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!
