The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

I am tired of the rich, but not the same ones as Dr. Cable. Good luck to the City "spivs", I say. No-one has to give them their money to invest. Every fee they make is paid by choice. Every trade they organise is between volunteers. If either party to the trade loses, it's his own problem (unless the Government chooses to make it yours). Frankly, if we had as many choices about the greater part of our money now taken and spent by government as we do about the small part we have free to invest, we would be happier folk.

The rich I am tired of are the "old money" sorts who – from their comfortable homes in the country and the more elegant parts of London – lecture those of us who earned every penny we have (not to mention all the pennies we don't have because stolen to be frittered away by government). I am thinking of the Cleggs, the Camerons, the Millibands, the Toynbees and – let's not forget – the Blairs. From their places of safety, they blather on about social inclusion and "the vulnerable" but their drippy view of the world – as informed by guilty consciences played upon by Marxist educationalists – exposes the rest us to danger. If they had to live next to "the vulnerable", they might appreciate the "social exclusion" they are lucky enough to have inherited.

Being in the UK means having my heart started in the morning by the Today Programme on Radio 4. It's now a sort of Dragons' Den for "social entrepreneurs" – people pitching for taxpayers' money, supposedly to solve social problems, but actually (in many cases) to provide themselves a living from the public purse. Today someone advocating special drug courts set my heart pounding with words to the effect that it was ridiculous to imagine that people "disabled by their addiction" should "run their own lives" well enough to avoid having their children taken into care. Almost everyone is capable of running his or her own life. Only the belief – supported by the welfare industry – that someone else is better able to do it, can change that.

This kind of irresponsible thinking led to the police losing control of our streets, as reported by Sir Denis O'Connor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary;

One study showed that almost half of almost 6,000 people surveyed had changed
their routines through fear of anti-social behaviour, by avoiding certain
streets or not going out at night.

Tell me again who "the vulnerable" are! As Inspector Gadget notes, the problem is all about insulating people
from the consequences of their own choices. Nothing could be more
stupid. Nothing could be more predictable than the consequences of such
stupidity. Those whose parents or grandparents became rich (with the assistance of previous generations of City spivs) are well able to scorn those who have yet to pull it off. Old money has always despised new. Old money has also always affected lofty concern for the downtrodden. The warped consciences of those
who have never known poverty are, by their political expression, a threat
to our civilisation. The possessors of those consciences – including the not-short-of-a-bob-or-two Dr. Cable himself – are the rich I am tired of.