Earlier this morning I picked up a Guardian article on my mobile that said Jeremy Corbyn wanted a legal cap on earnings. Later, when I checked in, this seems to have changed to a cap on earnings for government contractors.
Well, of course, if the government is tendering for work, then it can set whatever conditions it wishes as the buyer, so nothing to see here, however, it seems that my early morning peek at the news wasn’t a hallucination after all.
Jeremy Corbyn has humiliatingly ditched an ‘idiotic’ plan for a national wage cap just hours after he proposed it.
The Labour leader said this morning that he supported a legal ‘maximum earnings limit’ as he slammed salaries for footballers and fatcats in the City.
But the veteran left-winger immediately faced calls to set an example by slashing his own pay – which is thought to total around £190,000 a year.
Even his own former economic adviser David Blanchflower weighed in to condemn the ‘lunatic idea’, dismissing it as completely unworkable.
In a speech this afternoon, Mr Corbyn backtracked by insisting he was not seeking to impose an across the board cap. Instead, he suggested that executives at companies with government contracts could be limited to earning 20 times their most junior staff – around £350,000 a year.
Ah, right. I suspect that we were right the first time around after all, interfering in what people earn is right up there along with “social justice” and other idiocies that the far left seem to like, despite the real world getting in the way.When it comes to leftist lunacies, this one’s a peach. Let’s be clear here, it is none of the state’s business what anyone earns. The state has no place deciding what is right regarding earnings and the relationship between the employer and the employed regarding remuneration. After all, we have seen where this ends up, haven’t we? The socialist paradise of Cuba where the highly skilled were forced to accept what amounted to poverty wages because that vile murderous creature Castro and his evil regime decided that they, not the employer, should decide what people earn. However, even those nasty scumbags were forced to accept that it was a piss-poor idea. Such regimes are monstrous. The very idea is monstrous. Socialism is evil, so let’s have a big hand for Jezza for reminding us. And, long may he remain as Labour leader and long may he bimble along making an arse of himself and his party.
Mr Corbyn was widely criticised for his glowing tribute to Fidel Castro when the former Cuban dictator died last year.
This morning he signalled his determination to emulate one of the regime’s policies, saying he wanted a legal limit on how much people could earn.
‘I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap, quite honestly,’ he said.
Mr Corbyn declined to say exactly how the mechanism would work, and repeatedly refused to give a level at which it might be set. But he indicated that it would hit the wider private sector, including football players.
‘I would like to see a maximum earnings limit, quite honestly, because I think that would be a fairer thing to do,’ he said.
‘We have to be something that is more egalitarian, gives real opportunities to everybody and properly funds our public services. Look at the crisis in the NHS as an example.’
Tempting though it is, to rule him out as an idiot; given this desire to emulate Cuba, he is evil. Let us never forget that.
Well given the State taxes and spends virtually half the economy, there’s not going to be many large companies that don’t have a contract of some sort with the State. I’d like to see what would happen when (say) GlaxoSmithKline tell the NHS to go f*ck itself, and refuse to sell them drugs because they would have to impose a salary cap on its employees. Or the power company supplying the Houses of Parliament cuts them off and no-one will supply electric for similar reasons. Or the banks withdraw banking facilities from State bodies.
There would be plenty of other pharma companies willing to sell to the NHS and if they tried to be awkward about it they could be threatened with nationalisation. Power companies should be nationalised anyway as they form part of essential national infrastructure. As for banks, given the amount of money the government has already given them they ought to be nationalised anyway.
Singling out football players is rather foolish, given that a Premier League player’s high earning potential rarely lasts more than ten years.
Quite apart from the fact that a person’s earnings are no business of the State (apart from taxation), there is also the fact that this particular idea is on the far side of idiotic for a Labour politician to utter.
Labour, you see, has a few remaining business backers, these mostly being rich people who for whatever reason like Labour; it is also backed by assorted celebrities and BBC luvvies and the like. All of these likely backers earn salaries that sound ludicrously high to mere mortals such as myself (unrepentant Tory voter that I am).
The bulk of Corbyn’s supporters and the ones who got him elected are at the other end of the scale. They earn peanuts, indeed many are utterly dependent on State charity for their income. Fifty thousand pounds sounds an incredible, unattainable salary for scum such as these.
Set the maximum wage cap according to what the Hard of Thinking Corbynistas think is enough, and 80% of southerners and 100% of Labour backers will be hit by the cap.
Set the maximum wage cap to what the Labour backers think is obscene and the Corbynistas will think Corbyn a Tory shill and desert him.
This leaves Corbyn with a choice: annoy backers and defeat is assured, or annoy supporters and once again assure himself of defeat. It speaks volumes of this man that he could not think far enough ahead to see what a truly idiotically crap idea this is.
Scum???? The only scum are the people that think anyone that needs state help to survive are scum. That means you!
Got it in one Dan H.
Corbyn is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s a perfect example of how barking mad the Left really are