Labour Party

On Class Warfare And Social Engineering

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Veteran Labour MP Denis MacShane had a good think, and decided that the way to fix all that ails Britain is to introduce a draconian new method of social engineering. The BBC reports:

Only people on the minimum wage should be allowed to stand for Parliament in 10% of seats to make politics more representative, a Labour MP has said.

Denis MacShane said the backgrounds of MPs from all the main parties at Westminster had become far too narrow.

The backgrounds of MPs had become far too narrow? Seriously? I agree that there is a long way to go until the membership of the House of Commons comes remotely close to mirroring the population at large (if indeed this is even a desirable goal, which is questionable), but to suggest that we are moving backwards is surely pure lunacy? Has there ever been a time (the Blair Boom of 1997 aside) when the Commons has been more representative? And yet MacShane tries to convince us that a decades-long trend is underway, filling the Commons with wealthy landowners at the expense of everyone else.

Now, the BBC’s poor journalism makes it hard to divine exactly what Denis MacShane means. The BBC headline refers to “working class shortlists”, but the article only quotes MacShane advocating the idea that 10% of Parliamentary seats be reserved for those on the minimum wage. Both ideas are dumb, but it would be helpful if the BBC quoted MacShane properly, or at least came clean about what he is actually in favour of.

If a person earns 1p/hour above the minimum wage, would this render them ineligible to run for Parliament in those constituencies with “poverty shortlists”?

How would the Electoral Authority decide which parliamentary constituencies should have the shortlist? Would you select the wealthiest areas of the country, to stick it to all the rich suburbanites in Surrey and Kent, or let the “working man” represent his “own kind” by having the shortlists in traditionally lower-income constituencies such as my hometown of Harlow, Essex?

And if Denis MacShane literally means that 10% of Commons seats should be reserved for people who fall under the nebulous definition of “working class”, how are we going to define that? People on the minimum wage? People who did not go to university? People whose parents did not attend university? People who live in council housing? Does it depend on your accent, perhaps? Would I, as someone who grew up in a single parent household reliant on government benefits, be eligible to run as a “working class” candidate, even though I now earn a good salary?

What a useless contribution to the public debate.

How often do we hear politicians bemoaning the fact that their profession is “unrepresentative”, and expressing the hope that at some point (always indeterminately in the future) less people “like them” will hold the reins of power? Well, MacShane gives it to us again today:

Mr MacShane, an Oxford university graduate who worked as a journalist before becoming MP for Rotherham in 1994, said there needed to be fewer candidates with his kind of background in the future.

Feel free to do your part by resigning now to make way for the pilot scheme.

Harriet Harman Is Wrong

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Harriet Harman - Margaret Thatcher - Witch - Feminism - Sexism

 

According to Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, it is not possible to  be a Conservative and a feminist at the same time.

Who knew?

Of course, it goes without saying that this is complete and utter tripe. It would, for example, come as something of a surprise to Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany and the most powerful elected politician in Europe, that her conservatism automatically cancels out her feminist credentials.

Amber Rudd and Andrea Leadsom, writing in The Telegraph, do a good job of  dismantling Harman’s ridiculous assertion.

Money Quote:

At the core of Harman’s comment is her view that only socialism can empower women. What she fails to acknowledge are the different political philosophies of socialism and conservatism that inform how to improve women’s lives. Give a woman a Labour prime minister and she can live on welfare – just. Give a woman a Conservative prime minister and we will increase opportunities for her to get jobs, for children to get a good education, for hardworking families to improve their lives, for young women to get apprenticeships and for entrepreneurial women to start businesses. Conservative feminism is about boosting women to their full potential. We are optimistic and ambitious for women. Labour’s policy towards women is still about the state protecting them. They don’t believe women can achieve for themselves. What patronising rubbish.

Also relevant is this observation:

The Labour party no longer seems interested in how to improve women’s lives. Instead it uses the “women’s issue” as a political weapon against the government, making crude calculations about effects of deficit reduction and ignoring the improvements on the other side.

How true. The Labour Party do use “womens issues” as a cynical, blunt tool to score political points. As soon as George Osborne (and Lord knows I’m no fan of his) released his Emergency Budget when the coalition government took office, the Labour Party were quick to come out with a list of the ways that the spending cuts would harm women specifically. They went as far as to threaten legal action, relying on one of Gordon Brown’s “screw you” departing legislative gifts to sue the government for not considering the “equal impact on men and women” of their plans.

