British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn just proposed a salary cap for professional football (that’s “soccer” to us benighted colonials on the other side of the pond) in the UK:<\/p>\n
Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can\u2019t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And how does he kick off this project? By slagging off footballers, the most idolised sportspeople in Britain, cheered by vast swathes of the very people Labour no longer reaches but wishes it could. The money paid to footballers is \u2018grotesque\u2019, said Corbyn today, in his best irate vicar voice. Cue media coverage of Corbyn\u2019s moaning mug next to Wayne Rooney (\u00a3250k a week, loved by millions). What next in Corbyn\u2019s populist makeover? A call to wind down Coronation St<\/em>? Close pubs on Sundays? A Twitterspat with Ant and Dec or Sheridan Smith or some other national treasure?<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
Labour leftists have never understood this basic fact: ordinary people don\u2019t hate rich people. In fact they admire many of them. They don\u2019t wince when they see a footballer and his WAG posing by the pool in Hello!<\/em> \u2014 they think, \u2018That looks like a nice life. Good on them.\u2019 Corbyn bemoaned footballers\u2019 pay as part of his proposal to enact a law preventing people from earning above a certain amount of money. Yes, a maximum wage. \u2018I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap,\u2019 he said. It\u2019s the worst idea a British political leader has had in years, and it reveals pretty much everything that is wrong with the left today.<\/p>\n
First there\u2019s the sheer authoritarianism of it. It will never come to pass, of course, because Corbyn\u2019s footballer-bashing and bodged populism and general inability to connect with anyone outside of Momentum and the left Twittersphere means Labour won\u2019t be darkening the door of Downing St for yonks. But that Corbyn is even flirting with the notion of putting a legal lid on what people can earn is pretty extraordinary. It would basically be a stricture against getting rich, a restriction on ambition, a state-enforced standard of living: you could be comfortable and middle-class, but not loaded. There\u2019s a stinging moralism, too. Labourites complain about those on the right who look down on the \u2018undeserving poor\u2019, but what we have here is not all that different: a sneering at the undeserving rich, a prissy concern with the bank balances and lifestyles of those who\u2019ve made a bomb.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn just proposed a salary cap for professional football (that’s “soccer” to us benighted colonials on the other side of the pond) in the UK: Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can\u2019t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,53,20],"tags":[1090,143,315],"class_list":["post-36886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-politics","category-soccer","tag-jeremycorbyn","tag-labour","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9AW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36887,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36886\/revisions\/36887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}