Friday, December 12, 2003

SOCIALIST HYPOCRISY IN BRITAIN:

Below are some excerpts from The Spectator about Britain’s Leftist elite not practicing what they preach. Like the Soviets, what they give the worker is apparently not good enough for them. And the “Speccy” fails to mention that it was always thus. There was, for example, Barbara Castle -- Britain’s “Red Queen”. When she was a minister in the British Labour government led by Harold Wilson in the 60s, she said it was “obscene” for someone “to carve their way to a hospital bed with a chequebook”. When her son got sick, however, what did she do? She booked him into a private hospital under a false name!. And what was her reward for such vast hypocrisy? Harold Wilson made her a Baroness!

"It has become obvious that, in progressive circles, there has been one law for the political elite and another for the people. The most glaring recent example has been Hackney MP Diane Abbott's decision to send her son to a fee-paying school, after a lifetime campaigning for the abolition of private education....

For decades, Labour activists campaigned against the evils of apartheid in South Africa, but when Robert Mugabe embarked on a murderous policy against white landowners, barely a squeak was heard from these supposed crusaders against racial injustice....

Environment minister, Michael Meacher fulminated that 'housing is not, and should not be a status symbol, an object of conspicuous consumption or a source of market power and wealth. Too many people have second homes or too large homes for their needs, while too many others are homeless or over-crowded.' Meacher's words might have carried more weight if he had not been the owner of no fewer than eight homes himself.....

But the hypocrisy works on an even deeper level. For when leftists go private or offshore, they are trying to avoid the very problems they have created through their own socialist policies. They wilfully advocate measures that lower standards or destroy wealth, then run away from the consequences... For a socialist to complain about our shambolic education system is like an arsonist complaining that a building which he set alight has burnt down. Wealthy left-wing parents cannot tolerate the schools they have created, so they .. turn to the private sector they despise"

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UNEMPLOYMENT

There is a VERY amusing article here about how the record high levels of unemployment in France have been created by French law. There is a huge demand for workers but no-one wants to work: “"We've become a nation of bureaucrats and welfare cheats," Tessier of the Paris bakery says. "No one wants to work." He thought he had found someone last month to fill his vacant pastry chef position, only to have the new recruit quit three days later after learning his €1600-a-month salary meant he'd have to give up his rent-free public housing”.

Meanwhile, as in the USA, so in Australia, the economy is booming -- with lots of new jobs being created all the time.

But PC employment regulations in Britain are driving jobs overseas.

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