George Osborne has created more debt than every Labour government in history!

Over the years I've presented a lot of facts and statistics to demonstrate that George Osborne has been doing a terrible job as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that his ideological austerity agenda is spectacularly failing to achieve what he claimed it was going to when he came to power in 2010.

One of the main problems I've faced is that the facts and statistics I've presented contradict the almost ubiquitous mainstream media narratives that "George Osborne is doing a good job under difficult circumstances" and that "there is no alternative" to his ideological austerity agenda.

People find it difficult to accept the evidence that I'm presenting because it conflicts so badly with the narratives they've been conditioned to accept as true through their endless repetition in the mainstream media.

One of the assertions that people really struggle to accept is that George Osborne has created more new debt than every Labour government in history combined. This one is particularly hard for people to come to terms with because it conflicts with the (totally inaccurate) "folk wisdom" that "Labour always spend loads of money, then the Tories have to tidy up the mess". Further confusion is added by the way that Tory politicians (including the Prime Minister David Cameron) try to conflate the meanings of "the debt" and "the deficit" which are economic terms with completely different meanings.

George Osborne has created more debt than every Labour government in history

A quick look at the economic evidence reveals that only two Labour governments have ever left office leaving the national debt higher as a percentage of GDP than it was when they came to power, and all of the others have lowered it as a percentage of GDP.

On the two occasions that Labour oversaw increases in the national debt as a percentage of GDP there were the mitigating circumstances of huge global financial crises. The Ramsay MacDonald government of 1929-31 coincided with global fallout from the Wall Street Crash (they left a 12% increase in the debt to GDP ratio), and the last few years of the Blair-Brown government of 1997-2010 coincided with the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis (they left an 11% increase). The other Labour governments all reduced the scale of the national debt, Clement Attlee's government of 1945-51 reduced the national debt by 40% of GDP despite having to rebuild the UK economy from the ruins of the Second World War; Harold Wilson's 1964-70 government reduced the national debt by 27% of GDP; and even the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-79 managed to reduce the debt by 4% of GDP.

The majority of Labour governments have ended up reducing the national debt, and the two that didn't happened to coincide with the biggest global financial crisis of the 20th Century and the biggest global financial crisis so far in the 21st Century.

When we come to look at George Osborne's own record as Chancellor of the Exchequer it is an established fact that in his first 3 years as Chancellor, Osborne managed to add more to the national debt than the Labour Party did in the 13 preceding years.

By George Osborne's own estimates, the national debt will have grown by 26.9% of GDP between 2010 and 2015. If you want to check this for yourself, have a look at page 19 of the November 2010 OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook which records the debt to GDP ratio as 53.5% of GDP for 2009-10, and page 20 of the December 2014 OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook which records the debt to GDP ratio for 2014-15 as being 80.4%.

In the last 200 years of economic history there have only been three prolonged periods of debt accumulation worse than George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer: The First World War (+110% of GDP), the Second World War (+100% of GDP) and the tenure of Tory Chancellor Nicholas Vansittart 1812-1823 (+64% of GDP).
Having increased public sector debt by 26.9% in five years, George Osborne has undeniably created more new debt than any single Labour government in history ever has. In fact it's a bigger proportional increase in the national debt than all of the Labour governments in history combined.

Disclaimer

The reason I've written this article is not that I support the Labour Party. Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I'm not a Labour Party loyalist, and anyone who isn't familiar with my work can read this, this and this to establish that I'm no blind Labour Party tribalist.

The reason I've written it is that I believe that George Osborne is such a poor Chancellor that he makes Gordon Brown's tenure look highly competent in comparison!

It's absolutely incredible that George Osborne has the chutzpah to carry on churning out the "irresponsible Labour" narratives when his ideological austerity agenda has failed so spectacularly in its own terms, meaning that in just five years he's ended up creating more debt than every Labour government in history combined!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
What is the point of the Labour Party?
           
