Has Trevor Phillips drowned under his own politically correct guff?

"The Equality and Human Rights Commission must be given the power to fight the class divide in Britain, its chairman has said" the BBC reports, leaving all sane people with an uneasy feeling in their stomachs. Unfortunately, the BBC forgot to tell us what these desired powers might consist of. Luckily his communist sounding rhetoric is backed up on the Commission's website.

The article brings out that tired old argument of 'The divide between rich and poor has widened to its highest level for 40 years', which sounds awful, but in actual fact means absolutely nothing. It doesn't mean that poor people are poorer, it just means that the rich are richer. It also claims that a survey 'found that 76 per cent of people considered the gap between rich and poor to be too large'. I wonder which 76 percent said that? Hmm.

This is of course typical ugly socialism; the politics of jealousy. Don't congratulate people for doing well and making money, oh no, socialists want to take it off them and give it to people unable to make it for themselves. There is no such thing as a fair redistribution of wealth - it is just extortion under threat of imprisonment. It is one thing to tax people to provide services, it is a completely different thing to tax them simply to give their money to other people. Anyway, I digress.

Oddly, Philips seems to forget that he has made a major case against financial 'inequality' and instead manages to come up with a solution to a completely different problem; citizens’ petitions and local referenda. Or at least that's what I think he is suggesting. It's actually rather hard to tell from the article which is riddled with , as Private Eye would put it, Birt speak.

How allowing individual citizens to "hold organizations to account through their ability to access high-quality, up-to-date information alongside the power to demand action" will tackle the nonexistant issue of the wealth gap is difficult to understand. One has to ask: has Trevor Phillips drowned under his own politically correct guff?