A Poor Show

While all the rumpus about Hazy Greyfish and Porkins' Big School and the Westphalian E-Cauli Crisis rumbles on, the soothsayers are relentlessly bombarding the Northumbrian populace with yet more Pearls of Wisdom for the unreflective and the bovine.

Auntie Beeby See - the partially impartial propagandist of Jedweird Milliballs' magic mushroom-led Redistributionist Faction has been lecturing the public about one of the great evils in the Northumbrian Kingdom: Poverty. It would appear - horribile dictu - that there are Poor People in the land; there are families in the realm who are dependent on a lone parent who is unable to find employment to support his or her bairns. Such people live in unspeakable hovels under the curses of debt, deprivation and despair.

Now, this Cat has been around long enough to realise this in the rich tapestry of human existence, there are darker threads. And I've always been aware of the existence of an underprivileged underclass; thus it ever was. Even in the days of the Redeemer, He said, "The poor you always have with you." It has therefore been part of the mission of the Christian Church to minister to the material - as well as the spiritual - needs of those who come under its aegis. The monks at the Abbey at Streonaeshalch are - along with their daily chores and their regular devotional activities - engaged in the distribution of food and clothing donated to the Abbey by good-hearted Christian folk in the surrounding parishes.

But the machinery of State has also ground its creaky wheels into action and has decided that it should mimic this mission of the Church by taxing the working and the moneyed population and using the proceeds to set up a system of benefits for the needy, administered by legions of civil servants. By the time the groats from the public purse have been spent on the wages and extravagant pensions of these administrators, there are but handfuls of crumbs to cast to the impoverished. Furthermore, there are various characters in the Kingdom whose principal objective in life is to avoid all forms of employment, and make it their occupation to find and extract all available benefits from the teat of Mother State. Consequently, the parasites have depleted the available funds, leaving the poor with even less. Another astounding triumph for the Witangemot and their millions of Redistributionist camp-followers.

Anyway. Beeby See has amazingly discovered that there are people struggling to live at subsistence level. This is an indictment of the Cuts. Woe and desolation with cherries on. Apparently, this class of people have only come into existence since the Evil Axis of Caedmeron and Clegge have assumed the mantle of power. In the glory days of the Redistributionist government under the psychotic leadership of Tondbert the Blur and Guffrum the Brown, they were living off the fat of the land...

Pass the mushrooms, Beeby. I'm in the mood for a dose of fantasy...