Thursday 17 September 2009

Purnell write-up

I know, I know, I'm a week late with this. My excuse is that I've had a metric fuckton of deadlines; but more than that, I didn't know quite what to say. It was all a bit depressing, really, and it made me angry, and sad, all at once.

Firstly, thank you for your comments. Mr Purnell and his aides read all of them, and took them on board. Myself, I feel I got the mockery out the way by bringing him a peace offering of some lovely fridge magnets, since the newspapers tell me he likes them, enough to spend well over the monthly JSA stipend on fridge magnets and claim it all back off the state. One of them had a picture of Che Guevara on it. Give him his due, he laughed.

We had a half-hour meeting, Purnell and his aide and I, and the first half was mostly taken up by him talking up the new scheme for guaranteeing a limited number of long-term young jobseekers minimum-wage work, whilst simultaneously making it very clear that as he'd resigned from the cabinet this really wasn't his job anymore.

At some point during the meeting, I got tired of the equivocation. So I decided to tell him the truth and see if I couldn't make him listen. Very quietly, and mindful of how ridiculous I might sound, I said* -

"Look, James. You know and I know that the damage has already been done. There are hundreds of thousands of young people and people with disabilities out there whose lives have been entirely scuppered by a batting team of the recession and your damn stupid benefit policies. Sure, you're trying to guarantee jobs for one in ten of them now - but that's not enough, and we both know that. I'm not here to shout at you or to tell you how angry I am with you, and I'm not here to point out the massive hypocrisy in your personal behaviour over the expenses scandal -there wouldn't be a lot of point in that. I'm here to ask you, please, to listen.

"People are hurting, right now; people like my partner and my former housemates are in desperate situations and they are hurting. You're a highly ambitious, brilliant politician. There's not a small chance that by the time you're leader of the Labour Party or Prime Minister of Britain [note: neither Purnell nor his aide moved to correct me at this point] we will still be hurting, still be desperate, and some of us might still be unemployed. I want you to remember, please, that you owe us a voice. I want you to remember that our votes count, too, and that we are people just as much as people who are lucky enough to be employed. It's too late for some of us now; but we're good, bright young men and women who just want to earn our way, and our votes count as much as anyone's. So when you're powerful again, please remember us, and remember that you owe us. And that's all I have to say."

At which point, Purnell said, "Thank you. That seems like a good point on which to end the meeting".

I should point out that whilst I was muttering all this I was intermittently picking at a growing hole in my tights. I'm a lot less confident in person, especially when I've got something important to get off my chest. The planned flounce-out was somewhat derailed by my being dragged down to the nearest pub by the aide and a couple of other nice young ladies from Demos, and the whole evening ended rather ignominously with me yelling politicians are all such pussies! down Tooley street in the dark. The young people at Demos are the best of the bunch; one gets the impression that they're really, truly trying. However, I lost count of the times I was told that 'people like you are important, because you're passionate'. For fuck's sake. I'm not 'passionate', I'm angry, and I'm angry for a reason. Why aren't you?


*I wrote this down as soon as I got out of the meeting; it's pretty much as I said it, without all of the 'ums' and 'like, yknows'.

14 comments:

  1. **applause**

    And...

    However, I lost count of the times I was told that 'people like you are important, because you're passionate'. For fuck's sake. I'm not 'passionate', I'm angry, and I'm angry for a reason. Why aren't you?

    Yes. This.

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  2. There's no particular reason for saying this as a comment to this post rather than any other, but, why did you take away the nice angry redness of penny red? Wasn't the red supposed to be sort of symbolic? Pink and gray is a bit of a let-down, and the photos don't stand out as much either...

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  3. It sounds like you did your best. Hugs. (Please don't copy Mr Divine by trying to undo my bra during the hug.)

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  4. You should have hit him with a fridge magnet.

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  5. Language nitpick: technically, if it's metric, then it should be spelt a "fucktonne" in SI units...

    ***

    Great speech you gave at the end, that should be a campaign speech or something!

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  6. I really admire your guts! (bravery, that is, not your intestines, though I'm sure they're great too). Does sound frustrating as fuck, though.

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  7. "So when you're powerful again, please remember us, and remember that you owe us."

    Purnell is a cunt, and more pertinently, a politician. Why should he 'owe' anything to a demographic who, by your own definition, don't like him, haven't voted for and won't vote for him? What have we given him in exchange that he should 'owe' us?

    Oh, and do you ever speak on behalf of people who aren't personally known to you? Fetishising the misfortunes of your friends isn't a substitute for research.

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  8. Thanks for trying, I guess his reluctance to make any comment speaks volumes, but who knows, maybe, just maybe the comments may educate him a little on the subject, only time will tell - and any future actions or talks he makes about welfare policy at any point in the future.

    Lets hope he digests it all, and does make some comment, he could still make a difference if he wanted to.

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  9. What a feeble, truly feeble effort to take this creep to task. Pathetic.

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  10. Alright, Tamysyn, what would you have had me do? A massive shit on his shoes, perhaps?

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  11. "Lets hope he digests it all, and does make some comment, he could still make a difference if he wanted to."

    He dramatically resigned from a lame duck government which is not going to back in power for at least 4 years, probably 8, I think he is one of the people in parliament with the least ability to make a difference to anything.

    If you want to change things you're going to have talk to David Cameron, which is very sad but true.

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  12. Ah, but did the aide give away any secrets down the pub...

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  13. What about getting useful info about bachelor thesis writing? Here you can read a lot about it

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