Calling all lefties! Man up! Pay up! Shut up!

I had to give up drinking a quarter of a century ago. This means that, whenever I’ve been out for communal meals, I always end up contributing to everyone’s else’s drinks tab, despite having only drunk sparkling water myself. Boo-hoo!

Despite not being the world’s most generous cove, I’d never dream of complaining about this (besides, as the years roll by and everyone becomes more abstemious, the grotesque financial injustice of my situation has markedly diminished). If I felt that strongly about it, I guess I could always sneak an extra pudding, or pretend I’d left my wallet at home. (Fortunately, I’ve never hung out with the sort of people who wait till the bill arrives to start arguing about who ate what.) As I mentioned, these events are communal, so they’re about sharing, and it’s just easier if everyone chips in the same amount. 

So here’s my point: why is it that the very people who pride themselves on being part of a wider society, and who tell us they believe passionately in “social justice”, and who get positively randy at the prospect of governments confiscating other people’s money in order to hand it over to other people who can’t, or (more usually) can’t be arsed to earn it for themselves  -  why is it that these caring, sharing, communitarian lefty types throw a complete wobbler when the national dinner bill arrives, and they’re asked to pay their fair share? What happens to that compassionate urge to help out those less fortunate than themselves then?

After all, it was the government these bleeding hearts enthusiastically voted into power three times in a row which got us into this bloody mess by squandering billions of pounds of our money on largely undeserving people. Well, the bill for that little lot just arrived. But the very socialists who cheered when their Labour government spent years ordering all the most expensive wines on the menu now tell us they hardly had anything to drink, actually, so they think it would be jolly unfair to ask them to chip in. So what if they earn more than workers in the private sector? So what if they only contribute a maximum 3.5% of their salary towards their pension pot, while our taxes account for 19%?  (That’s £1000 per household every bloody year, by the way, so that some public sector lead-swinger can end up with a bigger pension than the vast majority of private sector workers.)

Where, exactly, did all that “we’re in this together, comrades” crap go? 

Listen, you lazy, greedy, selfish creeps – like everyone else, I have investments which, as a result of the stupidity and incompetence of a government I wouldn’t have voted for with a gun against my head and of bankers whose pig-like greed should earn them an eternity in the bottom circle of Hell, now look like the charred corpses shoveled into body bags in the wake of a plane crash. I, along with millions of other people, will end up with a lot less money than I was expecting to because of events and people over whom I had no control and which, as far as I’m aware, I did absolutely nothing to bring about or encourage. I didn’t drink anything during the meal – in fact, I remember warning that the restaurant the majority of us wanted to go to was far too expensive, and that it would all end in tears.

Boo-bloody-hoo!

Just stop whining, grow up, and stop asking other people to pay your share.

And that goes for the Greeks too. The government you voted for dragged you laughing and dancing into the Eurozone, and that was just dandy when it meant lots of phony pseudo-jobs, and not having to bother to pay taxes, and working two hours a day, and tons of lovely Euros sloshing about your pathetic little excuse for an economy. Now all we hear from you, and the public sector unions here in the UK, is how it wasn’t your fault. It was those horrible rich bastards. They did it – make them pay for it! 

But don’t you get it? There’s no point in trying to make the rich shoulder a greater share of the burden. They already account for a huge portion of our overall tax intake (if they don’t in Greece, that’s because Greeks don’t seems to pay any tax at all). And punishing banks and bankers will only lead to us all being markedly poorer – how’s that supposed to help?

Man up! Shut up! Pay up!

And that goes double for all you lefties currently taking to the streets and irritating the hell out of the rest of us. Look into your black, shrivelled, selfish little hearts and try, for goodness sake, to locate that belief in social responsibility that’s given you carte blanche to hector the rest of us year in, year out. It seemed to go missing the instant the bill arrived.