Divide and Rule

Multiculturalism and Diversity ideology divides our society into groups identified by characteristics that should bear no weight in choices and actions that are at society-wide levels. It is clear now that the same pernicious thinking has been used in economic and financial policy pursuits. Pensioners, children, hard-working families, the disadvantaged (various), have all been separated from one another and the generality, to be the target of policy objectives and policy justifications.

The truth is that just as all of us need our streets safe, our bins emptied, our schools educating, our army defending, our judges upholding the law, so too most of us are quite poor. Yet this 'progressive' New Labour junta, in its actions and in its ideological stance, insist on removing our money and handing it round their current priority groups.

Children and their poverty is a favourite. Well, my children are not under sixteen. No longer children, their wages can be taxed at double the rate of a year ago. Is sixteen suddenly a rite of passage out of worthiness and into targethood for rapacious Labour tax and spend policies? But eighteen year olds entering university are children and are poor. Unless their parents' income, used as the benchmark for determining their poverty or otherwise, excludes them from assistance with fees and living costs, even though the wealth is not theirs at all.

Most people under 30 are single and already handing over a large conribution, willing or not, to families and the workless. Now they are handing over double the amount, because they are not poor. Only by any reasonable measure, such as income, they are poor, but they don't count.

Pensioners are poor, unless they are single women, when they are not and must have their tax doubled. And so it goes on.

For over 10 years taxation, benefits, and spending policies have been in the micro-managing, bogey-covered hands of an intellectually underpowered, controlling, sly, lying, trotskyoid fanatic. They should have been both widely debated, agreed, and under the control of a clever, informed and competent technician with a sane and compassionate understanding of the possibilities of government and the alleviation of need in all classes and estates.

The Labour government had such person and gave him office. He was the Leader's first target and victim after Labour was elected. Brown then worked his way steadily through the Party and many of its ministers until he brought down the Prime Minister we elected, and usurped his place as he had that of Frank Field a decade earlier.