And there I was, thinking that former BBC producer Owen Smith was just another clueless leftard - shows how right one can be!

Labour's (pre-failed) leadership contender Owen Smith today published a list of twenty pledges to assure hard-left party members (i.e. the vast majority of them) that he's perfectly capable of coming up with a list of policies just as cretinously ruinous, unworkable, unpopular and unaffordable as those advanced by his main rival, Jeremy Corbyn. Well, Smith has succeeded splendidly. There isn't a single measure that isn't guaranteed to destroy business, boost public sector wages, send public spending rocketing through the roof, and send companies and wealth-creators stampeding for the nearest exit. The list starts as it means to go on...

...with "A pledge to focus on equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity", which enshrines the classic Marxist belief that the stupid, lazy and untalented shouldn't receive lesser rewards than the clever, hard-working and talented. This, of course, is the policy that turned the Soviet Union and its satellite (more accurately, slave) states into models of happiness, prosperity and streamlined efficiency. Good God! Do these bastards never learn?

Here's the whole ghastly package, designed to drag Britain kicking and screaming back to the late 1970s. Read it and weep - or laugh: it's up to you:

1. A pledge to focus on equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
2. Scrapping the DWP and replacing it with a Ministry for Labour and a Department for Social Security.
3. Introducing modern wages councils for hotel, shop and care workers to strengthen terms and conditions.
4. Banning zero hour contracts.
5. Ending the public sector pay freeze.
6. Extending the right to information and consultation to cover all workplaces with more than 50 employees.
7. Ensuring workers’ representation on remuneration committees.
8. Repealing the Trade Union Act.
9. Increase spending on the NHS by 4% in real-terms in every year of the next parliament.
10. Commit to bringing NHS funding up to the European average within the first term of a Labour Government.
11. Greater spending on schools and libraries.
12. Re-instate the 50p top rate of income tax.
13. Reverse the reductions in Corporation Tax due to take place over the next four years.
14. Reverse cuts to Inheritance Tax announced in the Summer Budget.
15. Reverse cuts to Capital Gains Tax announced in the Summer Budget.
16. Introduce a new wealth Tax on the top 1% earners.
17. A British New Deal unveiling £200bn of investment over five years.
18. A commitment to invest tens of billions in the North of England, and to bring forward High Speed 3.
19. A pledge to build 300,000 homes in every year of the next parliament – 1.5 million over five years.
20. Ending the scandal of fuel poverty by investing in efficient energy.

And this bloke's meant to be the sensible, sober alternative to Steptoe? Lordy!