Audience Rejects Labour MP View of Lord Freud at Newbury QT

[Teddy Bear]

No doubt the Question Time producer must have been shocked at the audience reaction last Thursday evening after the question was put to the panel on whether Lord Freud should resign following his recent comments which have been twisted as if to say that he thought all disabled people weren't worth the minimum wage. You can read what happened below, or watch it again via the link above.

Worth examining the left wing mindset in this example as it shows they never consider the rights or wrongs of their case, simply whether it conforms to their particular narrative. Any view that shows where it doesn't work in all case are labelled as racist, or Islamophobe, or deniers, or whatever word besmirches or dismisses the other view so they don't have to find and bring logic and reason into the argument.

It is the defense mechanism of the insecure or inferior mind.

'It's point scoring': Labour faces backlash for demanding disabled row minister Lord Freud is sacked

• Shadow Cabinet minister Angela Eagle appeared on BBC Question Time
• Audience turned on her after she demanded resignation of Lord Freud
• Welfare minister was recorded speaking at Conservative Party Conference
• Suggested some disabled workers ‘not worth’ the £6.50 minimum wage
• Miss Eagle insisted peer had been 'offensive' in last month's remarks

By James Chapman and Christian Gysin for the Daily Mail

Labour and disability charities are facing a growing public backlash for making a ‘disgusting spectacle’ of remarks by a Government minister about minimum pay for disabled workers.

Shadow Cabinet minister Angela Eagle looked shocked as a BBC Question Time audience turned on her when she demanded that welfare reform minister Lord Freud should resign or be sacked.

She insisted the peer had been ‘offensive’ in remarks secretly recorded by a Labour official at a fringe meeting of last month’s Conservative Party conference.

Lord Freud was responding to a councillor with a severely disabled daughter who suggested that people with mental health problems may be unable to work because employers are unwilling to pay them the statutory minimum.

Lord Freud suggested that some disabled workers were seen as ‘not worth’ the £6.50 minimum wage and mused on whether the Government might be able to top up their wages to enable more to get into workplaces.

Labour leader Ed Miliband ambushed David Cameron with a transcript of the recording at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, also insisting the minister should be sacked.

He has remained in his job after apologising, but Miss Eagle insisted on Thursday night: ‘I do think he should resign. I think what he said… has caused a great deal of offence to disabled people.

‘There are 50 per cent of people with disabilities who are not in work at the moment. The answer to that isn’t to somehow weaken the minimum wage and make them work for less than the minimum wage.’

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said on the programme it was clear Lord Freud had been talking about the state ‘topping up’ the incomes of disabled people.

One audience member agreed: ‘I think Angela Eagle is being extremely disingenuous. I think we all knew what he meant, even though he said it clumsily.’

Another person in the audience in Newbury, Berkshire, told Miss Eagle: ‘What you are doing is hypocritical point scoring and it’s disgusting.’

A young woman said: ‘I just wanted to see whether you [Eagle] would use this as a political football and you have done – thanks Angela.’

Yesterday a Conservative MP also defended Lord Freud, insisting that the minimum wage was having a detrimental impact on disabled people’s chances of finding work.

Jackie Doyle-Price, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, said the way Lord Freud’s remarks had been twisted by Labour and parts of the charitable sector was ‘frankly disgusting’.

It emerged the charity Mencap, which has led criticism of Lord Freud, itself warned an estimated 1,000 people with severe learning disabilities had part-time jobs or had their working hours cut as a direct result of the national minimum wage.

In 2000, it called for an urgent revision of the rules to enable ‘low output work’ to be exempted from the rules. It now says the system to support disabled people into work has been transformed in the last 15 years and debate has moved on, ‘as has our position’.

Conservative MP Henry Smith said: ‘Certain charities have seemed quick to make political attacks on what is a very serious and complex issue. Charities should not be acting as mouthpieces for Labour’s political point scoring.’

Former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was badly disabled in the Brighton bomb, said the attacks on Lord Freud were a ‘disgusting spectacle’.

‘What Lord Freud was being asked about was whether there are handicapped people who cannot produce enough to justify in purely economic terms a wage of £6 an hour. My wife was capable of earning her pay as an experienced nurse until the sadistic criminals of IRA/Sinn Fein crippled her. She is worth no less today, but she could not justify a pay rate of £6 an hour. Lord Freud was mulling over how to help such people.’