Busting the Tory "cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative 
                     
The remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain
       
The pre-election contract the Tories want you to forget all about
                             
Why you should use your critical thinking skills, no matter what the information source
                                         
Ideological austerity and economic illiteracy
                          
Why you should question everything, even me!
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Green Party have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
The rise of the non-traditional parties in UK politics
  

Don't read this article

I'm not sure why you're reading an article entitled "don't read this article". Maybe you're childishly susceptible to reverse psychology? Maybe you're so belligerent that you simply won't be told what not to do? Or maybe you're just curious as to why anyone would write an article called "don't read this article"?

Not reading articles

The reason I've written this is that I'm absolutely sick of people wading into the comments threads underneath the links I've put up on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page and making it absolutely and totally clear that they didn't even bother to click the link and read what the article said before they started spouting off about how shit and wrong it is.

What makes this behaviour so annoying is that I know that some 90% of people never (or very rarely) leave comments, even when they have read the article. This means that that those who leave comments without having read the article are part of a vocal minority. There's nothing wrong with being part of the vocal minority (in fact I'm delighted that so many people read my articles and then leave insightful comments), but there is something terribly wrong with people who are so opinionated that they yell their opinions without having even made a rudimentary effort to establish the facts about what it is that they're shouting about.

This habit of barging in with their opinions about the article they didn't even read is most commonly observed amongst UKIP supporters. Over the years I've found that you can't even convince them to read the article even when you use a link description goading them about the Ukipper habit of not reading the article.

Even if you say something along the lines of "If you leave a comment on this article about UKIP that shows that you haven't read it, you're only demonstrating to the rest of us what a confirmation bias riddled and belligerent bunch Ukippers are" - you'll still get a load of Ukippers showing up to write criticisms that demonstrate beyond doubt that they haven't bothered to read the article!

This trait of not reading the article before spouting off is most common amongst UKIP supporters, but it is not confined to them. In February 2015 I shared an article by Professor David Nutt about the way the UN is planning to impose a world-wide ban on the medical use of ketamine, even though it has proven and unique medical properties (it's the only anesthetic that does not cause respiratory depression).

The idea that just because some people use a substance to get high, means that doctors all over the world should be banned from using it for medical purposes is precisely the kind of ideologically driven nonsense that proves the irrationality of the "war on drugs". However many of the people who saw the link decided to wade in with their opinions on the recreational use of ketamine, and even to chastise me for "promoting drugs".  Had these people actually read the article, or even the article description where I explained that it was about the medicinal use of ketamine, there's no way that they could have construed my posting of the article as an endorsement of the recreational use of ketamine.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

This tendency for people to express opinions on articles they've not even read is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the proven theory that the less of an expert a person is on a subject, the more they tend to underestimate their lack of knowledge. Thus a guy who reads nothing but simplistic pro-austerity narratives in the S*n or Daily Mail (written in the vocabulary of a 10 year old) might think himself an expert on economic issues, whilst an economics expert who understands how ludicrously complex the global derivatives market is, will know that it's now so complicated that it's far beyond the ability of even a visionary genius to understand the entire financial system.

Essentially what people are doing when they express an opinion on something they've not even bothered to read is taking the incredibly pompous stance that they're such an expert, and their perspective is so inherently perfect that they don't even need to examine the evidence before they share their sage and ever-so-important opinion.

Long before the Dunning-Kruger effect was formalised, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Intellectual laziness

There is nothing wrong with forming an opinion just by looking at the title of an article and the associated image, in fact that's the way that most of us determine which links we're actually going to click and read, and which we're going to ignore.

The problem I have with intellectually lazy people is that they make the perfectly natural decision not to read an article, but then decide to share their blatantly unfounded opinion that the article they refuse to read is "absolute crap"!

The thought process they undergo is something like this:

1. I'm not going to read that because I don't like what I imagine that it says.
2. Nobody else should read articles that say things that I don't like.
3. I'm going to leave a comment saying how crap the article is in order to dissuade other people from reading it.

This kind of behaviour is about as clear a demonstration of intellectual laziness as is possible.

