John Bull Profile picture
16 Nov, 13 tweets, 3 min read
My first year at uni, there was still a grant if you could prove you needed it. But everyone else got loans.

In my halls at uni, 90% of the the kids with rich parents got grants. I had to get a loan.

Sadly, here's what happens IRL when a good idea like this gets implemented /1
So the state (rightly) has to decide, in some way, what makes a kid rich and a kid poor.

You'd think that's straight forward in theory. But it turns out that poverty is like that (almost certainly apocryphal) French judicial definition of porn:

"You know it when you see it."
But of course you can't build a grant/loan system based on "know it when you see it". You need written rules. To keep things fair. In theory.

But you know who LOVE rules?

Accountants.

You know who HAVE accountants?

People with money.
So you come up with a definition of poverty. Yay.

Enter stage left, Scrooge McDuck. His nephews want to go to uni. Scrooge doesn't want to pay. So he turns to the accountants HE ALREADY PAYS and says:

"Make my nephews look poor."
And that's suddenly what happens. Now the nephews don't LIVE with Scrooge anymore. Not on paper. They live with their mother. Who, IT MAGICALLY TURNS OUT has no assets to her name and her only income is 10k a year from a part time job in a dress shop.

Which (oh hey) Scrooge owns
So they tighten the rules and the definition of poverty. Bingo. Loophole closed.

Except what was a loophole for Scrooge's accountants, WASN'T a loophole for (say) a genuine breadline single parent with a cleaning job.
Now buried in the new rules somewhere is an exemption for that genuine case. But finding it requires:

1) Time
2) Education

Which are LUXURIES to poor families, or

3) Money to pay an accountant.

OH HEY! Remember who has an accountant?!

Yeah.

And so the cycle starts again...
And that is how as the child of two working class parents, working multiple jobs, I got barely any support.

While I was in halls with kids on full grants and loans, who drove a new car every year and boasted that they'd invested their loans.

Because mommy/daddy had accountants.
And i think that's also the experience that pretty much cemented two thoughts in my head:

1) The rich will ALWAYS find a way to get access to something intended to help the poor. So don't put barriers in front of the poor.

2) Governance can change lives. For better or worse.
And this is also why I'm a massive backer of the principle of universal income, btw.

Because pro-tip:

The generic arseholes who you don't WANT getting your tax money are already getting it. That won't change. But now you get to help the people we DO want to help, too.
And by helping THOSE people. By lifting those people UP, we'll create jobs, new economies, new art and a whole bunch of other things that benefit society a HELLUVAH lot more than trust fund kids stashing their accountant-acquired cheap loans in high yield stocks ever did.
People talk about things like free education or universal income as if they are overly idealistic. As if they're fluffy goody-good ideas.

You know what? Fuck that. No.

I believe in those things because I think humanity is generally the worst version of itself.
And so we have to model the best outcomes we can on the principle that people will abuse, in some way, the systems we put in place to stop them abusing them.

So we need to build governance systems that minimise the potential for that, and universalise where we can.

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More from @garius

18 Nov
I'm fascinated by how military history shapes language in ways we don't spot. Mostly navy in the UK but army too.

E.g.

Stop and ask yourself: why do so many British football clubs have a Kop end?

Let's talk Boer War battles, Jack the Ripper, Gandhi, Churchill and football /1 Boers at Spion KopLiverpool Kop End.
Let's start where this begins. January 1900. Second Boer War in South Africa.

Britain is fighting the Orange Free State and Transvaal. It's all very 'late Empire'. Grim. Bloody. Atrocities on both sides. "It'll be over by Christmas". Weapons making old tactics outdated. etc. picture of british forces a...
In fact, one reason the whole "lions led by donkeys"/Blackadder image of WW1 is wrong about THAT conflict is because the army learns from the Boer Wars, which ARE like that.

Lots of bad British generals doing generally bad things, while junior commanders try to save the day.
Read 22 tweets
18 Nov
Oh MAN. About time The Scheldt got more attention. A grim campaign to open up Antwerp. Always lost in Market Garden's shadow.

(Even at the time. Admiral Ramsay had to go over Monty's head to Eisenhower and complain that the Canadians were being abandoned)
You can probably imagine how well Monty reacted to that. But Monty was utterly focused on Market Garden (somewhat understandably) and hadn't spotted how dire the supply situation was.

Luckily Ramsay, the greatest logistician of WW2, did. And realised someone needed to step in.
Eisenhower too realised the danger once it was highlighted, and ordered Monty to divert some focus.

To say Ramsay was off of Monty's Xmas card list after that would be something of an understatement.
Read 4 tweets
16 Nov
Today is my Dad's 74th birthday. Told he was 'stupid', he left school at 16.

Despite this, he LOVES books. though he struggles to read them.

Late life diagnosis? Severe dyslexia:

"Told them I wasn't stupid"

Now he's writing on @Medium. Do please share: mickestevenage.medium.com
He's lived a long and varied life, and it's fascinating for me (as his son) reading some of these stories.

In this one about working long hours over Christmas and helping people, for example, it's weird to think one of the kids he's talking about is ME.

mickestevenage.medium.com/the-heartless-…
He's very chuffed about having somewhere to put his stories now though, and has promised more.

Particularly about Big Ken - i have prompted him for more of these, on behalf of those of you who were asking. 😂 Whatsapp screenshot: ME: "Also Big Ken has been popular
Read 6 tweets
13 Nov
Because someone was asking for a photo...
And how it sounds.
(Prologue to Henry V, in case you're wondering what I was typing)
Read 5 tweets
13 Nov
Milton was one of those people you could disagree completely with, but see where he was coming from, and vice-versa. A good man.

I wrote yesterday about Boris always wanting a deputy to do the work. That was Milton early on in London.
His ability to play Warwick to Boris' boy king was critical to Boris navigating London politics and government early on.

And his tragically early death is really the point at which the shine and functional drive started to come off his mayoralty.

He never replaced Milton IMHO.
Milton is why Boris has been so wedded to Cummings. He's been trying to recreate that power-behind-the-throne model with someone he feels he can trust and delegate the actual thinking of government to, ever since.
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
Something to remember about Boris: his spectacular laziness is always at war with his fragile ego.

So he hires people to tell him what to do. But eventually gets upset at jokes about him being told what to do. Then fires those people and hires someone ELSE to tell him what to do
There's a couple of stages between the two, but it's relatively easy to see coming.

You just watch for him announcing giant pointless projects. That's normally his last attempt to make people talk about him instead. If they don't get traction, he gets sulky and starts firing.
One of the advantages he had as mayor was that he could just appoint a shitload of deputy mayors to do a lot of the legwork. And they had no political power OUTSIDE of him.

Made binning them as part of temper tantrum nice and easy.

Doesn't work as well with MPs or proper SPADs.
Read 4 tweets

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