Express
January 24, 2014
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Intent on creating a climate of misery Left-wingers paint Britain as a land scarred by mass poverty and penury. In his bleak New Year message Ed Miliband piled on the gloom, telling us that we face “the worst cost of living crisis in a generation” – a perennial theme of his ever since he became party leader.
Labour now seems addicted to pessimism. A quarter of a century ago the party was led by Jim Callaghan, universally known as Sunny Jim because of his cheery outlook.
Today we have Melancholy Ed spreading despondency wherever he goes.
His party has followed his example by wallowing in woe. “Over half a million people cannot afford food,” claimed one piece of Labour propaganda just before Christmas as if Britain was a famine-ravaged, war-torn place like Sudan rather than one of the wealthiest nations with a growing economy and a generous welfare state.
If Labour MPs believe their own language of doom then why do they think more than 500,000 immigrants want to settle here every year?
Some of Miliband’s frontbenchers are so consumed with despondency that they appear to want a ban on any expressions of bonhomie from Government ministers. When Treasury minister Danny Alexander dared to look cheerful during a visit to a food bank sour-faced Angela Eagle tweeted: “Why is Danny Alexander smiling? Is he proud that 350,000 people needed them this year?”
The Left, which once believed in the capacity of our society to progress, is now gripped by emotional blackmail and fake pity. The promise of hope has been replaced by the promotion of helplessness. “Britain isn’t eating,” claimed one ridiculous pre-Christmas poster from pressure group Church Action On Poverty.
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More than 13 million Britons are living in poverty, argues Oxfam, a figure that can be achieved only by adopting a definition of poverty so broad that it is meaningless.
In this world of gloom Leftwingers pretend that Britain is sliding back into a dark, Dickensian past. “Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” proclaims the headline on an article by privately educated Labour MP Tristram Hunt, who then managed to get in a sneer about Prime Minister David Cameron’s Eton education while wailing about “cold gruel” for the poor.
This relentless pessimism now runs through all the Left’s policies. Britain is portrayed as so weak that we could not survive outside the smothering embrace of the EU. If we tried to regain our independence from Brussels rule, goes the Left-wing argument, we would sink into economic decline, mass unemployment and the collapse of trade.
The same contempt for the British people and our national identity can be seen in the Left’s slavish devotion to mass immigration. Just like European integration, open borders are a counsel of unpatriotic despair. They represent an enfeebled belief that we can no longer make it on our own because our own workers are too lazy, too greedy, too unskilled, too stupid to maintain our economy, while our supposedly dull, narrow society cannot manage without the infusion of more exciting, more vibrant foreign cultures.
This is not only dispiriting, it is wrong-headed. The Labour Party has been peddling its message of doom ever since it lost the 2010 general election. Miliband and his allies warned that the coalition would be a complete disaster for Britain. The recession would deepen, debts would rise and dole queues would lengthen. Cuts would lead to rising crime and chaos in public services while welfare reform would shatter social cohesion.