PARTY'S HYPOCRISY EXPOSED

Labour's Department for Trade and Industry published guidance in 2003 on when and where it might be acceptable to pay disabled people far less than the minimum wage.

The department, then run by Patricia Hewitt, said the minimum wage applied to all workers – able-bodied or disabled.

However, disabled people could be exempted from the minimum wage when they did work-related activity for therapeutic reasons, with no contractual obligation to work.

The guidance gave various examples of when that could apply, after the Government consulted with organisations including Scope, Mencap and the TUC.

It gave the example of a farm where people develop social skills through involvement in agriculture, horticulture, caring for animals and training.

Other examples included a charity running a workshop for people with mental health problems, which it suggested, could pay them as little as £4 per day.

A third example was a trust running a facility for mental health outpatients which does activities such as packing and assembly. They could be paid varying amounts up to just £20 per week.

[Teddy Bear]

I see Ed West at the Spectator has come to a similar conclusion about this mindset.

Where did the BBC find last night's Question Time audience? They were so sensible
Ed West

When I first learned about Athenian democracy as a teenager I was baffled that they could have decided government positions by lottery; what was to stop someone totally unsuitable and useless from ending up in control? But then I look at the current Labour front bench and think, how bad could it be?

I’m thinking in particular of Shadow Leader of the House Angela Eagle, whose performance on Question Time last night was a perfect illustration of how low the tone of so much political debate is – especially that involving manufactured outrage.

The outrage in question was over Lord Freud’s comments about the disabled and the minimum wage, which Labour cooked up in an attempt to make their opponents look like the nasty party. Freud had merely answered a question from a man who had a disabled family member who was unable to find work at the minimum wage. Would it not be sensible therefore, he asked Freud, to allow firms to pay less and have the government top up the difference; as is done in numerous countries and which disability campaigners have called for in the past. Freud said he’d think about ways to increase the number of disabled people in work, because some are ‘not worth the full [minimum] wage’.

Out of this Ed Miliband managed to cook up some totally artificial anger and the Conservatives, with the moral cowardice that is their trademark, apologised rather than telling Miliband to grow up and try dealing with the world how it is, not how it should be.

Manufactured outrage is not a joke. Since the totalitarian-lite ideology of political correctness was born on American campuses after the Second World War it’s been used to snuff out unpopular ideas and legitimate lines of scientific inquiry; it’s a sub-rational style of argument that has no more place in a mature democracy than flag-waving ultra-nationalism or religious fundamentalism. Indeed it appeals to the same emotional parts of the brain. As I wrote in today’s Express:

‘It makes Question Time unwatchable because rational arguments are drowned out by indignant, reason-free protests on behalf of this or that disadvantaged group.’

If I were a producer for the programme I’d have any politician who tried the outrage card sent off to a corner for ten minutes with a can of Coke and some crisps while the grown-ups did the talking. Many politicians are wont to play the card, although Labour MP Emily Thornberry in particular stands out for her use of it, her response to the debate on marriage tax breaks being along the lines of ‘as a child of a hard-working single parent I’m offended by this’, as if that were a winning argument against the vast data on the beneficial effect of being brought up by married parents on childhood outcomes.

Anyway, it the reaction to this that made last night’s episode of Question Time so pleasing. Eagle tried to make everyone feel outraged, but instead the audience turned against her, accusing the MP of distorting Freud’s words for party political gain; it was like watching the crowd turn against Ceausescu in Bucharest, and the first time I’ve ever seen a QT crowd react like this. I think I may have to move to Newbury: If that’s what their Question Time audience is like, imagine how sensible the population as a whole must be.

As for Eagle, her solution to the problem was, rather than face the reality of the market, as Freud offensively did, to ‘evangelise’ firms to pay more, whatever that means (more equality and diversity laws and regulations?). It makes you think: All in all the Athenian system wasn’t that bad.

[Teddy Bear]

James Delingpole encountered the same left wing mindset on the subject of Freud's comment when he appeared on Radio 4's Any Questions this week.

