How Raoul Moat became another stick with which to beat the so-called "underclass"

Nine days after his death, the media and politicians continue to obsess over Raoul Moat.

For a full week, Moat held Britain's rapt attention. From the attack on his ex-girlfriend and her new lover and the shooting of a police man to his stand-off with police and ultimate suicide (with a surreal intervention from Paul Gascoigne), it certainly made good copy.

The media lapped it up.The Sun branded him "The Psycho Commando," comparing him to Rambo in First Blood. The mythos of this "self-pitying monster" and "gun-spree hulk" who could "live wild for weeks" soon built up;

He would have no trouble catching his food, whether it is fish or rabbits. He would have no bother gutting fish and skinning rabbits and cooking them over a camp fire. He's not a stupid man. He can use a compass and is good at map-reading. He used to say he loved the solitude and quiet of the countryside.

He is very single-minded and when he gets something into his head he sticks with it.

Led by the Sun, the other tabloids followed the same line, building towards a Hollywood-style stand-off with the police and creating a cult hero for others to emulate. As Charlie Brooker put it, they turned a masochistic, mentally unstable child abuser into "a sort of nihilistic pin-up."

Johann Hari was one of those quick to point out the potentially deadly consequences of this sensationalism;

The media has been lasciviously describing every blood-flecked cranny of the shooting incident in Northumbria this week, while blankly ignoring the most important question – did we help to pull the trigger? Every time there is a massacre by a mentally ill person, like Derrick Bird's last month, journalists are warned by psychologists that, if we are not very careful in our reporting, we will spur copycat attacks by more mentally ill people. We ignored their warnings. We reported the case in precisely the way they said was most risky. Are we now seeing the result?

...

Dr [Park] Dietz [one of America's leading forensic psychiatrists] believes – based on his long experience interviewing mass murderers – that he understands the process at work here. "Mass murderers are almost always depressed to the point of suicide, and angrily blame others for their problems," he tells me. "You've got to imagine this small number of people sitting at home, with guns on their laps and a list of people they hate in their minds. They feel willing to die. When they watch the coverage of a mass murder, one or two will say – 'That guy is just like me! That's the solution to my problem.'... They will say this quite openly to you when you interview them. It's a conscious process ... The massacre seems to offer them both an escape from their unbearable pain, and an opportunity to punish the people they blame for their plight."

Suddenly, they are shown a path where their problems won't be trivial and squalid and pointless. No: they'll be the talk of the entire country. They'll be stars.

The way we report these cases can make that man more likely to charge out of his house to kill, or less. The psychologists say that currently we are adopting the most dangerous tactics possible. We put the killer's face everywhere. We depict him exactly as he wanted, broadcasting his videos and reading out his missives. We make his story famous. We present killing as its logical culmination. We soak him in glamour: look at the endless descriptions of Moat as "having a hulking physique" and being "a notorious hard man". We present the killer as larger than life, rather than the truth: that these people are smaller than life, leading pitiful, hate-filled existences.

But, after doing this, the media (with politicians at their back) are quick to condemn when people begin to support the mythic folk hero that they created.

Flowers were left by sympathetic members of the public at the scene of his death. A Facebook page sprang up titled "RIP RAOUL MOAT YOU LEGEND." The Sun, which built up his legend in the first place, declared the page "sick" and "confronted" its creator, no doubt pleased to find that - as an "unemployed single mum" - she was everything they despised.

Not to be outdone, the Daily Mail, "unmasked" the woman behind the "twisted online shrine" before leading into a comment piece by David Wilson which declared the page to be "A howl of rage from a bitter and deluded underclass."

Yes, that's right. It's not enough for the woman who created this page to fit one of the stereotypes that the Mail, Sun, and the rest of the gutter press love to hate. She has now, by fiat, been declared representative of the entire "underclass." "In the twisted mindset of his noisy supporters," Wilson writes, "he has been transformed into a modern anti-establishment hero, with the police cast in the role of the vicious enemy of the people."

