Running out of stuff to sell, George?

I've written on here in the past about the dogmatic determination on the part of the Tories to sell off absolutely anything. Anything they don't want the bother of running, anything they think they can make some quick cash from, anything they can use to please the Thatcherite economists in the party, is ripe for selling.

Now, it seems, even our rights can be sold off. This piece of nutcasery is the latest example of the sort of thinking that goes on in the Cabinet, and further evidence that they simple cannot think of anything but money. Money will sort everything out - if only employers could treat people like chattels, free to dispose of them as and when they see fit and for whatever reasons, then there'd be more businesses starting up and more jobs available. Terrific!

Of course, given the likely Ts & Cs on those jobs, and the type of people you'd be working for if they only started a business on the understanding that they could just ditch you whenever they felt like it, who's going to want those jobs? Perhaps we should set a price on our dignity as well, maybe we could sell that off, and then feel free to go and work for these Victorian-style workplace despots the Tories apparently so admire.

We're talking about loss of redundancy cover. Loss of the right to fight unfair dismissal. Doubling the amount of notice of return to work from maternity leave. Other details are patchy. And companies, while unable to force existing workers to sell their rights, would be free to offer only those terms to new employees. This is, frankly, absolutely staggering.

Over-reacting? Think of the money? Not only is this piece of lunacy another tacit admission of the failure of their economic policies (people are so desperate for money that they'll sell off their basic employment rights! Yay!), but what bloody good are shares in a firm which has sacked you and gone bust, only to then rise again as a Phoenix company? Not an inconceivable outcome.

There must be rank-and-file Lib Dem members (and voters) with their heads in their hands at the moment. How did they ever end up in bed with such a crew of right-wing, thoughtless, uncaring, patrician nincompoops as these? This would be laughable if it were not quite so insidious. Osborne, not that he ever feels any such emotion of course, should be hanging his head in shame. Even if he can't see the moral wrong in these proposals, surely, surely he could have seen how they'd be received by normal working people? I despair sometimes, I really do.