Labour has a plan?

 Rachel Reeves, Labour's putative Chancellor of the Exchequer has donned the sainted Margaret Thatcher’s free market mantle and declares that she will bring about the resurgence of Britannia. Draping herself in the flag which has never rightly been Labour’s to fly she promises that the incoming Labour government – a near certainty, given the parlous state of the Tories – will create growth.

Like all political promises this is long on rhetoric but desperately short on policy. How will this growth be brought about? By improving Britain’s desperately poor productivity. But how will this be achieved? By attracting investment! From whom? From companies and individuals wishing to invest in British know-how and technology. But why? Why? To make profits, of course which will create more wealth for all.

Ask how these attractive investments will be persuaded to come and the answer is that Labour will bring about growth, by attracting investment and improving productivity. It is a circular argument which poses one gigantic question; if it was as easy as wishing it into being, which seems to be Labour’s entire plan, why has it not been done before? Seriously, if there was a way of magicking up a nation-saving productivity plan, why has nobody yet come up with such a paradigm?

Well, for a start, nobody – least of all Labour – has the balls for the level of fight which will be needed. We need a US-style protectionist stance and the guts to say no to industry’s demand for cheap foreign labour. We need to reject demands for yet more NHS funding without any apparent improvements. And most of all we need to take a very long, hard look at society as a whole; everybody needs a good kick up the arse.

Of course, those for whom a kick up the arse would work have already delivered said kick to themselves, gone out and worked longer hours, scrimped and saved and kept the wolf from the door. A lot of them will have left for more friendly climes, possibly too ashamed to admit of their British origins for fear of ridicule. As ever, once the sturdy crew leave the sinking ship, all that’s left are the rats and the ne’er-do-wells…. and other assorted vermin.

Does Britain even have left a population worth fighting for? When the USA besought ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…’ they would have quickly changed their tune when they saw the miserable wretches lining up to see what the New World was prepared to do for them. The welfare state that is HMS Great Britain is a tawdry, lacklustre tramp steamer ready to strip any charitable undertaking of every last shred of its philanthropy.

Rachel, dear, you haven’t a chance. Once you have seen that the idle British, who have grown fat on the fast food of benefits culture, have no intention of  being any part of your solution, you will do exactly what the current, nominally Conservative, government has done. As your industries struggle you will open up the borders to ever-lower calibre immigration and lie about it. And when you give the vote to children, too callow to see through you, you will drive the final nails into the coffin of state.

Gosh, why didn't we think of that?

RIP England, RIP, disunited kingdom. Would the last Brit out please turn off the lights? Oh, wait, no need; the grid will have failed long before the end of your first term in charge. Politicians, may you all rot in hell.

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.

Eight days a week

I have been thinking about John McDonnel’s proposed four-day week. Obviously, I’d have got this piece out yesterday except it was one of my down days. I’m guessing the same excuse would become commonplace with clients demanding service – how dare they? The possibilities are endless: The production line, dispatch, delivery drivers, warehousemen, wholesalers, retailers - take your pick – were on their extra day off... consecutively. Complaint, madam? I’ll put you through; oh, wait, they’re not in today..

And what about that time off; how would you use it? No, I’m not talking to you, you outward bound, gad about town, charity volunteering, hobbyist sportspeople and all round good eggs that you are. It’s ‘them’ I’m addressing, the ones Johnny Mac is aiming his vote harvester at. Those who spend half the weekend pissed and the other half recovering, those for whom a hangover is an active, budgeted portion of their leisure. Downtime costs, whether you are active or indolent and particularly if you list ‘chilling’ among your hobbies.

Chilling is just look-how-cool-I-am slang for idling, slacking, doing nothing; if you were doing something of merit you would be too busy doing it to spend time tweeting pictures of your slippers, hangover face, over-priced coffee or trashed living room. When did sloth become so fashionably relatable? When did thrift and enterprise become so denigrated?

