Saturday 28 March 2015

Feeling The Benefits

If Child Benefit were only to be paid up to the second child, then employers who did not pay the Living Wage ought only to be permitted to employ up to two people who were therefore in receipt of in-work benefits.

Iain Duncan Smith, a father of four with a fraudulent CV that would get him sanctioned if he presented it to any adviser at a Job Centre, has lifted this Child Benefit idea from Nadhim Zahawi, who claimed parliamentary expenses in order to heat his stables.

11 comments:

  1. Just think, without the women only shortlist we would have had a "Labour" MP in favour of this kind of thing.

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    1. But the Lib Dems do not purport to be Labour.

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  2. Indeed, all-women shortlists are a way of ensuring that a supposedly adversarial Parliament is populated with people who hate adversarialism (because they don't relish the cut-and-thrust of debate, as men do) and that women have no representation at Westminster because Parliament is populated with female MPs who clearly prefer to spend time with their careers than with their families and are thus intensely unsympathetic to the majority of women whose priorities are the other way around.

    Stella Creasy and her campaigns against Barbie Dolls and men on banknotes, is the type who gets in.

    Hence Labour, the party of all-women shortlists (with by far the most female MPs) has made one of its five election pledges a pledge to provide 25 hours a week extra state-funded "child care" (which actually means child abandonment).

    Vote Labour if you want kids to spend 25 hours less each week with their own mothers.

    If you are a mother who wishes to raise her own children, Parliament has no time for you and the state actively opposes you.

    Particularly now there are so many women in Parliament.

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    1. You have obviously never met a politically active woman! "Don't relish the cut and thrust"? I wonder if you have ever had much dealings with any women at all.

      And most male MPs have been lumps of lobby fodder, bound by a public school or a trade union honour code that more or less forbade original thought, and which absolutely precluded acting on it.

      The all-women shortlist system has served this constituency well. It is probably coming to the end of its natural life, but even so.

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  3. If you think women are as combative as men, I can only suggest you try going on a night out with groups of both genders. On BBCQT, three female Labour politicians including Rachel Reeves made my point for me, suggesting we abandon PMQs because "all this adversarialism puts women off entering politics". Well, exactly.

    If you're for all-women shortlists (which ensure candidates are not even democratically selected but imposed on local party associations by central authority) and which patronise women by suggesting they can't make it in politics unless men are banned from standing agaist them, then you show you're no longer even pretending to be a conservative at all.

    Jolly good. It's about time you stopped pretending.

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    1. If you think women are as combative as men, I can only suggest you try going on a night out with groups of both genders.

      Oh my dear boy, I have been. Many, many, many times...

      I have a theory that women respond to men such that weak men (including the kind that feels the need to hit women) experience women as weak, because that is how women respond to them, whereas strong men experience women as strong, for the same reason.

      Think on.

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  4. As it happens there isn't any dispute about what I'm saying. As the feminists always rightly say, if roles had been reversed and women had been in charge, there wouldn't have been half as many wars.

    I quite agree.

    On BBCQT, three female Labour politicians including Rachel Reeves made my point for me, suggesting we abandon PMQs because "all this adversarialism puts women off entering politics".

    Well, exactly.

    If you're for all-women shortlists (which ensure candidates are not even democratically selected but imposed on local party associations by central authority and which patronise women by suggesting they can't make it in politics unless men are banned from standing agaist them)...then you're no longer even pretending to be a conservative at all.

    Jolly good. It's about time you stopped pretending.

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    1. The Cabinet that took us to war in Iraq was both the most female and the most feminist ever. For some past sin or other, I was on the Constituency Executive of the then Government Chief Whip, whom I suggest that you look up.

      The war in Afghanistan was sold in specifically feminist terms. Quite dishonestly, but even so.

      And again I question whether you have ever met any women politicians at any level. Or, indeed, any women at all.

      Only a very particular type of teenage boy thinks as you do (or is on the Right politically in general). That is very obviously what you are. Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

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    2. Leave it, Mr. L. He once asked a girl out, she said no, and unfortunately he turned to the Internet, we all know how these things end.

      But I still laughed out loud when you asked if he had ever met any women politicians, very clearly he hasn't, they are f*cking terrifying the lot of them.

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    3. "Formidable" is the word that I prefer.

      If he has never experienced formidable women, then that says it all about him. For some reason, I have rarely encountered any other kind. And certainly not anywhere near politics.

      I don't expect all-women shortlists to be in place by 2020, though. I cannot imagine them at all in 2025, 30 years on.

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    4. The AWS beneficiaries in the North East are formidable indeed, yours not least. They are mostly local and none of them are full blown right wing, several like Pat are definitely on the left. You are probably right that the idea has had its day but the usual arguments against it are just wrong.

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