I find people who are ill-informed slightly annoying, but it's understandable that the person who hardly reads anything other than flicking through the copy of the Daily Mail/S*n in the workplace canteen has got some pretty weird misconceptions (like immigrants being to blame for everything or George Osborne being a genius). Okay, these people should still probably understand that the newspapers are propaganda devices, and that they shouldn't allow themselves to be so easily programmed with right-wing propaganda narratives, but they can't really be blamed for their lack of critical thinking skills (that's a result of the top-down authoritarian education system we suffer in this country) nor for failing to come across independent information sources (even a reasonably successful blog like mine is a minuscule drop in the ocean compared to the daily circulation of the S*n or the Daily Mail).

There is a huge difference between being misinformed, and the sheer intellectual laziness of choosing to completely ignore the information you've been presented with, yet trying to form a counter-argument anyway. 

  
Hopeless counter-arguments
 How is it even remotely possible for anyone to believe that they've presented a coherent counter-argument, when they've refused to even read what the argument is?

The only way that it seems possible is if they are so fundamentally lacking in debating skills that they think that ad hominem (against the person) attacks, foul mouthed abuse, blatant straw man misinterpretations of what has actually been said, or a whole host of other common logical fallacies constitute debate winning tactics.

It is stunningly obvious that it's impossible to construct a rational counter-argument if you're unwilling to even consider what has actually been said. Yet some people are so afraid of reading things that might challenge their worldview that they will not only refuse to read it, but they'll construct ludicrous fallacious arguments against it in pitiful efforts to deter others from reading it too.

A simple rule

If you see an article that you think you're not going to like and choose not to read it, that's fine. It's just a manifestation of confirmation bias. I'm not judgmental about that in the slightest because I do it every single day when I decide not to read clickbait articles, celebrity culture drivel, above-the-line trolling or articles written by journalists with writing styles I find annoying, or opinions that I find offensive.

What I have a problem with is people who decide not to read an article, but then decide to express their opinion on it anyway. There's a simple rule that I try to follow, and it's this: If you can't be arsed to read the article, don't bother to offer your (worthless) opinion about what it says.

Conclusion

The problem I have in explaining my objection to the people who are this intellectually lazy, is that I can't explain why they should read things before they comment on them in the form of an article, because they clearly wouldn't bother to read it would they?

I was hoping that by giving it a "don't push this button" kind of title I might at least trick a few of them into reading it.

If you're the kind of person who doesn't angrily criticise articles that you've blatantly refused to read, and you feel like I've tricked you into reading this, then I hope you at least understand my reason for me doing this, and accept that the blame is entirely yours anyway, because I clearly told you not to read it in the first place!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
What is ... confirmation bias?
           
Ukippers say the funniest things
                     
The remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain
       
The pre-election contract the Tories want you to forget all about
                             
Why you should use your critical thinking skills, no matter what the information source
                                         
Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
                          
Why you should question everything, even me!
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Green Party have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
The rise of the non-traditional parties in UK politics
  

What this photo of Nigel Farage doesn't tell you about UKIP

On Tuesday the 17th of February 2015 a few revolting Chelsea fans brought shame upon their football club and, more significantly, shame upon our country when they were filmed repeatedly shoving a black man off the Paris Métro, then singing a song gleefully celebrating how racist they are.

After the incident, efforts were made to track down the guilty parties, and fairly quickly one of them was identified as Josh Parsons, a vocal 21 year old UKIP supporter who was educated at the £30,000 per year Millfield private school in Somerset, who was once photographed with the UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

Many people have tried to use this photo in order to attack Nigel Farage as someone who associates with racists, but in my view these efforts are extremely weak, and in fact self-defeating. Nigel Farage is a famous person who is photographed with all kinds of people on a daily basis. There's absolutely no way that he can be held responsible if one of the many people he's been photographed with goes off and does something unacceptable at some point in the future.

Anyone trying to manufacture the conclusion that Nigel Farage is a racist from this particular photo is really stretching the argument well past the bounds of credibility and, in fact, making other critics of UKIP look rather desperate by association. This is pretty ironic stuff because by using this photo to try and make Farage look racist by association, they're making more rational UKIP critics (who prefer to use facts and evidence to criticise the party) look desperate by association with them.

