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.

Power to the People?

So, Maria Miller finally resigns and I continue to resist having an opinion either way except to observe that while Tories were clamouring for her removal – as were the voters - the leader/s of the opposition seemed to be curiously tight-lipped about it all. Maybe I missed Red Ed’s impassioned demand for a ministerial resignation; maybe he was saving himself up for Prime Minister’s Questions, but something is very wrong here. A member of the government had misbehaved in a manner deemed, if not actually criminal, then deeply insulting to the office and to the electorate and yet the opposition were not baying for blood?

If ever there was a feeling of unease about corruption and collusion in politics the expenses scandal was surely it and yet nothing appears to have changed. Oh sure, they say, the whole system has been reformed; but why then, were the broken eggs not mopped up when the omelette was being made instead of being left to rot? The stench is so overpowering you have to wonder what else is going on, concealed by the all-pervasive miasma of sleaze. Is it any wonder that people despair of ever getting democratic representation?

It’s not very nice where I live. When Alan Bennett grew up here, literally just over the Tong Road from my humble abode, it was still pretty rough, but rough in that nostalgic, working class solidarity kind of way. Now - despite legions of apologists denying the facts – work is something many have never known. It is a stubbornly Labour constituency, a reliable seat despite the fact that the local MP, Rachel Reeves, knows nothing about the lives of her voters. The locals may be proud of one of their own, a butcher’s son, making it to Oxford but they are deeply distrustful of an Oxford PPE being parachuted in to exploit their loyalty.

I crossed the Tong Road on Monday night, to attend the UKIP roadshow - within a fondant fancy’s throw of the former Bennett household - and far from being surrounded by retired half-colonels from the shires, there wasn’t an obviously recognisable old Tory in the hall. Despite the true blue war machine pumping out warnings that a vote for UKIP is a vote for Miliband – and I’m not saying there isn’t a risk in many wards - this is a constituency in which the Tory war horse is always going to limp home riderless.

I’m not sure how many of the old working class actually signed up for socialism - I well remember the seventies and for most it seemed more about sticking it to the bosses than about any ideological struggle for proletarian rule. The well organised big unions may have waged class warfare but ordinary working men and women despise another class in Britain today – the career political class. As we took our seats in the well-attended, spacious venue an old boy plonked himself next to me and unbidden said, “I voted Labour all my life, but I can’t stand that Rachel Reeves.”

What I then witnessed was a clear demonstration of what Nigel Farage has repeatedly said of late, that far from simply denying the Conservatives, the upstart party will take substantial support from disillusioned voters leaving Labour. People are thoroughly pissed off with the two main parties and don’t generally care one way or other about the Limp Dems; all of them are utterly disconnected from the electorate who reject especially Labour’s 2010 proclamation that “British history has to be revised, rethought or jettisoned”. The biggest cheers went up for unreservedly old-British values and sentiments and every time the phrase ‘the people’ was used, applause spontaneously broke out.

I have to say, as an individualist I felt a little uncomfortable among rousing consensus but one thing was certain - UKIP’s message undeniably hits the spot. Reeves, Miliband, Balls, Cooper – what are they doing here in northern seats? It’s because they are relying on Old Labour solidarity even as they shit on the democracy it used to stand for. I’ve always had a mistrust of unchecked democracy, after all lynch mobs are a form of it and if Paul Nuttall, following his tub-thumping delivery of the UKIP message, had produced a noose I daresay we could have had a mob on our hands… an asthmatic, geriatric, wheezing, creaking mob maybe (and that’s just me) but a mob nevertheless. Maria Miller today; who’s next?

Vickification

To those jeering on the sidelines the flip-flop policies of the coalition government are seen as blind incompetence or else a sign that our 'elected' leaders are engaged in a kamikaze plot to deliberately try and sink the economy. Well, which is it? Whatever the government proposes will be branded wrong, even when the government reverses its proposals. That's because the opposition has only one purpose - to oppose. It's the only thing Labour can possibly do because they have absolutely no policies of their own.

Saying "We wouldn't do that!" or "This government is wrong!" or simply spouting "Tory cuts!" is so far from being an alternative policy that you wonder if they actually understand the English language at all. But then you realise, of course they understand the language - or at least 'language', minus the definite article. It's the Socialist agenda to meddle in the politics of language because Socialism cannot engage rationally with any form of practical or productive behaviour.

Socialism caused THIS, the Pollardisation of Britain. And isn't it apt that Vicky Pollard has become a symbol of most of what is wrong with this country, given the meaning of the verb 'to pollard'?

I pollard, you pollard, he/she pollards... we're all totally fucking pollarded

The linked article - well worth a read - ends by quoting shadow Treasury minister Rachel Reeves: "...the Conservative-led Government urgently needs a plan for jobs and growth." 

Yes, love, it does. Pity your lot never realised that while you were wielding the chainsaw.