How about teachers, John? Would they also work a four-day week? Given a reported 20% adult functional illiteracy rate how would this help? Going for 40% maybe? What if some of those who do find work might not be able to read and understand their terms and conditions; how does that stack up for human rights, John? Mind you, if a four-day school week meant that educators (we don’t call them teachers any more, do we?) would have to cut out the do-goody-good diversity bullshit we might actually get somewhere. Perhaps they could ditch mindfulness, so maybe there are some real positives?

Now I’m not saying that total collapse on the couch isn’t a perfectly valid use of your non-working time but have you ever studied the habits of successful people? They don’t really have downtime. If they are not at formal work they are doing all those little things that keep a roof over their heads: fixing, cleaning, building... possibly even literally putting that roof back over their heads. But there is still the question of remuneration. Companies making use of automation will simply keep their savings on wages as profit for shareholders. Maybe we could all become shareholders, John?

The robots are coming!

Of course, there you go, you want that as well. But who is going to pay for it? Quick recap then, for those still paying attention: Four-day week, lower incomes, reduced output, lower GDP, less tax, more welfare demand, downward spiral of supply chasing reduced demand, credit mountain, personal bankruptcy; migration to citizen’s basic income to cover up the failings, descent into Venezuela territory, capital flight, total collapse of the economy. Maybe, John, politicians could do a four-day week... but I doubt many of them would welcome the overtime.

Old McDonnell had a farm...

And on that farm he grew... mostly fantasy. They say that to be a good liar you first have to convince yourself and Labour’s John McDonnell appears to have done an exemplary job on himself. I wonder, does he gaze into a mirror and say “Look into my eyes...”? He certainly has the demeanour of a man not fully in charge of all his critical faculties and when he says he wants all Tories to face direct action – insurrection – every time they leave the house, he must surely send a chill down the spine of any sane person. I expect psychologists would pay a pretty penny to be able to study him once he has been de-activated and made safe.

And talking of money, he has been all over the airwaves expounding on his plans to renationalise everything that hasn’t been relocated offshore when he comes to move his favourite armchair into Number Eleven. Make no mistake, he seems to sincerely believe he will one day – and one day soon – have the keys to the Treasury. Last week he tried several times to explain how Labour would massively increase public spending and yet cost the country nothing. He seemed to think that by calling borrowing ‘investment’, sufficient numbers of eager acolytes would be convinced by his alchemy to vote for another socialist economic experiment.

One of his gambits was to imagine buying a house – and for many Labour voters, imagining is as far as they will ever get. He suggested that should you buy a house in London and borrow half a million quid to do so, you could rent this house out and make a small profit thus paying for the valuable asset you now owned. Of course this misses a few small, but not insignificant points. Firstly, where do you live? Secondly – and the whole buy-to-let mortgage lending criteria is predicated on this point – will the rent actually cover the mortgage? Without a substantial deposit this is unlikely; and where do you get the deposit? Thirdly, what about the overheads such as repairs?

The left seems to be convinced  that all landlords are neo-Rachmans, raking in huge and ugly profits. This ignores the simple truth that there are millions of accidental landlords – I am one – who effectively subsidise their tenants. For instance, while the rent (almost) covers my mortgage it goes nowhere to meet the costs of repairs and replacements and general upkeep of what is still my house in a habitable state. Many more people who bought into the industry, on the back of successive governments failing to maintain the level of public housing stock, struggle to make any operating profit, relying entirely on hoped for increase in capital values. Should any government actually deliver on the promises to build more council houses, the arse will fall out of that market.

As an example of how a Labour government would ‘make money’ from borrowing money this is far more illustrative than Big Mac might realise: Tenants unable to afford the true costs of housing themselves will have their rent paid by the benefits system. Landlords will desert the private rental sector as the capped rents won’t cover their costs. A glut of properties thus for sale will depress values, thus deterring private involvement in low-value housing. Unless the government takes them into public ownership those which can’t be sold will stand empty, unmaintained and become a hazard. The whole sector would become a vast money pit.

