Take a deep breath for this one. Nick Clegg has a point. Mercifully, it is not the point that he thinks he has.
The argument against trade union barons really is the argument against hereditary barons, and vice versa. Once one was gone, the other was bound to follow, to be replaced with the likes of Ashcroft, as the likes of Levy and Paul, of Ecclestone, Mittal and the Hindujas, partially supplanted the old union bosses and their millions of working, tax-paying members. Organised labour and the aristocratic social conscience are both important forces for good against what would otherwise be a particularly nasty bourgeois triumphalism, as we see from already having lost far too much of each and both of them.
Apparently, it is a scandal that James Purnell's "close friend", one Jonny Reynolds, has not been given his seat as a matter of entitlement, especially since Reynolds is also a "close friend" of Peter Mandelson's; Purnell's "close friends", at least, also include Stephen Twigg. So to hell with the Labour Party's Constitution and Rules, and to hell with the Constituency Labour Party that I used to be told on here "would never stand for" Purnell in a Cameron Cabinet: it is going to be Reynolds anyway, properly shortlisted, never mind selected, or not.
Let us lose no more of either of the bulwarks against this sort of thing, now dominant in all three parties. And let us see how we can get back at least part of what we have already lost.
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I can't see how threatening to bring down BA and wreck peoples' Easter holidays is being a force for good.
ReplyDeleteSeeing as most of the country is now essentially middle class is it surprising that the bourgeoisie has triumphed? The traditional Labour-voting socially conservative working class is dying.
The fault lies with that dreadful man who now runs BA. He is another epitome of everything that I denigrate in this post.
ReplyDeleteWe do not appear to be "dying" when a Leeds Catholic adoption agency can be saved from the Sexual Orientation Regulations. Nor, for that matter, when a hundred MPs are sponsored by Unite and numerous more by other unions.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of Cameron and the aristocratic social conscience, David?
Not much. Unlike Cameron and Osborne, proper, shire toffs do not imagine that they are where they are on “merit”, but rather recognise it to be by sheer good fortune, the means whereby Divine Providence confers responsibilities on the more fortunate towards the less fortunate.
ReplyDeleteWhereas Cameron and Osborne are capitalists, which makes them as anti-agrarian as they are hostile to anything or anyone else. They support making the world anew at the barrel of a gun. Osborne is an anti-fatherhood abortion enthusiast. And they both hold Israel First, America Second foreign policy views that are as far as can be from the traditional upper-class norm.
Hence their siding with the likes of Liz Truss against someone like Sir Jeremy Bagge. Perhaps he will stand against her? Better yet, perhaps Lady Bagge will? Truss would then have to explain how homemaking constituted no qualification whatever for representative office. When not trying to explain her opposition to the institution of marriage, her desire to abolish the monarchy, and the failure of her website to raise one single, solitary penny for her campaign.