Labour Pains

Eleven years into what purports to be a Labour government, and the unions are still having to call for (but not get) such hardly Castro-esque measures as the scrapping of prescription charges, the bringing of all hospital cleaning back in-house, the requirement that government contractors have unionised workforces, withdrawal from Iraq, a new council house building programme, the extension of the adult minimum wage (such as it is) to 18 to 21-year-olds and to apprentices, free school meals for all primary school pupils, the breaking up of the dominance of the big six energy companies, the introduction of a duty on individual company directors to ensure health and safety, the extension of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to construction, the allowing of low-paid workers to access sick pay, and the extension of parental leave to the first 16 years of the child’s life.

People who do not agree with even these most modest of proposals already have a party. It is called the Conservative Party. The fact that there is any need to withdraw from Iraq, and the fact that even so much as one of the other policies set out above was not enacted a decade ago, proves that there is simply no point to the Labour Party. The unions should stop wasting their money on it. And everyone else should stop wasting their votes on it.

It always used to be argued that policies such as these would be economically ruinous. Well, the absence of them has now proved to be economically ruinous, so we might as well give them a go, since they cannot possibly be any worse than what we already have. The argument of economic ruin has now gone the way of the equally specious argument of unaffordability, which was killed off by the wholly voluntary, never-ending, eye-wateringly expensive war in Iraq.