Labour’s gimmicks won’t get Britain working again
- The cost of sickness payments will soon top £100 billion a year
- After 14 years in opposition, Labour do not have a credible plan to tackle worklessness
- There is no better tonic for poor mental health than satisfying work
With all the technological and medical advances we keep seeing, this should be a glorious era where all barriers to work are demolished. To a modest extent, we have seen this with people continuing to work as they get older. Men in the UK used to retire at 65 – finally eligible for a state pension after decades of physical drudgery. Eligibility for the state pension is now 66 and is due to rise to 67 between 2026 and 2028, and to 68 between 2044 and 2046. It should be raised further and faster to avoid the country going broke. But we also have millions continuing to do work of some kind or another past the official retirement age.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of Labour's ideological unfitness for government. The party belongs in another age, not this one, and no amount of rhetoric can disguise it.
Labour are hard-wired to believe that a compassionate approach means an ever bigger role for the state with an ever more generous offer of benefits. They don’t really believe in the moral case for personal responsibility. Their instinct is to ‘protect’ people from work and being ‘exploited’ by business. But nothing could be a better tonic for our mental health than the pride of independence, of making a contribution to the needs of others rather than being a supplicant of the bureaucratic leviathan. What better boost to self-esteem and cure for loneliness and depression than the shared endeavour of wealth creation? Of the appreciation of satisfied customers, the teamwork of colleagues and the gratitude of the boss?
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of Labour's ideological unfitness for government. The party belongs in another age, not this one, and no amount of rhetoric can disguise it.
Labour are hard-wired to believe that a compassionate approach means an ever bigger role for the state with an ever more generous offer of benefits. They don’t really believe in the moral case for personal responsibility. Their instinct is to ‘protect’ people from work and being ‘exploited’ by business. But nothing could be a better tonic for our mental health than the pride of independence, of making a contribution to the needs of others rather than being a supplicant of the bureaucratic leviathan. What better boost to self-esteem and cure for loneliness and depression than the shared endeavour of wealth creation? Of the appreciation of satisfied customers, the teamwork of colleagues and the gratitude of the boss?
5 comments:
Another good way of combating depression and low self-esteem would be to stop lying to them over the climate, foreign threats, immigration, and health issues.
Anything that suggests that the public are not obese bigoted racists awaiting death by climate failure is dismissed by the government as "misinformation".
I've long said that the only way the State Leviathan gets its comeuppance is when the money literally runs out. And everything Labour are doing could have been specifically designed to hasten that point. They are taxing and regulating the productive economy to death, they are spending the money they raise on the utterly unproductive, indeed in the case of the State sector quite often the negatively productive, they are doing their best to give us the most expensive energy in the world, and they are importing millions who are nothing but a drain on society and always will be. All of which hastens the Atlas Shrugged moment when people who run businesses just stop. Either because they have to, or because the stress of remaining in business is in no way compensated for by the meagre financial rewards and they just shut up shop for an easier life. At that point the music stops and far from being only one chair short there are no chairs at all. Then the nonsense has to stop, because there is no alternative.
But until we reach that point the can will continue to be kicked.
Sam - that's a good point, veracity is healthy, constant lying is probably much more unhealthy than we collectively realise. Stop lying would be a very positive step.
Sobers - I agree, they have a huge majority, should be able to sit tight for the full five years, but everything they do brings the tipping point closer than they appear to realise. It may not be a rapid tipping point, but it will soon become too obvious to miss.
We may as well write them off as imbeciles. Yes they have their ideology, but it's an imbecile ideology long known to be unworkable.
What do we as a country make or produce? Stuff that earns real money. Enterprises that people would be proud to work in. The proles can get jobs in service industries. Unless your earnings come from taxpayers, ratepayers, taxpayer propped up "charities" directly or indirectly you are stuffed. But if you are in that blessed majority who suck off the taxpayer teat, you can earn so much that after a certain amount is tucked away in your pension fund it is not worth busting a gut to work on.
At the other end of the social scale, Covid lockdown has shown some, many, that actually getting up early of a morning, paying a fortune to get to and from a boring job, all in depressing conditions is not worth the candle. And they have just withdrawn. Not claiming benefits. They will be no worse off. The younger have even given up breeding - for various reasons. We are doomed.
Doonhamer - I think most jobs probably are boring or depressing and became that way as personal input was replaced by tightly defined systems and processes.
Talking to a central heating engineer recently. He'd come to service our boiler and he told me about a chat he had with another engineer who spoke the "heating engineer" lingo. Our chap said "Look we're just plumbers. We turn up, find which part is faulty, replace it and go away. It isn't engineering."
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