This leaves out the identity of who exactly "transformed" Moat. In the words of Phil at A Very Public Sociologist;

How the hunt for Moat was framed during his week on the run was crucial for him going viral as a glamorous outlaw. We found out Moat had sent a long letter to the police that said "The public need not fear me but the police should as I won't stop till I'm dead." This was a serous media management faux pas because it allowed the portrayal of Moat to assume a folky aspect. Rather than being a manhunt for a dangerous killer, coverage of the operation degenerated into a Smokey and the Bandit-style farce.

Whilst Wilson talks about "twisted mindsets" and "a graphic insight into an amorality that exists in our midst," the reality is that "it was only a matter of time before the half-sympathetic media profiles of Moat elicited support from some quarters."

It's true that a fair amount of this support has come from more deprived sections of society. But Wilson writes as though support for murderers is an incurable symptom of the underclass.

For him, they're all just "deranged elements," with "the infantile sense of victimhood; the hysterical abuse of the police; the grotesque belief that masculine greatness lies in thuggery; the portrayal of a killer as a crusader against injustice; and the pretense that democratic Britain is some kind of paramilitary totalitarian regime."

Phil, on the other hand, notes that "for the people who joined the Facebook tribute pages and left flowers outside Moat's house, the sentiments expressed in his letters and recordings condense a confused but widespread consciousness common among the more deprived sections of our class."

Rather than support for him because of his crimes, it's "a barely coherent sense of dislocation, frustration, and despair that impotently kicks against 'official' society." That is why "It doesn't matter that Moat killed someone" - "he had been abandoned by society and left to rot like so many others, and for a brief moment he was the lightning rod for lumpen anger and defiance."

But that is why these people are "the dangerous class that keep politicians awake at night, repulse the arbiters of good taste, and earn the ire of ever-so-superior middle class columnists" like Wilson.

He treats "the increasing prevalence of anti-police attitudes among the underclass, where the local constabulary is regarded not as protector but as the oppressor" as a cause rather than a symptom. Thus, the problem is just that "people now seem desperate to wallow in the kind of shallow, tear-soaked sentimentality that they see on TV soaps, devoid of all genuine emotion."

As with stories of "lazy" British workers, what we see here is a shallow hypocrisy.

The Mail is all to happy to acknowledge working class grievances when they can use them to justify their anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalism agenda.

But, in the absence of such other scapegoats, and with the same people latching onto the folk-hero mythos that they engineered, such grievances become a stick with which to beat those at the bottom of the pile. The "great white backlash" becomes "an amorality that exists in our midst."

Yes, it is perverse to sympathise with Raoul Moat. He was not a hero, but a deeply disturbed individual who committed horrendous acts of murder.

But it is important to remember that people aren't sympathising with Moat - they're sympathising with the myth created by the media coverage of him. As Phil concludes, they may be "an unwelcome reminder of the social refuse British capitalism produces generation after generation," but "that this strata exists without prospects or hope is the real perversion, not some daft commentary on the internet."

How the Propaganda Model drives climate scepticism

My last post on the subject of climate change scepticism ended with the observation that "as long as we waste our time arguing with sceptics clutching at straws, we are ignoring the real debate on climate change: what on earth do we do about it?"

What I should have added is that, perhaps, this is the point.

The one issue that I have yet failed to pick up on is where the climate "debate" fits into the Propaganda Model of the corporate media. Fortunately, it is a point that David Cromwell and David Edwards have taken up with aplomb over at Medialens;

English football’s Premier League is a farce. Year in, year out, the same ‘Big Four’ super-teams - Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool - fight for the same top four spots they have dominated since the 1996-97 season. Even for casual consumers of football news, the truth is hard to miss: at the end of every season, the teams that have most of the money - supplied by tycoons, TV rights and participation in Europe’s even more glamorous Champions League - simply buy off the best players from the lesser teams that have been causing them trouble. And if the super-team managers fail to deliver, then the best managers and trainers are brought in to put things right.

