The Jocks are as thick as their porridge!

Well, to be strictly accurate, at least the eight thousand of them in Glasgow North East who voted for 'the big Brown job' are as thick as their porridge. Those who remained at home did so, I guess, from a variety of reasons, mainly because their only outings are to the benefit office to pick up their state handouts and then back home via the pub, or possibly because they are dying, given that life expectancy in Glasgow North East is lower than many Third World countries:

Glasgow City, as a whole, has a male life expectancy of 71 years which is actually lower than the 72 years of both Gaza and Pyongyang. But this includes its lush suburbs. Those in the welfare ghettoes of Glasgow East can only dream of such longevity.

The life expectancy of its sink estates is worth recording here. A boy born in Camlachie is expected to live to 64.5 — the same as in Uzbekistan. In Parkhead it is 62, the same as Bangladesh. Just outside its boundaries lies Dalmarnock where the figure is 58 — lower than Sudan, Cambodia or Ghana. The lowest is Carlton, where the figure of 54 is lower than even Gambia’s equivalent. (*)

I suppose some of the 33% (a record low turnout) who did bother to vote must have come from that tiny percentage of the inhabitants who actually work:

Official unemployment is just 6.7 per cent. But add in such factors as those claiming incapacity benefit, and it quickly emerges that a scandalous 50 per cent of the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits. And here, as everywhere, dependency begets poverty.

Once, Labour would have been outraged at this. Now, the party refuses to recognise this as a problem — or thinks, madly, that even more money is the answer. What Beveridge once called the ‘great evil’ of idleness is now being mass-produced by a welfare state that pays the poor to do nothing. It is fuelling the very problem it was set up to eradicate, petrol on fire.

When, as must surely be the case, Gordon Brown is bound hand and foot and dropped into the Clyde weighed down with sundry Labour party manifestos, it will surely be because of this - and I choose the word with care - wickedness:

Mr Brown’s energies have been devoted to moving people from just beneath his arbitrary poverty line to just above it — and then claiming they have been ‘lifted out of poverty’. Those at the bottom, with no hope of crossing any threshold, are literally growing poorer each year. Languishing on welfare, they have been ignored and replaced in the British labour market by an industrious, ambitious immigrant workforce. This has been Labour’s deplorable formula for the last decade.

Glasgow North East in all its ghastly poverty and ignorance stands, or rather crumbles, as a monument to the hypocritical evil that is the Labour party.  The Jocks might be thick but that's no excuse for the rest of us; come the day of electoral retribution we must despatch this gang of crooks, spivs, charlatans and commissars to the unemployment registers they have filled so avidly.  "Do it England!"

(*) All quotations from Fraser Nelson in an article well worth reading even if it does make you weep!

Comments

[Stewart Cowan]

"The Jocks might be thick but that's no excuse for the rest of us."

Basically, the electorate is thick. There are far more English Labour MPs than Scottish and Welsh ones. We need to fight this together.

But yes, agreed, New Labour is evil and the other 2/3rds in the constituency should have made the short walk (okay, taken a minicab) to their local school to vote for something better.

[David Duff]

Yes, Stewart, you're quite right - and welcome to D&N, by the way - we are all to blame and consequently shits like me scratch about seeking someone else at whom to point the finger of scorn. Never mind, they say that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but like porridge, I prefer mine hot!

[Stewart Cowan]

I prefer Grape Nuts!