Poor Choices

Labour’s war on work

Those of you who know the answer to this one. Please don’t spoil it for everyone else.

There are fifty states in the USA. They range from the richest, California at the top, (which if a sovereign country would have, despite Gavin Newsom’s best efforts, the fifth biggest economy in the world), all the way down to Mississippi, which, as (racist!) fans of Huckleberry Finn would not be surprised to learn is the very poorest. This is in terms of GDP per capita and adjusting for price differences.

The question is, if it were a state, where would the busy bustling capitalist powerhouse that is the UK come? Near the top with the Golden State, New York, and Massachusetts? In the middle with Utah, Ohio and Virginia? Or down at the bottom with Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas?

The answer is we’d be rock bottom, about as poor as Mississippi, or by some measures, even poorer.

And yet still we routinely hear people on British TV, especially the BBC obvs, saying things like ‘Britain is a rich country and so we should be a world leader in carbon reduction.’ Or ‘a rich country like Britain can afford to send billions in aid to the Third Developing World’.

But we’re not a rich country. We’re an increasingly poor country. And we’re about to get substantially poorer.

Recently our po-faced Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a sombre speech in the Downing Street rose garden, where he warned the British public that

‘things are worse than we ever imagined’.

No Sir Keir. Things are worse than WE ever imagined. Because you and your joyless band of authoritarian scolds have only been in charge for a few weeks, and yet you have already contrived to turn Britain into a dystopian hellscape.

One that somehow manages to combine the puritanical despotism of North Korea, with the grim grey economic mismanagement of North Korea.

And things only look set to go downhill from here.

Granted Labour inherited a broken and beaten economy, one left teetering on the very lip of the precipice by the useless Tories. But Starmer’s B team of spiteful loons seems intent on giving it a hefty kick, right over the edge.

Labour’s masterplan; to revivify every failed economic experiment from the socialist 1970s, and give it one more go in 2024.

State aid. Picking winners. Price controls. Rent controls. Wealth taxes. Untrammelled union power. Over regulation. Nationalisation.

The gang’s getting back together!

This government is like a Winter of Discontent tribute act.

At least on 70’s TV the only bearded little man masquerading as a woman in a slinky dress, fake boobs and too much makeup, was Kenny Everett.

With so much to choose from I thought it might be worth taking a look at just a few of Labour’s top plans to bankrupt Britain PLC.

Let’s start, if you don’t mind, with a personal gripe. Can the MSM please stop claiming that Rachel Reeves has ‘identified’ a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the government’s finances?

That’s like the BBC announcing it has ‘identified’ a public institution awash with bias and pedophiles.

Or Ticketmaster ‘identifying’ overpriced Oasis tickets.

No. Rachel Reeves hasn’t ‘identified’ a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the economy. She created a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the economy. 

By spending £22bn.

On among other things, an unconditional 22% wage rise for junior doctors. 5% bumps for public sector workers.

And a whopping 14% uplift for train drivers. Again, without securing a commitment to increase productivity, or stop striking.

Which is a shame. Because two minutes after pocketing their bumper boost, the train unions geared up for a new round of picketing, and announced fresh strike action.

And to be honest who can blame them? As the Socialist Party correctly points out here, when the Labour Party are in power, striking works.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We should have ditched Olly Robbins, David Frost, Dominic Raab, David Davis and all the other hapless makeweights, and put rail union boss Mick Lynch in charge of the Brexit Negotiations.

I reckon he’d have had us out of the whole sorry sclerotic EU quagmire by the end of July 2016, with no ties to the failing trade block, and pushing a couple of wheelbarrows overflowing with compensatory Euros to boot.

Despite the best efforts of our hapless political masters, British industry has muddled through the last few years, in part, because our labour laws mean we’ve had a reasonably flexible workforce, ready to be deployed whenever, and wherever, it’s needed.

Not any more.

Because popular DJ and landlady, Angela Rayner, has put herself in charge of Britain’s workers.

Our Ange seems determined to destroy British businesses by making the cost of employing anyone so onerous it’s simply no longer worth the bother.

First in her sights are ‘exploitative’ zero hour contracts, which she has vowed to ban.

According to the pearl clutching BBC these outrageously ruthless and unethical contracts,

‘allow employers to only pay staff when they need them’.

As opposed, I’m guessing, to paying for workers when you don’t need them.

Look, I’m no Lord Sugar, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The funny thing is, if you ask workers on zero hour contracts what they think of them, you get a more balanced response.

Sure, they don’t suit everyone, and yes, they can be abused, but many workers seem to find a surprising number of positives in being ‘exploited’.