Quality is bolstered by quantity to further reduce the risk of failure - the super-teams are actually multi-teams. If an inspired lesser team manages to compete with one of the Big Four, the latter can always bring on fresh-legged, world class substitutes with whom the lesser teams, with no superstars on the bench, are unable to compete. The reality is that, over the course of a season, super-teams compete against lesser squads with the equivalent of two, three or more squads of their own. The cards - the credit cards, cash, lucre - are totally stacked in favour of the Big Four.

Week after week, Big Four fans look on breathlessly to see if a ton of money will once again allow the big business machine they call ‘us’ to overwhelm teams with a fraction of ‘our’ resources. No one seems to notice, or care, that every match is begun on a playing field mechanically tilted by giant under-pitch cogs towards the goal of the lesser team.

Type the words ‘Premier League’, ’Big Four’, and ‘dominance/domination’ into the LexisNexis search engine, and you will find occasional, small gestures in the direction of truth in the national press. In 2007, Simon Cass wrote in the Daily Mail that fans “are increasingly frustrated that the fight for the Premiership has become a money-driven, foregone conclusion with each passing season and the rich simply getting richer”. (Cass, ‘Only the top four matter,’ Daily Mail, July 26, 2007) Predictably enough, such observations are supported by analysis that is crassly superficial, and unlikely to embarrass the powers that be.

The Rise Of Climate Scepticism

In the New York Times on May 24, Elisabeth Rosenthal pondered another of the great unsporting contests of our time: the clash between people seeking and opposing action on climate change:

“Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here [Britain] to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?” (Rosenthal, ‘Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons,’ New York Times, May 24, 2010; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25climate.html)

The change in public opinion, Rosenthal noted, has been most striking in Britain, which has become “a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated”.

A BBC survey in February found that only 26 per cent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 per cent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 per cent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 per cent four years earlier. A Gallup poll in March found that 48 per cent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 per cent a year ago. (Ibid.)

Rosenthal made no mention of analysis challenging these figures. Professor Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has been surveying American views on climate change since 1995. Krosnick claims that Americans remain overwhelmingly convinced that man-made climate change is real and should be tackled:

“The media is sensationalizing these polls to make it sound like the public is backing off its belief in climate change, but it’s not so.” (http://www.thenation.com/article/climategate-claptrap-I)

According to Krosnick, Americans’ views have remained quite stable over the past ten years. In November 2009, 75 per cent of Americans believed that global temperatures were going up - a “huge number”, Krosnick notes. The number of Americans who think all scientists agree about climate change +has+ declined to 31 per cent. But as Krosnick comments: “most Americans have thought that for the entire fifteen years I’ve been polling on this issue”.

In the New York Times, Rosenthal cited newly sceptical members of the public:

“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. ‘But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.’”

Up to this point, Rosenthal’s analysis was reasonable enough. But this was her explanation of the change in public opinion:

“Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.”

Rosenthal’s account is so deceptive because it portrays climate scepticism, and media +enthusiasm+ for climate scepticism, as naturally occurring phenomena - they simply +are+. But this is a lie. Like Premier League football, the playing field hosting the public debate on climate is massively tilted by hidden forces in favour of the corporate interests that have long fought environmental responsibility tooth and nail. The pitch on which the game is played - the corporate media - is itself corporate! 

I would recommend that you read the whole thing. It demonstrates how the corporate media's weight on this issue doesn't just come into play in articles and editorials, but also in advertising, and even in the education system.

This is the point that's missed when climate skeptics enthusiastically point out that they're "not funded by Big Oil." The influence of "Big Oil" is only one element of the propaganda filters around this issue. As Cromwell and Edwards note, "it is not just that the pitch is tilted - the very tectonic plates underpinning modern culture are slanted against honest discussion of, and responses to, climate change."

This is what we're up against, not only in terms of public opinion, but when it comes to actually doing something about the problem. We need a way to change that.

British workers aren't lazy - we're run into the ground

A long-familiar story, rehashed every year without fail by the capitalist press, has resurfaced once again.

To get the true flavour of the story, you need to read it as told in the worst sensationalist fashion by the gutter press. So, step forward Daily Mail;

Lazy Britons take more 'sickies' than any other major European country, shocking research has revealed.

