Beware the numbers!

Lots of political capital (or should that be political lower-case?) has been claimed at Jeremy Corbyn’s inability to remember a made-up number on Woman’s Hour yesterday. The listening public, however, have probably forgotten the numbers already, as they should because all the numbers used by all the parties involved in this and every other general election are largely works of fiction. Nobody cares about the actual figures, their only significance is as a proxy for competence – can’t remember your own numbers, goes the logic, can’t be relied on to govern.

The Tory strategy of giving little detail in the way of numbers is both more realistic and yet just as negatively indicative of competence. What do you mean, you don’t know how much it will cost or where the money is coming from? Come on you must know! But, of course they don’t; nobody does. In the same way you don’t know what you will earn next year nor how you will spend it. You could get a substantial rise, but then your car might expensively break down. You might lose your job, but then have a horse come in on long odds. Hell you might even win the lottery, but then suffer a terminal illness. Nobody knows; the big lie of politics is that there is certainty.

So which way do you play it? Safe hands or bet the farm? Safe is boring, but then so is voting, in the eyes of many people. They may prefer a steady hand on the tiller, but placing a wager on the socialist miracle of state ‘investment’ (borrowing to the limit) might yield spectacular success in the short term, as it often appears to, but then the cold calculus of debt repayment inevitably turns up to ruin things. Ain’t credit cards a buzzkiller?

As for where the money comes from, every type of taxation is a stimulus to invent creative ways of escaping liability. Increasing corporation tax will lower company profits, either by clever accounting or by moving companies elsewhere. Land taxes and rent-capping will distort the property market still further and even fewer will be able to afford to buy, worsening the housing shortage and increasing stress levels and putting greater strains on the social care and mental health budgets, decreasing overall productivity, affecting credit rating and ability to borrow... on which plan your entire offer was made.

Making promises you can never keep is a singularly dishonest way to panhandle a vulnerable electorate, so desperate for a magic bullet they will believe anything; anything is better than being told the truth, that the only way out of poverty is hard work... and a bit of luck. Promising free stuff is effectively exploiting poor, ill-educated people. It is putting the disadvantaged at greater risk further down the line, burdening future generations with the debt of your desperation. It is everything of which Labour continually accuses the Tories. Who’s the real nasty party?

Tory Monsters

I swear they are getting worse. The already turbulent waters of social media are becoming a frothing, churning maelstrom of increasingly fantastic claims by the left about the motives and morals of Conservative voters. Every individual instance of less than the politically determined amount of bleeding heart compassion for all god’s creatures is seized upon as proof positive that the Tory heart is a black and evil one. The meme-o-sphere is alight with indignation and disturbed imaginings.

“Yes! We’ll bring back fox hunting! Because nothing says ‘Tory mindset and values’ quite as clearly as taking pleasure in the ritualistic slaughter of terrified woodland animals!” shouts the slogan on the photoshopped side of a Conservative Party branded mug. No doubt, in the fevered imagination of the acolytes of Corbyn, tea-towels exist which proudly depict the prone corpse of a newly shot peasant, his former master posing with one foot on an upturned buttock, an ear-to-ear grin on his face, while his beaters flush out a newly created orphan, just for the sport.

Oh yes, the Tories believe in taking pleasure in cruelty at least as much as The Labours want to barcode everybody, implant electrodes in their brains and link them up to the Matrix, mere cogs in the machinery of state. Were anybody on the nominally right-wing side of the argument to actually believe any such thing, one could say that both positions are ludicrous, each side believing the horror-tales of their own narrative, but I don’t think any such equivalence exists. For a start, given that on-balance Tory voters are net payers-in to the state, they are far too busy managing their own lives to be overly concerned about what the net recipients actually think about them.

Watching the ravings of the left is just an amusing diversion for us. We wish them no harm, as much as they love to tell each other of their brutish manhandling at the hands of ‘Tory Austerity’. In truth they are more to be pitied than derided because whereas Tories believe in hard work, thrift, family, country and the pursuit of individual betterment, Labour devotees appear to still be waiting for a government to do everything for them, as they have been led to believe is their entitlement.

Cruella May plots ways to torture the poor*

Come 8^th June the country will decide and it will decide to hand a decisive majority to Mrs May. As for The Labours, they’ve been waiting a hundred and seventeen years so far... another two or three terms won’t be any problem. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to put another wog on the fire.

(*For any left-wingers reading, this is what is known as 'satire'.) 

The Bell Jar

Trapped inside a self-imposed prison from which you can see only what of the world is immediately outside can give you the illusion that you know what is going on. And if all you hear is your own words, your own suspicions, bouncing back to you it would be hardly surprising if you began to believe your own theories. Political movements thrive on this echo-chamber effect as their acolytes hear and see only what they want to see and hear. This is how cults operate.

Labour’s supposed ‘grass roots’ campaigning group, Momentum (Surely ‘Inertia’ would be more apt?) is currently trying to whip up a groundswell of opinion that defies logic. In this strange world, instead of seeing the vast majority of the population getting on with things and looking out for themselves, as they surely must, the see a forbidden forest of darkness and squalor and unbearable cruelty. And because they each tell themselves the same story it is reinforced with every hearing.

The other day somebody tweeted, in outrage, a photograph of a poster advertising a private GP service. Look, they said, proof! Proof that the Tories are selling off the NHS! When challenged and when it was pointed out that this as actually of some benefit to the NHS, allowing those who had already paid for the NHS through their taxes to pay again for consultation and treatment, the tweeter simply didn’t hear it. The only thing they heard was their own echoed voice, yes, here is the evidence.

The same happens with schools, transport and many other publicly funded services; the higher earners not only pay for all of it (nobody on UK median wage contributes even close to the monetary benefit they gain) but they then pay again to go private. And then they are castigated by the left for not paying their ‘fair share’. This, of course, is absolutely true, higher rate taxpayers pay far more than their fair share and if they truly held any power they could easily choose not to. But no sayeth the glass-house incumbents, the Tories only work for the ‘rich’, recently defined by John McDonnell as anybody on over £75k.

But any logic is ignored by Momentum and their camp followers as they continue to bang the drum for class war against the Conservatives and drive that red wedge through society. A series of nested tweets has been doing the rounds:

·         As a teacher it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years schools are on their knees. Your child's education is at stake.

·         As a nurse it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years the NHS has been decimated. You and your children's health is at risk

·         As a firefighter, it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years, the UK fire service has been decimated. You are now less safe.

Etc, etc and on and on and some people are too dim to actually look around them.

Profile of a Labour voter in 2017...

Outside that bell jar not a single baby’s head has been stamped on by a Tory jackboot. Not one person in possession of their sanity has been forced to eat their young to survive. No gassing, no police state, no disappearances...  The world goes on, doing what it does and government - any flavour - does its best against the odds to facilitate it. Those who thrive are those who try, not those who sit and wail and wait for somebody else to fix their poor choices. You want a future for your children? Break the glass.