by
Les May
I have
frequently expressed my distaste for ‘identity
politics’ which has
been so enthusiastically embraced by those who like to style
themselves as being ‘of
the left’, but
now it seems that this way of thinking may be coming back to bite
them with a vengeance and ultimately harm Labour’s attempt to be
seen as ‘speaking for
the many not the billionaires’.
The
day the comment was made I watched someone who
in their TV appearances comes over as being a candidate for A. A.
Milne’s prose ‘For
I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me’,
sagely tell us that being a billionaire was just the reward for being
‘hard
working’.
Now
as it happens I know a lot of people who are ‘hard
working’.
Some of them work for other people, including billionaires, and
others run their own small business. Some of these are ‘doing
quite nicely thank you’,
but I can say with complete certainty that hard work alone does not
turn you into a billionaire.
Someone
on the National Minimum wage of £8.21p per hour would have to work
121,802,679
hours
which is 2,030,044, 60 hour weeks taking 39,039 years! No, there’s
not much chance of you becoming a billionaire through hard work
alone. If
you were a £100k a year man or woman it would still take you 10,000
years.
But
today after we
had heard the old chestnut of ‘the
politics
of envy’
we
had a new one,
singling
out
billionaires is ‘identity
politics’.
I’m
not sure how far that one will run, but you never know. Who would
have ever thought that anyone would take seriously the idea that if
you were
a man with a full set of wedding tackle and announced
you
were now ‘transgender’ you
should be allowed to serve your sentence in a women’s prison?
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