The poll highlights the extraordinary work-shy culture among millions of Britons, many of whom just cannot be bothered to go to work.

UK workers pulled more than 35million 'sickies' last year - the equivalent of every worker taking at least one day off.

Yes, that's right - some people "are taking several weeks a year despite being perfectly healthy." Worse than that, "a British worker is more than four times as likely to feign an illness to get time off work than Europe's 'most honest' workforce, the Danish." Cue the appropriate levels of tabloid-inspired outrage.

That is until, of course, you happen upon the truths buried deep within the bowels of the story.

For example, although "only half [of respondents] said [their sickie] was for 'a genuine physical or mental illness'," it emerges that of the rest there were "many saying they had to look after another family member, typically a young child or elderly parent." The lazy, conniving bastards.

Typically, the public sector are worse. The Mail cites the recent "revelation" that "on average, public sector workers took an average of 8.3 sick days last year, compared to 5.8 days in the private sector."

It glosses over the fact that "a sick day includes genuine illness as well as 'sickies'." Indeed, the discrepancy may have more to do with public sector employers being "more likely to be supportive of those with long-term illnesses and have good sickness policies in place."

Meanwhile, as Hannah Kay has written, going off sick can leave private sector workers in a precarious situation for both employment and money;

The sick pay laws in the UK are pretty damn unforgiving. There's basically two types. Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) and Contractual Sick Pay. SSP is the basic minimum that by law every company must adhere to, while the other is entirely voluntary which must be agreed to by the employer. Naturally, employers will only ever give more than the basic minimum in the rare cases when they feel that it's more profitable to do so i.e. when there's a militant workforce prepared to damage profits to get what they need.

With the state of unions and workers' militancy in the UK at an all time low, it shouldn't surprise anyone that most workers rely entirely on SSP, which is a very poor deal. In order to even be eligible to receive a penny in SSP, you must be:

- Off work for at least four days in a row
and
- Earning more than £97 a week

As you can imagine, most cleaners are working part time and earn less than that £97 a week and therefore cleaners are not eligible for any sick pay whatsoever. You may still be able to claim the incapacity benefit, or ESA as it's called now, directly from the Jobcentre, but this will take a very long time to claim and you will receive even less than SSP, which I'll show is already a poor deal.

Even those who are eligible are getting a raw deal. SSP is a rate of £79.15 a week. At best , this is a minimum decrease in pay by about 20%, going up to a 300% decrease for a full time worker on minimum wage and even higher for those above that! You don't even get paid for the first three days at all!

So, public sector workers are not lazier than their private sector counterparts. They're better organised, with unions willing to defend their rights, and have a better employer. But, as ever, the race to the bottom mentality prevails and this is seen as a bad thing.

Returning to the wider issue of British workers apparently being "lazier," it's worth remembering that, aside only from Romania and Bulgaria, we have the longest working week in Europe. We also have the least number of public holidays and of paid holidays in Europe. As one commenter on the Daily Mail website noted, "with the work/life balance well out of kilter, is it any wonder so many sickies are pulled?"

The irony in all this is that the "British workers are more lazy than foreign workers" argument is one used by liberals to counter the "British Jobs For British Workers" line of the reactionary right. That, with immigrants out of the picture, the right will rehash the same bollocks shows their true attitude to the British working class.

Also ironic is the whinge from the CBI and from bosses in general that "fictitious sick leave is costing the UK economy millions."

It has to be remembered that whilst the ruling class complain that workers who call in sick are, effectively, stealing from them ("the economy" being a misnomer for private profit), it is in fact the workers who are being robbed. We are the producers of wealth - our employers being parasites and theives who reap what we sow without lifting a finger.

We need to fight back against a culture wherein workers are afraid to take time for themselves and recuperate from sickness. Having to sell our labour to them is costing us not only the wealth of this earth but our health, our diginty, and our ability to lead balanced, creative, and fulfilling lives.

Christopher Monckton, "Climategate," and moving beyond the God of the Gaps

The so-called "controversy" over climate change rolls on, with two major stories coming to the fore at the same time.

