Guest Post - Christian May
Having mentioned Laurie Penny earlier today, it seems she annoys someone else too:
LabourList
came about as part of an attempt to counter the growing success and influence of ConservativeHome
. However, whereas the latter hosts serious policy discussions and conducts interesting research, the former has simply become a forum for disgruntled left-wingers to rant and moan. One article in particular sums up this approach.Laurie Penny
Every Family Matters
" report from the superb Centre for Social Justice
. By way of introducing Penny, let's look at her LabourList biography
: "Likes include: boots, books, fags, tea, socialist feminism. Dislikes include: bigotry, green peppers, people who think short people are funny." I don't know Penny's height, but I do get a chuckle out of seeing Hazel Blears behind a podium.Her article has the catchy headline: Undermining reproductive freedoms, sellotaping together unhappy couples and bribery - the Tory agenda for Happy Families, and it pretty much sets the tone for the rest of her rant. It’s littered with clever little phrases like “Torygeddon” and “evilly recalcitrant plans.” Honestly, you’d think we Conservatives were planning to slaughter the first born. (Mind you, this is the level of rhetoric and debate that we’ve come to expect from a dying Labour movement).
Let’s deal with some of the specifics in her “article” for a moment. Apparently, Conservatives want to see ‘men in the office, women in the kitchen.’ Not sure where she got this one from, but it just shows her out of date and out of touch she is. Moving on, we learn that “Cameron and his cronies simply do not LIKE women who live independent lives, or single parents, or gay people, or people with alternative notions of what a free and happy family constitutes." Is she referring to the same ‘cronies’ that support same sex marriage, favour equality and have today announced plans to make it easier for people to care for disabled relatives? It would appear so.
There’s absolutely no depth or focus to her rant. It’s just a collection of student union style debating points. Here’s my absolute favourite: Referring to the planned tax break for married couples, she says “that kind of logic is cargo-cultism, and it’s lazy, and it’s stupid, and it won’t work because it’s stupid.” In other words, “Toreez smell and I don’t like them because they’re smelly and they smell.” I think Penny should grow up. Her views are out of date, unhelpful and riddled with inverted snobbery.
The Centre for Social Justice has come up with more proposals for helping the worse off than a decade of Labour government has managed. The left simply don’t like the fact that the problems that they’ve claimed as “their own” (unemployment, deprivation, youth crime etc) are in fact best tackled with conservative policies, as opposed to quangos, targets, officers and committees.
Penny concludes that she doesn’t want live in a country run by Conservatives. Who is going to miss her?
Ed: On your bike love.
Posts
