Tom Harris doing something funny for money
Tom Harris, profiled in the Sunday Times:
“Families live their whole lives on benefits and that is wrong, morally wrong,” he says. “We should be making these value judgments. This is a problem damaging the whole country and hobbling our economic system. I remember scoffing when John Major said we should understand a bit less and condemn a bit more, but he was right.”
I have changed my mind about Tom Harris and my current theory is that he is actually carrying out this unprovoked attack on his own reputation for charity as part of Comic Relief's "Do something funny for money".
He started off by trying to pass off decades old generic right-wing dogma about "welfare dependency" as his new and brave idea, and got a Mail on Sunday column on the back of that. Weeks later, he still hasn't come up with a single policy proposal for tackling the problem of teenage pregnancy, but instead is quoting John Major approvingly in the Sunday Times and taking swipes at the 'poverty industry'.
I hope all this is for charity, anyway. It's pretty tragic if he actually believes that John Major was right and that the key to reducing teenage pregnancy is to 'understand a bit less'.
posted by donpaskini @ 12:49 am
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Every move and utterance he's now making does suggest he's tryingto create his own exit from the Labour party, straight to the Tories. The clever bit is the way he's trying to engineer his exit as having been cause by the 'PC idiots' on the left intent on getting rid of him and his good common sense, and that his only option is to, with integrity, leave the party.. Why else would he overtly approve of Major, why else mention his early SPD credentials?
The other possibility is simply that he's trying to re-enter journalism after the next election, as a Daily Mail columnist. In a funny sort of way, you've got to admire the tactics - shame about the people he's assaulting along the way, but I suppose he'll see that as legitimate collateral damage.
Or it might be for chariddee.
I've decided it's best to ignore him, in the same way as I ignore Daily Mail columnists.
He's been fairly strident in opposing Tory policy on air travel, even from a position of indepedence after he became a backbencher. I don't think he's likely to go to the Tories.
I've taken first his blog off my rss reader and now stopped following his twitter updates too; I don't think I'll miss out on much.
I think it's possible he's given up on trying to help Labour win the next election, assuming they'll be a power vacuum and wondering if he with Frank Field & Kate Hoey can form a new wing of the party. I think there's no chance - that current of thought just isn't big enough, but he may think otherwise.
there'll not they'll
I worked for 28 years then had an accident at work which kept me in hospitals for eighteen months.
I've done everything Labour has asked me to do and boy did they ask me, I did the survey which Labour spouts about saying 90% of people say they want to work, well thats all you could say the questions were rigged.
But way before the New Deal or the Pathways or the workfare I had been looking for work, most employers are looking for educated disabled people, then they look for the people with the least disability, then along I come with my legs in bits, my kidneys and liver damaged , bags attached to my legs to hold my urine and my well you know. I have a small pump fitted under my skin which gives me a dose of morphine each two hours, I also have a wife who is trained to give me injections and also trained to give me large doses of other opiates.
SO to be fair I'm in a mess, but it's nothing to some of the people I see daily, but what do people want me to do, I cannot do a job, but would love to work, who ever takes me on with employment is talking on a massive problem, I need help to do everything from feeding myself to washing myself to going to the toilet to cleaning my nose know any employers willing to do these things if so let me know.
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