Handout Britain

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The Financial Times this weekend, in the very first paragraph of its front page headline article, 'Hunt rules out US-style subsidies', offers in one short sentence the absolute exemplification of where this archipelago's government's head is at. I quote: 'Jeremy Hunt has insisted Britain will not adopt Joe Biden's "subsidy bowl" approach to economic policy, on the day he signed off a £500mn subsidy package for Tata to modernize the UK's steel industry.' There it is. In a bloody nutshell. Ratan N Tata, chairman of Tata's holding company, alone has a personal wealth of $1bn. Oh, and by the way, the deal could result in the loss of as many as 3000 jobs, overall.

And yet our public buildings are crumbling through lack of care and more crucially, government investment; our public health service is in ruins; our social care system is crippled, and we have a significant majority of working people of all classes and social backgrounds who simply cannot make ends meet. What's the government's response? Chuck as much money at foreign companies and high net worth individuals as possible; allow the false narrative of the over-funded pensioner class to go unchallenged, and blame anyone and everyone but themselves for the yawning vacuum of governance at the heart of it all.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I thought it might be a good idea to put a personal wealth cap on being an MP. I've revised my thinking on this. Let's reverse means-test the buggers. Everyone gets means-tested for 'state handouts' to see if they are worthy of assistance and entitled to state benefits. How about we operate an inverse sliding scale on parliamentary salaries and expenses based on personal and family wealth, with the threshold set at some level that would exclude those who could comfortably afford to fund their political careers out of their own pockets from drawing an MP or ministers' salary, whilst paying those of lesser means commensurately? And while we're at it, make lobbying for personal gain an imprisonable offence with a high tariff. I think we might see a few dropouts from the gravy train, as the careerists see their comfortable pocket money disappear from view, leaving the more committed to get on with the actual running of the place.

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