Labour Logic: Robbing the Middle Classes and then paying them benefits

Those who dismissed David Cameron’s talk of rolling back the State as nothing more than a gimmick might want to take a good long look at some of the latest figures to be released on tax and welfare. They reveal a surreal picture of a society where the successful see their income savagely raided only to find remnants of it returned to them in the form of benefits and welfare that they have no need of. This is bloated state bureaucracy at its worst as it blindly eats up people’s hard earned wealth along with their independence.

The new calculations by Smith and Williamson reveal that the average family now has an eye wateringly high 39% of their income taken away from them in the form of taxes. However for the Middle Class this rises to the draconian figure of 49% of people’s income. On the most basic level there must surely be a clear moral unacceptability to the State forcibly requisitioning almost half of people’s money. Indeed for those in the top rate of tax income tax rises to 50% alone not including other forms of indirect tax. This is privately earned wealth and no matter what marvellous programmes the State purports to be undertaking on its citizen’s behalf it has no right to seize it in such abundance.

Perhaps there would be grounds for attempting to defend the fact that taxes on Middle Class families have increased by 40% since 1997 if in return Labour had been delivering some social miracle. If in return for robbing the rich to better the poor society had in fact witnessed greater equality and opportunities for the deprived then these policies may at least have had something with which to justify them. If we were being given immaculate hospitals, excelling schools, crime free streets and generous provision for the elderly then perhaps we would have to tolerate these inroads to our freedom.

But this is not what has been happening. Public services are undeniably shoddy and desperately underperforming in comparison to how much cash is thrown at them. The amount pensioners are allotted is pitiful while certain urban areas increasingly take on a feeling of lawlessness. Furthermore none of these attempts to redistribute wealth has done anything to make British society any more equal. The gap between rich and poor has continued to grow rapidly while social mobility under Labour has fallen to levels lower than those so complained about by the Left under Margret Thatcher.

The entire situation takes another dizzying turn for the unfathomable when another set of recently released figures are taken into consideration, this time by the Office of National Statistics. They show that last year 32% of benefits went to people on higher than average incomes, a bill of 53 billion pounds. Money is quite literally being given away to people who have no need of it. People are having their money taken from them only to then have it returned to them with astronomic administrative fees deducted and at the end of this process instructed to be eternally grateful to the omnipotent and all benevolent State because their own money is being handed back to them dressed up as tax credits and benefits.

This tax on the wealth creating sections on the population is undoubtedly stifling the incentive for entrepreneurship and self betterment. It tells people that there is no point in starting your own business or trying to increase your income because it will only be taken from you by the government anyway. What does increase your income, people are told, is handouts from the State. This not only takes away the incentive to prosper through your own initiative but it also takes away peoples incentive and ability to seek their own welfare provision. Heavily taxed Middle Class families who might otherwise choose to get private medical cover, pay for the children’s education privately or make their own pension provisions are left unable to do so. If these people were left alone to arrange these things for themselves then it would lift a significant burden from public services and leave them for those who genuinely need them. The same should be the case for the benefits system.

Middle Class families don’t need benefits, they need their own money and incentives to put more wealth in the economy and cater for their own health and educational needs. This is not about better bank accounts for the privileged because such a scenario inevitably only serves to benefit the less well off also. The above situation creates jobs and income for these people and frees up their public services and welfare system from those who shouldn’t need to rely on it.

What has happened under New Labour in this respect has been appallingly illiberal and intolerably stupid and unjust. Unjust to those who have had their hard earned money stolen by the government and unjust to those who genuinely require welfare but instead have seen it paid to those who have no need of it. At the first possible opportunity the new government must start to work to rectify this.

The Palestinian Authority – The art of saying one thing whilst doing the opposite

This week Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been in Washington meeting with Obama. Presumably this must be some kind of reward for Abbas having finally agreed to enter into indirect talks with the Israelis, after having had his many preconditions met, not least the demand that all construction for Jewish homes in Israel’s disputed territories be stopped. Yet something rather strange has been going on during these talks and during a press conference in Washington this week the mask almost threatened to slip.

