The phoney war continues. While Labour searches for its next Michael Foot, the party’s stand-in boss, Harriet Harman, seems keen to lose the 2020 election as soon as possible. Some argue Ed Miliband has already performed that task. Either way, defeat is the only thing Labour does efficiently nowadays.
Ms Harman attacked the PM’s plan to abolish a policy that many hail as Gordon Brown’s Worst Ever Idea: tax credits. These mean that thousands of Whitehall scribblers deposit cash with workers who then return the money, via thousands more scribblers, to the government which never owned it in the first place. Labour loves the N Korean ambience of this system because it turns every citizen into a state vassal. But it’s an expensive, corrupting wheeze that licences rich firms to pay low wages.
Hattie claimed that Cameron’s reforms would cost poor families money. She asked the PM not to rob poverty-stricken kids (she actually said, ‘rob’) and added: ‘He doesn’t have to budget but many families do.’
Aha! The envy card. Subject of much tortured debate. A winner or a loser? Hattie clearly thinks it has ballot-box appeal because the voters must be spiteful meanies who like to pickpocket governments. In fact we reject the envy card because each of us secretly dreams of hitting the jackpot and becoming as rich as Ms Harman. Just look at the result in May. Envy wound up on life-support.
Yet here was Ms Harman pursuing the perverse notion that if Labour were to shift a bit closer to the Revolutionary Communist Party it could sweep the Home Counties.
At this rate Labour won’t even be a debating society in five years time. It’ll be a museum, or a 1990s party theme, or a Hallowe’en fancy-dress option.
If Labour lacks a leader, the SNP has too many of them. Chief clanswoman, Nicola Sturgeon. Director-emeritus-at-large, Alex Salmond. And Westminster chief, Angus Robertson. Roly-poly Robertson has assumed the lofty air of an international strategist since the general election. And that’s quite hard for a man who resembles a blancmange wearing a wig. But today he bared his knuckles and aimed a rabbit-punch at the PM.
His theme was the proposals for Scottish devolution which are known by the tag ‘Smith’. It sounds like a code-name but Smith is a human being, aka Lord Smith, a beaming drudge, whose constitutional position merits its own website.
Details of his lordship’s action-packed career are recorded for his millions of subscribers. Under his full title, Lord Smith of Recommendation, he goes around chairing this and chairing that. He’s a freelance seat-filler who assumes an enthralled grimace in stuffy meeting-rooms while pious bureaucrats drone and nit-pick and footle over details. He holds the world record for sleeping with his eyes open. Nice work. Quite what Smith may have proposed for Scotland is an irrelevance. What matters is the response his programme triggers. For the English it’s too much. For the Nats it’s not enough. No way. Never enough. Never, never – neverrrrrrrr!
The SNP is turning into a heavily sedated version of the Paisleyite tendency. They scour the political landscape for evidence of bad faith because they find betrayal arousing.
Today Mr Robertson was tussling over ‘full fiscal autonomy’. This may effectively spell Scottish independence. Or it could mean that Scotland’s been ‘abandoned’ by Westminster.
Either way it will run and run.
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