The Coalition of Kleptocracy

Long, long indeed have opponents of the Tory-Lib Dem Government expressed concern about their desire to privatise everything that moves: large swathes of the NHS out to tender, the Royal Mail sold off at bargain basement prices, even student debt put up for sale and now the highly profitable state run East Coast rail company is up for grabs.

There is a striking correlation between funders of the Government parties, especially the Tories, and the people/companies benefiting from this great sell-off. But what to do when, literally, there is NOTHING LEFT to sell. After all, even notionally state-owned assets are leased-out and when they are even trying to flog off the RAF's fuel supply line, this ideological regime must fear that it is reaching the limits of its asset stripping.

So, what is left indeed?

Why people of course! Now, as covered by yesterday's post, robots may get the better of us humans in due course as they don't need paying, other than a quick recharge in the wall socket and a touch of WD40 on cold mornings -but what if you make unemployed people pick fruit for really, really low wages? Or maybe none at all - call it training perhaps? The robots can't best that, at least not yet; can they?

So we have had supermarkets taking on unpaid trainees who have to stack shelves and clean floors at nil cost to the company - rather they have to do it to keep their benefits. Once their "training" is up, with their magnificently un-enhanced skills, do they get a job offer? Not at all - they are simply replaced by more "trainees".

What a wheeze, the taxpayer paying for free labour for big firms that avoid their tax.

But now, it gets worse: at least until now, the Government has, however dubiously, claimed this is all for the public good. Today, however, the level of rank self-interest and plundering of the state by these chancers was exposed just a tad more than maybe even Dodgy Dave would have liked.

The Farms Minister, George Eustice, commenting on the end of a scheme to recruit temporary migrant workers for seasonal agricultural work in the UK, was asked about how to replace the now barred workers. Simple, he declared - make benefits claimants do the work instead. Get them to pick fruit.

And Mr Eustice should know. After all, he and his family own...a fruit farm. No conflict of interest there; nothing self-serving at all. Is there?

Next week: "Indentured service; why it's not so bad after all." "12 years a Slave: good personal development opportunity." 

Slave Britain

Arbeit Mach Frei, the Nazis proclaimed above their concentration camps. Well, in 21st century Britain we now have a government offering cheap or even completely free labour to employers using the most vulnerable people imagineable - prisoners, the unemployed, the physically disabled and the mentally ill. And the dying.

No, it is not a sick joke. Cameron and Clegg's Britain has today seen three blows to what little civilised restraint remained among Coalition policymakers.

1. The "Justice" Secretary hosted a seminar for employers on his plans to create 10,000 new jobs in British prisons where employers of all shapes and sizes can boost companies' profitability by in-sourcing their work to jails. Prisoners are exempted from the national minimum wage and have no employment rights. So, anything from call centres to finishing kitchen units will be carried out by prisoners earning less than £1 per hour.

2. Tescos in East Anglia had the audacity to advertise PERMANENT "jobs" paying out of work people - nothing! The jobs were advertised in partnership with the appropriately named "Monster" website. As part of a government workfare scheme, they will continue to get their unemployment benefit - Jobseekers' Allowance - plus unquantified "expenses" in return for working all night. If they turn down the work, their benefits will be cut. Tescos made profits of £1,900,000,000 in the six months to October 2011.

3. And now, sneaking in behind the controversial Welfare Bill, the Government has briefed a range of charities that disabled people will be forced to work for free for charities, public bodies and high street retailers on open-ended work experience placements or face losing their disability benefits. This will include people who are terminally ill with cancer, but assessed as having more than six months left. 

These provisions have been voted through the Commons with the support of nearly all Lib Dem MPs and all voting Conservatives. When disability campaigners objected to the work experience plans on the basis they penalise and exploit vulnerable people, the cold-hearted response was Ministers felt sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility.

The terrible, inhumane thinking behind these "schemes" is bad enough. But the fact that the Government feels it has demonised  the weakest people of all in our country to such an extent that it can pursue them so vindictively and so openly and unashamedly is beyond appalling - it is positively chilling. If this is what they are like after 18 months, what about another three years of people with mindsets like theirs running our society?