More Right Wing Bastards

I thought I'd tie up some loose ends from earlier in the week: principally the fact that Paolo Di Canio now isn't a fascist.  Which is good to know, although it still doesn't explain those fascist salutes, statements of admiration for Mussolini, or the fact that, only a few years ago, he said that he was a fascist.  But as he has now said he isn't, I think that we're supposed to forget all that earlier stuff ever happened - which would explain why he hasn't actually recanted his fascist past, as it apparently now didn't happen.  Except that it did.  The other thing I was going to write about this week was the culmination of the Philpott trial and the way the whole sorry business was being used by the right-wing press to further demonise benefit claimants.  However, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 'Gorgeous' George Osborne, so crudely used the trial verdict to openly link Britain's so called (and non-existent) 'welfare culture', with wife-beating, arson and the killing of children, that I thought there was little point. 

That said, it is worth noting that, according to the Department of Work and Pensions', there are less than two hundred families with eight or more children claiming benefit in the whole UK, so Mick Philpott is hardly typical of benefit claimants.  Moreover, claiming benefits isn't what made Philpott a bastard.  Rather it is the other way around, because he was an evil bastard, he exploited the benefits system by exploiting his children.  The reality is that he would have been doing this even if the benefits system didn't exist.  Back in Victorian times, for instance, I'm sure that he would have exploited his children directly, by sending them up chimneys as sweeps, putting them on the street begging (or worse) or, most likely, sending them out, Fagin-like, to commit crimes for him.  At least with the welfare state, he was only exploiting them indirectly by claiming benefits for them.  Not that the likes of Osborne and his Tory bastard colleagues give a damn about that - they're just determined to exploit even the deaths of children in order to justify their continued destruction of the welfare state and demonization of the poor.  In the meantime, it is notable that Osborne has remained silent over the damning report into the conduct of his millionaire banker pals' mismanagement of HBOS, which brought the bank to it's knees in 2008.