A True Conservative Writes

This article by Phillip Blond appears in today's edition of The First Post:

John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise, gave a speech last night that underlined how enthralled the governing elite of New Labour are with big money and how detached they are from the lives of ordinary Britons.

Desperate to establish his uber-Blairite credentials, Hutton, speaking on the eve of the Budget, said we should "celebrate" Britain’s new millionaires, and urged that more of us should seek to attain the heady entrepreneurial heights of the hedge fund managers and financiers he so admires.

Forget for a moment that these heroic speculators are the same people who brought down Northern Rock; the same people who gambled the world's economic future by forcing the poor into high interest home loans that they cannot repay; the same people who abandoned business investment for debt leveraged buy-outs that have handed over 20 per cent of the private sector work force to the mercies of venture capitalists; the same people that contribute only 7.9 per cent of GDP.

Still this group seems to determine all of Labour's wholly discredited economic policy.

While the rest of us struggle on wages that have been below the rate of inflation for 30 years, New Labour has converted Britain into a perverse offshore European tax haven where the really really rich end up paying less than one per cent of their real income to the Exchequer, while the rest of us pay anything from 30-40 per cent.

One can only blink in amazement at the paucity of Hutton's grasp of economics - after all it is not as if we can all become hedge fund managers. What will be left of the Britain of economic security, small traders and shared enterprises? Don't worry, they'll be bought out or put out of business by more new supermarkets and chain stores.

In the future we will all be employees of this new dispensation, locked into a low-wage, high- debt culture to finance the city entrepreneurs that Hutton and New Labour so admire.