FraserWords

By their Tweets shall ye know them. It’s only 140 characters, but you can say a lot in 140 characters.

Here’s what the prominent Tory MEP Dan Hannan tweeted: “Why do politicians ‘boast’ about record low interest rates? How is it meritorious to punish thrift and reward debt?”

And doesn’t that tell you a lot about the party, the set, the mindset to which Hannan belongs? Its ideology is entirely in the interest of those who have cash stashed – the well-off. For those struggling to pay the mortgage? Not a care. Pump up the interest rate to reward the savers and punish the mortgage-payers.

That Tweet also reveals the intellectual poverty of the right: they want people to buy property; they rely on property ownership to fuel the economy; they forbid the building of rented accommodation; yet, secretly, they long to put up the interest rates being paid by all those poor people they encouraged to buy their homes no matter what. Osborne aims to use taxpayers’ cash to stimulate home buying with one hand, while with the other he fights off his party’s true believers who want to earn an extra few bob on the thousands, or millions, they have stashed on deposit.

Intellectual poverty. For another example, the Government has succeeded in persuading large swathes of the more challenged of the British electorate in believing it is right to withdraw aid from the needy, and succeeded in demonising the poor through a credulous public and a willing, compliant media.  Spending our money on aid is wrong, they tell us, and all this means we are now a nation that believes this Government has cut aid. But it has not, not at all. This is a Government with a passionate belief in aid.

Yes, there may have been some cuts in help for poor people, for poor people’s children, for the disabled, the jobless, the hungry and the cold. But that’s far from the whole story. There’s plenty of Government help available if you know where to look or how to behave.

If you consider not only Government action – the bedroom tax, work assessments for the unemployed that conclude dead people are eligible for employment – but also actions that are not taken, you can see that this Government is doing an enormous amount to help people.

To the shareholders who were granted dividends from former services that are now private sector monopolies, there’s aid – Thames Water’s happy band are about to push up charges for their 14 million customers yet again, and this will be permitted by no intervention from the Government.

The energy utilities are permitted by the Government’s powerless regulator to keep putting up prices to fuel ever-increasing record-breaking profits for the shareholders even though people die for want of heat. That’s what I call serious aid.

To bank employees who have been assisted by the government’s lack of action, there are still big fat bonuses to enjoy.

To rich corporations to whom tax is just something that happens to other people, there is also assistance – no action worth the name from a government that, today, was listening to Deloitte’s chief executive warn that corporations won’t come to Britain if they have to pay tax.

(How we have allowed our country to become the sort of place where policy and public life are dictated by the shareholders who own rich multinational corporations is another question. There are other questions too – where is the politician who’ll have the guts to tell such corporations: “Go then. We’ll do what you do with British companies and British staff paying British taxes for British people, thanks. Now fuck off.”)

Not that lack of action is the only aid available from the Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich – please don’t get the wrong idea.

For those with money, there’ll be the gift of the Royal Mail, in profit yet being handed over to the private sector by direct Government action.

For the banks and their shareholders, bailed out and returned to massive profit by the taxpayer, there’ll be the gift of maximising the benefit of that aid from a Government which can’t wait to hand the banks back to the private sector that bankrupted them, rather than continue public ownership and make money from them.

For top earners, there were tax cuts. For families where both parents are lucky enough to have jobs, there will now be tax assistance. For couples who get married, there will be tax benefits.

All direct action to provide Government assistance, in cold hard cash, precisely targeted.

No, there’s aid aplenty. All you have to do is fit in with this Government’s programme – be prosperous, conform, be lucky.

For the readers of the Daily Mail, this is a golden age of hate: scroungers, foreigners, single mums, the disabled – all getting a good kicking in a country which withdraws assistance from the needy and sends vans to patrol the streets telling foreigners to go home.

A new Channel 4 programme sees how 1949 benefits officers would have treated today’s needy under the rules of the time. Never mind that there’s no point whatsoever in comparing 1949 to 2013, the right’s poverty porn will have Mail readers spontaneously combusting as a single mum is refused aid and kicked onto the streets. That’s the sort of country we want!

Oh well. Back to Twitter, where we started. The Lord of Twitter is supposed to be Stephen Fry, though I don’t follow him. This week he took considerably longer than 140 characters to nail, brilliantly, the hate politics of the Mail and its proprietors to the wall, and I strongly recommend you read it:

http://stephen-fry-me.tumblr.com/post/57805910021/the-daily-mail-and-lord-dacre-appeasing-again