English: David Cameron Deutsch: David Cameron (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Cameron has now pitched in about the Government’s food hygiene advice. Check it out!

David Cameron: Coalition is helping families pay their bills – Telegraph.

You might want to see my earlier blog today where I argued that this story was a smokescreen to deflect from more serious issues. Here’s a quick recap:

Hard pressed families are unlikely to be impressed by the latest policy initiative from David Cameron’s Government. The release of this initiative seems timed to deflect focus from the UK’s Q1 growth figure of just 0.3%. For questions and answers open this. Surely, David Cameron’s Government has more to offer than a few tips on food hygiene?

I received a very full response to the earlier blog  from John Gelmini which I am sharing   below:

I tend to agree.

We need investment and we need growth and enterprise to put people back to work.

Cameron’s latest wheeze is to say that we need a global crackdown on tax avoidance which he knows will never happen. He will then say that because other countries will not agree to this he and George Osborne have no choice but to persist with austerity as a standalone policy and that people are wasting food.

Some facts might help to shed light on Cameron’s failed policies:

1)Last year the average family of 4 had £97 GBP in disposable income left over at the end of the month. This is before food price rises, increasing fuel costs and the fact that 2012 fuel bills are rising to record levels and the fact that winter lasted 2 months longer than it normally does making this March the coldest for over 50 years despite the repeated claims of Global Warming and Climate Change by Professor Beddington and the BBC.

2)Real wages are continuing to fall or not keep up with inflation so much of the £97 GBP ill now have been eaten away.

3)In 2012 some 350,000 people were fed at food banks including 126,000 children.In 2011 the figure was 128,697 and in 2008/2009 the figure was 26,000 (Source: Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust which runs many of these food banks

4)A look at the Knights of Malta official website reveals that the order is opening and planning to open more foodbanks in the UK.This is presumably because the head of this Catholic secret society, Matthew Festing, has access to the same or better data that I have which suggests that the present policies let alone the proposed welfare reforms are going to create more poverty and a greater need for food banks.
For example,”sanctioned benefit recipients” are in extreme cases going to be denied benefits of any kind for up to 3 years.

With 1.4% economic growth there are not enough jobs and charities cannot house people and feed them if there are not enough resources and 11 million houses too few (the current housing shortage is 10.5 million but will go to 11 million when legal, illegal immigration is factored in and the 350,000 Bulgarians and Romanians projected to arrive in January 2014 are in situ).

5)The Universal Credit pilots have all failed and the result will be rent arrears and evictions on a large scale. The result will be more charity cases and a greater need for food banks.This is because Housing Benefit recipients with few exceptions will fail to pay their rent.

The present system of direct payment to landlords recognized that normal Protestant values of work and thrift, Judeo Christian ethics and the idea of “paying your way”,”meeting your financial obligations” are often alien concepts to people whose hardest task is to get up at noon, watch Jeremy Kyle and go to the Jobcentre once a fortnight complete with trainers and an air of entitlement that would shame Louis the 14th.

6)2 weeks ago, I heard a speech at Ely Cathedral by the local Conservative MP to a local business group.
He talked in code and suggested that “local people were best placed to assess who needed benefits”.
This system is familiar to all those of us who are old enough to have read Oliver Twist, because what this MP was describing is a return to the Workhouse complete with a Beadle to identify paupers..

In the speech this man claimed that his thinking did not match the Government’s but to have said what he did in front of the Bishop of Huntingdon and a cathedral full of hundreds of people suggests to me that his words were carefully chosen to implant the vision of “The ghost of Christmas future”.

Whilst I am no soft touch and believe in tough love, I am also a realist —People need jobs, businesses need to export and expand and we need to sell and street-fight our way out of trouble whilst becoming more productive.

These are the only things that matter because without them we cannot pay our way and will become a 3rd world country within a generation.