First they came for the unemployed, the poor and disabled, I did not speak out because I was not unemployed, poor or disabled.
Then they came for the working poor, and I did not speak out because I was not one of the working poor.
Then they came for those on middle incomes, and I did not speak out because my income was higher, not top rate, but higher.
Then they came for me …… and there was no one left to speak out for me.
By blog commentator Rod Brown, today, lightly edited
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Can we please have a moratorium on Martin Niemöller’s quotation? Neither this government or Labour are going to embark on a holocaust. It is ridiculous to equate mean-minded hypocrisy with mechanised genocide.
I do not think Labour is
I do not agree with you regarding this government
They may not be delivering a holocaust, but I think we have to consider economic enslavement as their goal
You don’t know much about Germany before the war if you can’t see the obvious parallels. They’ve even got toilet paper rags like the Mail doing the same role as Der Stürmer.
I’m surprised that this needs explanation. The equation is not between ‘mean-minded hypocrisy’ and ‘a holocaust’.
The connection is as follows – when a powerful social group see themselves as inherently superior to another (usually powerless) group, the ‘superior’ group starts to see the ‘inferior’ group as less than human and loses the essential feelings of empathy, sympathy or identification with their suffering. There is a parallel with the bully and his victim. The difference is simply one of degree, not of essential quality.
Exactly
‘First they came for the refugees, but I was not a migrant so I did not complain” would be more accurate.
So many of these iniquitous measures and the demonisation which justifies them were trialled on asylum seekers first in the late 90s.
Like the vouchers instead of cash, so you can control where they spend and on what – and which, notoriously, did not include buying sanitary protection (not essential, apparently).
Wow, that really is a new low. As if the situations are comparable.
How dare you
I wish I was as sure as you
I wish that we could be sure that we are not being pushed into debt servitude too.. but the signs are not good.
I agree
Depends on your perspective. I agree that the Government has managed to plumb the depths.
Perhaps you should follow this link:-
http://economicwardiaries.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/gray-state-concept-trailer/
This page gives a little more to think about: http://economicwardiaries.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/awakening-to-reality/
Over 10,000 sick and disabled people have already died as a direct result of this Government’s welfare reform/work programme. Does
that count as genocide?
To quote Mr. Murphy below:
I doubt your claim
Evidence please
You know, I’ve grown up generally being anti religious, but, Christ, I dig this Quaker radical love for poor and working people.
Jesus, their inspiration, must have scared the shit out of the selfishly priveleged elite of his time.
That is why they probably humiliated and killed him.
I thought the Telegraph’s approach to Easter was instructive (sorry, I know you had a blog specifically on that but I missed it due to various family urgencies).
Point being that in the Western world it is, for whatever reason, much more common for people to say “I don’t believe in God” than “I don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus” although most people actually follow those teachings very sketchily.
Nonetheless, the Telegraph was unusual in making plain how opposed it was to those teachings;
“The poor are not blessed, they are vile & deservedly shunned”
“Bother not with riches in Heaven, you want material goods down here on earth”
“Ambition, greed & envy are excellent characteristics. They lead to a thriving economy”
“Those who shun the material to meditate on the spiritual realm are, at best w@nkers & at worst scrounging layabouts”
“Dunno about a camel but I bet you can get a Chelsea Tractor through if you really hit the gas on it”.
Re benefits: I had a look at a Guardian graph on welfare spending and they apparently count state pensions, that is public sector employees pensions, as a benefit.
Yes, they are funded by the taxpayer, but the government employs them and pays them for supplying a service. Contributions are deducted and put into a fund.
Since these pensions are paid for from contributions much the same way as workers in the private sector are, how can this be conceivably be described as a benefit when the money from employees wages is being deducted at source?
This apparent “benefit” is a sizeable chunk of the welfare budget too! Except it is not a benefit, it is deferred wages! It is pure siphostry to call it a benefit!
I doubt your claim
Evidence please
Now, I thought at first they might be referring to the Basic State Pension, which could conceivably be described as a benefit! However, they are describing state pensions plural as a benefit. Or so it would appear.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/dec/04/government-spending-department-2011-12
The chart or graph estimates state pensions costing £74.22 billion. They are described as a benefit. I concede I may have made a mistake here, but they appear to be describing all state pensions as a benefit.
I think you have this one wrong
Remember there are more than basic old age pensions – there are also income related pensions
“I think you have this one wrong
Remember there are more than basic old age pensions — there are also income related pensions”
I am willing to be corrected again, but don’t income related pensions essentially pay a pittance? For instance, you have to have paid in up to 25 years of contributions to get a full basic state pension.
Therefore, in most cases at least, it is a bit of a cheek to refer to most state pensions as benefits. They have been paid for with contributions and you are only fully entitled to the full amount of most of them only when you have put in enough contributions.
So I would still maintain that, in most cases, they are not benefits as this graph appears to say – they are deferred wages.
Stevo!!: You seem to think that there is some fund saved up that contains national insurance contributions paid in the past, and that pensions are paid out of the pot that was saved up. Not true. Pensions are paid out from current income. The NI contributions that current pensioners paid in when they were working went straight back out in pension payments to people who were then retired. When you retire, your state pension will be paid from contributions from people who are then in the workforce.
NI is nominally a separate pot from the General Fund, but in practice the government borrows from it all the time (promising to pay it back with interest), though the Treasury has a sort-of-rule that it should only be used to pay for investments rather than for general government payments, but frankly it’s more of a guideline.
You’re also confusing the basic state pension with pensions of state employees. The full basic pension is paid to anyone – privately or publicly employed, doesn’t matter – who either paid any National Insurance contributions, or otherwise gained NI credits (which being paid any number of benefits would do), for at least 30 years. It doesn’t matter how *much* NI you paid, it just matters that you did.
There is also the Additional State Pension (previously called Second State Pension or State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme, SERPS) which *is* related to how much you paid in NI contributions.
Public-sector employees have other pension arrangements for final-salary or defined-contributions schemes, and these are *not* counted as benefits, for the purposes of the government’s accounts. This is a top-up on top of the state pension schemes.
Whether funds are paid straight back out from contributions or not (and they apparently are), there is a National Insurance Fund, which strangely the government has tried to deny that such a fund exists!
Last year, according to some sources, this fund was in surplus to the tune of around £115 billion. That’s surplus, not total! As you and others have pointed out, the government effectively dips into it all the time. In the same way as a lot of the money from the road tax does not actually go on the roads, quite a bit of the NI fund does not actually go where it is supposed to. Meanwhile, this government are cutting pensions, increasing contributions and making people work longer, despite the fact that the NI fund is well in surplus.
Incidently, I am interested to know where the huge £74.22 billion figure for state pensions in this graph comes from. It seems inordinately high!
There is an NI fund that usually broadly beaks even
And pensions go on pensions ….. Have you not noticed there are many millions of them?
Richard, old boy, can you make sure and forward this blog to Labour HQ?
Not sure if you have seen what they are up to now:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/06/labour-plans-shift-welfare-payouts