Obama spoke of the need for Israel to continue to make progress regarding its ‘settlements’, although its hard to see how much more Israel can do on ‘settlement’ expansion considering that it is already enforcing a total freeze on Jewish construction in the West Bank. How much more frozen can Obama expect the freeze to be? Then the American President turned his attention to the Palestinian side and remarked that they too needed to make progress regarding incitement. To this Abbas indignantly declared that there was no incitement taking place on the part of the Palestinian Authority. Yet all indicators would point otherwise, including a recent report by the NGO Palestinian Media Watch which quite clearly shows that since the so called Peace Talks were resumed the Palestinian industry of hate and call to terror has been booming.
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2375

For while Abbas has been talking to the American President and international press of his commitment to coexistence with Israel he has been saying something troublingly different to his own people. Just a few weeks ago Abbas gave a speech broadcast on Palestinian Television in which he made quite clear that all Jews should have to leave Israel. Indeed as the latest report by Palestinian Media Watch so clearly demonstrates, since the start of peace talks the Palestinian Authority has, at every level of Palestinian society, incited hatred against Jews and Israel, called for its destruction, glorified terrorism and encouraged Palestinian children to aspire to join in armed struggle against the Jewish State. Those bothering to keep an eye open will have witnessed even top members of the Palestinian leadership apologising to their people for the cessation of violence against Israel and assuring them that it will commence again soon. For as Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Religious Affairs Minister in the Palestinian Authority, explained in a public address on the 14th of May this year; peace must be a 4th rate priority for the Palestinians.

This incitement for the destruction of Israel through terror has taken place in everything from Palestinian school text books and kids TV programmes through to crosswords in newspapers and on television game shows. This year’s Palestinian Women’s Day on May the 17th was dedicated to the memory of Dalal Mugrahbi and a square in Ramallah was named after her. Who was Dalal Mugrahbi? No not a renowned Palestinian Feminist or Rights Activist but a female terrorist who was responsible for killing 37 Israelis during a bus hijacking. Meanwhile May was also a wonderful month for anyone who enjoys a good healthy combination football and Islamic terrorism. One Palestinian football team was named after Fatah terror mastermind Majed Abu Sharar while Abdallah Daoud, of the 2002 militant uprising in Bethlehem and organiser of several other terror attacks was honoured with an entire football tournament being named after him. Perhaps most chilling to watch is the footage from the June 2010 Palestinian Culture and Education Festival which featured jihadis dancing around the stage with rifles while singing of their will to martyrdom. An insight into Palestinian culture and education if ever there was one.
You can watch those festivities here:
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2376

Under the terms of the Oslo Peace agreements both Israel and the Palestinians are obligated to educate their populations for peace and Hillary Clinton has made perfectly clear that Palestinian cooperation in this matter is an essential element of peace talks being successful. Yet as all the evidence shows incitement to hate and terror is still alive and well under Abbas’ leadership and one has to ask how Israel can be expected to conduct negotiations with a Palestinian leadership that is still taking steps towards facilitating the ultimate destruction of the Jewish State.

Islam’s Latest PR Campaign – when it comes to tolerance and understanding why must the traffic only ever be in one direction?

This week the British Islamic community launched a new poster campaign for the London Underground entitled ‘Inspired by Muhammad’. The posters feature pictures of British Muslims alongside such benevolent statements as ‘I believe in Social Justice’ and ‘I believe in women’s rights’ followed each time by the claim ‘so did Muhammad’. Especially intriguing was the one that claimed Muhammad believed in protecting the environment. I’m not entirely convinced that climate change and deforestation were concerns Muhammad would have been aware of in 7th century Arabia, but then I suppose if you are a prophet…..

The campaign justifies itself with a set of YouGov statistics that claim to show just what a negative attitude the British public has towards Islam. I wonder why that might be? And so in light of our collective ignorance we are all to be re-educated by a set of posters and an online campaign focused around the question ‘who was Muhammad’. Sadly the makers of the website seem to have absent mindedly forgotten to make mention of Muhammad’s marriage to a Nine year old or his massacring of populations who so unreasonably failed to convert to Islam. I wager that those behind this campaign hope the British public will be a little more cooperative than the troublesome Polytheists of Mecca or the obstinate Jews of Khyber.

