Not Born Yesterday

grievous bodily harman

There's only one thing rendering Harriet Harman dangerous, and that's the near certainty that Cameron's Cads will leave her deranged and divisive 'fairness' legislation precisely where it is once they get to power.

The Harriet Harman WUTS (Wishful Unthinking Tendency) are no longer to be feared for themselves and what they represent, their altered reality being as clearly on the way out as Free Market economics. But it is going to take one hell of a struggle to get this silly piece of legislation removed from the pages of any statute book it finally graces. This must be done in order to defend the real liberties of Britons (especially those who weren't born here and don't want to be housewives) but as any Hansard reader can tell you, getting things repealed is like losing weight: putting it on in the first place is far easier.

Ms Harman has a track record of leaving anger, bitter protest and simmering resentment in her wake. Memorably dismissed by Rupert Everett recently as 'a New Labour idiot', she and her ilk have created such about-to-boil-over organisations as Fathers4Justice and - as nby has warned several times since its foundation in 2003 - handed tens of thousands of votes to the BNP. These latter came home to roost in Henley Thursday night as Labour's candidate was beaten into fifth place by the Knuckle Draggers' Mr Timothy Rait.

A quarter of a century on from the fiasco of 1983, New Labour is revealed finally as the clone of Old Labour. Like Dolly the clone, New Labour has inbuilt genetic problems, the chief one of which is an absence of any real soul. But the most striking similarity between new and old is the deficiency in antennae. Be it Michael Foot's donkey jackets or Harriet Harman's anti-meritocratic nonsense, the Labour Party after Gaitskell's death has remained a club run by well-meaning middle class professionals completely out of touch with their electorate, and somehow naively immune to the virus called Real Life.

This condition is not restricted to what used to be called the Left. Throughout her Prime Ministership, Baroness Thatcher suffered from the same inability to understand that a good core idea could not necessarily be applied to everything and everyone. But the result of both socio-economic mantras for the British people in 2008 is the side-by-side existence of two antithetical views of the world, both of which are inapposite to (indeed,caused some of) our current problems.

The late 1960s social and sexual liberalism - and the feminism, Trade Union power pretensions, terror of giving offence and political correctness that followed - helped begin the process of vilifying authority figures and leaving them confused as to their role. The reaction to this was uncaring Thatcherism - a philosophy focused elsewehere and therefore happy to decide that the way to deal with the rootless folks thus created was to first ignore then, and then increase police powers to deal with them. In 1997, Blair ushered in a period of moving from passive ignorance of the problem to the pretence that there was no problem- and thus as there was no problem in Cool Britannia, we might as well give the country more of the ideas that didn't cause any problems.

So police powers had to be increased when the Unproblem got so bad, it became an issue. Ever since, New Labour has first denied there is a real problem (again) and then, as Brown's dour Kirk came onto the scene, blamed poverty and unfairness for its existence. The end of this blind alley now has Ms Harman, on a soapbox still, fighting social unfairness with statutory unfairness - and a Tory opposition in broad agreement about her aims, wrongly convinced as they are that this stuff 'plays well' in the focus groups. Of course it does: all the goody-goody ideas play well in focus groups.

This surreal cacophony - this manic, decreasing circle of idea, stunt, spin and long-discredited permissiveness - is nothing more than the sound of a thousand discordant trumpets trying to hide an insistent drum. But in private (when the incompetent musicians are off-stage) they look at one another in bewilderment and ask "How did this happen?" Unable to grasp why it's happened, they are also several galaxies away from understanding the breadth, depth and unpleasant nature of the urgent remedial strategies required.

Some people claim foresight now that past follies have produced contemporary near-anarchy, but I have to confess here and now I wasn't one of them. What I will award myself, however, is at least one mark out of ten for recognising my mistakes, and perhaps another mark for reading some of the data that makes the errors impossible to deny. It is on this scale that our current social, economic, cultural and political elite score minus thirty-seven. The Harmans, Hains, Browns and Straws of the previous soft Left remain unmoved by the mess they've helped create; the Establishment technocrats like Miliband, Purnell, Smith and Balls remain certain that it's about tactics not ideas; the bankers, economists and commercial captains scurry from one end of the historical solution-spectrum to another in search of a way to mend their broken model; and the media-junkey suits typified by Cameron and his Cads want nothing more than not being in Opposition any more.

The huge shift in values, wealth and lifestyle is coming. But awareness of this - and their abject failure to prepare UK citizens for it - is nowhere to be found in Westminster Village outside of a few Libdems - themselves also hopelessly disunited on a number of key issues. It is up to us now: the real people who are neither Nazis nor WUTS, neither tycoons nor benefit fraudsters. We need to find a Party that will represent us, and then change the electoral system that keeps these delusional polemicists in perpetual power.

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