Mr Enterprise.

The Tory Party Conference is on at the moment. Today it was George Osbourne’s turn to stand pompously on his cloud of privilege, flinging down arrows of empty, irrational rhetoric on a world about which he knows nothing because he’s never been here. His target was Welfare, and he conveniently omitted to mention something that should be obvious to anybody with a brain cell.

There didn’t used to be a culture of dependency in Britain when we had a sensible mixed economy. It came about as a natural corollary of Mrs Thatcher’s drive to destroy industry and public ownership, and replace it with a so-called ‘enterprise culture.’ Even after her demise, successive right wing politicians of both parties followed her lead, and they’re still doing it. And now that times are hard and somebody has to pay, they feel the right to blame and punish the victims of a phenomenon which they and their predecessors created.

Osbourne’s buzz word today was ‘enterprise.’ Well, of course it was. It’s a nice, comfy word to use when you’re trying to justify hammering the people at the bottom of the pile while leaving those at the top untouched.

I can understand why the smug, smarmy faithful sitting in the stalls applauded him. They don’t know much about the real world either. What I don’t understand is why anybody else takes him seriously.