There are all sorts of marketing stories about January - the famous one being that the 3rd Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year... created by travel company in the attempt to sell holidays.
So far this January hasn't been too gloomy. We have been busy, preparing the spare room for our Colombian student, and getting on with the re-write of TRF... but now Rafael has arrived, and the weather is unpleasant and cold and wet and grey... and the economic news is getting worse, and some of the news items are getting more depressing. So today I have felt that giving up Citalopram, which I had begun to do by cutting my dose in half, is perhaps not such a good idea.
The government is proposing to put a cap on benefits - which I find rather unjust, I cannot see why cutting help to the poor is justified. The government thinks cuts in benefit will force people to get work - er, hello? There are 3m unemployed out there... all they will do is make unemployment less "comfortable". It is such a sophisticated problem that it can of course easily be resolved by a simplistic approach. What I find so upsetting is all the people who are applauding this - benefits have actually shrunk in real terms in relation to the average working wage in the last 30 years, there's no way that the unemployed could be said to have shared in the country's wealth. But the self-righteousness of it: "why should taxpayers pay for this?" What else do they want to do with the money? We aren't going to get to keep it, impoverishing the poor even further isn't going to help anyone. Less money in the economy keeping small shops and businesses going... good thinking Ian Duncan Smith!
So far this January hasn't been too gloomy. We have been busy, preparing the spare room for our Colombian student, and getting on with the re-write of TRF... but now Rafael has arrived, and the weather is unpleasant and cold and wet and grey... and the economic news is getting worse, and some of the news items are getting more depressing. So today I have felt that giving up Citalopram, which I had begun to do by cutting my dose in half, is perhaps not such a good idea.
The government is proposing to put a cap on benefits - which I find rather unjust, I cannot see why cutting help to the poor is justified. The government thinks cuts in benefit will force people to get work - er, hello? There are 3m unemployed out there... all they will do is make unemployment less "comfortable". It is such a sophisticated problem that it can of course easily be resolved by a simplistic approach. What I find so upsetting is all the people who are applauding this - benefits have actually shrunk in real terms in relation to the average working wage in the last 30 years, there's no way that the unemployed could be said to have shared in the country's wealth. But the self-righteousness of it: "why should taxpayers pay for this?" What else do they want to do with the money? We aren't going to get to keep it, impoverishing the poor even further isn't going to help anyone. Less money in the economy keeping small shops and businesses going... good thinking Ian Duncan Smith!
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