Family values

The hunting party intend to break us yet again to save the country. How many times do we have to be broken and why do we need to fall to rise again? I don’t like to be broke and Ms Nomates hates the idea of being a fallen woman. Don’t worry, bankers – you will always be bankers in our eyes.

The Conservatives have had years, the Liberals have had aeons of time, in which to plan to seek advice, consult, check and recheck the numbers for any policy they wished to implement. And what did the coalition announce first? Up the children, that’s what! As I understand it, a man who earns £43,875, with a wife looking after their children will get no child benefit. That sounds fair. Two people who are not married and both work earning just below that amount ie £43,874 each will receive child allowance. Brilliant! I make that more than £87,000 and they still get a ‘Brucie Bonus’. There is a button missing on my abacus so it is approximate. I wonder if Mr Osborne, the wonder Chancellor, has a button missing. The sheer genius of the plan. It makes you proud to be dyslexic and numerically challenged. What’s more, it fuels the desire to remain single while procreating. Family values eh? Who needs them? The ‘Cons’, as I now like to call them for obvious reasons, are trying to convince us that it will be only the poor people who will get family allowance.

Their problem is that they don’t understand what poor is because they have never been poor. Look at me honestly and tell me that if you earn £43K you consider yourself hard-up. A married couple who devote their lives to serving the public at the Coop will never earn £43K a year between them, not even if they include their ‘divi’ and have their hands in the till. If they did they would be punished. You have to be in power to get away with that sort of thing.

I know what it’s like to be skint. If you are on the minimum wage and have to forage in the hedgerows to obtain your five-a-day vegetables you could be considered to be poor. If on the other hand you can afford to drive a BMW and take holidays in the Bahamas you could be considered to be reasonably well off. If you can afford to eat in a Chinese restaurant nowadays you are very fortunate. That’s why they give fortune cookies at the end of the meal. From humble beginnings the Chinese food industry has taught us the real meaning of inflation. And in case you’re wondering it is ‘tong zhàng’.

Never mind ‘There’s gold in them thar hills’. ‘There’s gold in them thar noodles’.

Thank goodness I can just about afford to eat Indian but I fear they will be next. We could dine a lot cheaper if we could actually eat in China or India but if we can’t get a bus back from Chester what chance is there to extend public transport to those places? Watch this space. It will soon be easier and quicker to fly with EasyJet or Ryanair to far flung continents for dinner than to travel to a restaurant in any town in the UK on public transport.

The Cons are going to get people off benefits and in to work. Brilliant idea, except to say they intend to cut public services to the bone and where will the staff go? Straight on to benefits or in to the service industry where the poorer among us work. The Big Issue work force will more than double and the magazine could actually outsell the Financial Times. Our supermarkets and DIY sheds are already overrun with people who don’t know where anything is when you ask them.

The growth will come from Indian and Chinese eateries and I for one would like to work in the ‘Far Flung’ restaurant.

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