at least the Budget is consistent

I've always thought The Jeremy Kyle Show far more intelligent than The Jerry Springer Show. People spectate at Springer for the same reason as they watch high-speed car racing, whereas Kyle's cameras are taken off a crash on his show until order is restored.

This morning, the audience was struck silent as Kyle opened an envelope which contained the results of a DNA test to settle the question of a child's paternity, disputed by a young man who didn't see any reason to be involved with the offspring of his former girlfriend. The test was positive, and the boy was without answers as to why he hadn't been there when, for example, his daughter had become ill and had almost died.

So what does this have to do with the Budget? The answer is contained in either one or two words, depending on who you think is governing Great Britain: (New) Labour.

Labour has long championed the case of families in "alternative" situations, for example single mothers, and there's nothing wrong with that. My Mum was widowed when I was seven, and I witnessed her fighting the darkness that can sometimes overpower somebody whose dreams have been snatched away from her.

But what socialist feminists have long said is that women don't need men, to the extent that Labour-run councils would prioritise young unmarried girls with babies for flats and houses on the grounds that the traditional family - ie Mum and Dad - was guilty of being oppressive and even abusive. Sometimes individual families were, but more often young, vulnerable girls with newborn babies would find themselves lonely, isolated and easy prey for the local nasty piece of stuff.

Just so, the Labour belief that people who earn a lot of money are thereby guilty of something as terrible as it is nebulous has resurfaced in Alistair Darling's budget, which has introduced a 50% tax on higher-earners for no discernible reason other than they earn a lot. There have been many examples of how such a policy is unworkable aired today, but, given that George Harrison's 1966 song Taxman (from the Beatles' album Revolver) is being played a lot today, I think it's best to heed what Harrison said about tax in a 1969 interview:

The British Government's policy seems to be, grab as much as you can now because maybe it's only gonna last another six months. I know personally for me, there's no point in me going out and doing a job, doing a show or doing a TV show or anything, you know...So, you know, why bother working? But if my tax is cut then I'd do four times as much work, I'd make four times as much money. They'd take less tax but they'd make more from me. But they cut their own throat. They do it all over the show, every place you look in Britain it's the same.

It seems strange to be revisiting the times when, as the Telegraph's Harry Wallop reports, we're looking at the prospect of people leaving Britain for less expensive shores.

Similarly, we are revisiting other times: earlier this month, a fellow appeared on Jeremy Kyle's show to ask, "How can I be the father of her child when I only slept with her once?" The eclipse of responsible sex education by the attractive, abusive lies of beourgeois left-wing ideologues is certainly making itself felt. It's like going back to the days of the Victorian horrors when rugged individualism was the Trojan horse for all sorts of unsupportable prejudices which targeted mainly the poor and, within the poor, mainly women.

I'm thinking right now of tonight's harrowing documentary on C4, Kimberley: Young Mum 10 Years On, where we revisit a girl who, in 1999, proclaimed herself "keen to avoid getting pregnant young like her mum and sister", struggling to keep her second child from being taken into the clutch of social services like the first, due in no small part to the actions of men. (I recommend her insistence that she will not abort her third child to anybody tempted to cynicism about the continuing action of goodness in the world.)

Just as New Labour and its fellow travellers arrogate to themselves the right to abolish a child's right to a father, they now seek to abolish any sort of comon-sense analysis of where the present financial crisis arose, because it leads not to a cloud of people rich enough to be subject to the 50% tax, but specifically to government ministers and their placemen in financial spheres.

If there's one thing I can say in Labour's favour, it's that they're being consistent: they've cut the Gordian knot of ties that bound many families together, broken the bonds of trust between people and the powers that be and, now, fled in fright to monetary policies that were Pyrrhic victories in the first place. I would refer Government MP's to Chapter 19 of The Time of My Life, the auobiography of former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey:

any substantial attempt to improve the lot of the poorest section of the population must now be at the expense of the average man and woman, since the very rich do not collectively earn enough to make much difference, and the average man [sic] does not nowadays want to punish those who who earn a little more than he, since he ultimately hopes to join them.

Healey is a much-needed intellectual within the Labour Party, an anecdote to the lazy, guilty rich whose attitude is summed up by the old saw, the working class/can kiss my ass/I've got the foreman's job at last.

On the Jeremy Kyle show, how would Gordon Brown fare in a confrontation between himself and a single mother struggling to bequeath a legacy to her child that amounted to more than the cold comfort of impermanent liaisons? Not very well, I think, because Kyle possesses something Brown has proved himself to lack - a moral compass.