Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

8 December 2013

The term “a dog’s life” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an unhappy existence, full of problems or unfair treatment” and “a dog’s dinner” is described derogatively as “a mess”.

Well, this isn’t always the case.

We are grateful to the diarist in the London Guardian for the following vignette observed by a shopper in the upscale Waitrose supermarket and published in the paper on 3 December 2013:

“I was behind a well-paid young couple in Berkhamsted Waitrose at the butchery counter who were ordering fillet steak – not for their own dinner, but to feed their dog. The complacent man boasted that he wouldn’t normally be at Waitrose because he regularly got the fillet steak for the dog at Harrods food hall.”

“Poor Fido,” commented the diarist, “no one escapes austerity.”

It sure brings tears to one’s eyes to think what that poor pooch must have gone through as he munched his way through downmarket steak from an upmarket supermarket.

After such a harrowing tale of canine suffering, one has hardly any compassion left for the plight of human victims of the most vicious attack on living standards in living memory that is now being mounted on Britain’s sick and poor by a smug governing clique of fatcat politicians wallowing in wealth and privilege.

Who, for instance, can have much time for the following whinge-ridden story by correspondent Amelia Gentleman which appeared in another part of the London Guardian on the very same day that Fido’s misfortune was retailed?

“It is…cold inside the Morley [a district in Yorkshire] home of Auxilia Mapuranga, a former NHS [National Health Service] healthcare assistant, who is sitting wrapped in a blanket, her feet tucked into a special electric foot-warmer bag, which she thinks is a cheaper way of staying warm than turning on the gas heating in her two-room flat, which she has mostly stopped doing because the bills were getting so high. It is dusk, but she waits till it gets a bit darker before she turns on the light. Her judgment on whether the economy is beginning to turn around is entirely framed by what she sees as ever-tightening restrictions on access to state support. Because she is unwell, immobilised by arthritis and back problems and the after-effects of chemotherapy, she has been subject to the new, more stringent fitness-for-work assessments, which she has failed twice in the past two years. For most of this year, she has been trying to get by on reduced benefit payments of £35 [€42 or $57] a week, but has run into debt, and has been unable to pay the £10  [€12 or $16] bedroom tax…She lives alone…She has not ventured out for Christmas shopping in Morley’s Queen Street because she finds it hard to get about and in any case she has noticed that the cost of her regular weekly shopping is already creeping up to unaffordable levels. Instead, she is retreating further into her home. ‘When I can’t switch on my heating, I’d rather stay in bed to stay warm…,’ she says.”

Don’t some mothers ‘ave ‘em! Moaning minnies, all of ‘em. Why don’t these people get up in the morning and go out and do a decent day’s work? Forget about the lie being peddled by Commies that there are not enough jobs. It’s all down to personal determination in the end. Pull your socks up and get on with it. Skivers, slackers, ne’er-do-wells, the lot of ‘em, they just won’t make the effort. Everybody knows that if you are poor or ill, it’s your own fault. Horatio Alger and Samuel Smiles proved that years ago. Grit and hard work lead automatically to affluence. The rich deserve every penny they’ve got (even when they’ve got it without having had to work for it).

Our thoughts are with poor Fido.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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