These sort of contracts are highly flexible, often allowing people to work the hours that suit them, structure work around childcare, or even hold down two jobs. Which many people are obliged to do these days, because wages are so low, (I wonder why), and taxes, and the cost of living are so high.

But who cares what the actual workers think? They’re just little people. Who clearly don’t know what’s good for them.

Also. Let’s cut to 2026, when all the delivery drivers have been moved to fixed contracts and Labour’s middle class moaners are suddenly demanding to know why the hell their Friday night Deliveroo has just gone up by £20.

Dunno. Must be price gouging.

The government has also announced plans to allow staff to demand the right to ‘compress’ five days of work into four, and take Fridays off. Which essentially means giving office workers the right to insist on being paid five days wages, for doing four days work.

No wonder it’s popular.

To ensure evenhandedness and equity in the workplace, Labour is setting up The Fair Work Agency.

Which is being billed as a workplace ‘watchdog’ on the lines of schools inspectorate OFSTED, but will no doubt turn out more like the endlessly intrusive, heavy handed, and highly politicised, media overseer, OFCOM.

Nominally ‘independent’, (so rabidly leftist and anti business then), this incredibly powerful, unelected quango will inevitably become an immense drag on productivity, creating yet another huge opportunity cost for business.

Forcing every employer to negotiate an ever shifting obstacle course of box ticking and form filling, and waste ever more time, complying with an endless list of stultifying diktats, decrees, and directives.

But don’t worry though, The Fair Work Agency will no doubt be unimpeachably above board, equitable and even handed.

It has to be right? After all. It’s got the word ‘fair’ right there in its name. What more of a guarantee could you want?

Let’s stay with workers’ rights.

Currently if you start full time at a firm it takes a couple of years until you enjoy the full suite of worker’s benefits.

There is perhaps an argument that this period is too long.

Well fear not, Angela Rayner is planning on introducing legalisation to reduce it. From two years.

To no years.

Under new government legalisation, workers must be offered pretty much every benefit, from Day One.

Which means you will be able to turn up at your new job, tell your boss that sorry, and all that, but you’re feeling a little too peaky this morning to sit through an entire induction video about micro-aggressions and trans allyship, and so be back home, enjoying full sick pay, all in time for Bargain Hunt.

It sounds like a Scouser’s charter.

Employment legalisation is already being weaponised against employers.

Last month a tribunal judged that mid price clothes store Next had breached equality legalisation.

It was paying different rates to the company’s shop workers who tended to be women and worked in the errr….. shop. And its warehouse workers, who tended to be men and worked in the, yep you guessed it, warehouse.

It seems that as far as the tribunal was concerned these jobs are exactly the same. And paying the retail staff and warehouse workers different wages to perform their supposedly interchangeable tasks was discriminatory.

In my youth I worked in both the shop, and the warehouse of a well known furniture store. I can tell you from experience that these jobs are not remotely similar. With only one involving a significant risk of being run over by a forklift, crushed by a pallet, or beaten up for liking The Smiths.

Now Next is on the hook for £30m. Some of which will have to be paid to staff who no longer even work there.

This is actually a huge deal. It creates the precedent that a company boss no longer gets to set the wage he or she pays their workers.

The task of deciding the value of each worker has effectively been outsourced to the state. If you think that is a recipe for a successful and vibrant economy, then welcome to Belarus.

If I was running Next I’d close down the entire firm. Take my money, and dump the keys to the stores, and a huge pile of P45s at the employment tribunal’s offices.

It should be happy. Now everyone is being paid the same. Nothing.

I could go on. But let’s wrap up by mentioning Labour’s plans for a UK ‘National Wealth Fund’ to rival the Sovereign Wealth Funds of countries like Norway, and The United Arab Emirates.

But of course unlike those countries, Britain hasn’t actually got any ‘sovereign wealth’.

Instead we’ve got a pile of debt that would stretch to the Moon and back. In fact we’ve borrowed so much we spend substantially more on our interest payments than we do on defence.

This is the economics of borrowing money from the bank at 8%, putting that cash into a building society high interest saver at 3%, and thinking that you’re some kind of financial genius. You’re not. You’re a moron.

In his morose and depressing rose garden speech Prime Minister Starmer warned that come the November Budget, his government will have ‘no choice’ but to put up taxes.

Nonsense Sir Keir. You always have a choice.

It’s just that with your anti business, anti enterprise, anti wealth, and ultimately, anti worker policies, what you have chosen to do, is make Britain, and all the people who live here, even poorer.

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LSO