Thank you darling

The creepy looking CoE Alistair Darling puked some froth up for his Mansion House Speech about pay restraint. It was a wildly contradictory speech. The basic message seemed to be that unions should not get pay rises because that would only make their members worse off.

"Continued restraint on pay is required from both the public and private sector. We must recognise the need to reward efforts of people who work hard. But to return now to inflationary pay settlements would undermine rather than raise people's living standards with a damaging circle of wage increases eroded by steadily rising prices. We must never return to those days."
Mr Darling rejected suggestions that the UK was heading for a 1970s-style period of stagflation, with stagnant growth and spiralling inflation fuelled by large pay increases.

The key point here is that a 'damaging circle' would 'materialise' (like it's not already here) if the little people got more money because then, prices would go up (because the bosses, er, want to keep their profit margins high). So instead prices will rise ('. . . "today's turbulence is caused by international pressures from oil and food prices, being felt by every economy in the world", he said.') and workers will have their living standards undermined - that can be the only inference from the drivel he was coming out with. Sure, as I argue below, poverty is ok so long as it's not a debilitating poverty and an equitable one, but Darling's approach is one guaranteed to continue the social conflict already bubbling along at the moment. His preaching is aimed at the public sector workers mainly and not at the slobbering snouts he was talking to, who will enjoy massive bonuses and huge pay rises. Perhaps he is a deep revolutionary mole sent into the system to bring about its violent demise by exposing capitalism's insoluble contradictions in terrible speeches like this. Wanker.