Rich Seam Of New Labour Dross

March 12, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

Is there anyone alive today who can remember what that funny, old fashioned Labour Party did?

There was something about helping the poor and acting as a safeguard against the ravages which the rich might inflict upon them if left to their own devices. It was a party which stood up for the weak and made the voices of ordinary people heard against the clamour of the rich and privileged.

None of that nonsense now applies, of course, in this rich and brave New Britain, where everyone is on the make and only wants to be given “opportunity” and “empowerment” to exploit their “talents” to make money, or so says John Hutton.

As far as he is concerned, the rich should have no obstacles placed in their path to amassing more and more money and if poor people get in the way, they can just be mown down by the onslaught to create more and more millionaires.

“Over the coming months and years, we must be enthusiastic - not pragmatic - about financial success.

“We are, for example, rightly renewing our historic pledge to eradicate child poverty in Britain. But tackling poverty is about bringing those at the bottom closer to those in the middle.

“It is statistically possible to have a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60 per cent of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy. In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.

“So rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.

“Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people.”

To be enthusiastic, rather than pragmatic, sounds like a formula for idiocy, which is probably what John Hutton hopes will propel the rich to become richer. Pragmatic simply means guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory. The pragmatic experience of everyone trying to get rich quick is that the process tends to devastate both the body politic and the lives of the poor.

So, John Hutton, the one who has not heard that Thatcher’s wonderful world of market forces has been discredited, even amongst those foolish enough not to spot the gaping holes in the theory first time round.

Still, crazy guy, crazy, stupid ideas.

So, enjoy New Labour while you still can.

Come election time, it will not be coming to a town near you, but will be more forgotten than the old version is now.

Bankrupt Legacies

March 1, 2008 · Filed Under News · Comment 

When Mrs Thatcher was playing Oliver Hardy to Ronald Reagan’s Stan Laurel, everyone thought their time had come.

We were all going to live in lands flowing with milk and honey and riches and comfort would befall us all the days of our lives, even if we were going to have to behave like ravening wolves to achieve it.

To nobody’s great surprise, it did not quite work according to plan. Things just went on pretty much as normal, with the rich getting richer and the poor picking up the bill.

We all woke up to find we had been conned.

Then along came Tony Blair selling the same old claptrap and everyone got fooled again.

As that heavyweight of political thought, George Bush, would say:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

No, it doesn’t make any sense, but you can see what his poor little brain is aiming at.

We all know that these bankrupt ideas have made a very few people repugnantly rich and the world in general a poorer place. As Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian shows, people are now wise to all this nonsense.

The problem is, how soon will it be before the politicians catch up?

Tony Blair’s legacy is that he was a pantomime Mrs Thatcher in drag who managed to take the farce on tour for one long, last show before all the costumes and props unravelled and collapsed on the rickety stage and everyone saw the horror of the real ugliness of the players beneath the peeling and running greasepaint masks.

Not much to show for ten years in power.

What will Gordon Brown’s legacy be for the couple of years he will have at the big top of the political circus?

Blair To Brown: Spin To Spinelessness

February 15, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

The art of spin is, by its nature, underhand, artificial, duplicitous and deceiving.

It was what ordinary people, less skilled in the black arts of politics, would call lying.

During the First Coming of Tony Blair (zealots across the world are awaiting his Second Coming as Emperor of Europe later this year) spin was all the rage. Real news was blotted out by fairytales; concoctions of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking were paraded as reality; newspeak became the political lingua franca.

Under Gordon Brown, of course, all that changed. Creating as much distance as possible from the new pariah Blair became essential. All well and good.

The downside of this, however, is that we can all now see that the new emperor has no clothes.

We thought that Tony Blair’s oleagenous toadying to the rich and famous would be consigned to history and not be the shape of things to come. Looks like we almost got conned again.

As Paul Routledge says in The Mirror:

If you want to change this government’s mind, don’t be poor, don’t be old and don’t work in the public services.

No. Be wealthy, have influential friends in high places and the power to blackmail weak politicians.

Chancellor Alistair Darling spurns the claims of pensioners and people on benefit, and insists that low-paid government employees accept real cuts in living standards.

But he’s caved in to the rich and powerful. He backed down on plans to tax traders who sell their business. Cost to the taxpayer? £200million a year.

And now he’s backtracking on proposals to soak the super-rich who live here but don’t pay taxes, the so-called “non-domiciles”. Cost? Many hundreds of millions.

The Telegraph is no more charitable to Darling of the Treasury:

HM Revenue and Customs has written to tax lawyers withdrawing some of the most contentious aspects of the non-dom plan.

Mr Darling’s retreat follows last month’s climbdown on plans to raise capital gains tax and threatens to make his first Budget next month a public humiliation.

The Chancellor still plans to charge long-standing non-doms a £30,000 annual levy, but other measures are significantly watered down.

These include no longer asking for detailed information about offshore trusts, not taxing works of art brought into the UK for public display and not taxing money brought into the UK to pay the £30,000 levy.

According to Forbes:

‘This clarification is a victory for common sense,’ said John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general.

‘The proposals were clearly cobbled together in a hurry … we need the government to be more careful in future about sending out a message that Britain is no longer interested in attracting talent and ideas to our shores, or that those people already here, who contribute over 23 bln stg to the UK economy each year, are no longer welcome,’ he added.

From the day that Mrs Thatcher told Rupert Murdoch that Tony Blair was “a safe pair of hands” and therefore allowed him to be elected, to the tea-party with Mrs Thatcher when Gordon Brown had only just moved into 10 Downing Street, the signs that New Labour is just the old Nasty Party in disguise have been there for all to see.

Tony Blair tried to disguise it, but Gordon Brown is just blatantly shoving it in people’s faces.

If you are not rich New Labour is not interested.

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