The really sad thing about such weak efforts to taint Nigel Farage by association is that there is such a mountain of evidence out there to criticise UKIP with, meaning that such desperate tactics aren't even remotely necessary.

To give you an illustration of how many real issues there are about UKIP, I'll briefly list a few of them:

• Tax-dodging: In February 2015 UKIP were the only UK political party to side with the Greek Golden Dawn fascists to vote against an EU motion to clamp down on tax-dodging. The motion was passed by 612 votes to 19, with more than half of the votes against coming from UKIP.
• Far-right extremists: In October 2014 UKIP prevented the collapse of their EFDD group by signing up an MEP from the extreme-right Polish KNP which is led by a bloke who claims that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, the disabled should not be allowed on television and democracy is the stupidest form of government ever!
• Party funding: UKIP is 90% bankrolled by people who used to bankroll the Tory party. Once you know that they get most of their cash from former donors to the most establishment friendly party of all, it's extremely difficult to take their claims to be an anti-establishment party even remotely seriously.
• Blatant opportunism: UKIP politicians will say and do anything if they think it will win them votes. They posture as a leftish party in Labour constituencies and an even-more-Tory-than-the-Tories party in Conservative seats. One of the clearest displays of this kind of blatant opportunism is the way that they keep stealing my infographics, even though I'm fundamentally opposed to their Thatcherite economic agenda.
• Gay floods: The UKIP councilor who described the Somerset floods as God's retribution for the passage of gay marriage legislation through parliament is just one of dozens of UKIP politicians who have embarrassed the party by using their status as UKIP representatives to spout ludicrous, bigoted, racist, sexist and/or homophobic gibberish. 
• Neil Hamilton and other Ex-Tories: UKIP is absolutely riddled with ex-Tory politicians. It's shameful enough that they decided to give the disgraced former Tory MP Neil "Cash for Questions" Hamilton a route back into politics, but some of their other failed Tory MPs (like Bill Etheridge and Janice Atkinson) are arguably even worse.
• Laziness: In the last European parliament UKIP's band of MEPs were the laziest of any political party in the whole of the European Union. They barely ever turned up to debates and votes, and when they did bother to vote they obstinately voted against almost every motion, no matter whether it was in Britain's national interest to do so or not. Their inherent laziness didn't stop them from claiming millions in salaries, expenses and party subsidies from the "EU gravy train" that they're always so keen to criticise though!
• TTIP: The schizophrenic UKIP stance on the TTIP corporate power grab is one of the clearest indicators that they simply cannot be trusted to do as they say. TTIP represents a huge threat to UK sovereignty because it would allow multinational corporations to completely bypass our democratic and judicial systems in order to sue our country every time our government does something that they don't like. Some UKIP politicians like Louise Bours have criticised TTIP, while others are clearly strongly in favour of signing away our sovereignty to corporate interests. William "Dartmouth" Legge propagandised in favour of TTIP in the European parliament and their industrial spokesman Roger Helmer even voted in favour of it when it came before the European parliament!

Returning to the photo of Nigel Farage with the Chelsea fan from the Paris Métro incident, it's simply not possible to conclude that Nigel Farage is racist from that picture, and any attempt to do so actually undermines the many rational fact-based arguments that can be deployed against UKIP.

It is of course possible to use the photo to illustrate the fact that UKIP is a party that tends to appeal to racists, but then that's an assertion that hardly needs any more supporting evidence. You only have to look at the constant stream of fruitcakes who are thrown out of the party for spouting bigoted nonsense, or at the vile comments that appear so regularly in the comments on UKIP social media pages, in order to see that an awful lot of bigots and racists are undeniably attracted to the party. When it's already so clear that UKIP have a strong appeal to bigots, and there's such a wealth of factual evidence to criticise them with, using a picture that can easily be construed as a "cheap shot" against Nigel Farage is simply not necessary.
        