The true economic basis behind McDonnell's Farm

Add to this the massive sums they intend to pour into the NHS, social care, police and infrastructure and you compound this fiction of ‘investment’. The fag-packet suggestion that becomes a pamphlet espousing some nebulous concept of public ownership evolves into a gargantuan novel with no end in sight. When you don’t pay your debts, sooner or later the big boys with the clubs come calling and it never ends well. Has anybody in the Labour Party actually read Animal Farm? Old McDonnell had a farm all right – a funny farm.

Fun with Numbers

Yesterday was a bad day for Diane Abbott as she floundered on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show, making up figures on the hoof and generally revealing that she had been sent out to bat without the necessary equipment, to wit; numeracy, a grasp of basic economics and a rudimentary intuition of the right time to fake your own death, live on air. Honestly, all she had to do was gasp, clutch at her left arm and slump in the chair. It would have been less embarrassing. Or, you know she could have used that legendary parliamentary prowess and just refused to be drawn; the technique she uses every time with Andrew Neil.

Fortunately, a day is a long time in politics and today a Labour spokesperson, a completely different person, came out to clarify the situation. Dana Abbottson said in an interview on the world service in the early hours of this morning that the pledge to employ an extra 10,000 police officers would, in fact, be self-financing. “You see, it’s all very simple. Yes, we have to pay them up front, but if we tax their salary at 25%, after four months we get it all back. Then we can spend it again and buy recruit more.”

When pressed that A) you would have still paid out four times what you took back and B) that it all came out of general taxation anyway and that C) Nobody paid by the state is a contributor to the public purse regardless, Ms Abbotson (not, we stress, Ms Abbott) adjusted her wig, glared at the presenter and said in her very best Margaret Thatcher tribute voice “Andwew, I’m sure I don’t have to explain basic economics to yououou...” She then excused herself on the grounds of having just suffered a cerebral aneurism brought on by cruel Tory cutbacks to the NHS and hastily left the studio.

Seeking to put the incident behind them an email was later received from Labour’s Level 1 Key Skills Unit explaining that ‘Dana’ had been misunderestimated and quoted out of context and that, of course, the Labour Party’s policies were fully costed. The proposals are, in fact, to bring in a universal 100% tax rate, rising to 150% for high earners. This, the e-briefing note elaborated, would promote a fairer society by removing any incentive to pursue inequality and actually put the exchequer back into profit.

It went on to outline Labour’s other popular policies to supply every household with free meals-on-wheels, put a policeman on every lawn, provide lawns for those who went without and increase participation in future elections by ensuring every child was registered at birth for a postal vote. Climate change would be arrested by making it illegal to engage in ‘hate weather’ and education standards would be brought in line with inflation, which would be pegged at 5% thus ensuring a year-on-year increase in GDP of thirty-several.

Labour's fully costed budget plan...

A researcher for The Daily Politics telephoned the Labour Party’s Victoria Square head office for a comment. They are still waiting...

Fining our way out

In a world where we sit back and do nothing against a Neolithic death cult intent on beheading every last infidel and allow them to drive their own needy millions to our shores, testing our ability to remain blind to our own overwhelming and imminent destruction. In a world where people like Sepp Blatter can resign over allegations of systematic corruption but then continue in post for another six months with impunity. In a world where we spend £billions to alleviate a non-specific global climate issue we don’t understand, further enriching lots of rich people in the process at the expense of the poor, it’s good to know that we can focus more clearly on problems closer to home.

It appears that Hackney Council is taking a tough stand on anti-social behaviour linked to begging and sleeping rough by introducing a new Public Space Protection Order. The order empowers the police or ‘council officials’ to miraculously prevent the aforementioned begging, boozing, loitering (with or without intent, I presume) swearing, shouting, abusing public toilets, sleeping in doorways, taking drugs and causing what is cutely referred to as ASB. Wait a minute, don’t we already have ASB Orders? A breach of a PSPO attracts a £100 fixed penalty notice and failure to pay can land you in court where you can be fined up to £1,000.

