Monday 23 January 2012

Setting Our Cap

There should be a single form of payment, called and providing Social Security, and fixed permanently at half median earnings, however much that happened to be from financial year to financial year. It would cost next to nothing to administer. Like, for example, free public transport. Or free prescriptions, free eye and dental treatment, and free hospital parking.

IDS, over to you. And to the Lords Spiritual, successors of the upper and upper-middle-class people who joined the early Labour Party precisely because their backgrounds and involvement in the Church of England made them familiar with the importance of State action against social evils, and they used their new party as a platform from which to defend Establishment against Liberal assaults.

Apart from a certain numbers of individuals who keep the Red Benches the right shade of red, notably Lord Glasman and Lord Stoddart, the Bench of Bishops looks like the best-organised presence of what this Parliament desperately needs, a party of return to the trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other non-Marxist roots from which once sprang the Labour Movement. IDS is not without his Tory populist and Social Catholic sides, either. He needs to ask himself what he is doing in this mess.

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