Why on earth was Louise Haigh, whose hair colour is a clear clue to her politics, allowed by Starmer to swan around among some of the great financial entrepreneurs of the globe at Labour’s much vaunted summit?
Let’s just look at her CV and compare it with, say, the boss of Goldmans Sachs. First of all, Haigh almost single-handedly blows up the jamboree by attacking P&0 while their owners, DP World, were planning a £1 billion investment into the UK.
So bad was her outburst that Starmer had to ‘’disassociate’’ the government from her. Not bad enough it seems to kick her off the team. Actually, he’s very Left. More Harold Wilson than Tony Blair.
Haigh’s background should have made her totally inappropriate to be in the same room with these people, either intellectually or financially. As an MP, for instance, she endorsed Jeremy Corbyn for leader, a man so balmy that he isn’t even in the Labour Party anymore.
As an ex-Unite shop steward, you would have thought she would be kept away from the levers of power by Starmer. Not a bit of it. While Secretary State for Transport, she takes our money and gives huge dollops of it to bullying train drivers, taking their pay to £93,000 for a four-day week.
In commercial life, she would have been sacked for using other people’s money on such an undeserving group.
But in Labour’s world, she would have gone up a notch. And knowing the way Lefties think, I imagine she would have been an even bigger heroine for her swipe at P.O. Although it has to be said she wouldn’t have taken the poke at P&O unless it was cleared by No.10.
The problem for Labour is they are trying to square a circle. They want us all to be sitting at home enjoying family life on a one-day week with minimum pay of £75,00-a-year and a subsidised council flat costing £300 a month.
That money has to come from somewhere. And they have two targets in mind. One is business, which is still recovering from minimum pay going to £11.44 an hour and the other is the middle classes.
So, an increase in the employers’ side of National Insurance is nailed on (netting an incredible £17 billion) and the other is any family who has taken a risk and invested in another flat/ house stocks and shares.
It is quite clear from a well-sourced story in the Guardian the other day that capital gains tax is going up to a minimum of 33 per cent. That will blow growth right out the window.
Who on earth is going to take a risk when the downside is enormous and if you do happen to strike it rich, 33 per cent of it will go to the government?
I must say I feel enormously gloomy about the UK right now. There was huge incompetence under the Tories but under Labour, I feel they hate the ambitious middle classes. They want them to fail. Or work for a state industry. Or, looking at the railways, a mixture of both.
Still, the direction of this government is Left so one day you might find Louise Haigh running the country. God help us all.
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