On the Today programme this morning Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee

On the Today programme this morning Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee featured in a discussion with presenter James Naughtie and journalists from The Times and The Daily Telegraph. They were discussing the prospects of the Conservative Party as the Conservative Party Conference comes to an end. They also discussed the likelihood of a possible general election.

Polly Toynbee was uniquely qualified to be in this discussion, her ethics being the only Guardian strand of thought to be co-opted into the Conservative Party “brand” values by Tory leader David Cameron (the image of society as a "caravan"). The Toynbee affiliation should be seen as part of an attempt by both major parties to lure away key supporters from other parties, a procedure that seems to resemble the entrapment practiced by the goblins of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (Polly Toynbee at least managed to keep her lips tightly shut whereas red-faced old buffer Quentin Davies greedily gobbled the forbidden fruits dangled by Gordon Brown and has become a neither-fish-nor-fowl outcast so lukewarm he is bound to be spat out). Polly Toynbee’s response to David Cameron was rather ungracious compared to Quentin Davies’s lickspittle praise of Gordon Brown at last week’s Labour Party Conference.

The Toynbee “brand” is itself distinctive, stemming from the formidable intellectual achievements of Arnold Toynbee (her grandfather). I received Mankind and Mother Earth as a birthday present when I was sixteen and read it cover to cover. Polly Toynbee’s most valuable work has been related to low-wage sector workers and the hardships they have to endure.

On the subject of the low-wage sector, we are constantly told that London would “collapse” if the entry of low-wage migrants into the economy were to be stopped. This is nonsense - if the labour market closed, the market mechanism would raise wages in the lowest sector until some of the million or so “unemployed” were attracted into work (they may be more difficult to manage, and require training, but that is what personnel managers should be doing, not relying on migrants so desperate they are unable to answer back whatever the pay and conditions - globalisation should mean the export of United Kingdom employment practices and standards of pay, not the import of Third World standards)

Goblin Market: http://plexipages.com/reflections/goblin.html
Mankind and Mother Earth: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mankind-Mother-Earth-Arnold-Toynbee/dp/0192152572/ref=sr_1_1/026-8660421-6346800?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191444287&sr=1-1
Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain (2003): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hard-Work-Life-Low-pay-Britain/dp/0747564159
The fate of the lukewarm: http://bible.cc/revelation/3-16.htm