It is time to resuscitate Margaret Thatcher’s catchphrase: “There is no alternative.” With a twist, of course. Back then, “Tina” was deployed in favour of an economic model that gave us badly distributed low growth, shambolic rip-off privatised utilities, a housing crisis and social insecurity. It is now devastatingly clear that there is no alternative to discarding this failed experiment.
Yet this week, our supposedly Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will take a scalpel to departmental budgets already devastated by 15 years of austerity. Our government has robbed most pensioners of the winter fuel payment, and announced £5bn worth of cuts to disability benefits, which strip support from citizens unable to independently clothe themselves, or who need an aide to use the toilet. By the time of the next election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, all households will have suffered a fall in living standards, but the poorest will be clobbered twice as hard. This, under the rule of a party founded to represent the interests of ordinary people.
The British public could be forgiven for believing they are imprisoned in a political Groundhog Day. They wake up, their leaders tell them they are awfully sorry, but they are going to have to make yet more unfortunate cuts – but this time, pain will be rewarded by the coming prosperity. A thousand sleeps, another thousand sleeps – and the nation wakes to the same speech. Here’s the bad news: on our current trajectory, you’re going to hear that speech for the rest of your life, whatever your age.
We could have had corbyn instead of this red Tory shite
Government has become too beholden to the financial industry. Anything that takes power back from them will ostensibly look like a market crash and so chancellors are politically snookered.
I don’t think anything will change until either the government has the courage and wits to face this down (implement economic policy that is good for the people but bad for the markets) or if external forces cause a crash and it has the opportunity to rebuild the economy. The first option would be quicker but more gnarly for politicians and the financial industry and the second option will be worse for us all.
Those who sit around passively getting rich on rents and debt interest (the same thing) are the real scroungers, not benefits claimants.
The financial industry deploys capital solely on the basis of its profit.
The vast majority of £'s in existence are created by banks and deployed for the purposes of their profit. Government spending is a relative drop in the ocean. This is the basis for the ‘development’ of our society.
The UK have experienced a slow motion version of Musk and Trump’s slash and burn, except we are coming to the back end of fifty years of it.
We haven’t needed to sell bonds for more than fifty years now. We don’t have to have an grossly underfunded NHS and public services, and collapsing quality of life on a contracting basis. It is going into the city of London’s pockets instead.
It isn’t just that neoliberal ideology has captured both main parties, and the lib dems. There is such a lack of talent, even intelligence, in government.
We see the criminalisation of what should be lawful protest.The powers that be want us to quietly accept being stripped of material and environmental wealth so that they can get fat, and insulate themselves against the coming disaster of climate change their over-consumption is the primary driver of.
They didn’t rob the winters fuel allowance.
Oh, it’s Owen Jones…
