Revolution in the afternoon

It's all go round here, I tell you.

Management are absent - apparently they think better in posher surroundings, so they're having an 'away day' - kind of like the Wannsee Conference for education (too tasteless?). Shame teachers and students aren't afforded the same consideration.

In their absence, I sloped off for a very frustrating swim, then for a quick demonstration, supporting our City of Dark Place College colleagues as they fight huge cuts in Further Education, which is under severe attack.

Then in a few minutes, I'm off for another meeting with the Vice-Chancellor and the Executive. I plan to ask how many of them are earning more than the Prime Minister and how it makes them feel. The V-C was on £228,000 in 2008-09 - it will have increased since then - while the PM struggles along on £142,500. 4 more of my management 'colleagues' (obviously they don't mix with the likes of me) earned took home more than the PM too. Well, 'we're all in this together'.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor has announced plans to force local authorities to cap council tax at this year's level, and plans to provide mechanisms to force them to cancel raises in future if a small number protest.

This is a naked attack on working people. The focus on prohibiting rises makes this clear: some (Tory) councils stay in power by charging very low tax, and therefore providing very few services. What if a local population want to pay more, for better services? Sorry, that won't count. What if a council needs to charge more because of exceptional costs - a hard winter perhaps, or entire housing estates need renovating? Tough - Cameron hates government and detests public services, so he wants you to hate taxes and hate collective action. Lower taxes produces selfish individualism. He sees this as a good thing. I see it as socially damaging.

This bit's really pissed me off. The welfare system isn't 'out of control'. It might need tidying up a little, perhaps even tightening. What's out of control is that Britain's given the banks hundreds of billions because they screwed the global economy, and they're back to the bad old ways, without paying any of it back yet. Quite frankly, I'm far happier for someone on unemployment benefit (£51.85 for 18-24s, £65.45 per week if you're over 25) to fiddle things a bit than I am for free-marketeer bankers to demand state bailouts. That's real fraud.

All the political parties hysterically condemn benefit fraud for impoverishing the country. Let's see what the figures say:

Benefit fraud and error overpayments, 2008-09: estimated £3.1bn, or 2.1% of the benefits budget.
Benefit underpayment: £1.7bn, or 0.9%.
Total loss: £1.4bn.

So where's the campaign to get people to claim their full entitlement? How much is fraud, and how much is error?

Now, let's see. Benefits fraud and error loses us £1.4bn. Now, how much have we given or guaranteed the banks?

£1.5 trillion. £1, 500,000,000,000,000
Take away £1.4 billion for those benefit fraudsters and I reckon that George Osborne's being rather generous to the bankers and rather mean to the rest of us.

Also, I want to know this: which minister in the International Development department replaced African art with a massive Union flag and a portrait of Margaret Thatcher, as reported in yesterday's Observer?. Given that the department exists largely to repair the damage done by the kind of imperialism Thatcher was nostalgic for, neither decoration seems appropriate.