Socialist lexi-con trick

All politicians are good at verbal legerdemain – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be politicians.

But socialists are infinitely better at it because they have no scruples about combining the gift of the gab with brazen mendacity. They not only come up with slogans but are capable of turning even a single word into one.

Having taken ownership of spurious neologisms, they then turn them into weapons in their quest for power. In my book How the West Was Lost, I referred to this stratagem as ‘glossocracy’.

One such word is ‘equality’, which, after a series of intermediate steps, in reality gets to mean ‘bigger and more powerful government lording it over a smaller and less powerful individual’. After all, people aren’t really created equal in any other than the theological sense.

In the material world, inequalities of personal traits and qualities are bound to produce inequalities of wealth and status. These can only ever be negated by coercion, of the kind that only the central state is strong enough to apply. The closer we wish to get to the egalitarian ideal, the bigger and stronger therefore the state has to be.

Since the word ‘equality’ seems to imply something else entirely, it’s nothing but a glossocratic tool, wielded by all British parties, including the Tories. Thus we have a Levelling Up Department, which, though founded in 2006 by Blair, has survived under all the subsequent Tory administrations.

Another glossocratic misnomer beloved of socialists is the word ‘work’ and all its derivatives. “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,” was how Marx and Engels put it to criminal use in their Communist Manifesto.

To them and their gang the word ‘worker’ thus meant strictly a manual labourer in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The poor chap was oppressed, not to say enslaved, by ‘capitalists’ (another glossocratic term, by the way) and toiled round the clock for miserly pay.

You might object that a worker is anyone who exchanges his labour for a living, regardless of what kind of labour he does. It may indeed be manual, but it just as well may be mental or even, God forbid, creative. A scientist who never leaves his lab even on weekends works hard for his crust, as does a clichéd poet scribbling his verses throughout the night in his garret.

If you do proffer this objection, you miss the point. You are trying to use English, not glossocratic. True, your definition of a worker is correct as far as the English language is concerned. But we’re talking about the glossocratic language here, and there this word can’t deviate too far from Marx’s definition.

This little preamble explains the confusion Sir Keir Starmer caused by using the related term ‘working people’. Once his Labour Party is ensconced in power, it’ll never raise taxes on ‘working people’ – such is Starmer’s mantra, and it’s echoed in every pronouncement by his socialist colleagues and even his party’s manifesto.

Since anyone capable of doing elementary sums knows that Labour’s commitment to higher spending is impossible even to approach without tax rises, Sir Keir was taken to task by his normally sympathetic interviewers at LBC.

“What, or rather, whom do you mean by ‘working people’, Sir Keir?” they asked, or words to that effect. That was a signal that the marks were ready to fall for the lexi-con.

“When I say working people,” explained our future PM, “it is people who earn their living, rely on our services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble.”

In other words, he means people in employment who have less than £1,000 in savings, which is considered the minimum nest egg to handle contingencies. Such people add up to about a third of the working population. This means that at least two-thirds of Britain’s working households don’t qualify as ‘working people’, as far as socialist lexi-con artists are concerned.

The remaining third are people who have no savings, that goes without saying. But neither do they have overdrafts and credit cards to be used as umbrellas on a rainy day. That number, I’d suggest, has to be much smaller than even a third of the population.

(I go by the crowds of people who max out their overdrafts and credit cards for frivolous reasons, such as going on an expensive holiday. Surely they could do the same to save Grandma’s life or pay for Grandpa’s operation? Provided, of course, that the horrendous NHS waiting lists preclude a ‘free’ option.)

That means that at least two-thirds, and in reality probably more, of the working people should brace themselves for vast tax increases.

These can come in the shape of higher council taxes, levies on homeowners and motorists, lower thresholds and higher rates of inheritance tax, taxes on parents who scrape pennies together to give their children a half-decent education, definitely wealth taxes and much higher corporate taxes.

Jeremy Corbyn, whose leadership of the Labour party was passionately supported by Sir Keir, once promised to “squeeze the rich until the pips squeak”. This is exactly what his disloyal friend and disciple is planning to do – and ‘the rich’ is of course another glossocratic con.

Socialists define ‘the rich’ as loosely and self-servingly as they define ‘workers’. Anyone is rich to them who works hard to salt away a few pennies, to own his house (however modest), to send his children to a school that doesn’t confuse education with brainwashing, perhaps even to bequeath an estate to the next generation to give it a better start in life.

Such people keep the economy ticking over, and they are to be clobbered for that. And, if the current polls are any indication, they have only themselves to blame. They should see through the socialist lexi-con and refuse to fall for it at the ballot box.

“The Tory Party is a party of high tax,” sneer Labour spokesmen, and unfortunately they are right. However, the implication is that the incoming socialist government will lower the tax burden, which is a cynical lie. Or a lexi-con, if you’d rather.