WILL MILIBAND AND HIS ILK NEVER LEARN ?

You can always rely on Labour to promise to spend money that isn't there.

 

With their annual conference about to get underway, Ed Miliband has finally come out with a few scraps in an effort to keep his followers happy. Unfortunately, the latest round of promises are nothing but political cant and attached to the usual rhetoric about 'taxing the rich'.

 

The only possible reason that Miliband and his clan should promise to reverse the current government's changes to housing benefit is vote-catching. That tenants in council-owned property have historically been able to claim a higher level of housing benefit than those in privately owned homes was a nonsense and needed to be stopped. The claims Labour has made about the change being a 'bedroom tax' are ridiculous and to reverse the change would be a shocking and unwarranted act. It will also cost money which the government does not have.

Something that would cost us all is his additional commitment to increase the minimum wage. Rather than extolling people to live within their means, or reducing taxes, it's always been Labour philosophy to hand out cash, someone else's that is, in a pointless effort to make the lower paid better off. All it actually achieves is a general uplift of all wages which can only be paid for by increasing prices, taxes and borrowing; the supposed 'poor' don't benefit in any way and everyone suffers, as we all know only too well from the efforts of the previous Labour government.
 

Next, Rachel Reeves, a horribly nasal and earnest shadow treasury person, has separately said that people earning up to £60,000 are not rich and will not be taxed more under a Labour government. That the first part of her statement is blatantly true can't be denied, but the second will deserve serious scrutiny. We already know that Labour, under the Blair / Brown axis, made similar promises about income tax and promptly increased national insurance. There is nothing to say that a future Labour government would be any less weasel-worded and anyone with anything will be well advised to think very carefully before accepting Ms Reeves words at face value. Anyone with an income of more than £150,000 pa, the 'rich' according to Labour, can expect to be absolutely hammered, of course.

 

Thirdly, another of  the old guard, Yvette Cooper aka Mrs Balls, has said that Labour would guarantee what she refers to as "wraparound" childcare for the parents of all primary care children, meaning that they would not have to bother about little Johnny or young Tilly at all between the hours of 8am and 6pm. Why this is considered to be a good thing escapes me. Far too many parents already give far too little attention to their children and pass them over to others at every opportunity, some of the consequences being the appalling behaviour of hordes of our teenagers, their addiction to their 'phones and the internet, their lack of meaningful educational achievement and their total lack of any moral compass and sense of decency or self respect. What we need is a reduction in the outsourcing of our childcare and much more input from parents, not even more state intervention and support.

 

How they would pay for all these promises hasn't been explained but I think we can all be pretty certain that anyone who has anything will find that they become poorer. Buying and owning a house will become even more expensive, indirect taxes will rise dramatically and inflation will soar. While you can take the boy out of Labour, there's no known way of taking Labour out of the boy, and Miliband and his friends still have a basic belief in a big state funded by excessive taxation, despite the shocking consequences of the Blair / Brown years from which we are only just beginning to recover.

 

We can only hope and pray that enough of the population has enough sense to ensure that Labour never again gets the chance to destroy our nation as it so nearly did between 1997 and 2010.