Yet the real question is why is it that it is always the rest of the British population who must be educated, lectured to and preached at about their terrible ignorance of the apparently faultless doctrine of Islam? It seems to have become perfectly acceptable for Britain’s Islamic preachers to dismiss the entirety of British culture as materialistic, licentious and decadent. True there are aspects of British culture which have increasingly become some of those things but this now seems to be being used by the Islamic leadership as an excuse for rejecting integration into British society, deciding instead that it is the rest of us who should learn from them.

And while the British population is busily being ‘educated’ in the breathtaking wonders of the way of Muhammad, who is really making any genuine effort to educate the insulated parts of the Britain’s Muslim community to the importance of Western values of democracy and tolerance for individual freedoms. What, I wonder, would be the reaction if a similar campaign was began to target the Islamic community with posters promoting traditional British, or heaven forbid, Christian cultural values?

Lastly it might be worth remembering that we see no such similar campaigns to win over the wider public to the brilliance of Sikhism or the justness of Hinduism. No doubt those behind the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign would say that these religions don’t need such an initiative because they don’t suffer from the same negative public image as Islam does. But then that only raises the question of why don’t they? Why don’t people see Sikhism as a religion of war or Hinduism as a religion of female persecution or any of the religions of Britain’s Chinese immigrants as aggressively hostile to British culture?

Perhaps the reason that these other minority groups aren’t launching similar PR campaigns is quite simply because they don’t have anything to prove. For when we are told over and over again that Islam is a religion of Peace, one can’t help but eventually respond ‘I think the lady does protest too much’.

Assassinate Thatcher? – Has Labour learnt Nothing?

When it comes to Labour, history just seems to keep on repeating itself. First they wreck the public finances (again) and lose office (again), now just like in the early 80s they are swinging dangerously back towards the old Left. During Labour’s leadership hustings at the GMB conference, in the suitably grim Southport, the bright-eyed hopefuls demonstrated they have clearly learnt nothing from Labour’s disastorous last years in government.

Andy Burnham told his Trade Union audience that Labour had listened too much to big business while Ed Miliband told them Labour in government hadn’t listened enough to…yes you guessed it…the Unions! Indeed Miliband (the younger) said that Labour had gone wrong precisely where it had neglected its core values. I wonder what those might be? The same core values in Michael Foot’s oh so popular 1983 manifesto perchance? Those would appear to be the days these people would want to return themselves to.

But perhaps the biggest surprise came when John McDonnell mirthfully told the audience that if he could do one thing to make the world a better place he would go back to the 80s and assassinate Thatcher. And for this he received the heartiest applause of the whole conference. How might he do it I wonder, with a bombing of a Hotel that would leave many bystanders dead and injured maybe, just as the IRA attempted to? Indeed in the past McDonnell has spoken glowingly of the IRA and how he believes it was their terrorism that helped spur on the peace talks.

Now all I can assume is that McDonnell and indeed most of the people at this conference must have spent the past 25 years in some obscure mining town cut off from the rest of the Britain; that is how far their politics seems to have progressed. For if they had travelled to just about any other part of the country then they could not have failed to notice how Thatcher’s revolution has immeasurably improved the British people’s lives and the Nation at large. Indeed Britons have gained more prosperity and opportunities for personal success as a result of Thatcher’s program than anyone ever could have imagined possible back when she took the reigns of a failing nation in 1979. The reason that Tony Blair was elected was because people thought New Labour had finally understood this.

If it turns out that Labour has in fact not understood that the British people now share Thatcher’s vision of property owning democracy and instead imagine that they want to be taken back to Mass Nationalisation, Cradle to Grave Welfarism, Council Houses, Heavy Industry, Coal, Soot, Unions, Strikes, Inflation, Unemployment, Shortages, Power Cuts, Rioting, Economic and Social Breakdown; then they will be out of power again for another political generation.

