Please God, No...
How long will it be before some twenty-first-century incarnation of the workhouse will emerge? With housing now pretty much unaffordable to most via ownership, and the rental market exhibiting definite signs of collapse, with the eviction of long-term tenants - aided and abetted by this outrageous government - who are being forced into effective homelessness because 'market forces' have been allowed to distort what were normal transactional arrangements between buyer and seller, renter and rentier, to a point where no-one outside the monied elite will benefit, either side of the transactional equation.
We are not talking about a peasant class or lumpen proletariat here, we are talking middle-class people, in otherwise solid occupations, being forced to the margins of society through the abstract machinations of 'the markets'. Heaven forfend we upset that particular deity. When I hear that the PCS (Civil Service union) have engaged the Passport Office in strike action over pay - their members being expected to knuckle down and accept a two percent rise, when food inflation alone is running at eighteen, let alone all the bloody rest - and to hear that action is being questioned by the media in the name of 'balance', makes my blood boil.
This government doesn't only seek to dismantle the Civil Service through vicious cuts, it wants to give its civil servants every reason to jump ship of their own accord through desperation: they won't even engage with them in discussion, such is their arrogance. Don't this bunch of thick-witted Tory excuses for politicians realize that these are the people who actually do the donkey work of running the country for them, enabling them to posture and preen themselves in the public - and the Tory press' eyes? The sad fact is, they know full well, and don't give a shit. Oh, and the delays getting to France via ferry being due to bad weather? Just ask the ferry operators themselves: they'll put you right.
As to workhouses, given that we now have to provide free 'warm spaces' for people who can't afford to heat their homes; have middle-class professionals regularly needing the assistance of food-banks; and have health and social care professionals needing to take second and third jobs simply to survive; I don't think we are that far away from their re-institution. What form they might take and under what legislation is moot, but if this shower of frauds is allowed to continue in 'government', anything deeply unpleasant is entirely possible. Having had a relatively recent ancestor of mine [blog post's passim] die in poverty in one of those places, I can't help but feel a shiver every time I listen to these vile idiots spouting their bilious, mendacious venom.
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