Blue Labour - Because Bollinger Doesn't Buy Itself and the Nanny Doesn't Pay Herself

The 2015 UK election campaign has begun in earnest and Labour is desperate to leapfrog the Tories  in order to capture the votes of  "Middle England" (swivel-eyed loons who do as they're told by the Daily Mail and Daily Express).  After years of policy vacuum, Ed Balls has set out his 'vision'.

The pre-speech pap, dutifully churned out by Churnalists up and down the UK was that the target was to be unsympathetic wealthy pensioners being stripped of their Winter Fuel Allowance.  Despite the seismic move away from the universality principle of some benefits, his paymasters had calculated that in the chorus of "Is that it?" slagging about finally filling the Labour policy vacuum, the meat would be missed.  Meat there certainly was, and Ed likes his steak bleu.

Forget all the rhetoric about austerity being the wrong answer, Ed will stick with Tory cuts and spending plans for at least the first year. Note to Ed: That's not enough to satisfy your paymasters in the City, must do better.

The real meat however, is the cementing of Labour's attitude to the Welfare State as being not the Safety Net insurance system it was created to be, but as a means of having the many subsidise servants for the wealthy.  After all, how can one maintain a Champagne Socialist lifestyle if one is having to pay a living wage to the 'help'?

In the cockeyed world of the London-Centric UK, Margaret Thatcher's economic 'miracle' of destroying British manufacturing and mining and funding the consequent mass unemployment with North Sea oil revenues was topped with the Big Bang and the creation of the honeypot that is London. Gordon Brown's economic 'miracle' was creating a complex system of Tax Credits so that the squeezed middle would fund the Working Poor so that the upper middle classes could have subsidised services without the inconvenience of paying a living wage to their servants, coupled with mass immigration to the honeypot to keep the Working Poor keen.  

Moreover, the squeezed middle wouldn't notice the squeeze because they could borrow Mickey-Mouse money created by the honeypot on the strength of their ever-increasing property values, even though the apparent house price inflation was caused by the flood of Mickey Mouse money in the first place. When it all went to ratshit there was certainly no question of the guilty being punished and the City bond-holders of the lenders being hit. No, The State would create more Mickey Mouse money to bail out the guilty, the innocent and thrifty would pay with below-inflation interest rates on their savings for years and the Bollinger would continue to flow in Wasteminster and Canary Wharf. And all over the Country, a whole generation could forget the notion of home-ownership.

While the Eds sweated over removing Winter Fuel Payments from pensioners, The Tories (the Blue ones, not the Red ones) took pity on  the Banking classes and extended subsidised childcare to those poor people on salaries of up to £60,000 and privatised the English Health Service at huge cost. And the profits rolled in as the squeezed middle resorted to Payday Loans with interest rates of 5,000%.

Now Balls proposes a total abandonment of the notion of the Welfare State being a National safety net by introducing a London Weighting to benefit caps (and cutting caps elsewhere in the Country) to be overseen by the Low Pay Commission so that the rest of the UK may subsidise the Working Poor in the Honeypot rather than have the bankers and politicians pay their nannies, waiters, cooks, carers, bin men, policemen and firefighters a living wage in that environment.

However, The Eds are whistling up a tree.  The House Journals of 'Middle England' - The Mail, Express, Times and Telegraph are already in thrall to UKIP and the most likely UK result in 2015 is a UKIP / Tory coalition.  The only way to convince the swivel-eyed loons of 'Middle England' may be if they replace The Red Flag with The Horst Wessel Lied at their annual conference.  Even then, the basic problem is that neither Ed is remotely electable.

The Independence Referendum in 2014 offers Scots a lifeboat with which to escape the lunacy that is RMS Brittannia on the Brink, holed below the waterline and Captained by either Blue or Red Tories / Red or Blue Labour. You can't put a fag paper between them because they both work for the same boss and it isn't the people of either the UK or Scotland.  It is an irony of the first water that a Labour Heid Trougher is in charge of the Tory / Lib Dem campaign for a No vote and the architect of the ruin of Britain himself is in charge of the Labour Splitters' campaign for unity.

We can return to our traditional notions of thrift, investment in real industry and garnering of our resources for the Common Weal.  We can also escape the idiocy of the last 35 debt-fuelled years in the UK where the answer to the perennial question "Who contributes most to public health, the Bin Man or the Brain Surgeon?" has been "The Banker."

Anyway, to end on a cheery note, from today's Hootsmon, no less (Someone's going to get fired!): Scottish Independence Brings Foreign Investment.

Short link to this article: http://goo.gl/JhALk

See also Iain Macwhirter in The Herald 10 Jun 13: Ed's welfare squeeze betrays workers

Wings over Scotland 13 Sep 13: Old Labour, New Labour, Slave Labour.