Free Market Football

The Fabian Society has released the results of a survey that they commissioned on what British people considered a ‘reasonable’ wage for certain professions.

The YouGov run poll of three thousand people demonstrated that the public thought footballers’ and company directors’ salaries should be radically curbed while nurses and bus drivers deserved far greater financial rewards.

I think the survey’s findings do ring true. Many people in Britain are indeed resentful of those that earn much more than them – though arguably that is only natural human behaviour. However, I do wonder how many of those questioned in the survey go to watch football matches week-in, week-out and therefore provide the demand and ticket revenue that supply the footballer’s wages? Quite a few I would imagine.

The Fabian Society’s spokesman, Tom Hampson, said ‘Progressive politics should acknowledge that the public want the unfair gap between rich and poor narrowed’. In other words, the Fabian Society believes the Government should directly intervene even further into private sector wages to curb ‘excessive’ earnings.

This is, of course, just the Left-wing socialist equality agenda of old dressed up in the new Progressive agenda clothing - the Progressive agenda being the supposedly forward-looking, always improving doctrine of modern politics rather than anyone not agreeing with that world-view who must instead be a backwards looking ‘regressive’.

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Goodbye Global Warming

Only a few weeks ago, the Met Office, an organisation not particularly well known for their ability to accurately predict next week’s weather let alone that of the next decade or century, claimed that temperatures are set to rise by 2014.

Unsurprisingly, for organisations that already firmly believe in the politicised pseudoscience theory of global warming and wish to present evidence to justify their beliefs, it’s not really all that difficult to do.

First you select the outcome you desire – in this case higher mean temperatures in the next couple of decades. Next you take your data (usually carefully hand picked or manipulated in some specific way) and then adjust the output graphs until you obtain your end-goal result – ie. predictions that ‘prove’ temperatures will rise, and thus global warming ‘must’ be happening. Simple.

Gordon Brown in his tenure as Chancellor used similar methods to forecast and present favourable economic growth. The most valued statisticians at the Treasury were those that, regardless of the data, managed to fiddle around with economic models and arrive at the ‘best’ figures – usually 2.5% growth or more.

However, what’s really interesting about the Met Office report is highlighted in an online article by the Guardian. It says the forecast reveals ‘natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009, but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily’.

So, what exactly does that mean? Well, it’s basically saying that the climate will cool slightly due to ‘natural variations’, meaning that any evidence of rises in temperature caused by us humans will be cancelled out – but that despite this, global warming still exists. How convenient.

For the next few years the global warming pseudoscientists will have no basis for their claims and it’ll all be a matter of blind belief – it’s just that they’re getting their excuses in early.

Redwood Economic Proposals

John Redwood’s policy review on economic competitiveness has now been officially released today. The report recommends that the Conservative party pledge to cut £14bn worth of red tape.

Naturally Labour, with ample help from their colleagues at the BBC have heavily criticised these proposals as ‘a lurch to the right’ – but then they would, wouldn’t they.

The proposals in Mr Redwood’s report suggest that corporation tax should be cut to 25p, that taxes including capital gains should be reformed, and that many EU laws should be unilaterally dis-applied in the UK. The BBC license fee, which Mr Redwood described as an unnecessary ‘poll tax’, also came in for criticism.

The policy review report was broadly welcomed this morning by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor – but crucially not endorsed yet.

Much like the previous Iain Duncan Smith policy review on Social Justice, David Cameron does not have to endorse any of its findings or introduce them as party policy. Therefore, as seems to be the case, if the Conservative leadership are just going to ignore the vast majority of the proposals made by their own policy review groups, exactly what purpose do they serve?