Anyone who needs to know not only why the Labour Party is currently out of power but should remain so for the foreseeable future would be advised to study recent comments by its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman.
Ms Harman is, of course, famous for her obsessions with equality and man-bashing feminism.
But what she told her South London constituents at a meeting last week reveals something rather more fundamental. It demonstrates the total absence in the space between her ears of any grasp of right and wrong.
The meeting was apparently called to find ways to increase the flow of money from Britain to other nations through ‘remittances’ — money sent by people who have settled here to family members who remain in their home countries.
Ms Harman used this event to praise as ‘heroic’ immigrants who send money back home in this way — including those who claim welfare payments in Britain.
She added that the Government should make it easier for them to send the money home and called for tax refunds to encourage more immigrants to follow suit, in particular those who paid for their children to be educated in the Third World.
Many will find it hard to credit that even Ms Harman could have said something so absurd and objectionable.
For there is all the difference in the world between those immigrants who work and send money home to their families, and those who receive welfare benefits.
Those who work, often for low rates of pay and yet still manage to support their families in Africa, Asia or elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, are indeed behaving most commendably in helping to look after their own.
But those receiving welfare are in an entirely different situation. Such payments are intended to relieve their own poverty. So if welfare recipients can afford to give some of their income away like this, it might be thought that, far from amounting to no more than breadline subsistence, welfare benefits are rather too generous.
The more fundamental point, however, is that this is money provided for the hardship relief of people who are living in Britain and contributing to its economy. It is emphatically not provided for the relief of those abroad who have nothing whatever to do with Britain — except milk its coffers.
Ms Harman, however, does not appear to grasp the difference between earnings and welfare. Indeed, she praised foreign-born welfare recipients, along with people working for wages, as ‘hidden heroes of development through developing new policies on remittances’.
What an extraordinary thing to say! For she is trying to pretend that welfare payments to people living in Britain are in fact a branch of overseas aid.
But they are nothing of the kind. And it is outrageous to extol their diversion to prop up the needy abroad. For this is swindling the British taxpayer, who understands that this money is to be used to support the needy at home.
That indeed is what a ‘welfare state’ means. It is a compact between Britain’s government and those who reside in the country. The idea that it is to be used instead as a kind of global poor relief fund is utterly bizarre.
It would mean that people could come to Britain specifically to leech off Britain’s welfare state for the benefit of people who have absolutely no connection with Britain. This is clearly a preposterous negation of social justice.
Yet this is what Ms Harman is suggesting — that immigrants should be encouraged to come to Britain precisely so that they can act as a conduit for British taxpayers’ money to be funnelled to Africa and other Third World countries.
What an insult to the many immigrants who come to Britain to work hard and wouldn’t dream of being a drain on the public purse, let alone cheat the taxpayer (including immigrant taxpayers) in this way.
Yet to Ms Harman, such behaviour is ‘heroic’. What a debasement of the language and an evacuation of morality. True heroes sacrifice themselves out of a sense of duty towards their country. Ms Harman wants people to milk her country by abusing its sense of duty.
A country has an obligation towards those living within its shores over and above its requirement to assist people living elsewhere in the world. But for Ms Harman, this elementary moral code is reversed.
Indeed, the very idea of Britain giving priority to its own people strikes her as wrong.
For pledging to fight any proposed reduction in the overseas aid budget, she also derided ‘those who say we should look after our own first’ in the recession.
To which all one can say is heaven help Ms Harman’s husband, children or other relatives, since clearly she sees no reason to give any priority to her own kith and kin over the population of the planet.
Yet isn’t ‘looking after their own’ precisely what the immigrants she so lauds are themselves doing in sending money back home to their relatives? Or is it — as it so often is with the Left — once again a case of believing that the Third World can do no wrong while the West can do no right?
Many will be wondering how any politician can be quite so out to lunch. Of course Ms Harman has always taken positions which are as unjust as they are ridiculous.
Take, for example, her oppressive and destructive equality laws. Or her campaigns against marriage and the entire male sex, which she seems to regard as intrinsically violent and oppressive towards women (one always wondered whether her trade union leader husband Jack Dromey was sufficiently androgynous to meet his wife’s exacting feminist requirements).
Those who dismissed Ms Harman because she cut such an absurd figure were much mistaken — and not just because of her pernicious effect upon business, the traditional family and the male of the species.
For Ms Harman’s extremism is rooted in a wholesale and terrifying denial of justice and reality that characterises the progressive intelligentsia in general.
This is because the whole purpose of its political existence is to create the unattainable utopia of the brotherhood of man. Which is why the Labour Government of which Ms Harman was such an ornament subjected this country to unlimited immigration.
The result has been impossible pressure on the public services, destruction of the country’s identity and character, and widespread resentment.
But Ms Harman and her comrades are too high-minded to care about the little matter of what those whom they expect to vote for them actually think. And those who dare object are branded as racists or xenophobes.
It is typical of Labour politicians that the most privileged — Ms Harman was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and is the niece of Lady Longford — are the most divorced from reality.
Maybe through class guilt, it is the upper-middle-class Lefties who tend to combine fanatical adherence to some bonkers ideology or other with stupendous arrogance and contempt for the people, the nation and democracy itself.
With the Coalition Government embarking on a struggle to reduce the number of people on welfare, Ms Harman has shown that Labour is still hopelessly out of touch.
It was, after all, attitudes like this that caused Labour to all but destroy Britain. Ms Harman’s remarks remind us that if ever they were to be re-elected, they may be expected to finish the job.
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