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
12 significant Tory-UKIP defectors
           
The TTIP corporate power grab is the biggest threat to UK sovereignty
                     
The remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain
       
The pre-election contract the Tories want you to forget all about
                             
Why I'm sick of UKIP stealing my infographics
                                         
Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
                          
Fish and Ivory: UKIP's appalling EU voting record
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Green Party have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
The rise of the non-traditional parties in UK politics
  

Jon Snow's whitey wasn't "an experiment", it was an exercise in anti-drugs sensationalism

In the third week of February 2015 the mainstream media was flooded with reports about how the widely respected Channel 4 News journalist Jon Snow had taken skunk cannabis as part of an "experiment" and then hated the experience, describing it as worse than any warzone he'd ever experienced and the most overwhelmingly frightening experience of his life!

The problem with this so-called "experiment" was absolutely obvious to anyone who has the slightest understanding of cannabis. Here was a guy who admits that he only ever dabbled with cannabis in his youth, suddenly inhaling two full balloons of highly potent skunk (THC content 19% CBD content 1%) out of the blue, and then spending the ensuing fallout in a MRI scanner! That's the equivalent of making someone who has been teetotal for many years down a full bottle of vodka, banging them in an MRI scanner and expecting them to have an enjoyable experience. The big difference of course being that deliberately inducing such an overdose on alcohol could actually kill a person, whilst deliberately inducing an overdose on cannabis will just produce a very unpleasant "whitey" that may last a few hours, but won't ever risk actually killing the subject.

I'm not sure what the people who were conducting this experiment were trying to prove by deliberately inducing cannabis overdoses in their subjects victims, but it really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If they were trying to prove that skunk is more potent than traditional forms of hash or homegrown, their experiment is the equivalent of asking one person to down a pint of beer, another a pint of cider and another a pint of vodka in order to determine which is strongest, instead of simply measuring the alcohol content of the beverages. If they were trying to establish which forms of cannabis, if any, have the most harmful long-term psychological effects, then inducing one-off overdoses in celebrities doesn't seem to make any sense either.

One possibility is that the producers remembered the fallout from their last "experiment" where they gave people ecstasy (MDMA) and recorded their reactions. The tabloid press were absolutely furious with the (highly predictable) findings that the majority of people in the "experiment" rather enjoyed their MDMA experience. The tabloid press were so outraged that the show demonstrated that MDMA is a enjoyable drug to take (which is the obvious reason that so many millions of people take it) they claimed that the show should have shown more footage of people hating the experience in order to "balance it out". Perhaps the strategy of deliberately inducing cannabis "whiteys" came as a result of the producers heeding these tabloid calls for false balance? Perhaps they thought they'd get a load more tabloid flack if they showed the majority of people enjoying their experiences of low doses of cannabis, so they upped the dosages to such an extent that they knew they'd trigger some seriously unpleasant consequences in order to appease the right-wing press?

The fact that the people conducting this experiment took the decision (for whatever reason) to deliberately induce cannabis overdoses in celebrities, record the fallout and then feed the footage to the tabloid press brings me to an important point, which is that moderation in drug use is the key to avoiding severe negative consequences. This stands true for alcohol as much as it does for prohibited substances. Responsible drinkers understand that a glass or two of wine on an evening can have a wonderful relaxing effect, but drinking two or three bottles of wine on an empty stomach is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, responsible stoners understand that a small amount of cannabis can stimulate creativity and inspiration, but if you smoke too much you'll either be too stoned to be able to put your creative energy into actually doing anything worthwhile (writing, drawing, making music ...) or worse still, you could end up having a "whitey".

The fact cannabis can inspire creativity in the right dosage was illustrated by the fact that a few hours after he came down from the overdose he had been deliberately exposed to, Jon Snow wanted to draw a nice picture. Had the producers given Jon Snow a microdose of cannabis (equivalent to a few drags on a spliff) rather than two whole balloons of skunk vapour (equivalent to chain smoking several strong spliffs to yourself), he would likely have enjoyed the experience and done something creative from the offset, but that kind of approach would clearly have undermined the objective of demonising skunk and giving the right-wing press something to shriek about.

I have absolutely no objection to scientists conducting scientific experiments on cannabis and other drugs in order to better understand their effects, but deliberately inducing extremely unpleasant overdoses and then feeding footage of the "experiment" to the tabloid press severely undermines any claim that this is any kind of rigorous scientific endeavour.