FROM FARAGE TO FREUD: HOW THE CULTURAL MARXISTS ARE MURDERING OUR LANGUAGE

by JAMES DELINGPOLE

The other day on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, I made a point which unfortunately went right over the heads of my booing audience. It had to do with the way lefties like my fellow panelists Chuka Umunna MP and TUC leader Frances O'Grady too often choose to misrepresent the meaning of perfectly harmless words and language for nefarious political ends.

We were discussing Labour's confected furore over Lord Freud's remarks on the disabled. As is now abundantly clear to anyone even halfway acquainted with the background to the story - the fact, for example, that his comments were addressed sympathetically to the father of a severely disabled daughter - Lord Freud's intentions and meaning were unimpeachably honourable and decent.

So instead his critics resorted to that well-tested lefty fallback position: distortion and misrepresentation. In this case, Lord Freud's remarks about disabled people being thought by employers to be not "worth the full wage" were twisted so as to mean that he thought disabled people were "worthless."

This is a weasel trick and when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tried it on Any Questions, I called him out on it. Umunna has his faults but unutterable stupidity is not one of them. Suppose, I put it to him, that he had heard someone in the pub after a rugger match boasting about having "murdered" the opposition. Would he call the police?

Of course he wouldn't because like anyone born into our richly allusive English-speaking culture he would have understood that our language depends as much on tone and context as it does on the words themselves. That verb "murder" is a perfect example of this. Sometimes, it can indeed mean literally "kill". But on many other occasions it can mean something innocuous like desperation for a drink ("I could murder a pint") or abject defeat in a board game ("he murdered me at Scrabble").

And the amazing thing is that despite the fact that depressingly large sections of our population have low IQs, are functionally illiterate, and are almost totally uneducated thanks to our dumbed-down education system, even the most unutterable thickos among us are yet capable of grasping these semantic nuances - even though they wouldn't know what a "semantic nuance" was if it bit them on the arse.

So if even the thickest of thick native English speakers can understand basic concepts like the fact that even though "worth less" and "worthless" sound the same but actually mean something different - why can't a bright, articulate, Manchester- and Burgundy-University-educated, City lawyer like Chuka Umunna?

The answer, of course, is that it suits him not to - in much the same way it suited Nigel Farage's various lefty-feminist critics not to at the time of his supposedly contentious remarks earlier this year about women in the City.

What Farage said, you may remember, was this:

"And if a woman has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to the employer when she comes back than when she went away because her client base will not have stuck rigidly to her."

This is a fairly straightforward economic point which, I'm quite sure, any City employer would tell you (albeit guardedly, lest they seem in any way "discriminatory") is no more than the ground truth.

Yet the truth was no defence for the likes of Labour MPs such as Harriet Harman who naturally piled in to accuse Farage of saying something he had never actually said: that female employees are, to some degree, "worthless."

Of course I understand why the Harmans and the Umunnas of the world play this game: it's a useful way of circumventing the awkward fact that the left rarely has any useful arguments.

But what astonishes me is our cultural tolerance for it. I remember the other day engaging in some kind of minor Twitter spat with Channel 4 news presenter Cathy Newman. She's not thick. She went to Oxford. Yet she too belongs to the Harriet Harman "truth is no defence" school of political thought. That is, she appears to believe than when a public figure says something it is perfectly reasonable to judge them not merely according to what they said and what they meant, but also on what they might possibly be misconstrued as having meant if, say, you were of a sensitive disposition or you weren't very clever or you were mentally ill or what have you.

The rot set in, in Britain at least, in the era of Tony Blair when his Labour government introduced a new category of "hate crimes" - which were defined as "'Any incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.'

In other words it no longer mattered what the alleged criminal's motives were. All it required was that someone, anyone, be it the victim or a random passer-by should declare the crime "racist" or "homophobic" or whatever - and, hey presto, it instantly made it so.
Not being a lefty myself, this wantonly subjective view of the world makes absolutely no sense to me. In fact, worse than that, I think it is downright wrongheaded and potentially quite evil.

"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate once asked.

If the answer, as the cultural Marxist left now seems to imagine, is that the truth is whatever any one of us decides it means, according to our whim at any given moment, then civilisation is in deep, deep trouble.