A message to all the ‘crap parents’
Are your kids struggling? Are you struggling? Struggling with what exactly? Finding enough hours in the week to earn money, manage school runs, keep up with the bills, pay increasingly ridiculous prices for school uniforms etc?
Are you trying to do everything you can to give your kids the best start in life that you can afford to give them, but constantly disappointed at how stiff and unyielding the household budget is these days? It doesn’t stretch far enough does it, and something has to give somewhere.
Earn more money, work more hours, take second and third jobs, and you lose time with your kids. And when you do finally finish work, you’re so tired, and it’s hard to work up enthusiasm though you wish you could. Do you feel guilty for being absent, even when you’re present?
But what if you can’t work, what then? Guilty anyway? A government that simultaneously harasses you for not working but would also badmouth you for ‘abandoning’ your child (another bit of anti-wisdom from one of the other ‘new conservatives’) if you could find affordable childcare to enable you to work in the first place? You can’t win, can you? What is your crime – it’s not being wealthy enough.
A government that resents the shit out of having to provide social security to those that need it. Who will have a go at Labour policies because they imagine they will be ‘throwing money’ at the problem of people being too fucking poor to turn the heating on.
To them I say this: You have two choices, you can either un-privatise our essential services and make them affordable or you will have to increase the provision of welfare so that people who need it can actually get by.
You can browbeat people all you like, but don’t think for a minute your bullying ‘helps’ people back into work or helps them earn more. What you do is slowly grind people down, until they have no fight left and their mental and physical health declines. Your own figures tell you that after 13 years in power, people are sicker than ever. You haven’t got the answer now and you didn’t have it in 2010. As governments go, you have been so much worse than ‘crap’.
So one of your ‘new conservatives’ decides to insult people with children who are struggling and labels them ‘crap’. What do you hope to achieve? Five minutes trending on Twitter and a couple of headlines to show us all what a bigshot you are? Do you know why any child struggles? Some may well have troubling and difficult lives at home with parents who may not be doing their best, even doing harm– but woefully overstretched social services will struggle to help them. Thanks to your governance.
But the parents who are already feeling the guilt of not being able to provide – for a multitude of reasons (which may include insufficient income, rising costs, inadequate housing for a start), your insult – calling them ‘crap’ – ought to keep you up at night. Who backs you up? Other ‘new conservatives’? Equally as ignorant and lacking in very basic human compassion as you?
Children bear the scars of poverty for a long time, and they may very well ‘struggle’ while their home lives are fraught with arguments over money. But you have done nothing to help them. 13 years is a childhood. A childhood diminished by bedroom taxes and two child limits and benefit caps and sanctions and profiteering of the basic essentials – gas, electricity, water, food.
And you have decimated the public services, ravaged local authorities so that they too can no longer afford the essentials they used to provide. Crumbling schools, closed libraries, closed community centres, more dirty mattresses in shop doorways than I have ever seen, and higher Council Tax bills that none of us can afford any more. We pay more, we get less and still you sneer at us.
That you would call any of us ‘crap’ when we are doing our best…shame on you. Your band of new conservatives are nothing new and hopefully you will all be gone at the general election.
Now, quick, get yourself down the Foodbank for a selfie.
