Ah! Poor little Syrian orphans of war - what was advertised, and what actually arrived in the post

Heart-rending, right? What sort of monster could possibly object to Britain taking in poor, vulnerable little mites like these? Not even me!

But when the courier knocked at the door this morning, this is what the package contained:

Some simple rules when it comes to doling out millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money

Lord Freud’s mistake was believing that the self-esteem of the disabled matters more than that of professional compassionistas

And lo! the land was filled with the sound of outraged wailing as left-liberals – many of whom make a pretty decent living out of compassion-mongering – did gnash their teeth and rend their garments and demand loudly and repeatedly on and on and bloody on that something really must be done!

What a nauseating display of masturbatory self-righteousness.

"So why have we handed out one million food parcels?" Because people like free stuff, I suppose

Ridiculous excuses offered by benefit cheats, courtesy of the Northern Echo

A Disability Living Allowance claimant from the North-East asked why she claimed she was incapable of cleaning her own house when she was a full-time bus cleaner said: ''By the time I come in from work, I'm that knackered."

Of course our taxes aren't being wasted on lazy, moronic, useless, ungrateful spongers!

(Hat-tip: Guido Fawkes)

Warning: the following post contains views which some readers may find upsetting

Improve the tube map – take out the wheelchair symbols and replace them with ones for toilets

The genius of Harry Beck’s London Underground electrical circuit map (50 years old this week) is demonstrated by its ability to absorb brand new underground lines without tipping over into incomprehensibility. The only thing that really annoys me about it – because it makes it unnecessarily cluttered – is the introduction of blue symbols to mark stations where getting to the trains in a wheelchair won’t result in the equivalent of the Odessa Steps runaway pram sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Kelvin MacKenzie makes a good point – it's time to ask the rest of Britain to stand on its own two feet

There’s a splendid diatribe from Kelvin MacKenzie in the Telegraph today (here), in which he puts forward a proposal to declare the prosperous, hard-working South-East of England a separate country. Funnily enough, I started writing a post on this very subject last week, but got distracted.

“I’d be happy to pay more tax” – yeah, as if!

The poet and Cambridge academic A.E. Housman voluntarily sent a cheque to the Treasury during the First World War. I can’t remember how much it was for - £2,000, I think. He was in his mid-fifties at the time – well past serving age – and, as he didn’t have any dependents, saw it as his duty to use his savings to help his country at a time of need. Of course, he could have been pretty certain that it would be spent on the war effort, rather than on, say, Overseas Development or wind farm subsidies. (Needless to say, Housman was a conservative.)

Why is a public sector agency advising us to spend money on stuff we really can’t afford?

Isn't Democracy wonderful!

(Hat-tip: MRCTV)

A modest proposal to amend the child benefit system

I’ve just read a Telegraph item by Neil O’Brien suggesting the public would accept a child benefit cap for more than three children (available here). Well, yes, obviously we would. But surely the problem isn’t the number of children that recipients produce, but rather the kind of children the coalition government's proposed changes would leave us all shelling out for in perpetuity.

The poor are unhealthy for the same reasons they're poor

An item on the BBC’s local London TV news had me scratching my head the other day (you can read an article about it here). “Experts” from the University of London produced a map of three East London Boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham - lovely!), showing the geographical location of those adjudged to be most at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And blow me down if this map didn’t show a “startling” correlation to the Charles Booth poverty maps compiled using observations made in 1898 and 1899.

Doreen's Story - I warn you, it'll have you in tears

The first society in history to abolish the need to become an adult

Throughout the vast majority of human history, the most important life change has been the passage from adolescence to adulthood. The reasons for its importance are obvious – it meant another member of the clan could go out and hunt bison and/or kill enemies, and that girls could find a mate and start spawning, thereby ensuring the viability of the clan. The same proved even more true of farming communities (except that kids could make themselves useful well before puberty).

We shouldn’t be giving a penny to the UN disaster relief fund – let alone £94m!

Barftastic UN logo

The UK’s International Development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, has been warning that countries failing to pay into the CERF, the UN fund set up after the 2004 tsunami, are leaving the world “dangerously unprepared” for future crises. The UK is the largest contributor to the fund.

Here’s a list of contributors (prepare to be annoyed):

Why is the supposedly cash-strapped NHS paying for IVF?

There’s a photo of a nice, smiling couple on their wedding day in this morning’s paper – the sort of image that releases a floodlet of endorphins into the system of any normal human being. But then I read the headline of the accompanying story: “Couple win fight to get NHS money for IVF”, and the feel-good effect rapidly evaporated.

If you behave badly enough, we'll pay for a life-coach!

Three items in this morning’s paper confirm the suspicion that the people who run this country are, by reason of sheer stupidity and a refusal to learn from past mistakes, utterly unfit to do so. Firstly, 120,000 problem families – i.e. loose agglomerations of unemployed sperm donors, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, child-abusers, wife-beaters, criminals, their feral offspring, and pit-bull terriers  (referred to collectively as “the underclass”) - will have a further £450 million of taxpayers’ money squandered on their useless, moronic hides in the form of an army of “family troubleshooters”.

“Everything is what it is and not another thing” – politicians should take heed of Wittgenstein

I’ve been using Wittgenstein’s phrase for years, almost invariably – and pompously - giving Ludwig a name-check in the hope that people will be cowed into accepting whatever point I’m trying to make. It usually works. (It won’t here, obviously, because I’ve just given the game away.)