Dread

Back to A4E tomorrow. The charity shop is not ideal, but it's better than that place.


I feel like someone's skivvy, skivvy-work's most of what I'm doing.


Googlegroups is still playing up. I wonder if that's just for me.


I wonder what A4E will have me doing all day tomorrow. It could be sitting around doing nothing again, that seems most likely. This big problem with the charity shop is overstaffing. As I say there are two managers, always at least two volunteers and sometimes as many as four volunteers, along with regular visits from the area manager and so on. A couple of young volunteers, preferably not the usual old biddies, and one manager would be more that enough. They've got me up in a blimmin' uniform now too, buggerit.

But enough of my problems.


I saw a black woman on TV this morning. BBC Breakfast, it was. I don't go out of my was to watch that, but I woke up and it was on. She, this black girl, was a poster-girl for the government's new plan to force "lone parents" onto their beloved New Deal. It was an advert, basically, a black woman who was supposedly living on benefits but somehow managing to live in a house of respectable size (not like my poky little bedsit, I must say) with various trendy clothings and so on. She looked every inch the respectable middle class woman very much not fallen on hard times. New Deal isn't meant for people like that. And beauty creams aren't meant for the beautiful people in the adverts, their meant only for people who are both ugly and incredibly stupid.

The New Deal, similarly, is meant for the hopeless slum-dwellers you find popping up so often in Coppersblog and so rarely in the mainstream media. "Chavs", as they say - and I've no doubt they would include me in that. I am, after all, in a New Deal placement. No, this black woman who went to the jobcentre one day to pick up her Giro, or modern electronic equipment, and was being serviced by a friendly private-sector New Deal consultant the next day and was in work with the government paying for her child care and buying her interview clothes on the third day is a myth. Or, at least, an entirely affluent phenomenon. Someone who already dresses like an off-duty catwalk model and is the sort to be picked to appeal to the clueless housewives who watch Breakfast is going to be easily able to find work anyway. My own situation is more normal: you're forced from the jobcentre, although I was signing on a year before being sent on New Deal because the Jobcentre people were dragging their feet for six months, but you're forced from there to the New Deal office and then you sit around for a bit doing the odd bit of paperwork until they find you some skivvy-work for which you get not a single penny and the company who "hire" you get paid to take you on, as well as getting a free labourer who is incapable of any kind of protest.

But isn't the BBC massively anti-government? Why are they advertising, albeit in a blatant and possibly counter-productive manner (depending on the level of intelligence present in the average "Breakfast" viewer)? The BBC has never been anti-government.

Here's a quick list of the BBC's major crimes, from my point of view on the extreme left wing of the political spectrum:
Orgreave, the BBC doctored footage to make it look like the miners had stoned the police and the police retaliated with a cavalry charge, when the reality was the other way around, the police attacking and the miners, half-naked hordes being chased along by the cavalry and shield-banging savages of the the imperial infantry, just trying to survive.
Mossadegh, the BBC fired the starting gun on the overthrow of Mossadegh, via the World Service.
Gladio, the BBC also started the overthrow of the Italian government by the Super SISMI by a World Service broadcast.
The 1926 general strike: the BBC performed so well the government gave it a charter, under which it operates to this day.
Cchristmas tree files, the BBC lets MI5 vet and approve all personnel. Been in the Communist party? Better get a new career, because the BBC-dominated (and therefore MI5 dominated) broadcasting industry isn't for you.

That's enough for one day, I think.