Labour: Freedom Fighters?

It's interesting how two sides can view the same material emanating from Labour, isn't it?

Last week, Brendan O'Neill commented thus on their new manifesto packed with ways of dictating what working people freely choose to consume.

These proposals tell you pretty much everything you need to know about modern Labour. They reveal in Technicolor glory the party's killjoyism and its contempt for the public. They expose a party machine so cut off from everyday people, so very aloof from the man in the street, that it has come to view us as effectively overgrown children who must have chocolates and booze hidden from our view lest feel be tempted to gorge on them and become fat and tipsy in the process (heaven forfend). They show a party so utterly bereft of big ideas for how to kickstart the economy or reinvigorate industry that it now concerns itself with – drum roll – the fact that there are Mars bars next to the tills at Morrison's. I mean, really. Who has ever spied a Twix while waiting to pay for his groceries and thought to himself, "I wish the political parties would do something about this chocolately assault on my senses"? Answer: no one, ever.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, Owen Jones tells us that Labour are the party of freedom and light; the party of less government intrusion into our lives. No, really.

The authoritarian statists in No 10 have got away with dressing themselves up as freedom-loving champions of the individual for too long. The fight for personal freedom and liberty is a great historic cause, but it now falls to the left to take it up.

Well, it would be nice if Labour were ever to take up Owen's challenge by actually reading letters from vapers about e-cigs instead of their enforcer ramming unwarranted regulations through Brussels; by obeying the concerned public about plain packaging; by not "empowering people" by taking away choices and punishing the poor with minimum alcohol pricing. In short, by not being such aloof, deaf, snobby, authoritarian, disconnected toffs.

I'm still waiting for someone in politics - anyone in politics - to actually talk about freedom properly instead of arguing about which party is the best at stopping us eating chocolate.

So all this left/right guff is pretty irrelevant.

I'd say, though, that Jones is wildly deluded if he really thinks that his lot are the freedom fighters in the 21st century. I'm old enough to remember Harold Wilson talking about such things, but even he - the disgusting pipe smoker, he - would now be a legitimate target for 'denormalisation' by Jones's bunch of screaming prohibitionists.

He does have one tiny point, though. That being that the incumbents are not distinguishably any better, otherwise his article would be so laughable that Harry Hill would be making a show out of it.

Three parties; one goal. To screw the public as much as possible. Bet you simply can't wait till that glittering choice on May 22nd, eh?

H/T Mudgie