One of the most disappointing things about this so-called "experiment" is that I'm actually really interested in the stated premise of the research - that some forms of cannabis have markedly different effects to others. This interest in the subject stems from the fact that I've read research showing that the natural chemical component of cannabis CBD has strong anti-psychotic effects, meaning that cannabis strains with higher CBD contents (like hash and old fashioned "homegrown") are much less likely to trigger underlying mental health conditions than strains that have been bred to be very high in THC and very low in CBD (like most forms of skunk). 

The findings of this research on the anti-psychotic effect of CBD are (anecdotally) backed up  by the fact that almost all of the cannabis smokers in my age group quickly gave up getting stoned on a regular basis when the supply switched from mainly hash in the late 1990s to mainly potent hydroponic skunk in the 2000s, because they found that they just didn't enjoy it anymore. Instead of getting mellow and relaxed as they used to with hash, they tended to get hyperactive, jittery and paranoid on skunk, so they just stopped doing it.

Traditional forms of cannabis contained two components that seem to naturally counterbalance each other. The selectively bred forms of skunk that dominate the UK cannabis market these days have had their THC contents massively increased at the expense of CBD, which is almost eliminated. These potent forms of skunk have been bred because they require much less growing space and are much less bulky to transport, meaning growers and dealers are significantly less likely to get caught and prosecuted if they produce and sell highly potent skunk varieties, than if they produce and sell traditional "homegrown". This means that many thousands of people will have been made to suffer the psychotic effects triggered by high levels of THC in the absence of CBD when they smoked skunk cannabis are yet more victims of the ideological "war on drugs", because if hash and homegrown were available from registered cannabis vendors, then highly potent skunk varieties would never have come to dominate the UK market as they have under ideological prohibitionism.

One of the few heartwarming things about this exercise in anti-drugs sensationalism dressed up as a proper scientific experiment is that beneath the ever-so-predictable fearmongering anti-drugs diatribe it provoked in the Daily Mail, by far the most uprated comment of all read: "The experiment is flawed. Effectively, they have done the equivalent of asking a non-drinker to down a bottle of brandy in one, and then ask him if he liked it!". When even the majority of Daily Mail readers can easily see through anti-drugs sensationalism when they see it, it really does seem that the establishment are losing their ludicrous ideological propaganda war against drugs. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Why we need to end the ideological "war on drugs"
           
Why you should use your critical thinking skills, whatever the information source
                     
The remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain
       
The pre-election contract the Tories want you to forget all about
                             
How I overcame social anxiety to become a successful political writer
                                         
The Tory vandalism of the English education system
                          
We need to talk about cyber-bullying
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Greens have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

David Cameron's plan to exploit our children as a source of free labour

In February 2015 David Cameron attempted to distract attention away from the massive scale of tax-dodging by the wealthy establishment class (and the flow of millions of pounds into Tory party coffers from these tax-dodging individuals) with some predictable displays of Tory scapegoating.

Scapegoating and distraction

First (while the Chancellor George Osborne was still hiding from questions about what he know about the HSBC tax-dodging scandal) David Cameron announced a policy of sanctioning benefits claimants who are overweight. It was soon revealed that this attempt at a headline grabbing scapegoat policy would only actually affect fewer than 2,000 people according to the government's own statistics. Additionally it surely must have caused disorientating bouts of cognitive dissonance to anyone who believes the Tory rhetoric about Labour being the "nanny state party" that interferes in people's lives and the Tories being "the party of freedom" from state interference, and also to anyone who knows who Eric Pickles is.

After this effort to grab headlines with an attack on the overweight went down so badly that even hacks in the notoriously right-wing Telegraph ended up referring to the policy as "the sadistic hounding of the obese", Cameron and the Tories decided to switch their attention to another minority; the young.

As the HSBC tax-dodging scandal rumbled on, and more serious politicians began to draw parallels between the dodgy way in which political parties are funded and the inexorable rise of political dissatisfaction and outright apathy, Cameron decided to launch a policy that young people (18-21 year olds) should be immediately forced onto unpaid labour schemes if they can't find a real job.