To the Labour Party:  Elect a female leader, and then come back and talk about feminist issues with a little bit of earned credibility.

Labour Party Balderdash On Jobs

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Ed Miliband Jobs Guarantee

 

Good news, everyone. Ed Miliband has solved the youth unemployment crisis in Britain. I guess he was lying in bed last night and the ghost of Michael Foot visited him and told him what had to be done to make everything better again.

Once he and his merry band of super-competent cabinet colleagues are sworn in as the next government in 2015, everything will be fine. Rainbows will appear in the sky and bunny rabbits will hop across the land. We know this because, at the one-day Labour Party conference in Coventry today, Mr. Miliband unveiled his “real jobs guarantee”.

The nasty Conservative Party, of course, likes young people to be unemployed. It gives us right-wingers a kick to pay taxes so that people can receive Jobseekers Allowance indefinitely.

His plan – to give every young person who has been unemployed for 12 months or more a guaranteed internship with a company, paid at the minimum wage – would be paid for by another £600m arbitrary raid on bankers bonuses.

Miliband says:

“To business we say, we’ll pay the wages, if you provide the training … To young people: if you’re out of work for a year we’ll guarantee you the opportunity to work.”

The BBC article goes on to mention:

“Those taking part will be expected to turn up for work, as well as looking for a full-time job and complete training, or face “tough consequences” – including possible benefit sanctions.”

What other tough consequence could there possibly be for failing to turn up for work or complete the other requirements for receiving government benefits, other than to lose those benefits? Being scolded by someone at the Job Centre? Being sent a letter of disapproval? Anyway.

I almost don’t feel as though it is worth delving into the flaws in this dystopian policy, especially given the fact that Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, was apparently clueless when it came to how much the scheme would cost, and whether this cost would be fully met by their proposed one-time (but seemingly all-the-time) tax on bankers’ bonuses.

Nonetheless, a couple of points of rebuttal, just to go through the motions:

1.Guess what, not all “bankers” had a hand in bringing about the global economic downturn. In fact, a lot of people in quite a lot of industries, and government positions also had a hand in it. So when will the Labour Party get over trying to use banks as a piggy bank to raid at will to fund their latest scheme? Gordon Brown was either Chancellor of the Exchequer or Prime Minister for the decade leading up to the collapse, so how about we also arbitrarily add a 10% tax surcharge on all of his future income to help him atone for the consequences of his calamitous incompetence?

The time to extract penance from the banks was at the time of the bailouts, but it didn’t happen. The Labour government missed the opportunity. Businesses cannot plan for the future and grow and prosper if they don’t know if they will be hit by a new punitive tax at any moment to fund the latest socialist pipe dream. Should the country have extracted more of a toll from the financial sector at the time? Almost certainly. But we didn’t, and now it is too late, and we have Gordon Brown and his heirs and successors in today’s Labour Party to thank for it.

2. This policy is so vague as to be worthless. Mr. Miliband says that “saying ‘no’ is not an option”, but doesn’t outline the consequences of saying no. After never once having gotten tough before in their history, does anyone really expect that this Labour policy, if implemented, would actually have any real teeth?

3. Youth unemployment currently stands at around 22.5%, or 1.042 million people. How, exactly, is a future Labour government going to coerce enough firms to take people on in order to reduce this to 0%? The answer is, of course, that they won’t. And if they even come close, it will only be because they bully firms into taking on people to do non-jobs that are of no training value, just to help the government meet its target.

4. Go away, and come back when you have a real jobs policy or any kind of plan that will actually solve the problem of youth unemployment. And in the meantime, perhaps stop demonising the current government’s “Welfare to Work” plans, which are much more cost-neutral and much more likely to succeed.

Ed Miliband Therapy

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

When life is getting you down, or if you are just having a slow day in the office, there are few geeky political pleasures as sweet as listening to Ed Miliband being systematically destroyed by BBC Radio 4 listeners on a recent phone-in show:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/9126362/Callers-maul-Ed-Miliband-during-BBC-radio-phone-in.html

I think my favourite is the one where the guy pretty much flat-out states that Ed Miliband is incompetent, and says in a voice dripping with pity “I don’t mean to be cruel, but it’s such an important job that you are doing, and I don’t think you can do it”, and Ed responds “we obviously have a difference of view about that”.

Does anyone actually believe that Ed Miliband will lead the Labour party to victory in the next election?