Ha ha ha! Toby Young sticks it to the Gurniad and Labour luvvies

[Wellwobbly]

There's a great example in the Guardian this morning of what Americans call "gee whiz" journalism, as in, a piece of news greeted as if it's jaw-droppingly sensational when, to the rest of us is, it's bleedin? obvious. I'm talking about John Harris's belated discovery that "the yoof" don't share the values of the liberal, Guardian-reading metropolitan elite. Incredible as it may seem, they're not pro-immigration, pro-welfare or pro-redistributive taxation. According to Ipsos MORI, only 20 per cent of 18-34-year-olds agree with the statement "the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain's proudest achievements". How dare they?!? Most amazingly of all ? to Harris, anyway ? is that Generation Y don't blame the "Con-Dem cuts" for youth unemployment. Haven't they been listening to Len McCluskey?
The most telling passage in the article comes at the end, when Harris meets a 27-year-old in Warrington who's just got a job after a bout of unemployment thanks to the government's Work Programme. Harris asks him whether he thinks his joblessness was his fault.
"Yeah," he says. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this ? tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes ? you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try."
Harris describes this reply as ? wait for it ? "heartbreaking". Yes, it breaks the Guardianista's heart that this young person doesn't think the world owes him a living. Instead of becoming welfare dependent, trapped for the rest of his life in poverty and despair ? as any self-respecting member of the proletariat should, doncha know ? he's actually gone out and found himself a job! Oh tempora! Oh mores! What's become of the client state? It's as if 13 years of New Labour never happened.
Harris blames "Thatcherism" for the proletariat's false consciousness ? and the fact that Labour hasn't been a proper socialist party since Tony Blair ditched Clause IV. The "up-by-your-boot-straps Conservatism of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher" (yah, boo, sucks) went "largely unchallenged during the New Labour years" and is now accepted by millions of young people as "a simple matter of fact". Echoes here of red daiper baby Owen Jones, whom Harris singles out (alongside public schoolgirl Laurie Penny) as a beacon of hope amidst all the gloom. Owen thinks "the rightwing media" is to blame for brainwashing the lumpen proles. If only the poor sods read the Guardian or the Independent, then they'd know THE TRUTH which is that the millionaire-Tory-Bullingdon-Boys-ruling-class have a vested interest in keeping them down.
Hmmm. Call me a capitalist running dog, but I can think of another explanation for Generation Y's lack of enthusiasm for the values of John Harris, Owen Jones and public schoolgirl Laurie Penny.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the reason 18-34-year-olds aren't wild about the consequences of Labour's open-door immigration policy is because they noticed that nine out of ten jobs created under the last government went to foreign-born workers.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the young residents of towns like Warrington aren't in lockstep with John Harris and Owen Jones and public schoolgirl Laurie Penny when it comes to state hand-outs is because they've witnessed the appalling, destructive, calamitous impact of welfare dependency with their own eyes.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the reason more 18-24-year-olds say they're going to vote Conservative (31 per cent) than Labour (27 per cent) is because they recognise that Britain wasn't in a great place after 13 years of the other lot in power, that we need to get the deficit under control if we're to avoid joining Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and (any day now) France in the bankruptcy club and that David Cameron and George Osborne's plan for digging us out of this hole is just a teensy weensy bit more credible than Ed Miliband and Ed Balls's.
No, silly me. It's because they've all been brainwashed by The Sun.

No, I went to London

Owen Jones. I would. Oh, yes.

MrsTwgtwf, the only explanation for that statement is that you have been drinking. The only matter of doubt is how many you have had.

.....drooo....oooo....ooool......

But in a good way.

Spot the difference:

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNzgxMTcyMjEyOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDIxMTU4Ng%40%40._V1.SX640_SY816.jpg&imgrefurl=www.imdb.com/media/rm2910764288/nm0331516&h=816&w=640&sz=78&tbnid=wHkFNGiQ5_9LIM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=71&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dryan%2Bgosling%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=ryan+gosling&usg=__Opgt7mUdduP2cuBldcSU80uVdzA=&docid=9m1uSOWVp-nbWM&sa=X&ei=QXnLUce2O-rB0QWppIHIAw&ved=0CJIBEP4dMBE" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I think so.

Yes, there is a slight resemblance from that angle.

But a full frontal view of Owen Jones soon shatters that dream and dispels the myth unless you have been on the pyth or are taking the pyth.

claig. Pass the doobie.

MrsTwgtwf has got it

Thanks for joining in, MNetters!

I did want this to be a lighthearted post and nobody has got ugly, so thanks.

xxx

One book that is very very sobering:

'The Vision of the Anointed Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy' by Thomas Sowell.

He likens the liberal-left (the Anointed) with making the same fault as the Nazis - so intent on their ideology (the Vision) that they are utterly blind to any discordant feedback that it doesn't work.

He then looks at the favourite social policies of the Anointed - welfare, war on poverty, rehabilitative justice, marriage, racism and sex education - and uses US census material to empirically prove that the Vision has actually made things WORSE.

But the Anointed refuse to acknowledge this, and instead say that the solution is to have more of the Vision: more welfare, etc etc. They also immune themselves from criticism by truly believing that they are more caring and morally superior than people who do not have the Vision, and that people who disagree are therefore evil and uncaring.

He writes in his forward: 'the West is sleepwalking to disaster'.

A very sobering book. Because he uses statistics to prove everything he says (ie welfare has ripped African American families apart) it is heavy going, post-graduate level.

sorry, census returns not statistics

Would you Mrs Twgtwf? Hmmmmm!

I would. And now I'll have to buy his book "Chavs" cos I had no idea it was him wot wrote it.

