It has been suggested that women who were delighted that we have our first ever female Chancellor are now up in arms about the pig’s ear she’s making of it. Who are these strange women who ever supported Rachel Reeves? I’m delighted when a female politician makes it on merit, but not when it’s merely ticking the diversity box. No one in their right mind from the word go thought that Reeves would cut it as Chancellor and as tales of accepting freebie clothing, lying on CVs and incompetence emerged it was quite clear she was completely out of her depth.
This is a woman who proclaimed her first priority was growth and then promptly put a tax on jobs. Inevitably, there are now fewer of them. A five-year-old child could have predicted that. Nor is she any good at politics. The removal of the winter fuel allowance was a totally unnecessary and self-inflicted wound and I still completely fail to understand why she did it in the first place.
There’s been some guff about taking “tough decisions” to reassure the markets she wasn’t a wuss, but a tough decision would have been to face down the junior doctors rather than targeting the vulnerable. She managed to come across as both callous and utterly politically inept – quite the double act.
Not that the others are any better. Angela Rayner is driven by class envy and not content with lobbying for higher taxation and higher public spending has now decided it would be a great idea to decriminalise sleeping rough.
There was a reason that legislation was in place, love, and it wasn’t to grind the faces of the poor into the ground, as she seems to believe. It was simply to maintain civil order.
My mother was one of the nicest women who ever lived but when beggars bedded down at the end of the street where my parents lived, her sympathy soon evaporated. They had options, but they always appeared when it rained, she pointed out (they lived in Manchester, so that was often), with theatrically bare feet.
And she was absolutely right, as proven when one of them unsuccessfully tried to mug her. Is that what Ange wants for the rest of us all?
Meanwhile in London, we have gangs from Eastern Europe setting up camps in Hyde Park and while this might seem a problem just for the capital, it isn’t. They frighten visitors, which discourages the tourism that pours a great deal into this country’s coffers. Well done, Ange.
I cannot think of a single capable female Labour politician but we shouldn’t be surprised: this is the party that produced Harriet Harman. Remember her?
Harman is the one who supported PIE, aka the Paedophile Information Exchange, back in the 1970s, an endeavour in which she was supported by her husband Jack Dromey. People have bleated that it was a very “liberal” time, but here’s the thing. The clue is in the word “paedophile”.
There are no circumstances in which it is acceptable to back a group which promotes sex with children. I recall one of their slogans, and sorry about what I’m going to write here, but it’s what these people said. “Sex before eight, before it’s too late.” Those are the people Harman backed but later admitted regret for that decision. She also wrote a pamphlet about women in politics which failed to mention Margaret Thatcher, one of our greatest ever PMs, by name.
No wonder Labour has a problem with the women in its ranks. Admittedly the Tories haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory with their two post-Thatcher female leaders, but at least most of them understand that if you tax jobs, there are going to be fewer of them.
I also personally know a few female Tory MPs who really are made of the right stuff. Bring them on. It can’t happen soon enough.