Basic

While the great Brexit betrayal continues, with Theresa May apparently willing to collude with anybody who will help to avert Brexit while the toothless and very likely incontinent 1922 Committee look on impotent silence, I turn my thoughts to a parallel possible consequence of this whole sorry saga; a future Labour government. Never mind that they have yet to announce any coherent policy regarding the enacting of something called for by 17.4 million people, they still imagine they possess an ounce of credibility on economic matters.

Last week, for instance, they announced a policy to raise the minimum wage for the under 18s from £4.35 to £10. At a stroke, presumably, which is what employers will likely have. Given that the current minimum wage is £8.21 for over-25s, everybody will get the sugar. Oh, except for all those young people who will have become instantly unemployable. And all those slightly older but still less experienced workers who will be laid off.

How will Labour counteract this? I expect they will resort to their knee-jerk response of compulsion. After all, if their minimum wage plan is such a good idea, why not force employers to take on trainees regardless of the value they bring to the business and make it illegal to make people redundant. Then if the business starts to falter, will the red government also make it against the law to go bust? This is about as economically competent as Jeremy Corbyn’s assertion that getting money from a bank, then paying it back with interest isn’t borrowing.

And then just the week before, Labour were floating the Citizens Basic Income bollocks without any real clue as to what they were proposing. Of course we could have universal welfare; it still has to be paid for. But the CBI is fundamentally flawed on so many levels. Where is the socialist logic of paying rich people a basic income, out of the taxes they pay in order to give exactly the same basic income to poorer people? This is like those on the left who believe that taxes collected from those paid from the public purse is some form of income instead of a mere rebate on wages paid.

Welfare, workfare, charity, price-capping, job-guaranteeing, minimum standard of living, citizen’s basic income; these are all, on the surface, laudable societal corrections for those of low opportunity, aspiration or ability, but the principle objection remains - who pays for it? Oh, the rich? I see. And in Labour Land ‘the rich’ is anybody who pays more in tax already than they take out in a share of public services. I’m in that group; is there no end to our largesse? Is there no bottom to our pockets?

I want to like socialism – it should be likeable – but the opportunistic mammal that is man does not respond well to conformity. Yes, we are a herd animal and like leadership – man, we LOVE leadership – but we also have aspirations and ambitions of our own and are fiercely protective of our brood. So don’t pit my brood against yours; the natural winners will always win and the natural losers will rely on our charity. This may sound harsh but life isn’t fair and humans are not equal, no matter how much burden you place on the backs of the more able.

Forget Brexit and our frustrating battle against the pro-EU establishment. Forget the Remainer-Leaver antagonism. If you really want to pit half the population against the rest, all you will need to do is vote for Labour in the next general election; it will make Theresa May’s duplicitous, cack-handed premiership look like the good old days.

Panama People

I listened, incredulous (as is often the only way) when I heard a reporter on Radio 4’s Today programme announce that a study had discovered (‘discovered’ mind - no doubt by some Pulitzer-level miracle of investigative journalism) that over fifty percent of young people ‘drift’ into work without (gasp) a degree. She sounded astonished that such denizens were capable of breathing, let alone earning a living.

Drifting? As if the only way you could get to stack shelves, sweep up leaves or fuck about keeping people waiting for a cup of coffee – no, drawing a heart in the froth does NOT make you a barista – was if you had paid your dues at the altar of higher education. When the economically illiterate Tony Blair made the fallacious deduction that as graduates earned more than the hoi polloi, forcing 50% through the degree sausage machine would somehow increase everybody’s wage, those of us out here in the world of work were screaming “No!”

Getting a sixteen-year old to learn about getting to work on time, every day and actually, you know, working, is hard enough. Trying to do that with an endless succession of twenty-five year old graduates (MA in intersectional gender and social butt-hurt issues) who can’t yet tie their shoelaces and wear their sub-standard scholarship as an entitlement gong, is just a waste of everybody’s time and energy. Education isn’t about ‘things’ it’s about life, which includes finding out how everything actually works.

Maybe a lack of general common sense explains why so many people are over-excited about the ‘scandal’ of the Panama Papers. (Notwithstanding David Cameron’s clumsy handling of his own involvement) If only those nasty rich people who legally avoid paying more tax than the governments ask them to would voluntarily pay more tax – then we could have a universal basic income... they think.

“You didn’t just make that money.” they bleat, “Society let you make it.” Society, they say, built the roads, made the energy and bred and cared for the workers, all for those hated capitalists to exploit with their greedy ideas.  I have news; put everybody on a universal basic income and watch that income get redistributed really quickly, right back to the people you took it from. In any case, if everybody started out with something, that something would soon become the datum level... that is, two-grand or ten-grand, everybody would still, effectively, start out with nothing.

Every time some social justice type bangs this particular drum they assume that all the money that the people they hate have access to is unfairly gained, that it is liquid and that it can be effectively taxed. They assume that it can be equitably distributed at no cost and with zero corruption. They also imagine that if this is done, the people being fleeced will be happy to keep on generating more. Possibly the ultimate aspect of their naivety is the belief that everybody else – you know, the ones who are not capable of creating wealth – will spend it wisely.

Not funny... because it's true.

But here’s an idea. Maybe if they chose a vocational education early on, learned to become somebody useful, then went out to earn their own money not at 23 on some extended graduate trainee-ship, but at 16 when they should be perfectly capable of picking up a trade or other useful work skills; maybe then, by the time they come to have an interest in other people’s tax they will have paid plenty of their own and be very cautious of enabling the heavy hand of state to pick their pockets. Just a thought.