Yeah, nasty Tories! But wait once more; Hackney is as Labour as Labour can be and all of a sudden I’m getting a flashback to Tony Blair’s brilliant idea of frog-marching drunks to cashpoint machines to pay fixed penalty notices. But even as I feel the guffaws developing deep in my gut I can also see with some clarity the sheer socialist genius of the idea. Jailing the homeless would be pointless; that is playing right into their hand and giving them exactly what they want – a roof over their head. So with a bit of lateral thinking let’s punish them by levying a fine they can never pay; let’s taunt them with their own inadequacy. That oughta do it.

What next in the lefty armoury of fuckwittery and failurenomics? How about we fine everybody who is not a millionaire – wait for it – a million pounds! Then we can give that million pounds to an actual millionaire in return for, say, leasing out his land for a solar farm, then – and here’s the genius part – levying a 50% tax on his earnings so that after a few short years we can get that million back into the nation’s coffers. The more poor people we fine the richer will become the millionaires, the more tax they will pay and 'Hey Presto!' back in the black we jolly well go.

The Nation's Salvation

When the world’s problems can be solved so easily by the simple trick of abandoning all logic and ignoring all practicalities it is somewhat of a surprise that Labour did not win the election and are not now ruining running the economy. But now they have a whole five years to employ their combined IQ of seven in the effort to come up with some whacky, crowd-pleasing offerings to tempt the voters next time round. I’m putting money on them rebuilding the welfare state from the proceeds of a massive, national, fucking, swear box!

Free for all!

Is it Wimbledon already? The big two’s election campaigns seem to have degenerated into a straightforward, back and forth, yes we will – no you won’t – ‘tisn’t – ‘tis – shan’t – so will, tit-for-tat about who will do what for whom and how both sides will somehow avoid paying for it all. Party promises not worth a pauper’s piss with the equally unbelievable Tory giveaways versus Labour’s iron fiscal fist. Only a week and a bit to go before we can start arguing over who actually won, but it strikes me that the only winners will be the ‘experts’ who make their living failing to forecast anything of any value.

That’s the problem, see… money. One of the great drivers of inequality (I’m taking Ed’s corner here, just to see how comfy it is) is the ease with which rich people (spits) can hover above the chaos endured by the rest of us. The rich can simply purchase better outcomes in every way; money buys you better education, health, housing, justice and, yes, government. So, let’s just get rid of all the money. Rich people, your money is no good here, for everything will be free when Ed’s dream becomes reality.

No more rent control, energy price freezes, or having to continually raise the minimum wage to keep pace with prices. Radical, brainstorming, blue-sky lateral thinking can only get you so far – what you need is a synergistic, new-energy, virtual iParadigm shift. In the Red Kingdom everything will be yours for the asking. Everything. Free house, free cinema tickets, free car, free PS4, free healthcare, free education, free, free, free. Say it out loud – don’t you feel freer already? The government – your government – will take care of everything and you need fret no more.

Food, you say? Worry not for we will set up community refectories in every ward where all the food will be delivered and stored – let’s call it a food ‘bank’ – and then lovingly prepared and served up at pre-set times. No need for cooking and so need for any more celebrity chefs or poncey cookery shows with overpaid presenters; two birds, one stone. Who says socialism isn’t thought through? The only kitchens you will ever need will be soup kitchens

Want a new car? Take your pick – the fuel is free too, so don’t be shy. And think of the work you’ll be providing for the car manufacturers. With this simple example you can see that if everything is free the demand will soar and simple economics dictates that soon we will have full employment. In fact we will pretty soon have more jobs than workers and then even Ukip will agree we need to let in more immigrants. And we will have no need to pay them, because everything will be free for them as well. And as an added bonus if we don't have any money we will have no need for banks. Who says we don't have a plan for the banks?

We'll even give you free money - because it wil be worthless!