How Do you Solve a Problem like Lauren?

This is a question that Tony Blair must have been wrestling with for some years now, for Lauren Booth would appear to have made embarrassing the former Prime Minister her life’s work, only not quite. There is one pursuit that seems to take precedence over humiliating her brother-in-law; spreading as much hate as is humanly possible against the Jewish State of Israel.

From her ineloquent and childish columns and speeches that so compliment her simplistic and infantile thinking it doesn’t take long to realise that clearly the woman is a fool. Fools and madmen can be all too easily dismissed, usually rightly so, but in the character of Lauren Booth there is someone who is symptomatic of a phenomenon that goes far wider than her own drivel laden wittering. And while much of what she has written about has indeed been dull and self-pitying drivel about her personal life she like the wider phenomenon that she represents has an all together more dangerous streak.

This weekend Booth was one of the speakers at the 20,000 strong rally furiously protesting the death of the eight militants who attacked the Israeli Sailors sent to prevent them braking Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas. Just to repeat: that’s 20,000 protestors for eight dead, fortunately there hasn’t been quite the same ratio of protestors for the hundreds of thousands murdered in Darfur, the Metropolitan Police never could have coped you know. After having told her elated crowed not to watch the BBC because it had dared to feature an Israeli spokesperson, or ‘Israeli killer Zionist’ as Booth so articulately put it, she went on to say something far more chilling.

‘You wanna know something? I don’t care about Israel’s security’ she delivered coldly and calmly before bellowing down the microphone ‘I don’t give a damn!’

This statement she confidently justified with the claim that because of its conduct Israel doesn’t deserve security. Oh well that’s okay then.
But no, it’s not okay is it. Is she really telling us that Israeli civilians deserve to die because of the actions of their government? Even if the Israeli government were engaged in all the murderous campaigns that Booth claims does she really believe that Palestinian terrorists would then be entitled to kill Israeli children simply because they are Jewish Israelis? It would seem that she does.
Indeed she went on to say that the world should take up arms against Israel in revenge. Peace activists just ain’t what they used to be.

Back in 2009, at another mass rally against Israel’s right to self-defence, Booth had declared ‘when Israel kills a Gazan child, they kill my child’. One can only fear for the welfare of children whose mother can make such shamefully disingenuous and flippant remarks. Yet her comments almost make a little more sense when viewed along with her claim in the same speech to be ‘proud to be from Gaza’ which she then followed by leading the crowed in a chant of ‘we are all Palestinian’.

Ms Booth is of course from Southern England as were most of the other protestors and one might further ask why they weren’t all ‘Tibetans’ or ‘Darfurians’, don’t these peoples deserve just a little humanitarian solidarity also? In claiming to all be Palestinian Booth and her adherents were revealing what they really believe the core of the Palestinian identity to be; opposition of the State of Israel. For these people being Palestinian is not about being an Arab from a particular part of the Middle East, no a Palestinian must be someone who fights against the Jewish State and therefore any Westerner who joins them in that fight, no matter how half-heartedly, is also Palestinian. The two identities flow and merge into one it would seem.

And on the subject of identities merging it is worth noting that Booth also now works as a presenter for the Iranian mouthpiece Press TV, no Israeli spokespeople are featured there you can rest assured. On that channel you can watch Booth sporting a rather unfetching headscarf and carrying out interviews with the likes of suicide bomber wannabe Jenny Tonge, the two no doubt struggling not to outdo one another in the act of closet Jew hatred. But there is something truly sickening about seeing women who were clearly not raised Muslim now willingly donning the scarf. This is not simply turning back the clock on hard fought for women’s rights, this is introducing new types of female oppression that are totally alien to this society and that the likes of Emily Pankhurst could never have imagined having to battle against.

This is really the crux of the matter when it comes to a problem like Lauren Booth. Many have remarked on the strange alliance being formed between the illiberal Left and hardline Islamists, yet now the likes of Booth and George Galloway have so slavishly repeated the Islamist propaganda that they have crossed a threshold where they have ceased to simply be in alliance with these people but rather have become indistinguishable from them.

