwich Park who had their Barbara Hepworth stolen and cut up for scrap for a fraction of its true cost how they feel about replica shirts, golden boots and vandalism.

As Sigourney famously growled in Alien: “Get away from her you b**ch.”

Carry on camping

In the High Court, Mr Justice Lindblom has ruled that the Occupy London encampment outside St Paul’s is unlawful. The City of London Corporation are now free to evict the happy campers. Many will say “good riddance”, but in fact it is good riddance to the freedom of expression and assembly and another small step towards totalitarianism.

The first name of Mr Justice Lindblom is not actually Justice. He usually answers to the name Keith which sounds a little less intimidating. In his summing up, Keith or Justice, or whatever his name is, said:

“The freedoms and rights of others, the interests of public health and public safety and the prevention of disorder and crime, and the need to protect the environment of this part of the City of London all demand the remedy which the court’s order will bring”.

It is interesting that health and safety should be rattled at the tent dwellers when this pitiful excuse for a government is seeking to repeal health and safety legislation designed to protect people in the workplace in the name of productivity. Dead worker, dead hippy, good riddance.

There has been no disorder or crime at any of the Occupy sites other than the actions of the security forces. Who can forget the images of peaceful protesters being doused with pepper spray by overweight policemen in the States?

As for the environment of the City of London? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The Corporation wishes to evict peaceful demonstrators opposed to the corporate greed that has brought the planet to the edge of the abyss. The pepper spray is going in the wrong direction.

Freedom to protest and freedom of assembly is a basic human right. Keith thinks that it is not and has given a judgement that protects the avaricious and allows law enforcement agencies to hit innocent people over the head.

The Occupy movement will not go away and even now, smaller hippos have been tasked with finding the moth eaten tent that lurks somewhere in the cluttered garden shed.

Alone we whisper, together we shout. We will carry on camping.

Freudian slip

It is not certain if Under Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Lord Freud has ever visited Walsall to view the Garman Ryan collection at the New Art Gallery. Should he do so, then West Midlands Police need to be vigilant. The man is a cheat and a liar and is capable of nicking Uncle Lucien`s best work.

Sir David Anthony Freud, Baron Freud to his mates, has been tasked with guiding the coalition government’s Welfare Reform Bill through the House of Lords. After the bill suffered a series of defeats last week, the Lords temporal and spiritual return the the Other Place with the government hoping that they will vote away common decency, independence, freedom and basic human rights. Lord Freud, however, is not doing very well and is becoming increasingly desperate.

When the Lords soundly defeated the government last week, Freud decided that he would not accept the decision. When the Lords and Ladies went home to enjoy a well deserved cup of Horlicks and an Inspector Morse DVD, Freud sneaked back into a deserted chamber late at night with a large number of Tory peers and introduced amendments to reverse the earlier votes. Having lost the argument to withdraw state benefit from people with terminal cancer and from children with severe disabilities because of an absence of National Insurance contributions, this ignoble lord attempted to cheat his way to stealing from the poor and, in so doing, brought parliament into disrepute.

With the mainstream press all but ignoring the outstanding #spartacusreport compiled by disability rights campaigners, Freud and the Department of Work and Pensions turned to their chums at News International and the Daily Mail to again smear people with disabilities as scroungers. It is no coincidence that the day before another series of crucial votes in the Lords, the Sun and the Mail cut and pasted a DWP press release demonising the sick, the disabled and the dying. For good measure and in the time honoured tradition of distraction, a story was leaked of the government gifting a £60million yacht to an 85 year old to celebrate her being the richest woman on the planet for the last 60 years. £60million is an awful lot of Disability Living Allowance.

So how is the great grandson of Sigmund and the nephew of Lucien and Clement qualified as an expert in both disability and democracy? After public school and Merton College Oxford, David Freud used the family name to blag a job on the Financial Times. In 1983 he entered the world of finance and made a complete hash of the Channel Tunnel project which lost investors £2billion and required a £1.2billion government bail-out. He later boasted that he had “successfully sold the market a pup”. He then completely failed as vice-chairman of UBS, an investment bank notorious for rogue trading and tax avoidance. How appropriate that all this qualifies him to take £75 a week away from someone who cannot walk.

His credentials in the democratic process are equally bogus. Declaring that he was bored with the city and not merely useless, Freud was appointed by Tony Blair to review the benefits system. He concluded that the private sector should have more involvement in welfare and that single parents and people with disabilities should be forced to work by having their benefits stopped. Then, and now with knobs on, he offers no explanation as to where these jobs are going to be found. When grumpy Gordon Brown took over from Blair, Freud saw the writing on the wall and he jumped ship to join the Conservative party. Rather than endure all the unnecessary effort of standing as a parliamentary candidate and face a tiresome election, he was quickly ennobled as Baron Freud of Eastry and is now the minister that has lied to parliament, lied to the country and is trampling over disabled people and democracy.

Exactly a year after he became a minister, Lord Freud was hit by a motorcycle outside the Houses of Parliament in May 2011. Fortunately, he made a full recovery and remains able-bodied. How different his attack on the vulnerable might have been if he were immobile and in need of care. However, this Perineum Peer, so called because he is somewhere between an utter penis and a complete rectum, remains along with Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and Maria Miller, a liar. When a Rabbi offers a sermon comparing the Welfare Reform Bill to policies adopted in Germany during the 1930`s, you know that it is time to become very, very frightened.

