A bit rich?

Red Ed says “Five more years of misery” Well he would, wouldn’t he? Having thoroughly abandoned the working class way back when – many of their votes are secured firmly on the back of residual Thatcher hate anyway – Labour are hitching their wagon to a gleefully pessimistic message and crossing their fingers in hope as they pray for an economic downturn.  Good to know whose side they’re on, isn’t it? But that’s the left, through and through. They can’t bear for anybody to be independent of the state so they would rather we all be driven into penury than have a chance to breathe for ourselves.

Quite by chance yesterday I stumbled upon a 2009 report by an ‘independent’ think tank called NEF –the New Economics Foundation. Ironically, it’s entitled A Bit Rich. Of course, like ‘progressive’ the description ‘independent’ only SOUNDS like a move in the right direction and is intended to cunningly conceal the partisan ideology of the very left. It is a subliminal attempt to plant the seed of approval and prepare the argument to resist dissent; how could you not want progress, or independence? In truth it is neither. Like calling a barman an assistant bar manager, or a waiter an associate or indeed calling a coffee server a barista, it is mere semantics; words impersonating action to alter expectations.

Anyway, with soothing words, NEF tells us we got it all wrong and using real-world money to put a financial value on people is a dreadful, baby-eating capitalist tool of a thing to do. In their alternative methodology it appears you pluck happy, fluffy figures from the ether and build an economic plan around that. Their estimates of economic worth, according to the Adam Smith Institute, are a tad fanciful, applying their own notions of value to members of society and then using extreme examples and emotive words to ‘tszuj’ their findings up a bit. So a tax accountant destroys £47 of value for every £1 they earn, while a glorious people’s soviet revolutionary recycling comrade rewards us with £12 for every £1 we pay!

While it is true that a person’s worth is more than just what they earn, their paradigm is spurious to say the least, blaming every single evil banker for every single penny ‘lost’ and ascribing the role of social hero to hospital cleaners, attributing the saving of lives directly to their contribution as if some future would-be philanthropist may not survive but for their judicious application of Flash. Well then, by that logic let’s pay hospital cleaners £100 an hour because if they are worth - as NEF asserts - 10 times what they are paid, this would inject £1000 into the economy for every man-mop-hour – Savlon salvation!

Anybody can play that game: Let’s say a person claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance adds £5 to the economy for every £1 they claim – why, that makes the coalition’s resistance to increasing welfare spending an utter nonsense! And if children are the future let’s assign a value of a billion pounds to each child, thus making every penny paid in Child Benefit money very well spent. If only Jesus were alive today-he’d be worth a mint.

As you read through ‘A Bit Rich’ you wonder when you are going to get to the part where, for every pound of pocket money a child receives, the sum total of joy in the world goes up by five unicorns. But if that child grows up to be a capitalist, a mermaid must die for every pound of profit on which they legally avoid tax. But here’s the serious point: if Labour get in this is the sort of background thinking that will actually be employed to shape economic policy development. Five more years of misery - I can hear them thinking - is that all the coalition has to offer? Labour can beat that by a factor of ten!