Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Gnasher]

fuck me Boris Johnson earned over 600 thousand quid last year and that's without the possibility of undeclared back handers.

[Jairzinho]

Robert peston the bellend genuinely said making future prime ministers publish their tax returns would deter the next generation of talent from joining parliament.

 

I agree with him. If by "talent" he means "hateful sociopaths".

[Gnasher]

If the UK leaves the EU you lot are going to get fucking anally raped by these fuckers, they'll be looking for payback.

Good let's us get to the end game quicker.

 

The tories unregulated will hang themselves.

[Scooby Dudek]

.

[Manny]

Well, one week after this all started it's reached the media/tory circle-jerk endgame. It's no longer about the moral ambiguity of tax havens and how we can stop potential tax receipts disappearing off into the Caribbean. It's about who's the quickest to publish their fucking tax returns, and Hamface has (as per usual with his Fleet Street buddies) been allowed to reframe the debate. "It's a private matter" was the initial response, and now the stage has been set up for him to come out with "despite this being a private matter, I will show you just how honest and open I am for I am St Dave of Bullingdon, the most open and honest politician there ever was. I've slagged off Corbyn's tie, and accused his predecessor of knifing his brother in the back, but don't make out my father went out of his way to stop tax from reaching HMRC because that's out of line."

 

It's not about fucking tax returns. It's about the type of cuntery that's aided and abetted by the likes of Fossack Monseca robbing the state of billions every year, and the rest of us having to suffer more as a result of it. It'd be nice to have a government that at least tries to limit this, but when the leader of it has profited - directly or indirectly, in the past, present or future - at best it doesn't exactly fill you with confidence that they're going to try particularly hard in this endeavour, and at worst it makes the population think they've got fuck all moral authority in this matter.

 

But no. Well done Dave. He's put his tax return on Twitter, so can we all move on and this'll be fucking sorted in 20 minutes. They've got this all fucking sewn up, haven't they?

[Scooby Dudek]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36017175

 

Critics of David Cameron's tax arrangements should admit that they "hate anyone who has even got a hint of wealth in their life", a Conservative MP has said.

Rallying behind the prime minister, who has faced questions over an offshore fund set up by his late father, Sir Alan Duncan said Mr Cameron had been unfairly criticised.

He warned that if the PM's critics were not careful, "we risk seeing a House of Commons which is stuffed full of low achievers, who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family and who know absolutely nothing about the outside world".

Mr Cameron said he was "grateful" for Sir Alan's support, before saying MPs should not be forced to publish their tax returns as it could discourage people from seeking election to Parliament.

 

 

 

You have to admire the sheer cheek of them. It appears being opposed to people not wanting to pay their fair share of tax and not being rich enough to hide it away means you are the party of non aspiration and don't believe in looking after your family.

 

Even Sky news said that was a bit of a stretch. No doubt they will change their independent view over the course of the evening.

 

[Anubis]

Actually, they've handed a PR prize out there, if people are savvy enough to take it. What we need are doctors, scientists, journalists, nurses, and people who work in shitty conditions like soldiers, ambulance staff, care workers, refuse collectors, cleaners and restaurant staff, posting pictures of themselves with their families and holding a LOW ACHIEVER sign.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

So much for his Libertarian outlook on life. 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I see dead dad has joined dead son in the Cameron playbook.

While living daughter gets left behind in the pub.

 

Meanwhil, Alan Duncan speaks up for the high achievers who just want to look after their families.

[Stickman]

I see John Whittingdale has been with a prostitute .

 

A kind of ironic story seeing as the BBC is allowing itself to get fucked by this Government for any extra cash it can get paid by it.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/john-whittingdale-culture-secretary-admits-having-relationship-with-prostitute-a6981671.html

[FieldingMellish]

[Anubis]

I see John Whittingdale has been with a prostitute .

