The council elections loom on Nov 5th (sure to be fireworks) as the government drags democracy and honour into the gutter. Trust has evaporated in all except the most ardently brainwashed.
Despite Starmer’s lack of charisma and the way he has hauled the party into the middle of the road to become watered-down Tories, Labour is now 6 points clear.
I receive the news with mixed emotions. Just about anything, short of the Ku Klux Klan, is an improvement on what must go down as the most inept, corrupt and dishonest government we have ever had. Even Starmer feels like a ray of hope.
I’ve looked at Labour’s record, Opher. In the mid to late 1970s, they inflated the currency deliberately, just as the Tories are doing now. The result was that people who had saved hard and and retired on non-indexed pensions lost everything they had worked for all their lives. So much for Labour supporting the poor.
As to Labour dishonesty and corruption, in 2002 they inverted the precautionary principle, making it in effect into “If in doubt, government must act.” This they and the Tories have used to put ever increasing and ever more costly restrictions on ordinary people. In 2006 they had the Stern Review deliberately overstate by orders of magnitude the (in truth non-existent) benefits of action to “fight climate change.” Then in 2009, fearing that an objective cost-benefit analysis would show up that these touted “benefits” are non-existent, they made it impossible to do objective cost-benefit on anything involving CO2 emissions. Both they and the Tories have subsequently used this to ratchet up the restrictions and the costs of green policies. Oh, and what about the million pound “donation” they took from Bernie Ecclestone to let Formula One continue its tobacco sponsorship? What about Mandelson’s interest-free loan, and his other conflicts of interest? What about Cash for Honours?
As to Labour not being prone to give to the wealthy, what about Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list of 1976? And that was Old Labour, not New. As to “supporting public servants,” that is their constituency – public sector trade unions. If you’re not a trade unionist, or not in the public sector, you are their enemy, not their friend. As to creating a more equal society, by bringing in IR35 back in 2000, they actively increased inequality. They blocked independent people like me from access to the consultancy market, forcing many consultants into body-shopping firms that make obscene, unjustified profits – like Boston Consulting Group, the ones that were charging £6,000 a day for staff on Track and Trace.
Opher, you need to face up to the facts. Labour and the Tories are, as I said, two wings of the same bird. They are working together – and have been for decades – for their own interests and against the interests of the people they are supposed to be serving.
Don’t know what happened, but the other comments on this thread (including the one you “liked”) seem to have mysteriously disappeared.
I think that may have been me. I accidentally pressed something! Hopefully that’s now rectified!
Whatever you did certainly caused some changes – I am now getting a slightly different format for the “like” e-mail (much the same info, though).
WordPress is weird Neil. Did the comments return?
If you meant “did I get an e-mail back just because I commented on Opher’s World,” independent of when and how you answered, then the answer is no. And just as well, in my view.
I’m not really sure why everything disappeared. I think it had to be reapproved.
I see where you are coming from Neil.
🙂