Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to
fish and he’ll be gone the entire weekend. Joking aside, as tired as the old
aphorism about giving people the tools to look after themselves is, it is
nonetheless a verifiable and logical truism. Man cannot live by charity alone
and it is not a kindness to insist that they do. For all the [questionably] higher
motives of the resurrected Band Aid troupe the recipients of their largesse
would be far better off in the long run if they were given the means rather
than just the money. Feed the world? Let the buggers feed themselves.
This principle was, until recently, almost the definition
of Britishness; keep yourselves to yourselves, look after your own, but come
together when necessary to build the barn, reap the harvest… or repel the
invader. But tradition and traditional structures mean nothing to the ‘progressive’
left; in their attempts to advance the bizarre ideology of enforced equality nothing
has been sacred, nothing has been immune to destruction. Break down the family
unit, debase the principle of self-determination, make everything subject to
state regulation and make the state the sole arbiter of decency and fairness.
On what grounds can Labour and the left continue to try
and claim the moral high ground when so much of what they have done is so
clearly contrary to what most ordinary people would regard as sensible and
morally just? Here are just a few ways in which the extraordinary hypocrisy of
the left manifests itself:
- Lay charges of bigotry, racism and xenophobia at people they have an unnecessary and irrational hatred of.
- Use hate speech to control what they have decided is hate speech, namely individual expression.
- Engineer a low-wage, private sector economy then dare to vilify and punish those whose taxes pay to prop it all up via the ludicrous tax credit system.
- Elevate non-jobs to a status beyond the reach of reason and impeachment, paying public servants wages that would attract bricks through windows if they were bankers.
- Deny companies the right to employ those best able to do a job in support of an equalities agenda which forces quotas and inefficiency and actually results in lower employment.
- Claim to work for the ordinary citizens while pursuing policies which directly harm those same citizens’ life chances.
The left flag-wave for an ideology that has only ever
caused harm, given enough rope. Socialism always ends in queues and rationing
but the socialist cure for socialism is always more socialism and their excuse
is always that it wasn’t true socialism anyway. What works in theory in
fanciful heads doesn’t work when mere humans try to follow it. So they have to
make more things illegal, constrain trade, tax more, borrow more and as the
hurt rises, invest more in the message. Tell people how well they are doing –
despite the evidence of their own eyes - and how horrible it would be if the
nasty parties of self-determination and aspiration got in.
What we need is a government of men and women prepared to
actually roll up their sleeves, take the flak and get on with what has to be
done. Not a bunch of Oxford PPE graduates squabbling in the common room over
points of political theory. Otherwise in the brave new world of EUcialism there
will be no fishing by anybody unless they have undergone a course in Fish Empathy
and Diversity, adhere to strict rules enforcing the equality of fishkind and
most of all, harm no fish. In other words, just as with Band Aid, expend time and energy talking about the problem but ultimately achieve nothing. Teach a man to fish then prevent him from going fishing? Gutted.
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