 

A kind of ironic story seeing as the BBC is allowing itself to get fucked by this Government for any extra cash it can get paid by it.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/john-whittingdale-culture-secretary-admits-having-relationship-with-prostitute-a6981671.html

That Independent article is a joke. The press have deliberately sat on this story, and it has nothing to do with public interest and, I suspect, has more to do in influencing his decision not to regulate.

 

It's correct to say this isn't about him being in a relationship with a prostitute for a year. It is, however, about the aspect of the story which the Independent have omitted. Namely that at the same time she was with Whittingdale she was also seeing a London gangster who had been arrested for a firearms offence. As such, a senior serving minister left himself open to potential blackmail. Which very much questions his judgement - and that is in the public interest.

[redinblack62]

What use are published tax returns for people who don't declare all of their income?

[VladimirIlyich]

What use are published tax returns for people who don't declare all of their income?

Chocolate Fireguards and Eunechs in Brothels spring to mind.

[Stickman]

A history of the Cameron wealth and creation

 

After a full week of revelations, we can get into something political. The Tories have started to print their tax returns and unsurprisingly they don’t contain any illegality (HMRC might have pulled them up if they did, that’s how tax returns work). They could still have millions in tax havens, the nature of the beast is that they are secret. The publishing of these, and many of the specific questions about how and when Cameron benefitted from this or that fund have been truly pathetic, as was the call for Cameron to resign – if we were powerful enough we wouldn’t have to ask.

The information that has been brought to light though, is not uninteresting even if a justified cynicism makes it unsurprising. What it explicitly shows is the massive wealth of Cameron, Osborne and Johnson. Their fathers have to make decisions on how to legally transfer half a million pounds to their children, through paying £300,000 to the son and £200,000 by proxy through the wife in Cameron’s case. Johnson pulls in over a million a year after tax. Osborne gets £45000 a year from his family wallpaper company.

To most people, these amounts are staggering. Perhaps because of the excessive pay of premier league footballers we don’t see this as quite so shocking – but it should be. Not only do they have massive vested interests outside of politics, they are evidently part of the 1% and an ever increasing gap between rich and poor. Non-radicals like Danny Dorling and Thomas Picketty have demonstrated how dangerous this can be for a capitalist economy – and it part of the reason our current one is in such a mess can be attributed to issues of distribution and the hording of banks and individuals. Indeed, part of the reason Cameron et al can be so glibly optimistic about our economy is because for them this spluttering and broken system still works.

What this comes down to is a defiantly political position. They don’t see anything wrong with their incredible wealth sitting in a city with an epidemic of homelessness. Hiding inherited money which was potentially earned by an unscrupulous banker (Ian Cameron) in the was yesterday redefined as ‘wealth creation’. This volte face is true to an extent, they are generating wealth for themselves, though it is hard to really understand how David Cameron inheriting half a million quid without any taxation really benefits anybody other than him and his family. Inevitably the right wing press have rallied to this defence, and even criticised Corbyn for not contributing as much in tax as the super millionaires. Shame on Jeremy for devoting his life to public service rather than being outrageously overpaid for newspaper columns (in a newspaper that justifies this wealth), for not engaging in rentier capitalism and inheriting the wealth of his father through various island protectorates. Perhaps he is what Alan Duncan considers a low achiever (NB – Alan Duncan’s only significant achievement is being regularly mistaken for Robert Kilroy Silk).

This incident can give us a case on which to reflect on the points of political conflict that may come to characterise this century.  I am going to give a small analysis of what to me is the deeply political travesty that lies at the heart of this media fervour, which gets to the very core of a political conflict which hasn’t been resolves for generations.

Firstly, Cameron et al are not wealth creators. Wealth is not an easy concept to work with at the best of times, but to say that those who profit from banking and whose families have a lineage of inheritance back to the aristocracy have somehow created wealth or anything else is highly dubious. They have preserved rather than produced. Smith, Marx, Ricardo, Picketty… all these eminent economic thinkers have argued that capitalism can enter crisis when wealth is horded – the circulation of money (or value) is essential to keep capitalism moving. The more they put in tax havens for a rainy day, the less value there is circulating around the economy. Beyond this, it is worth considering where this ‘wealth’ is created. Cameron hasn’t created any wealth even if we allow for this bizarre neoliberal rhetorical sense, it comes from a lineage of inheritance from other so called wealth creators.