In Blackburn Booth spoke at a large protest, of mostly Muslim men, organised by the Islamic community there. After whipping up the crowed into a frenzy by telling them how discriminated against Muslims in this country are she proceeded with one of the most vile and hate filled tirades against Israel imaginable. Replacing the word ‘Israel’ with ‘the Jews’ in her address to 10,000 Muslims would have produced a speech that might have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels:

“We will fight for you and your children! And we have a message to you, Israel. You’re finished. That’s it. No more stories about self-defense. No, no, that’s over. You – you are the nation of hate! And you are the criminals – that we detest! … We are angry, and we want Israel out of this country!”

Indeed Lauren Booth has often referred to Gaza as a concentration camp and questioned how those who were in concentration camps themselves could do such a thing. But as the photo below of a rather well nourished Booth in a rather well stocked shop in Gaza would suggest she must know of some rather different concentration camps to the ones the rest of us are familiar with.

How do you solve a problem like Lauren Booth, I’m not sure. But there maybe many more Lauren Booths coming our way soon and they will constitute a real problem.

Here’s a photo of the delightful Lauren picking up a few snacks from a shop in Gaza while on her holiday there in 2008 (during the supposed blockade).

And another........

And here are some videos of Ms Booth speaking in Blackburn and at this weekends anti-Israel festivities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbDj3N2gy44

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pub57LhGbsE

The Euro Zone to be ‘dead within 5 Years’– the Eurosceptics just might get vindicated after all

Back in the spring of 2001 an election took place in which William Hague led his Conservative party on an avowedly anti-EU anti-Single Currency platform. Then he and his party were mocked and jeered as a stuck in the past band of pensioners and fox hunting throwbacks whose politics revolved around saving the village pub and salvaging Imperial measurements – pounds and ounces. Today as a Telegraph survey of the City’s 25 leading economists reveals that the majority of these experts believe the Euro won’t survive the next five years it seems that Hague’s blue rinse brigade may just have the last laugh.

With Greece, Spain and Portugal all facing severe economic difficulties it looks as if the best the Euro Zone could hope for is to be able to stagger on with a much reduced membership. Yet now some are questioning whether the single currency can hope to survive at all. Indeed even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has come out and spoken of the grave existential threats that the Euro faces. And without its single currency it seems that European Federalism could soon find itself in the same dejected state as so many of the other doomed ideologies that European leaders have attempted to impose on their peoples over the last century.

Undoubtedly the global downturn has played its part; indeed the recession seems to be fast becoming a locomotive of history whose effects could well be echoing down the decades with us with for quite some time to come. Yet surely now is the time for those who so blindly championed a European single currency to confess that the whole project was ill conceived from the first. Once again outlandish visions of grandeur took one look at reality and decided they didn’t much care for what it had to say. Those who professed opposition to the Euro were branded as having committed the crime of nostalgia and were accused of standing in the way of progress while the rest of us boldly and valiantly marched on to our brave new sunlit transnational Utopia.

But the single currency was ill conceived and not because grandmothers across Europe were sentimentally clinging to their Pounds, Francs and Drachma but rather for precisely the reason that those who weren’t listened to gave; simply that it was unworkable. Even within individual Nation States different regions have greatly varying economic circumstances and compete with one another to influence their governments into pursuing an economic policy that best suits their own needs. It was madness to ever think that this would somehow not be all the more the case across a whole continent.

Not that anyone one would acknowledge it then and not that anyone will probably acknowledge it now but those geriatric, flag waving, Jerusalem singing Euro sceptics that lined up behind Hague ten years ago just may find themselves to have been on the right side of history all along.

The Demonstrations outside London’s Israeli Embassy say a lot about the Two Sides

It is of course only natural that people should be upset when there is loss of civilian life at the hands of an army, especially if they have been led to believe that the victims were peace activists and humanitarian aid workers, rather than the heavily armed militants which they in fact appear to have been. Predictably the hallucinatory media and subsequent public reaction has been out of all proportion compared to what it would have been had these events occurred with just about any country other than Israel. Yet the nature of the demonstrations taking place outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington says important something about a cultural conflict brewing beneath the surface of British Society.

