Connected
I'm slowly picking up on the news of the past week or so - my attention has been focussed on other areas of late. So. A quick run through.
First up. I've been reading about this "wife swap" programme on C4. The one with the impressively obnoxious Bardsleys of Rochdale in it. £37,000+ per annum in benefits for the parents and their eight kids - more than one of which has asthma so chronic the parents receive carer's allowance.
The wives swapped with a couple from somewhere down south who both worked excessive hours and brought home the grand sum of £27,000.
There IS something wrong here - on both sides of the fence. The Bardsley's are happy to claim benefits for their asthmatic children whilst at he same time smoking their way through a weekly total of £140 of cigs and blowing the smoke all over the poor little buggers.
Mrs Bardsley:
“It is not like we are defrauding the system – we are entitled to all that money.
People should leave us alone and get a life if they have a problem with us having benefits. I am an adult with a mind of my own and if I choose to have eight children, I know I can look after them, love them and provide for them, so what is the problem?"
I think the point is that you can't "look after them" or "provide for them" without the rest of us paying you and your husband to stay home to do it. Might be a bit different if you had to get up every day to travel to work, spend 8 hours there, travel back and then start feeding, bathing and entertaining them before settling down to an evening washing and ironing and the rest.
Understandably, the public outcry has been aimed at the Bardsleys while painting the Sprys -probably correctly - as "decent hardworking folk".
What seems to me to get missed though is the hours and the pay these two were receiving. The wife had two jobs and worked 45 hours per week. The Husband put in a regular 70 hr weeks. Their joint take home pay was £27,000. My (admittedly weak) maths makes that around £4.52 per hour on average.
Now - given the hours they had to put in to earn what they did, they must have been paid below the, legally enforceable, minimum wage. Or have I missed something ?
I know that the Sprys worked extra hours to keep their heads above water, but some of the other employees of these companies must surely be only able to work 35 to 40 hour weeks ?
So, on the one hand we have a family who are being subsidised via sickness benefit, carer's allowance and who-knows-what-else and, on the other, businesses that are also being subsidised via income support, housing benefit and the rest. One of those facts causes public outcry, the other is accepted as normal. It's a funny old world.
Hmmm allegations that IDS paid Betsy slightly above the minimum wage for her stint as office girl immediately after his election to Tory leader. Does he really need an inquiry to finally see him off ?
So The Beatles (?? errr.....well Paul and Ringo) will not allow any of their stuff to be downloaded from t'internet ? I've got news for them, we've been downloading it for years.
I can't believe that their albums are still full price after all these years. They've been purchased in so many formats: LP, Cassette, 8 Track !, CD, Minidisk and God knows what else, that the coffers of EMI (or whichever unwieldy, rich-as-Croesus, conglomerate now owns the back catalogue) must be full to overflowing. £32:00 I paid, in the early 90s, for the White Album. 6 years later I was GIVEN a CD with the ENTIRE Beatles oeuvre on it in MP3 format. The immediate future had arrived.
So...c'mon "Fab 2" get real. It's already out there for free - and I don't think either of you really need the money do you ?
I see ASBOS are in the news again. We have had some successful implementations about a mile from where I live and they have been a success in the sense that, when the brain dead twunts broke them, they were incarcerated.
Now they want to use them to get rid of nuisance neighbours. As far as I am concerned, the sooner the better. These people are the root cause of so much crime in the areas they inhabit it beggars belief. They just couldn't give a shit about anyone but themselves.
20 years ago, Dearest, young Eldest, very young Youngest and myself had to endure a year of neighbours from hell. Drunken rows nearly every night of the week, numerous attempted "suicides", aggressiveness and ambulances on a weekly basis. The kids were petrified half the time, constantly woken up by the incoherent screaming. When they weren't doing that, their offspring would be playing heavy metal at all hours. So ASBOS ? Yes please. Because there IS such a thing as society.
Tonight Youngest and his Darlin' came round to see Dearest and brought a DVD - . In my opinion a wasted opportunity on the part of Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter to bring The French Lieutenant's Woman to the big screen.. Believe me, Fowles' novel is far superior. However this DVD was given away free in one of the weekend's manifestations of the Mail. Free DVDs ?? How small has their readership become that they have to resort to this ?
Dearest has developed a tickly, normally insignificant cough. Usually such mild irritants are not a problem. Buttercup syrup and all is sorted. Different when you've just had radical abdominal surgery though. To see her, legs pulled up, with a pillow case clasped to her stomach as every pathetic little cough leaves her nearly crying with pain is hard.
Get well soon - that's all I can say.
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