I will stick with the PM as the case for this enquiry, given that he has been the focus of much media attention. The Cameron side of the family can date a lineage back to William IV at least and perhaps beyond. Ewan Cameron was a successful accountant and banker in the 1800’s, who made money of trading on wars as well as reorganising banks in British colonies like Hong Kong. Lets pause for a second and think what is being created and how. Through having connection to royalty, a man is able to gain a job in the emerging world of finance (even if he was very bright/talented), and then utilises the military and economic wealth of the empire, colonial rule and conflict, to make himself a further fortune working for HSBC (which started off reputably trading in opium) and generally managing these colonial banks as part of a vast system that extracted wealth from the toi,l misery and possession of peoples bodies and lands. This is the reality of wealth creation, and it is not clear to me why this should be celebrated.

The Cameron ‘wealth’ then met the Geddes wealth through marriage. Ewan’s son, Ewan, married into a wealthy family, which was derived from a man called Anthony Geddes, a Scot who went to live in Chicago. Whilst here, he speculatively bought shares in corn. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire nearly burnt his physical ‘wealth’, but fortunately the safe survived. Even more fortunately, the value of corn rocketed due the amount destroyed in the fire, instantly creating wealth as people couldn’t feed their children. He used this fortune to build Blairmore house (as children starved), where Ian Cameron (daddy) was born. This created physical wealth that was sturdier than paper in a safe, and this is perhaps why Ian decided to call his tax avoidance scheme the same thing. Enough has recently been written about Ian Cameron, and he seems to have followed a family tradition of inheriting money and using this to speculate and invest in the misery of others.

It should be noted hear that relatives of both Cameron and his wife were beneficiaries of the huge state injection of wealth that was the compensation paid to slave owners. The state helped to create a hell of a lot of wealth here, but the state is the antithesis of a wealth creator on this current neoliberal definition (NB Neoliberal rule 1 – never let historical fact get in the way of a rhetorical device) so therefore this must have been something else – profligate spending perhaps…

This brief assessment of the Cameron ‘wealth’ is not meant as a character assignation. I want to make two points. First, I am baffled in what sense Cameron is wealth creator. His family were wealthy, and they paid for him to go to an expensive school which has long been a direct route to parliament. He has been working for public funded organisations his whole life. If his family are the sainted wealth creators, it is worth remembering the root of much of this inherited wealth is colonial exploitation, and simply having money to speculate with to make more money, without any clear productive impact. It is highly dubious that this is sign of people who should be celebrated, over and above anyone else. Second, in what way are these people creating wealth? By owning shares? By selling slaves? The classic capitalist exploits the workers within his factory, in order to generate profit which may be accumulated as wealth (Marx argues that the source of many a capitalists original capital is colonial). Cameron’s lot use the fact they have money to keep themselves as part of a long standing elite. They ride on the coat tails of not just the workers but those capitalists who the workers can definitely said to be in symbiotic relation with. They exploit their connections and the colonial tentacles of the British state to this very day to enrich themselves and contribute nothing, and avoiding even basic taxation on this unproductive wealth. Thus, if Cameron and his family are wealth creators, do we want wealth creators? These people are parasitic, they exist on their name and inheritance rather than on their intelligence and merit. One of the dreams of modernity and the ideal of democracy is to have something like a meritocracy. Instead, our parliament is full of people who have barely achieved anything given that they have had every possible socio-economic advantage– it isn’t an achievement if it isn’t hard to do.

