A better kind of poor

Accusations were flying thick and free from the LimpDem conference stage this weekend as they attempted to resurrect their busted flush of a party and distance themselves from the Tories. Danny Alexander couldn’t have been more emphatically anti if he’d claimed that without the LibDems at their side the Tories would have by now mandated the compulsory eating of babies as an alternative to food banks – nice roasted, by all accounts.  And by re-branding themselves as the “Party of In” they now seek to present themselves as empowered and mighty players in the EU experiment.

I say ‘experiment’ because I’m sure Greece and Spain and Cyprus and the other raped and impoverished southern European countries, with massive unemployment and crippled economies feel closer kinship with vivisection subjects than with their richer northern neighbours. But don’t panic fellas, that inequality is being addressed and we’ll all soon be just as poor as you. And Cleggy is determined to take us on that journey come hell or high water. He claims to love all nationalities, so why does he hate the British so much?

Despite the passage of over a decade since a report suggested that over three million UK jobs ‘depend’ on the EU and despite numerous rebuttals of that claim it still seems to be Clegg’s only real rationale for remaining in the club. Oh, that and his other dodgy assertion that, should we leave, Brits abroad will be immediately dispossessed and repatriated. Both claims are, of course, utter bollocks; the main jobs that would be lost would be the commissionerships for Clegg and his troops.

The argument that British workers abroad would lose jobs and domicile rights just doesn’t hold true. The British have been emigrating economically or otherwise for centuries and none of that will stop. And as for jobs at home, even in the ‘good old days’ of manpower intensive industry people lost their jobs and moved, often en masse. From mills and pits and the land old jobs have gone and will keep on going. But Clegg wants to play on that fear of the inevitable and spin the declining pay and displacement of labour as a wholly good thing.

What IS a monstrosity is the fact that in 21^st century Britain, by whatever definition, we still have poverty. And if the LibDems believe that ever cheaper labour is not partly to blame they might want to try asking the actual poor, because every place where we have poverty we also, presumably coincidentally in Clegg World, have large and new immigrant populations. Mind you, if you listen to some commentators a bit of poverty is a small price to pay for opening our borders to so much thrilling diversity. You see, through the right coloured spectacles cultural ‘enrichment’ is just as good as the monetary kind.

If only we would open our minds and see the world through Nick’s sparkly eyes we would see the incredible benefits of membership. Soon almost none of us would have to work at all. We would live comfortable, easy lives while our Lithuanian gardener tended the lawn, our Portuguese cook prepared dinner and the Polish builders erected the nursery extension for the new baby currently incubating inside our Romanian surrogate. Of course, as we would be ‘unwaged’ we’d still be poor, but it would be a new and better kind of poor. But what do I know?