The latest kinder, gentler politics kerfuffle is footage of a feckless young character called Sion Rickard, a classic example of what you get when you abandon discipline and rigour in education, suggesting that Toryism can be educated out. Don’t you just love it when the young and unemployable explain to those of us who pay for everything, who build everything, who take care of everything, how society ought to work? Sion has, of course deleted his social media presence, which announced him variously to be vacuous, flimsy, inconsequential and arty, so the vicious Tory thugs couldn’t point and laugh.
Oops, too late. If you’re going to pop up on Jeremy Christ’s stage and thump the tub for applause by trotting out the tired old dogma of the Nasty Tory narrative you ought, really, to have the bottle for the fight. He said – on education, for which he is a clearly an authoritative spokesman: “If we give them a proper Education …we will probably have no Tories”. Cue thunderous applause from the drooling stooges; what a shame that the evidence shows pretty much that well-educated, gainfully employed people eventually graduate toward the Conservative view of life.
But hey, when you are building a movement (what the hell does that even mean?) you must never let the truth get in the way of a piss-poor aphorism. As Dawn Butler said the other day “Better to break the law than break the poor”; shame she missed the bit about how New-New-Labourism will actually make the poor. Forget the statistics, forget the polls and look at the simple reality; socialism can only ever work if everybody buys into it and that runs counter to human nature. Rickard’s naïve dream relies on the cult-like grooming of young minds to reject the family and adopt the tribe; the rag-tag rabble of ‘disadvantaged’ minorities who deem themselves entitled to a share of the producers’ output.
Jeremy Christ himself said in his sermon: “The super-rich are on borrowed time.” No, Jeremy, their time is bought, paid for and secured away from grasping states in offshore vaults on private islands. You will never be able to touch the super-rich; that’s how they got that way. Those you will go after are the lower-hanging fruit, the fruit you can squeeze, as Denis Healey gleefully announced, until the pips squeak. This was the Chancellor who presided over the economy and the political climate which brought about the ‘winter of discontent’. How did that go for you, Den?
I work longer hours than all of my immediate colleagues, for which I get paid considerably more (don’t tell them!) I avoid tax by ploughing every penny I can spare into my pension. I expect to have work until at least 70 before being able to retire with any degree of comfort. Under a Corbynite government my thrift would be deemed ‘fat cattery’ and taxed so that others may retire earlier. You may be able to persuade young parents that their children’s interests lie in embracing punitive taxation on those who have accumulated some wealth, but try taking that wealth from their grandparents.
The conclusions from the Labour 2018 Conference? That old socialists never die and that they never learn. That the politics of envy is alive and well and stoking the flames of class hatred anew. That the false prophets of equality, diversity and multiculturalism put doctrine before cold, hard truths and bellow for the nebulous rewards of ‘social justice’ from their pulpits while having no regard to actual justice. And that there is no fool like an old fool. I think the second coming of the Messiah may need to be postponed.
This post was originally published by the author on his personal blog: http://batsby.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-very-naughty-boy.html
Should be required reading for university professors.