CLAIG. A book everbody needs to read is SEASONS IN THE SON BY DOMINIC SANDBROOK. THE BATTLE FOR BRITIAN 1974-1979 It is uncanny how everything about 1974-1979 has come round full circle and the decisions and policies of the time are so relevant today. We have the european referendum of 1975 people fighting against bad schools and loony left ideas within schools 1976 IMF CRISIS 1976 people seeing non working people living better than them with "COULOUR TVS". It is quite extraordinary how history repeats itself in almost parallel lines.

The chapter on education in the book is hilarious and not even the biggest lefties today would even comtemplate that sort of teaching. the book shows in general though that the left still have the same sort of 1970s type thinking today. These were the sort of policies that Brown and Balls inflicted on britian and left it with an economy that is broken and maybe unrepairable.

Thanks for that book suggestion beatback. I will look into that. I have read some of Sandbrook's articles in the Mail and they are good.

Thank also for the Sowell book reference from WellWobbly. I wikipediaed Sowell and he is quite a guy, and that sounds like an interesting book on progressives ("the anointed ones") and why they make the mistake of thinking like they do!

CLAIG. perhaps it takes a housewife to see that Britian"s national housekeeping is appalling. Britian is producing every week the same as she was in February last year.Yet she is spending half has much again. No family could survive like that. For a bit they can borrow,buy on HP,and delay paying the bills. But in the end the only way to get straight is to stop spending so much. What is right for the family is right for Britian. MARGARET THATCHER SHIPLEY 1975. I thought i post this speech. This speech describes today in great detail and that is why Even labour know we have got to start reducing the public debt . But the problem is labour dont have any coherent or logical policies in dealing with the debt they make it up on the hoof and we all know that as soon as Unite threaten to stop funding the labour party any semblence of common sense on dealing with the debt will go out of the window.

Very true, beatback.
Labour have no answers. All they ever do is milk the taxpayer and waste the taxpayer's money and eventually leave notes saying "sorry, there's no money left".

FFS. Yay bring on more welfare cuts everyone will thrive!

I saw a picture of Cameron at a food bank. Is he not embarrassed that people can't afford to eat on his watch?

It makes me sick to read some of the nonsense on this thread.

If waste had been controlled for the last 15 years in the public sector we would not be having to make any cuts . the money that has been wasted by appalling profligacy within certain parts of the public sector is criminal. It is appaling that anyone has to use food banks ,especially as most of the people using food banks are people who though poor education and bad luck have found very few job opportunities but with 9 out of every ten jobs created going to foreign born workers that is hardly suprising. Certain people within the labour party rub their hands together with glee when the see people using food banks because "WEVE GOT ANOTHER CLIENT FOR LIFE" forcing desperate people to listen to their propaganda. If labour were a force for good why after 13 years did we not have full employment then and why did the difference between the richest 0.1% of the population increase at a rate faster than at any time in history and a lot of the 0.1% pop stars Fred Goodwin and other friends of labour were abusing their own faithful voters. People say its the top 1 percent but the reality is is the top 0.1% who have all the money.

Jon Cruddas, who I think is Labour's policy chief, said that "food banks are here to stay". His vision is to work with them, not to get rid of them.
That shows how bankrupt Labour's vision is.

We need to engineer growth so that we can create wealth and jobs and get rid of the need for food banks.

To do that we have to cut some of the waste and not remove money from ordinary people's pockets.

We don't need to cut services for vulnerable people, but we need to scrap the waste in our public sector - waste on expenses, home flipping, taxi fares, £100 million wasted on a BBC IT project, golden goodbyes to BBC staff, stop spending thousands a year on chauffering BBC TV stars from down South where some of them live to the studio in Manchester.

Cut the waste, cut spending on street football coordinators, climate change operatives, subsidies to rich landowners for erecting windmills and rewrite some of the tax laws so that corporations have to pay their fair share.

There is lots that can be done. We don't need to be resigned to Jon Cruddas's view that "food banks are here to stay".

Scrap the subsidised bars and canteens in the House of Commons while some of our people queue up at foodbanks.

Scrap HS2 in a time of national crisis and spend the £30 plus billion on building new homes, roads and infrastructure to create mass employment which will lift us out of recession in the short term, and start HS2 in a time of boom only.

UKIP say they can save £50 billion with a bonfire of the quangos and the curtailment of salaries of the quangocrats.

Even if they are overstating it, there may well be billions of waste that could be cut there and which could be used to boost growth in the economy.

Claig. The biggest Labour vanity project, the Salford Studios. The whole project was frankly riduculous and has not benefited salford or the North West in any way. The appalling way in which the stars refuse to live within a reasonable distance of the salford studios .In any other industry you have to live near where you work you cant claim first class rail fares everday, or like Victoria Derbyshire decide you cant be bovvered to get the train so broadcast near your home in london there cant be any other business in the country that would allow that kind of abuse. The Salford Studio "LABOUR VANITY PROJECT" has not benefited the region because none of the presenters live or spend any time in the region. It was as if it was a sweetener to "MANCHESTER CITY COUNCIL" especially, after Brown stopped the super"CASINO" project. I live in Osborne Constituency in Tatton and it is no suprise he used is influence to make sure HS2 avoided Knutsford but this is a total waste of money and wont come on stream for 15 years. The country needs the 30 billion now but spent on projects that will generate future growth not in the labour way which would be a give away to the union backed industries .Maybe the money should be used to help small and medium sized business grow and to take away some of the stifling bureaucracy in things like rateable values that small business cannot afford to pay so have to make people redundent in order to pay business rates, surely this is economics from the mad house but this is just everyday stuff for small business up and down the country.