Can’t get a proper job? Try politics

LIFE AND OTHER BITS: FOR those who like elections, mostly politicians and media pundits with swingometers and books of voting patterns, the coming together of a general election and local elections is excitement of orgasmic proportions.

For the rest of us it means being bombarded with blue, red and yellow leaflets that are, in the main works of fiction telling us how good our representatives have been or how much better off we will be if we vote for them.

In truth the only people who profit from elections are the elected who go on to draw fat salaries, even fatter expenses and get pensions that set them up for life.

Has anyone ever had a politician standing on their doorstep pleading: “Vote for me because I need the money and am not qualified to do a proper job”?

Sadly, total honesty is not always the currency of politics so the message is that if we vote for them, our children will be rosy-cheeked and clever, all our holidays will be sunny and our lives will be prosperous, healthy and happy.

Are they much different from those guys who call saying that they are reformed convicts and if you buy a 10p duster from them for £2.50 it will help to keep them on the straight and narrow? Of course they are.

Do they differ from bogus callers only in that they don’t actually take money out of your bedroom drawers while you are standing at the sink like some loon, running the cold water tap, but snaffle it in taxes? Of coure not.

How fortunate we are in Oldham that all of our MPs and prospective MPs are honest, upright citizens. Lucky us.


OLDHAM has 6,000 16 to 24 year olds who are not in work, training to be in work or undertaking some kind of education. NEETS they are called by the Government but those who get up at the crack of dawn every day and go out to earn an honest crust probably have another name or two for them.

Some of them are between jobs (no, don’t laugh) and others are on gap years which means they take a year off thinking what to do with their lives before deciding that being a lifelong NEET would be, well, pretty neat.

Now you might wonder why the benefit system (which probably doesn’t benefit you at all) supports these gentle souls to whom work, training or education is all too much and why we make it easy for them and for those who set the shining example of fiddling the system by pretending to have a bad back, knee, hand or elbow to live off our taxes.

It’s because we are certifiably daft.


FINAL WORD: Oldham is getting £1.7 million to make the borough a better place. How many parking meters and double yellow lines will it buy do you think?