All Aboard, if You've Got the Right Ticket, that is...

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One of the saddest litanies, constantly trotted out at PMQs by the Prime Minister, is that Labour left office last time, having bankrupted the country. That was thirteen years ago, and no, Labour didn't leave the country bankrupt. Gordon Brown sold off the Gold Reserve back in the early years of the century - and made a bloody good profit on the trade - probably foreseeing the way the world economy was headed: away from coffers of bounty as the basis of trade and currency, and towards something rather less tangible, but no less useful in trade. Consider the state of the economy in the years since under Tory misrule. This government's idea of 'rescuing' the Health Service, and public services in general, is to employ bloody consultancy firms at massive expense to the public purse, rather than employ direct labour and expertise at sensible and guaranteed salary and pension levels: to whit, Deloitte, et al.'s little gravy train of three-grand-a-day [and the rest] individual consultancy fees to do fuck-all: and yes, it's still going on.

How a government such as this bunch of wealthy scroungers has the brass neck to accuse the opposition of being spendthrift, when they wilfully piss money in bucket-loads into the bank accounts of their frankly useless mates, is beyond risible: it's downright immoral, if entirely understandable, given who and what they are and represent. We apparently can't afford proper pay for our NHS staff, but the resources available to private consultancy to fill in the gaps left by such underfunding appear to be endless. And who pays either way? We do. Not them. Time to face up to the reality of the rule of the Übermensch NeoCons and stop buying into the myth that we can all somehow ultimately benefit from aspiring to be like them: they just won't fucking let you. Simple as that: it's their club, and you ain't getting membership, period. We really do need a new way of doing things in this country and the world generally: and it could just be that it's the old, slightly socialist, largeish-state way that fits the bill nicely...

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