Benefit Busters

I've made a couple of replies on Subrosa's blog about benefit busters. You might want to nip over and have a look. I'm going to flesh out my comments here.

Time and time again, you see government envisage a problem, spout rhetoric, deploy plans and then declare the problem is fixed, when the reality is far from the truth. I provided an example on Subrosa's blog: The government announced they were getting tougher on the unemployed and their policies (like the minimum wage) were going to create lots of lovely well-paid jobs for them to do. The benefit rules were changed so you lost jobseekers after 6 months, the minimum wage was introduced to make sure people didn't work for less than benefits, working tax credits were introduced to help those on benefits, private companies were brought in to manage the unemployed into work, in fact a whole raft of changes to the welfare and benefits system have been enacted over the past 12 years.

But has it worked? Well we don't know, because the feedback from the system is either non-existant, skewed so much by government departments as to be useless, or of more concern, totally ignored or suppressed.

Anyone in the system will tell you it doesn't work. The system hasn't been changed where it counts to reflect modern working practices, which requires people flexible enough to do extremely short term temporary work. Also, some of the changes have been counter-productive, providing a disincentive to leave benefits, rather than an incentive.

So why don't the government see this and sort out the system? Because thanks to the lack of reliable feedback, the government believes its done the job and thats the end of it. Instead it takes a FOI request like this one to show that in fact in real terms, the number of unemployed hasn't dropped, despite the government's best efforts. So feedback shows the inputs they made to the system haven't had the required effect.

Another example is the governments avowed policy to reduce child poverty. Many schemes have had much money spent on them, but only now has the feedback been produced to show that child poverty has increased under Labour than decreased.

Another is climate change. The government has raised billions in extra "green taxes" and intends to spend billions in order to reduce CO2 emissions. But nowhere is there any mention of measurement. How do we measure our success? If we monitor the megawatts of electricity used, does a reduction indicate people becoming more energy efficient, or is it an indictor of recession? Are we going to monitor every chimney for emissions and note any reduction in CO2?
I took Ed Milliband to task on Labourlist about this back in July, asking him before he comitted billions of pounds of our money to climate change, how was he going to monitor success? Because without feedback, he was just chucking money away. I never got a reply.

A crucial point about all this is once you have feedback from the system, if your expected output doesn't match your objectives, you modify the input by either going back to how the system was before you messed with it, or by identifying where the anomalies lie. That, one instantly recognises is the logical progression.

In the case of unemployment as the FOI request mentioned above reveals, its pretty obvious that uncontrolled immigration has had a quite significant impact. Its also had an impact on education and the health service too, but hey, immigration is too hot to handle for the government. Although you'd think a dispassionate analysis of reliable feedback data would be welcomed, as it should remove most criticisms or cries of racism.

Governments will continue to add layer upon layer of new legislation and process changes heaped on top of those already in place. With no feedback, how can they ever hope to ensure such a complex system is changed for the better?

Well the answer is they won't. The REAL problem with reliable feedback is that its an indicator of failure as well as success. Governments don't like to be labelled failures because it invites criticism and rectifying it may go against whatever dogma they are peddling at the time. But they should embrace failure, because as long as they do something to correct it, failure is all part of the process.

Just remember when governments of any persuasion tell you they are going to do something, ask yourself and them, wheres measurement, the feedback that will confirm success or failure?

Ask yourself some questions: what if Churchill, during the second world war, kept sending ships across the Atlantic without measuring how many of those sent actually arrived here safe? How would he have known that the U-boat threat was increasing? How would he have known that his current plans were failing and that something needed to be done about it? How would he have known that the things he implemented worked or not? He had to have reliable feedback and he had to aknowledge failure, be brave enough to embrace it, and strong enough to do something about it.

This Country is Fucked

I've been saying it for 18 months or so now, I could see it back then, so why couldn't all the "experts"? This country is already fucked, and is going to be even more fucked during the next 12 months. There will be no "green shoots", there will be no recovery.

Look at this report from the BBC: The economy shrank by the greatest margin for 51 years. That one sentence tells you all you need to know about how monumental a fuck-up this crisis and the government's response to it is. Look at the graph at the bottom of the page. Look closely at the cliff-like drop in growth. Does the trend look like it's slowing, or does it look like it's gaining momentum? Looks like the latter to me.

Now add on top of that drop in growth, the rise in national debt. Thats a huge burden on and already overburdened economy. But there's more. Add on top of that overburdened economy the cost of welfare: paying people not in work. Thats a huge unproductive cost. In fact the cost of welfare has just outstripped the amount of money raised by tax revenue. Might as well slap on top of that the cost of PFI and Public Sector pensions. Not to mention the cost of interest on top of the whole fetid pile.

Things can't go on as they are. Gordon Brown continues to borrow money like a crack addict, with no investment in wealth-creating projects. Instead its dead money: used to pay people to sit idle. Its used to fund pet projects that have no chance of creating wealth, only increasing regulatory burdens. Its used to fund public sector jobs that don't generate wealth.

The one-eyed twat can't see farther than his nose. Neither can his self-interested chums in finance, that spout a rosy picture in order to keep mugs investing money in a dead horse economy. All to fund their bonuses.

All the while the Bank of England, despite warnings from Mervyn King, authorises the creation of billions of pounds of funny money, created to prop up the economy and buy the next election. Zimbabwe politics in action. Why not have done with it and buy everyone a fucking toaster, or whatever the equivalent is over here eh Gordon?

Experts are predicting the Pound will be worth less than 1 Euro by the end of the year. I wonder if that will signify a rush by Politicians for us to join the Euro Zone? Will the EU let us join?

I said it last December: This country is spiralling into the abbyss. No-one at the top seems to care.

Its about time people stopped whinging and grew some.

I'm prepared to. Mainly because I have no choice. My council tax is going unpaid as we speak and the baliffs letters arrived last week. Can I materialise 1500 fucking quid out of thin air when I don't get benefits? No I fucking can't. So, looks like I'll be doing time for non-payment then. Far better than actually finance the spendthrift fuckers in government.

Mervyn King should stop whining and grow some too. If he thinks that quantative easing is bad for the country and is steering us on a dangerous course, he should stop authorising it. Its not a political decision, its economic. If we're bankrupt, fucking say it how it is.

Her Majesty the Queen needs to drag Gordo in and have a stern word about his mad plan too. I know shes got a set of solid-gold baubles. Its about time to say protocol be fucked, these are unprecedented historic times: its time something was said.

The 646 self-serving fuckers in the house of commons need to grow some, although I have no faith given they've proved only to be in Parliament to line their fucking pockets and pay for their property portfolios. Start taking the monotonous, monosylabic one-eyed moron to task about his plans. Where are his figures? Do they add up? Just how is a nation that produces fuck-all supposed to pay it all back?

The ermine-robed nobs in the Lords need to grow some too. Why hasn't Weaseley Mandleson been given a hard time there. Instead the smug fucker wafts shit and destruction all about the place. Will no-one sort the fucker out?

We all need to start to get organised to protest against the madness too. Start locally and then once you get a critical mass, link up nationally.

Its time we all channelled our anger towards the twats in government, where it rightly belongs.

A Tip for the Budget.

Read the small print. Not every important detail will be mentioned in the Chancellors speech.

It really will be an interesting exercise, I promise.