Lord Christopher Monckton is one of the leading lights amongst Climate Change sceptics. On October 14th 2009, he gave a talk at a climate sceptic event sponsored by the Minnesota Free Market Institute. The slides from the talk can be found here (PDF).

You get an idea of the ideological bent behind the talk from Monckton's use of the phrase "the left, the environmental left, the intolerant, communistic narrow minded faction that does not care how many children it kills." Nonetheless, because it presented a detailed, if erratic, critique of the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, it deserved a response.

John Abraham, a professor of Thermal Sciences at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, offered that response. In a 73 minute talk, Abraham challenged the arguments that Monckton made, his interpretations of cited sources, his honesty in citing sources, and his credentials as a scientific commentator.

Monckton's immediate response was to whine about "artful puerilities."

As Abraham noted soon after, Monckton's article "dealt with a small number of very peripheral issues" and "there remain very severe errors with your presentation that are yet unanswered."

But it seems that this was only an initial response, and the climate sceptic has now "issued an extensive and detailed critique and refutation of a widely circulated 83-minute personal attack on him." So says Monckton's employer, the Science and Public Policy Institute, whose website hosts the 99-page document (PDF).

Already, the document has its detractors.

In particular, Gareth of Hot Topic takes issue with Monckton's response to the assertion that he has no scientific background;

He claims his “heavily mathematical” paper on climate sensitivity was published in a “reviewed journal”. Interesting choice of words, Chris. The “paper” was published in a newsletter of the American Physical Society, not in any peer-reviewed journal, and was never subjected to the sort of review that would be routine for any scientific journal. Lucky, really, because Monckton makes so many errors his opus would never have made the grade in the mainstream literature.

The rational basis, therefore, for the assumption that Christopher Monckton, Viscount Brenchley, has no scientific background is that the evidence shows he hasn’t got one. The very best that can be said for him is that he has a facility for maths, a wonderful line in pompous prose and a bee in his bonnet.

He's not the only one to come to such a conclusion.

Rabbett Run has already dissected points 455 and 456, and a commenter over at The Blackboard has this delightful summation;

My favourites so far:

27 – You said I said the world is not warming, but you’re wrong because I said the world is cooling.

30 – You said I said that sea levels are not rising. But you’re wrong because I said sea levels are not rising.

These are also good …

1 Are you familiar with the convention in the academic world that if one wishes to rebut the work of another he should notify that other in good time, so as to avoid errors in the rebuttal and to afford the other a fair and contemporaneous opportunity to refute the rebuttal?

Did you contact Al Gore before issuing a criticism of ‘Inconvenient Truth’ or are you a hypocrite? Did you contact Professor Michael Mann before accusing him of genocide?

also 17 Please provide a full academic resume. Though you have described yourself as a “professor” (3, 62) more than once in this presentation, are you in fact an associate professor?

Though you have described yourself as a member of the House of Lords, is it not the case that you are not and never have been? That you stood for election and received zero votes?

Heh.

Thus, Richard Littlemore concludes;

Here's the bottom line: Monckton is a risible hack who burries fact in a lather of language, and who cares for nothing so much as the promotion of his own dubious reputation. If you doubt it, take the 90 minutes to watch Monckton's rude, sophomoric and objectionable presentation and then take another 80 minutes to watch John Abraham's remarkably respectful response. Then, if you're really, really determined, check out Monckton's latest epistle.

After such an exercise, preferably followed by some strong drink and a good night sleep, I believe that most people will conclude that John Abraham is a careful scientist and that the Lord Monckton is a belligerent and unapologetic polemicist, pushing an ideological viewpoint that is - in a way that he has noticed himself - quite directly in opposition to the evidence at hand.

Meanwhile, there has been an independent review (PDF) of the so-called "climategate" emails. More than 1,000 emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia were leaked by hackers, with sceptics delighting that they supposedly unveiled a conspiracy to cover up evidence against climate change.

However, though "there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness," the inquiry found that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt." The scientists failed to comply with Freedom of Information requests and were too quick to dismiss critics, but they were "not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it" and "any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis" if they so wish.

