Tyndale: My award for Pain of the Year goes to...

Dec 26 2010 By George Tyndale

IN a gesture of festive goodwill, columnists are inclined to cast aside their venom-filled keyboards and reflect on the positive contribution of individuals at Christmas.

As the year draws to a close, it’s customary to laud achievements and praise the efforts of others who have, in that ridiculous phrase, “gone the extra mile” to bring a ray of sunshine into people’s lives.

I’d do the same, but to be honest I’m struggling.

Mrs Tyndale is to be commended for bringing me a cup of tea in bed each morning, and preparing my hard boiled egg and soldiers, but a special award for her would whiff of nepotism.

I have decided to hand out awards to this year’s biggest irritants in the hope that we will never hear from them again. Sadly, this is a forlorn hope as only one of the recipients is dead.

Here they are then: Tyndale’s Turkeys for 2010.

STUDENTS

Have you ever seen so much hot air expressed by such a pampered, ungrateful bunch?

Students donned face masks, brandished Socialist Worker banners and threw fire extinguishers to protest over the fact that they are being asked, quite reasonably, to pay towards their three-year campus holidays.

UK plc is up the financial creek without a paddle thanks to 13 years’ of Labour misrule and massive savings have to be made if we are not to become impoverished and vulnerable to a take-over by Greece.

Making gobby and yobby middle-class students cough up for the cost of their training makes sense. Lots of them will land plum jobs in law firms, accountancy practices, technology businesses and medicine and will be able to pay off their tuition fee “debts” with their first-year bonus.

There can be no excuse for the scenes of violence witnessed in London. Kettling’s too good for this rabble.

CHILD-BENEFIT REBELS

These are predominantly the parents of my first Tyndale Turkeys (students) and kicked up a hypocritical stink when the new coalition Government unveiled proposals to axe child benefit payments to high-earners.

Families with a breadwinner bagging £44,000 will no longer be entitled to state hand-outs simply because they have shown themselves to be adept at breeding.

The move will save about £1 billion a year. Additionally, the total amount of state payments that one family can claim will be capped at £26,000, which, if you ask any hard-working taxpayer, is still far too high.

Volvo-driving parents were quick to rebel over child benefit reforms, saying they might have to sacrifice skiing holidays in St Moritz and get rid of one their ponies due to the Tory-Lib Dem purge profligacy. Here was the supposedly liberal, caring middle-classes showing themselves in their true light – as money-grabbing and selfish.