Keeping It In The Family: DWP Give Michael Gove’s Wife Free Advertising

The new DWP twitter feed, recently announced on twitter by the Prime Minister, has been providing free advertising for Michael Gove’s wife’s new online business.

Two tweets earlier today plugged Get The Gloss, an ‘award winning website’ according to the department.  Meanwhile on the DWP’s facebook page Get The Gloss Production Editor Judy Johnson was given a post with a link back to the the fashion and beauty website advising claimants on how they should dress at job interviews.

Now it has emerged that Get The Gloss is a new online venture started by Sarah Vine, wife of odious Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Most online businesses would do almost anything to get this kind of free publicity from a government department, although even the most ambitious would probably draw the line at marrying Michael Gove. 

To let the DWP know what you think of them giving tax payer funded free adverts to their partners contact them on twitter @DWPgovuk

The DWP are currently using the hashtag #job2014 on twitter, occupy it!

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

Hey Posh Boy, Leave Our Kids Alone

Rarely has there been a better example of one rule for them and another for the rest of us than Michael Gove’s latest plan to slash school holidays.

Gove wants the UK to be more like China and is intent of wringing every last scrap of joy from the lives of anyone who isn’t rich.  Now the Summer holidays are in his sights as his fake concern for children masks a desire to cut childcare costs and make it easier for bosses to exploit parents.

The Education Secretary has previously claimed that children suffer a ‘learning loss’ over the Summer holiday.  Yet children at private schools, like the one he went to, are barely ever required to turn up.

Eton College closes for the Summer this year at 1pm on Friday 28th June.  Students will not return until the 3rd of September.  The children are groomed for the gruelling life of being a posh twat by swanning off on holiday for just under an astonishing 10 weeks.

Then come Christmas they’re off again, breaking up on the 10th December and not returning until the 8th January, around twice the length of the holiday those at state schools receive.

Yet Gove wants to turn schools for working class children into Chinese-style education camps, with kids forced to sit in stuffy classrooms for months on end learning strings of pointless facts about dead toffs.

No doubt he hopes this will indoctrinate children for the miserable lives of ever increasing work for ever decreasing money that Gove and his neo-liberal vampires are attempting to inflict on the rest of us.  Gove’s new workfare schools show the real direction this Government is travelling.

Both main teaching unions are set to strike over this year over working hours.  They should be backed by every decent parent who doesn’t see childhood as merely a holding period before people are turned into profit making stock for the rich.

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children

The NUT are set to strike in Nottingham over plans to cut the school Summer holiday and lengthen the working day.  In a resounding 90% vote members will take industrial action over plans to cut the Summer Holiday to four weeks and split the year into five separate terms.  Other education Unions in the city may yet join them.

Nottingham Council have threatened to sack any teachers who oppose the move and offer them re-employment under the new conditions.  An all too familiar tactic for Councils imposing brutal cuts on pay and conditions.

Michael Gove has said he supports cutting the Summer holiday.  The man who destroyed the educational chances of a generation now wants to strip any last remaining joy from their childhood as well. He claims that children suffer ‘learning loss’, during the six week break.  As if working class children are too stupid to have a holiday.  Most private schools, like the one Gove went to, have ten week Summer breaks.  The double standard is as clear as ever.  This is nothing to do with the educational needs of our children.  This is about squeezing yet more labour, for less money, from the people who actually do the real work in this country.

Growing up in the 80s, teacher’s strikes were a common occurrence.  The NUT were heroes to Thatcher’s generation, not just because we hated the old witch, but because we got a day off.  No-one normal liked school.  Most people got out at the first opportunity when they reached 16 and many of us before then as schools practiced informal policies of exclusion after the age of about 14.  Truancy was an acceptable solution for both kids and schools alike.  We didn’t want to be there and the feeling was mutual.

The Summer holidays are often the good bits we all remember about childhood.  Dicking about with our mates for days on end.  It didn’t matter if some parents worked.  The more of them out of the way the better to be honest.

But these long carefree days are set to come to an end as this Government set out to remove any possible pleasure from the lives of everyone but the rich.  If you want a vision of the future imagine a human being stacking shelves in Tesco forever – for no pay.

The NUT have said that cutting school holidays is about saving money on childcare costs.  It will no doubt also be used as cover for yet more DWP bullying of single parents who are not in work.  Teachers are rightly resisting this attempt to lengthen their working hours for no extra pay.  No-one, it appears, has thought to ask the kids what they think.

The people who fought out on the streets the hardest during the student protests in 2010 were by and large not university students or rock star’s kids.  They were the EMA kids from the ‘slums of London’.  A year later they really began to show their teeth.  Their resistance may have been far from perfect.  Burning working class people out of there homes is not on.  Lessons must be learnt, and not in the classroom. But the riots didn’t reveal a generation happy with the future being inflicted on them.  Even in my day everyone wanted Nike trainers.  But we didn’t do that.

Social mobility, much like the benefits system, have both been an effective sticking plaster for working class rage.  Let a few make it, usually in the world of sports or pop music, and the illusion of fairness is flimsily maintained.  Work hard and you too could be Alan Sugar.  In fact you’ve got more chance of winning the lottery.  Chuck about a few middle class public sector jobs to bright and obedient working class kids and everyone thinks they might be Obama one day. Except now the people who ran the youth clubs and wrote ‘diversity strategies’ are stood in the dole queue along with the youth.

Pay people just about enough so they can keep a roof over their head and they might not murder you in your sleep.  Giving elderly and disabled people decent benefits and healthcare means their children may not burn down police stations.  Pay single parents a pittance and their kids might not go out and fight, burgle or mug yuppies for food.

These sticking plasters are now being ripped away by this Government of toffs.  Naked class war lies beneath.

The Scab Society

It appears odious Education Secretary Michael Gove is supporting parents being asked to take over classes in an attempt to break this Thursday’s strike by teacher’s unions. According to The Independant, a spokesman for Gove has said it would be “great” if parents could help out with teaching. The true motivation for the Big Society becomes ever clearer.

Let’s not mince words. Any parent who offers to help out in this way is a dirty fucking scab and should be treated with the contempt they deserve. They should be ostracised by their communities and have shit chucked at them in the street. Slogans should be painted on their houses and driveways to make sure people know of the scum in their midst. As author Jack London once wrote: “No man has a right to scab as long as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with.”

Perhaps it will be the children they supervise who will give them a first lesson in how a scab should be treated. Kids everywhere should be unrelenting in their abuse, delinquency and contempt for these vermin who would happily help to destroy the education system, and not even take pay for doing so. Give them hell kids. And if the fuckers complain tell everyone they tried to touch you up.

And on that note let’s finish on a song:

It’s in the evening after dark,
When the blackleg miner creeps to work,
With his moleskin pants and dirty shirt,
There goes the blackleg miner!

Well he takes his tools and doon he goes
To hew the coal that lies below,
There’s not a woman in this town-row
Will look at the blackleg miner.

Oh, Seghill is a terrible place.
They rub wet clay in the blackleg’s face,
And around the heaps they run a foot race,
To catch the blackleg miner!

So, dinna gan near the Delaval mine.
Across the way they stretch a line,
To catch the throat and break the spine
Of the dirty blackleg miner.

They grab his duds and his pick as well,
And they hoy them down the pit of hell.
Doon ye go, and fare ye well,
You dirty blackleg miner!

Blackleg Miner – Traditional English Folk Song