Middle Class Whingers

You know the worst thing about this week's budget?  The fact that it has brought out in force the middle class do-gooder whingers.  You know what I mean.  'Oh, these measures will only reduce bills by £45 (or whatever) a year, this just isn't good enough. What use is that?'  OK, I won't deny that I've sometimes said similar things, but the fact is that we are saying them from a position of privilege.  Forty five quid (or whatever), might not sound like much of a saving to us, but, believe me, for those living on a shoestring, as the poorest people have no choice but to do, forty five quid can seem like a fortune.  Of course, those privileged, middle class 'socialists' who like to lecture the rest of us on 'how terrible poverty is', actually have little or no idea what not having any money is actually like.  As someone who was once down , quite literally, to their last few quid and came within a hairs breadth of defaulting on their mortgage, (I quite literally had enough in the bank for one more payment), I'd like to think that I do have some idea of what life is like living on the breadline.  OK, I was lucky, before I had to make that payment, I managed to get some work.  It was casual work with horrible hours and shitty pay, but it enabled me to keep a roof over my head.  Just.  The amount I had left over to buy food and pay bills was paltry and had to be very carefully managed.  Some tough choices had to be made.

Even when did get a full-time job, the pay was still shitty, so I had to keep on making those choices, learning how to like supermarket economy brands, where to find cheap clothes (and how to learn to put up with wearing socks with more holes than fabric and underpants with the arse out them for far longer than was comfortable), learning how to minimise the amount of heat I could live with in my house during the winter.  Any saving and I mean any saving, no matter how tiny, I could make was a Godsend.   So please, middle class whingers, don't patronise the poor by dismissing what you think are paltry savings that they might be able to make as a result of this week's budget.  In fact, please just fuck off.  These middle class wankers are a large part of what is wrong with the 'left' in this country.  It used to be that these middle class do-gooders were confined to the Liberal Party (or Lib Dems or whatever the fuck else it is that they call themselves).  You know the sort: always wringing their hands at the plight of those 'poor people' - not that they knew any themselves and they definitely wouldn't want them in their houses, but it helped salve their consciences to throw them a few scraps and congratulate themselves for their enlightened generosity.  What they definitely didn't want was for those oiks to get sufficient help to better themselves and - horror of horrors - get their own hands on the levers of power.  Which is why they identified as Liberals and decried the Labour Party.  But now they seem to surround every bloody proposed Labour policy, tut-tutting their disapproval whilst simultaneously claiming to be 'socialists'.  Jesus, just fuck off, will you?