Of course, this will not sway the most resolute of sceptics, who - like creationists - will continue to pick at the edges and pray to the God of the Gaps.If you want to argue with such people, then you can find an extensive list of their arguments debunked here.

As long as we waste our time arguing with sceptics clutching at straws, we are ignoring the real debate on climate change: what on earth do we do about it?

The circus ends as Peter Tierney is sentenced to community service

Today, Liverpool BNP activist and donor Peter Tierney - found guilty of Actual Bodily Harm last month - was sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court.

Although the BNP had organised a protest in support of Tierney, Liverpool Antifascists had been wary of calling a public counter-demonstration, given that the last two call outs had resulted in the court date being moved and thus numbers being diminished.

They did eventually announce a demo. But what last-minute rescheduling had done to previous actions, a late call out did to this one. Many members found themselves unable to get time off work, whilst a lot of students who have also previously supported Liverpool Antifascists' actions were away from the city. This was disappointing, but given the circumstances perhaps couldn't be helped.

For their part, the BNP didn't fare all that better. The vast majority of their members jobless*, and their ranks swelled by a contingent bussed-in from Salford, they still numbered twenty at most.

Once again, pre-recorded chants and speeches were the order of the day, the party obviously not trusting its members to deliver those things for themselves. The gems on offer, all nationalist plagiarism of common UAF chants, included "the UAF is the Labour Party, smash the UAF" and "British Jobs for British Workers - smash the TUC!"

For anybody who isn't keeping up, this economic arrangement - corporatist protectionism combined with the destruction of the trade union movement - is fascism.

Anti-union sentiment was high on the demonstration, with placards proclaiming "Don't trust the TUC," and a "Smash the TUC" banner standing next to their "racism cuts both ways" ones. The most bizarre, though, was one which read "The Unite union funds the UAF who urinate on our war memorials."

Yes, you read that right. I doubt that the BNP have mixed Unite Against Fascism up with the English Defence League, who pissed on Nottingham Castle back in December. More likely, they're falsely associating Philip Laing - the idiot who urinated on a Sheffield war memorial last October - with UAF. In fact, Laing was out of his mind on drunken student night Carnage, and the Royal British Legion said afterwards that it "is satisfied that what Mr Laing did was not a wilful act of vandalism or desecration and was not a political protest."

And yet, the BNP had the nerve to make a complaint about Liverpool Antifascists handing out this leaflet (PDF). Apparently, stating the fact that he'd been convicted and making a point about political violence in fascism is unacceptable. Unlike false claims of monument desecration.

Karen Otty, Liverpool BNP's former secretary with links to both the EDL and neo-Nazis, threw an absolute hissy fit when Liverpool Antifascists complied with the police request to stop giving out the leaflets ... on the condition that they had to put away their banner as well.

Having realised by this point that we could still talk to people, most of whom were avoiding the BNP contingent, and tell them what Tierney was guilty of, it seemed a small price to pay to piss them off.

Informing the party that they had the Union Flag upside down and back to front evoked no such reaction from the "proud patriots." Hazel Hesketh and Veronika Martel, whose main contribution to the BNP's first Crown Court protest was banging pots and pans, simply shrugged and continued to chant out of step with the recording.

Inside the court, Tierney was sentenced to 100 hours community service. Which he could do at any time as long as it was completed in 12 months. This seems lax by comparison to pensioners sent to jail for council tax evasion, for example, especially when the protest outside was shouting "Shame" as Andrew Tierney's pre-recorded, rambling polemic declared "shame on this criminal justice system."

After this, the BNP protesters told the police that they would leave only when the antifascists were gone. Not having the numbers to wait it out and see them scuttle off first, we waited until the BNP's pre-recorded chanting fell silent before moving on.

It was a shame, and it would have been good to have more numbers, but ultimately we made our point. Tierney's guilt in the St George's Day attack has been established, and more of the public know what he did.

It is also good to see the end of a circus that has been dragged on for far too long.

*This is not an attack or a condemnation but an objective fact. For my thoughts on the unemployed and welfare, see here.