Compulsory unpaid labour for young adults

There are numerous problems with this policy, not least the fact that - even if we ignore the fact that unemployment benefits are the a payout from the National Insurance policy that we all hold with the state, not a wage - making people work 30 hours per week for £57.40 is the equivalent to less than £2 pounds an hour, a clear effort to undermine the National Minimum Wage that the Tories opposed so strongly when it was introduced, and still hate with a burning passion.

Another objection is that if young people can be forced to do menial jobs like litter picking, graffiti cleaning, working in care homes and tidying parks, what happens to the people who do these jobs for an actual salary when their jobs can be done more cheaply by David Cameron's slave army of unemployed youngsters? What happens aggregate economic demand in your local economy when the litter pickers and park attendants lose their salaries when they are laid off from their jobs and replaced with Cameron's unpaid youth army?

It's clear to anyone with the wit to think things through (rather than uncritically lapping up the tabloid ant-welfare rhetoric), that all of these Tory forced labour schemes contradict the simple principle that if the job is worth doing, it's worth paying someone to do it, and if it's not worth doing, there's no sense in forcing anyone to do it at all.

Another objection to these forced labour schemes is that they are used in order to rig the unemployment statistics. Anyone who is familiar with the way the way the ONS calculate the monthly Labour Market Statistics reports will know that the hundreds of thousands of people who are on these forced labour schemes are excluded from the unemployment figures, despite the fact that they all still receive unemployment benefits.

Yet another objection to this policy is that the young adults who are going to be affected by this draconian scheme would have been 13 or younger at the time of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, meaning that Cameron and the Tories are intent on punishing people who were children at the time of the crisis, whilst they've let the financial sector speculators who actually caused it continue enriching themselves with vast bonuses (often paid out by taxpayer owned banks).

The looming second global meltdown

Perhaps the biggest objection of all can be seen if we think back to November 2014 when David Cameron announced to the world that he has reason to believe that there's another massive global economic crisis is on the horizon. In light of the fact that David Cameron believes that there's another crisis on the horizon, and a consequential spike in unemployment looming, a scheme to force young people to work 30 hours per week for their pitiful subsistence allowance looks like a deliberate effort to cash in on the inevitable crisis doesn't it?

The idea that the labour of the young adults is a commodity that can be harvested for free by the state is revolting and economically illiterate enough in it's own right, but once we consider it in light of other things that David Cameron has admitted, we can see it as the utterly vile policy it is.

What can we do about it?
   
It's completely obvious that if you know anyone in the 18-21 age group, you should advise them to register to vote (which is very easy to do), and then to use their vote wisely to vote against the political party that sees their labour as a commodity that belongs to the state.

People who fall in the 18-21 age group after the next election are not the only ones who will be affected by this if the Tories win power. If society becomes normalised to the idea that the labour of young people is a commodity that belongs to the state, then future generations will be hit hard by this policy, especially when the second crisis that David Cameron predicts kicks in.

It's not just future generations of young adults who are going to be hit by this policy either, it's their families too. Imagine if Cameron gets his way and young people are denied housing benefits and forced to work full time for a paltry fifty seven quid a week. Where are these young people going to live? And who do you think is going to be left with the financial burden of supporting them?

If you believe David Cameron's prognosis that a second major global meltdown is on the horizon, and you have children, then it is your duty to your kids to vote against a political party that would exploit your children as a free source of labour in the wake of the next massive global financial crisis.

Even if you don't have kids of your own, or your kids are grown up, surely you have nephews, nieces, grandchildren or other young relatives that you care about? Surely you couldn't bring yourself to vote for a political party that has announced a policy of exploiting them as a source of free labour when they're struggling to find jobs in the wake of the next global financial crisis that David Cameron himself has warned us about, and that they had absolutely no role in creating?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Are you gullible enough to believe that David Cameron is serious about tax-dodging?
           
A letter to fans of workfare
                     
12 things you should know about "Help to Work"
       
The pre-election contract the Tories want you to forget all about
                             
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy
                                         
The Tory vandalism of the English education system
                          
12 Tory-UKIP defectors
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Greens have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies