In da hood

The latest employment statistics are being bandied about; lowest unemployment for 42 years, apparently. But of course, the Labour Party doesn’t like it – it’s the wrong kind of full employment, they say and then cite falling living standards, portray more state funding for everything than at any time in the past as ‘cuts’ and generally whip up the fervour of discontent. How the memories fade, eh? Anybody remember the last time a left-wing Labour government was in power?

Compared to the late seventies, the 21^st century is a cornucopia of riches beyond avarice. Walk down any supermarket aisle; the biggest problem today must be which of twenty identical products at food prices cheaper than at any time in history do you want to complain about. And the internet! My god, for some of us a hoop and a stick was once the height of technology and we had just two television channels, which broadcast for about six hours a night tops.

Today’s kids have instant and largely free access to all the world’s wonders and still they are not satisfied, using it to organise demonstrations about their meagre and cruelly shrivelled potentials; children pay for nothing today, not even music, which used to cost us a week’s paper round money for one lousy single. The closest we had to streaming was ‘dial-a-disc’. But none of this is good enough and the spirit of revolt still beats in revolutionary breasts stirred by the great tenets of the age: “Equality! Diversity! More free stuff!” They cry, as they don the mantle of victimhood.

Over the last day or so I have been gently joshing with a no doubt charming, caring, intelligent young lady who – possibly because she has yet to accrue the self-critical hindsight which comes with age – cannot grasp that there are very good reasons why some people would prefer to work with people more like themselves. Many immigrants to foreign lands tend to  congregate and work together and certain parts of the muslim community are almost exclusively monocultural, but when it comes to whitey we must diversify or be crucified.

Confident in the certainties of the doctrines of multiculturalism – a system that has failed throughout Europe – she has been insisting that even small firms must have diversity at the forefront of their thinking to the point that employing somebody you feel you can get on with is practically racism and that you should instead hire the one with the shiniest CV, the blacker the better, even if he despises you and your white privilege. I am, of course, reading between the lines.

But she was having none of it and instead of quietly accepting that to prefer the company of your own is not bigotry, merely preference, she then moved on to the sexism segment of the leftist war manual: ‘ways to defeat the patriarchy’. Honestly, shop stewards were bad enough when they were merely jumped-up little Napoleons, but who would willingly employ one with a race and gender agenda to cleave to? No wonder we have the wrong kind of employment – our poor productivity figures are certainly impacted by the cost of policing work policies which seem to do nothing so much as churn out yet more unemployable victims.