One can only hope that Her Majesty lives long enough to see the champagne bottle smash against the bow of her lovely new yacht.

A Comedy of Errors

We all make mistakes and there is something profoundly comforting in witnessing someone who should know better drop an almighty clanger. In Walsall, we are not just twice blessed, but thrice blessed.

The Comedy Store on Lichfield Street staged its regular open mic night in the form of a meeting of the full council on Monday evening. Open Mike Bird, a stand up in the tradition of Bernard Manning, offered an hilarious routine themed around how much he is worth. After a successful tour of radio studios and press briefings where he claimed to be the most underpaid entertainer in the West Midlands, the outpouring of outrage resulted in heckling from the cheap seats. Walsall’s answer to Roy “Chubby” Brown realised that trying to line his pockets when cutting services and making people redundant was a bit of a mistake. Faced with a hostile audience, the rotund funny man tucked his thumbs into his trousers, rocked back and forth and head banged the praises of Status Quo.

Bird is a comedian of sublime timing and the killer one line. When it became certain that his attempt to plunder more money for him and his cronies from the public purse was doomed to defeat, he suddenly changed tack and called a vote on keeping the current system of allowances. This is nothing short of comic genius as it allows him and his podgy mates to claim some sort of victory. By telling a long, familiar joke and then changing the predicted punch line makes the gag doubly funny.

If Mike Bird of Ephesus made a mistake by being greedy, then Tim Oliver of Syracuse bodged the response with a howler of herculean proportions. Rather than embrace the opportunity of every elected member, including Bird, rejecting Bird’s avaricious proposal, the Labour group decided to vote against the status quo. The cabinet avoided humiliation and at first glance it looked like Labour were in favour of paying cabinet more. Labour, of course, opposed the idea of rewarding incompetents for failure but that’s not what it looked like and that is at the very heart of Walsall Labour’s problem. It’s all very well voting against the status quo of councillor’s allowances, but without any form of alternative proposal other than vague talk of keeping within existing budgets, Labour look ridiculous.

The insulting idea that Bird and his cabinet should scrounge yet more money from the trough first came to light in October 2010. He dodged the incoming custard pie then by performing a U-turn worthy of R2D2. Since then, Labour have had some time to come up with an alternative. Sadly, we are still waiting for the plan. If, as expected, Labour take control of Walsall council in May, what will they do about councillor’s allowances, health care, an education system in melt-down and a dying town? Erm…hang on…we’re thinking about it.

This time, Bird avoided the rotating plank by simply bending down to tie his shoelace leaving the plank wielder with a nasty blow to the back of the head. Labour then crowed that they had halted the increase in allowances. Sadly, it was Bird who climbed down in the face of public disgust leaving egg on the faces of the opposition. This does not bode well for the future. It must really hurt being out smarted by a buffoon.

It would be interesting to hear the views of Labour councillors adept at the use of social media. Judging recent events on Twitter, any criticism of Walsall Labour produces indignant squeals from the left accusing the author of this humble blog of being a “Tory loving amoeba” or a wild-eyed anarchist Trot. Your correspondent is neither but is merely a left leaning voter and a payer of council tax who is worried by Bird and his chums and is disenchanted with what Walsall Labour are doing and, more importantly, not doing.

As for Dromio in the sad form of local Liberal Democrats, it is probably best not to dwell on the final days of an endangered species. They are, though, very entertaining and always good for a laugh.

The vote to maintain the current system of councillor’s allowances went 28 – 27 in favour with five councillors absent from the chamber. With 27 Conservative councillors and 27 Labour councillors, the mathematics in this are rather interesting. Two councillors sent apologies, one Labour and one Tory. Having recently undergone heart surgery, the absence of the Labour member is understandable. One Libdem was unwell and two further Tories were absent. One was on Twitter complaining of the rail fare from London Euston and the other was probably touring the doss houses of Palfrey clutching postal vote applications and searching for imaginary vagrants.

Maths has never been a strong point on this humble blog, but a simple quadratic equation based on 24 Tories, 26 Labour, four Libdems and one Independent, suggests that Libdems supported Bird and the Independent supported Labour. But, in a triumph for local democracy, we may never know which of our elected representatives voted for what. There is, of course, a huge margin of error in the above calculation. It might be the case that Bird’s U-turn caused such confusion that members did not know what they were voting for and simply raised their hands in a Pavlovian response opposing anything the other lot were in favour of. Tribal block voting does not serve the people of the borough and with Walsall now the laughing stock of local government, councillors should remember that they represent wards and not political parties and group leaders should take a peek at the Council Constitution.

Part 5, Codes and Protocols, paragraph 3, point 2 (b) states that members: “Must not bully any person”.

Point 5 states: “You must not conduct yourself in a manner which could reasonably be regarded as bringing your office or authority into disrepute.”

We have gone way beyond disrepute and descended into total farce in Walsall. With Liberal Democrats not bothering to field candidates in by elections, the Conservatives trying to grab whatever they can and Labour’s only policy is to hope that people dislike the existing bunch, it is no wonder that election turn outs are so low.

In these hard times, we really deserve better.

As Antipholus of Syracuse says in Act One:

“Upon my life, by some device or other
The villain is o`erraught of all my money.
They say this town is full of cozenage;
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.”

That Shakespeare bloke knew a thing or two.