HARRIDAN

Three cheers for Laura Smith! This is the harridan who, on the penultimate day of the Labour Party love in – that would be their annual conference – got to her feet and gave it both blazing red barrels, screeching for a General Strike to get rid of the Tory government.

If any one event at the Labour party’s yearly meeting helped to ensure the future of the Conservatives, it was this extraordinary and very revealing outburst.

Revealing because, although some of the Marxist top dogs queued up afterwards to disassociate themselves from what Miss Loudmouth was demanding, her actual audience gave her a standing ovation. Right on comrade!

And so to free shares for the workers. The conference came out with a plan to allocate 10% of shares in companies to their staff, with bonuses on those shares paid to those staff.

This sounded like a cracking idea at first. Who could argue, in all conscience, with a scheme giving staff a share in the profitability of their company. But just hold up a minute. Is there a snag? You betcha.

For openers, any bonuses that are paid to workers will be capped at £500 per individual. What happens when the actual bonus that is due is more than £500? Why, the surplus goes to the future (OMG!) Labour Government. And – wait for it – that government will hold the shares.

All companies with more than 200 employees will be victims of this rip off and, in effect, the government will trouser huge amounts of dosh.  No one has worked out yet how much that will be but, with the top 100 UK companies alone obviously targeted, it’ll be in the billions.

What a devious bloody scheme.