Of course, we are not naïve enough to believe that there isn’t a price, even if it is not measured in monetary terms. Labour’s newly turned leaf now includes economic probity and we understand the need to honour two sides of any bargain. So this is the pact we make with the people of Britain. You get everything for free, forever and all we ask in return is that you give up your vote. Let’s face it; you weren’t planning on using it wisely now, were you?

(PS: For any actual socialists reading this - it's a joke.)

Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen

At the end of the dog there is usually a waggy tail, doing the dog’s bidding and indicating joy; joy at being fed, joy at being appreciated, joy at the sheer wagginess of belonging to a happy dog. The tail has no purpose without the dog and the dog is the poorer for lack of its semaphoric appendage. The Labour Party is a detached tail, desperately trying to wag its dog.

Once the party of the poor, fighting for those without representation, they now rely on the tribal loyalties of the poor for their very existence. As somebody said, keeping people poor is effectively Labour’s business model. Without poverty where is the fear to keep people voting for the red flag? So in recent years Labour has cleverly championed ruinous policies sold as incentives to help the poor while deviously increasing their numbers.

What is classed as poor in modern Britain? Adjusting that measure was a stroke of genius. If less than half of median income used to make you poor then redefining poverty as less than 60% of median income added to that number handsomely. As did inventing the terms ‘fuel poverty’ and ‘child poverty’.  Unless they’re on a mahoosive whack of pocket money children are by every measure in miserable, grinding poverty. But if altering the meaning of words isn’t enough there are a number of policy strategies you can employ to make even the non-poor feel the pinch.

Gordon Brown increased the fuel duty escalator and scrapped the 10% tax rate, adding to the woes of the working poor and then appearing to come to their assistance by introducing tax credits – taking with one hand while giving some back with the other. Minimum wage policies inevitably drive down legitimate employment and encourage the sub-minimum wage economy, putting more UK citizens on the breadline. The living wage rhetoric is just the same, ignoring economics in favour of looking like they care. Rent controls always impact most heavily on the poor yet still Labour pursues the illusion that government can fix such things that are beyond its control without totalitarianism.

Things like the climate and the cost of fuel. Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act locks everybody into increasing fuel costs for ever more. The wind farms don’t work as promised; the costs will never be recovered, let alone returned with profits and most of the government-subsidised ‘income’ goes to foreign investors or rich UK land owners. How many poor people have a share in a wind turbine? So it is rather astonishing that under the banner of challenging the coalition’s economic credibility Mr Ed flaunts his own credulity towards the climate change industry; the project which will guarantee enduring poverty and insecurity for years to come. But that’s socialism for you.

But still the biggest problem is people – rapidly increasing populations with increasingly voracious energy appetites. Keeping people poor and ill-educated - the Labour vote machine - is an ecological disaster in the making, because poor, ill-educated people have more kids.  And kids are the root cause of even more kids. So if you want to reduce poverty you need to tackle the root cause. Want fewer people in poverty? Simply reduce the numbers of poor people. Time to chop off that annoying tail.

Top Marx!

Well I, for one, am happy about Ed’s conference speech. He very clearly laid out what all non-Labour voters have always suspected; the utter contempt in which the private sector is held and the total lack of understanding of how society, any society, functions. Unless you believe in anarchy – and that bizarre notion seems to be a perversely unique preserve of people with otherwise left wing views – nobody objects to contributing a portion of their earnings towards the public purse.

Nobody on what they insist on referring to as ‘the far right’ - which is shorthand for anybody not employed by the state, anybody getting by without claiming benefits – wants to destroy the NHS, but people who often pay for their own healthcare anyway and take care to lead generally responsible, healthier lifestyles – are increasingly fed up with their contributions pouring into the bottomless money pit the current NHS represents. The third or fourth largest employer on the PLANET? Are you insane? You would have to be if you think a relatively small population in a formerly heathy, fully developed nation needs a medical system costly enough to care for all of Asia’s teeming billions. 

