Why Can't She Get A Proper Job?

Hilary Mantel, the evil non-Bagshavian fiction writer who broke the Duchess of Cambridge's heart and virtually assassinated the sainted Thatcher, has been up to no good again, comparing the coalition unfavourably to the man whom the noted historian Boris Johnson probably thinks chopped off Charles I's head. In 1536 Thomas Cromwell tried to introduce a law to provide financial aid to people who were unable to work, and also to employ the idle able-bodied in public works. Parliament threw it out, partly no doubt because of an entrepreneurial British antipathy to the thought of meddling with the free market just to bring down unemployment, but mostly because it would have meant raising taxes to subsidise elderly, sick and disabled scroungers. Not content with this level of iniquity, Cromwell also drew up an anti-enclosure act limiting the number of sheep which a single person could own. Fortunately, Rupert Murdoch was quite young in the sixteenth century and thus managed to ride out the Socialist storm until Cromwell expired by royal appointment some years later.