Monday, January 19, 2009

The Politics Of Envy (& Deep Stupidity)

A lot of people are trashing Labour List, the new weblog set up by Derek Draper. The criticisms are largely justified, his uncanny ability to alienate those who should be natural supporters of the site is hilarious. Someone who thinks that there are only 20 people in the country who matter was perhaps not the ideal choice to spearhead Labour's blogging presence.

Let's not write it off completely though, because it has published the details of the most recent Fabian conference, in which Daily Mirror political editor Kevin Maguire shares his deep thoughts on how to revive the economy:

10:1 maximum wage, set against the workers getting the lowest wage in the company.

Dawn Butler likes the idea, Ken Livingstone complains that someone else has taken his job anyway!

One delegate asks how Maguire would stop people atomising into self employment to avoid the limits, while David Aaronovitch questions how Man City will be able to purchase the services of Kaka.

Maguire proposes an anti-self-employment hit squad, and claims that the ‘benefit all' effects of the policy would create incentives.

Would anyone put it past this government to implement that idea?

2 comments:

Leg-iron said...

They already have an anti-self-employment squad. They call it the tax office, and they're coming to get us all this year.

Better make sure you have the receipt for every paperclip and can prove each and every one was for business purposes only!

Ross said...

Yeah, now that I think about it, given the government's capacity for failure, an agency that was actually trying to persecute the self employed would do less harm than the tax office.