All that successful people ask is that their tax money, from which they get little direct benefit, is spent wisely and that they are left to spend the rest how they wish. They’ve earned it, after all, by adding value to goods and services and creating true profits in a way the state never has and never can. The state is entirely paid for by private money. And that includes the wages paid to public employees and the tax they then levy on that. If you work for the state you pay tax on the money that has already been collected in tax. You are bought and paid for by the private sector; and some of you are paid to count what you are paid, hand it out, take some of it back and recycle those amounts to create the illusion of government money. Ever heard of a non-job? 

What you do may be important, you doctors and nurses and bin men and bus drivers, but never forget that all of you are paid by those some of you would drive away by your sheer avarice. Yes, that. Oh, it’s not you personally, you all believe you are doing god’s work, but that’s only because, like the party that feeds you by picking somebody else’s pockets, it serves you to believe that those who are not on the national payroll are its enemies and not its benefactors. So what if the wealth they pay tax on is inherited? So what if they happily fall into the family business; it’s none of your business, that’s for sure. The NHS, the government, welfare, defence, education, law enforcement, roads and railways are ultimately paid for not by you and your taxes but by the hated 'them' and their taxes. 

It's because they care...

When the money finally does run out and the crumbling façade of the Labour experiment is peeled away there will behind it be an ancient barn door on which the altered legend will still be visible: "From each according to his vulnerability, to each according to his ngreeds!

Rough Trade

Trade. It’s an honest word, implying as it does that something is exchanged for something else in a deal that is beneficial to both sides. I have something you want to possess, you have something that likewise I crave, let’s organise the handover and go on our way. For goods and direct services this is surely the only reasonable way of operating - you get what you want as long as you can pay for it. This is how human beings have interacted forever and a weighing up of relative values enters into all our decisions.

From the fundamentals of choosing a mate all the way through to building civilisations the deal is the thing. Even an underhand deal is still a form of trade, albeit one hinging on the employment of graft – ‘bribery and other corrupt practices used to secure illicit advantages or gains in politics or business’. Capitalism, say the socialists, is bad because vested interests will always hijack the markets for their own gain. Better let the state run everything, then we can set fair prices and level the playing field. But let the state take control and you remove everybody’s ability to trade in what is important to them as individuals. Collectivism is anti-trade, anti-enterprise.

But look again at the definition of graft; it includes politics because whether you are on the right or the left, corruption appears to be at the very heart of politics itself. Humans are made to trade and whether it’s politics or business, work or play, some are better at it than others. Few deals are completely balanced –it’s not what something is worth, it’s what you are prepared to pay for it. And successive governments have always been prepared to pay over the odds for peace and quiet rather than tackle the harder, less popular tasks:

You see it with the welfare state. Rather than educate and try to develop a workforce to match the skill demands it was deemed more cost effective in the short term to allow a dependant underclass to develop. But the reason programmes like Benefit Street have come about is that the price has risen too high for those who ultimately pay for it – everybody else. Those who are forced to pay in to the state, accept it – up to a point – as the price for a quiet life. But the riots of 2011 showed that some of the people who are rewarded to remain out of sight don’t always honour their part of the contract.

An Ed Miliband, big state economy is doomed to failure. As soon as you interfere too intrusively in commercial markets you swap the people who are skilled in trade – the consumers and the suppliers – for those who are merely skilled in cooking the books. Let politicians set prices and you lose the honest suppliers. If the demand is still there, the black market takes up the slack and both quality and tax revenues fall. In a socialist world the rewards no longer fall to those who are good at making things, but rather those who are good at playing the system. Graft, corruption, sleaze and genuine hardship go hand in hand with disadvantaging ‘those who can’.

In the lexicon of Labour ‘trade’ is a dirty thing. They talk of ‘fat cats’ and ‘millionaire bankers’ and while they still use the word ‘aspiration’ they denigrate the natural order of things whereby some will always rise higher than others. Under Labour it was never the workers that won, it was always those who feigned to bang the drum on their behalf. In his urge to drag us back to the nineteen-seventies Ed seems to forget that back then it was the ‘union barons’ who were the fat cats.  

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!