Distribution - Manufacturing - Healthcare - Motors - Professional - Property - Retail - Wet Trade

Cut costs now!

Posh bird gets slapping from Pope

Harriet Harman is of aristocratic blood and is of a pull-up-the-ladder persuasion, along with rich and public school educated Socialists, who seem irritated by those who seek to advance themselves by hard work, self improvement, saving capital, buying a house and taking an interest in the education of their children.

They just cannot abide the aspiring middle classes getting uppity.

Harriet sought to underpin her Socialist credentials by marrying her bit of rough, Jack Dromey from the union movement, who, surprise, surprise, looks like being parachuted into parliament with the gift of a safe Labour seat. Shame you missed the great expenses bonanza Jack but thank you for reminding us that Gordon Brown’s reference to the privileged, and the have-nots, clearly has you and your missus amongst the former.

But she would expect nothing else coming from her background.

How else would you think you could get away with allegedly speaking on your hand-held mobile telephone whilst giving women drivers a bad name (you of all the sisters) whilst proving unable to avoid a stationary car when parking?

Harriet, maybe not such a surprise choice for deputy leader of the Labour party given the precedent set by Two-Jags Prescott and his track record that made Frank Spencer look like a top McKinsey man, has a bee in her expensive bonnet about equality and has been beavering away with a piece of legislation destined to cost business billions.

Lord Mandelson, one of the few in the Labour party with any grasp of business, has done his utmost to kill it but he is preoccupied trying to portray David Cameron as flopping about like a wet haddock on a slab, dithering and indecisive. A mission in which he is receiving an amazing degree of help from his victim, and mindful that dithering, and indecisive, are writ large on Gordon Brown’s CV, and hopefully soon-to-be political epitaph, Mandelson has twigged that more of the same is something voters do not want.

That said, he has to pin his colours to Brown’s mast which explains why every night, now, we see Gordo on the Beeb with some initiative or other where the only common denominator is our name on the “invoice to” part of the plan.

Harriet, who dissolved into vapours on the Andrew Marr show recently at the thought of what the Tories would have done about credit-crunch stricken SMEs, claimed that Labour, by its tax holidays, had saved 200,000 small companies.

Had the tax holiday not been agreed, the companies would have folded, I doubt that HMRC would have recovered very much and the unemployment rate would have climbed by about half a million too.  A no-brainer, even for those with no brains.

Needless to say the burden of Harriet’s school-marmy strictures will fall heavily upon those dreadful little people owning and running SMEs who will now have to grovel for the ever larger lump of our GDP comprised by the gravy train of the public sector and Quangos (bill up another £10bn this year), touch their forelocks and swear undying faith in Lady Harriet’s mission by employing people who might not be best for the job.

The problem is that whilst you can lose such good folk within the sprawling morass of creative inertia that is the Civil Service, in the SME sector, all must pull their weight or a massive burden of inequality falls upon others. The maternity laws beloved of Harriet’s ilk have already done this and distorted employment of young women towards the public sector, robbing our SMEs that often cannot afford them, of much talent.

Poor old Hatty.

She had to include religion in her piece of social engineering and the Labour party is highly selective as to the butts of which religion it kisses, and which it does not.

Dear old Rowan Williams, like an Old English sheepdog with no bark, was not heard. But Pope Benedict was in with his teeth bared like the Rottweiler Ratzinger he was once alleged to be.

Hatty had to climb down when she realised that her bill would not get through unaltered before the election. The church of St Peter for two millennia, notwithstanding the antics of some of its cohorts in the choir stalls, was not for being changed by a posh bird with uppity ideas.

If only our SMEs could have done the same.

But as you know better than most Hatty, some are much more equal than others.

Laugh or cry?

You could not make it up.

Editor