Political Piles

To get to the top of the political pile it is not enough just to have talent, drive, ambition and an influential sponsor or three, you must primarily have faith. In traditional Tory circles the correct belief always was that people should stand largely on their own two feet… or daddy’s broad shoulders. On the left the followers of the doctrine must believe unequivocally that they know better than everybody else what is good for the little people; those poor, downtrodden human cattle who are simply incapable of escaping their moribund destinies without the over-zealous assistance of the card-carrying faithful.

It comes from a place of unrequited love, this conviction; a passion to right the wrongs and slay the dragons of oppression, cut free the chains of enslavement to uncaring masters and deliver the wretches to the sunny uplands of equality, fraternity and liberty. In the gospels of the church of Labour the horny handed sons of toil will roister with their comrades, singing gallant songs of derring-do, of the struggle joined and overcome. The reality, sadly, is one of killing with kindness.

Singing Onward Comrade Soldiers has led us to a nation of state-dependent zombies suckling from the teat of welfare in its many forms. Instead of people making a living, they are given one without a commitment in return. Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Tax Credits should be entirely unnecessary, but people are so wedded to the idea that the state must provide that they can’t understand how their lives would be so much better if these crutches were the exception rather than the rule.

To maintain the addictions the left like to toy with the language, bandying around words like cruelty, poverty, inequality, need, entitlement, deprivation and so on and shouting racist or homophobe at anybody who dissents. Labour even deployed adverts a decade ago, telling people to claim their tax credits as a right! It’s free! It’s yours! Nobody has to pay for it except those who have too much already! Language is everything in this arena and in the war of words the devil has the best weapons. The language of self-esteem beats the language of self-reliance every time – who doesn’t want the illusion of heaven on earth?

To succeed as a Labour politician you also have to be capable of denying what you see with your own eyes – progressively lower wages, visibly increased and uncomfortable immigration, the stretching of services and the lowering of standards of both living and behaviour. And just in case anybody with a functioning memory should try to air a recollection you must master the rewriting of history, conveniently airbrushing out the appalling squalor wrought by your own policies every single time you've held power. The cognitive dissonance must scream like tinnitus in all but the most indoctrinated of brains.

In Labourspeak borrowing is now called investment and increasing the national debt beyond any hope of repayment in a lifetime is referred to as balancing the books. Hampering teaching by the need for multiple language interpreters is enrichment. Foreign criminals are all endangered asylum seekers and the mass importation of unskilled, criminally low-paid workers from the poorest parts of the European Union is celebrated as the triumph of diversity.

One political arse looks much like another

This week, fearing an outbreak of clear vision and unclouded minds, some on the left have been trying to claim that race should be kept out of politics. Race is a proxy here for any discussion about immigration in what is euphemised as ‘unhelpful’ terms. That is, if you see a problem then have the audacity to point to it you are a heretic. It's like dealing with haemorrhoids - the more you scratch the itchier they get. And red or blue, those piles are really irritating. Maybe it’s about time we all denounced our faiths and became political apostates. And bollocks to the lot of them.