On Monday evening, the day that news of Israel’s interception of the Hamas bound Flotilla broke, as many as a thousand angry protestors swarmed around London’s Israeli embassy. The next evening in heavy rain their numbers dwindled to about 250 still very vocal hardliners. Depressingly this small protest received far more media attention than the pro-Israel demonstration of more than 700 supporters received the following evening, which inevitably was greeted by an even more depleted yet even more enraged anti-Israel demonstration. They furiously howled and shrieked ‘MURDERERS’ at those making their way to the Pro-Israel rally. They even began throwing things at one of the pro-Israel demonstrators who had they looked at more closely they would have seen a wooden crucifix hanging around his neck, for as he explained he was an Arab Christian who had come to voice his support for Israel.

While the pro-Israel supporters waved British and Israeli flags and sung the British National Anthem and Peace Songs a rather different picture has been emerging from the anti-Israel protest. Amidst the Palestinian flags activists were also waving a huge Hezbollah flag, the Iranian satellite terror group that calls for the murder of all Jews, an incitement to terrorism on the streets of London if ever there was one. And while the pro-Israel demonstrators carried placards calling for peace for Israelis and Gazan’s, freedom for Gaza from Hamas and aid to its people rather than arms the other side were chanting for Israel’s destruction and reciting that much loved old classic ‘From the River to the Sea; Palestine will be Free’ a direct call for the Genocidal destruction of the State of Israel.

And before someone helpfully attempts to remind me that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism we needn’t even go there because there was quite enough open anti-Semitism being voiced to keep race hate monitors busy for weeks to come. One Muslim boy (there were many young children brought along to this rally) was given the megaphone and loudly proclaimed ‘there was this five year old boy who was kidnapped by a Jew, can you believe it? Can you believe it?’ No I can’t believe it, it sounds made up to me and a bit like a medieval blood libel. Previously the same boy had declared ‘how can the Jews take this land?’ and how indeed could Quakerly liberals and Left Wing Jews stand along side such people without stopping to wonder if there wasn’t perhaps some conflict between the tolerant progressive views they purport to champion and the ones being voiced by their fellow travelers.

Not to be out done in the joys of Judeophobia by a minor a group of young Muslim men ecstatically bounced around while singing the Islamic battle cry ‘Khyber al-Yahud’ which calls on today’s Jews to remember Muhammad’s slaughter of the Jews at Khyber. But of course I’m sure someone more enlightened than myself will be able to tell me that in the correct Arabic translation this is actually a call to peace.

Remarkably the two demonstrations managed not to descend into violence, although several of the anti-Israel protestors had to be led away by the police, including one who was found to be carrying an offensive weapon. Not that there weren’t those who didn’t attempt to provoke the pro-Israel demonstrators. Perhaps most bizarrely was the incident of a group of heavily hijabed girls hysterically accusing ‘Fake Jews! Fake Jews!’ at a group of black hatted Orthodox men as they made their way from the Israeli rally. There was of course no time for them to stop and produce documents assuring these zealous young women of the validity of their Jewish status.

It is probably too much to ask that British observers be able to take a step back to fully consider the spectacle currently taking place on their streets. But if they did then coming quite clearly into vision they would see two distinct groups and two world views set before them. One side patriotically committed to Britain while also showing their support for the Middle East’s only real democracy, calling for peace for both peoples, an end to terror and a fare hearing for that democratic state in Britain’s media, not much of which bothered to turn up to report on these calls. On the other side onlookers would find an incensed rabble of Islamic fanatics, radical socialists and militant pacifists. All of them deeply opposed to mainstream British culture and many of them as eager to see the British establishment pulled down as quickly as they believe the Jewish State should be wiped from the face of the earth.

But you need not take my word for any of this. The footage below speaks for itself.

The anti-Israel Demonstration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IsmXUu7M&feature=player_embedded

The Pro-Israel Demonstration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Uaqmf69e0