No Wage Slaves

You know, for the sake of my health and because I've been in a good mood lately, I was going to skip this week's political rant. However, the recent furore over the government's 'workfare', (or as we civilised people call it, 'slave labour'), scheme culminating in a humiliating climbdown on their part, has moved me to drop tonight's planned post for a brief rant. In a desperate attempt to disguise the scale of their defeat, we've been treated to the spectacle of several senior members of this pathetic excuse for a government denouncing anyone who opposed the scheme as 'Trotskyites' and 'Communists'. Clearly, this childish name-calling is now a cornerstone of government policy, as it follows bonkers Education Secretary Micheal Gove similarly denouncing parents who opposed the conversion of their school into an academy as 'Trots'.

Lest we forget, what this argument was about was forcing young unemployed people into 'work experience' schemes with large corporations, on threat of losing their benefits if they didn't comply. Now, I don't have anything against the concept of 'work experience', except that what the participating firms were offering was no such thing. Instead, young people were being used to stack shelves and other menial tasks, alongside paid full time staff, whilst receiving no pay themselves. Moreover, there was never any prospect of them actually getting a proper job at the end of this period of forced labour. If opposing this kind of exploitation makes me a communist then I'll happily state my love for Lenin and his policy of collectivisation here and now.

But, I'm not just a communist, but also, according to 'Call me Dave' Cameron, I'm also 'job snob', disparaging those who perform low paid work. I'll plead 'guilty' again. Whilst such jobs are essential and I have the utmost respect for the people who toil way in them (for low pay and long hours), the reality is that, given the choice, nobody would choose to do them. Unlike Dave and Co, I can speak from experience here as, unlike these millionaire bastards, I've actually done a few of those low paid jobs when I've needed the money. Incredibly, despite the fact that the government was forced to back down on the issue as a result of public opinion (which, in turn, had forced several large firms to leave the scheme), there were still some idiots amongst the masses who decried the derailing of the scheme. "People should have to work for their benefits, just like I have to work for my pay" and "once again people on benefits are getting something for nothing" were amongst the choicest moronic comments I heard on news programmes. Yeah, I think you're missing the basic point that benefits are paid to people because there is no work for them. But, let me put it another way for the doubting morons out there - do you think it right that huge corporations, (including Tesco, Burger King and Marks And Spencer), should have their payrolls subsidised with taxpayers money, when they already make huge profits off of us? Because that's what was happening under this scheme. It's about greed - the greed of corporations who want to take our money any way they can. And this government can't wait to help them.