The Cameron wealth creator is therefore the person we should be dubious of entering elected office, they have a lineage of self-preservation on the basis of others suffering. You may guess that I am not particularly enthusiastic about the productive capitalists, however it is true that they are essential to capitalism, are integral to its success. The parasite capitalist is of little use to anyone. The most disturbing thing is the evident sense of entitlement. A key neoliberal belief is a perverse inversion, the belief that it is the rich who are carrying us! It is not the builders, teachers, bartenders, business owners, cleaners, junior doctors, academics, sex workers, bookmakers, nurses… (insert your profession here)… who make the economy work, whose efforts are the real source of value and wealth within the capitalist system, somehow it is those who have historical hordes of money when they are occasionally asked to give some of it back. The reverse of this is a forgotten socialist belief – it isn’t their money in the first place! Money is a token, a symbol of wealth and of value. Value doesn’t come out of nowhere, it comes from our blood, tears and death. It is as much Cameron’s as it is mine, and we need to make sure they know this.

I welcome the defiance of the statement on Monday. He admitted that he believes himself to deserve all that he has, and that we should keep our noses out of it. Others echoed the sentiment, and reinforced this with claims that we need privileged posh boys who have never brought any value into this country to rule it. Since the 1800’s, these people have been terrified of us. They are terrified that we will realise their inversion, realise how desperately they rely on us. They are terrified that we might start entering the private school debating theatre of parliament and start doing things our own way, realising we are twice as bright as them and start diffusing power across the nation. They are terrified of democracy, terrified of losing what they stole over generations. Are you a democrat? Do you think we can justify colonialism? Slavery? Should we glorify those who profited from this? These are the questions that are raised by the revelations this week, which lead us to the bigger issue of whether we want parasitic capitalists at all, never mind in government. In hording this ‘wealth’, they are taking money from the mouths of the homeless. It may help them sleep at night, but it is hard to say that we life in a great society when some get paid 20K a week to write a shit newspaper column or have hundreds of thousands handed down to them whilst others live in dire poverty as a direct result of the accumulation of their wealth. Privatisation is this arrogant view operating at the state level, it is the insistence that those who are already rich know how best to run things, workers need to keep their ideas and democracy out of it.

Cameron declared that he stands with the archaic way of thinking that justifies this. Where do you stand? The posh boys are out to get us, and we don’t seem up for the fight.

*By way of a disclaimer, I do not feel I am doing anything wrong with pointing out these things about David Cameron’s family. He daily causes material harm to many families, and his party and ilk have long attacked both my family and others like them. In comparison, I have been gentle.

 

https://marketmythology.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/what-is-the-real-scandal-a-brief-material-history-of-camerons-wealth/

[Stu Monty]

That Independent article is a joke. The press have deliberately sat on this story, and it has nothing to do with public interest and, I suspect, has more to do in influencing his decision not to regulate.

 

It's correct to say this isn't about him being in a relationship with a prostitute for a year. It is, however, about the aspect of the story which the Independent have omitted. Namely that at the same time she was with Whittingdale she was also seeing a London gangster who had been arrested for a firearms offence. As such, a senior serving minister left himself open to potential blackmail. Which very much questions his judgement - and that is in the public interest.

 

I'd disagree with that even being the major issue. I'd say that the major issue is that the press in this country deliberately held off reporting this story in order to keep their "asset" (he was actually called that by people involved) from implementing reforms and reigning in the press. They kept it in their back pocket as insurance in case he decided that he did want to try and regulate properly or even did want to go a bit easier on dismantling the BBC.

 

It's what makes the term "conspiracy theory" such a laughable concept, as it shows how the normal workings of power are very much conspiratorial in that there's always people being leveraged to work to other people's self-interest.

 

The Independent killed the story because the Mail are their landlords, and he was a Mail asset. They should be so proud.

[Bobby Hundreds]

What is the point in PMQ's if you don't have to answer the questions. Whats the speakers fucking job. Sick of the smarmy bastard jokes and bullshit, answer the fucking questions.  Our system is a sham. 

[Anubis]

Given my first paragraph,Stu, I'm not sure we're disagreeing. My second paragraph merely points out the rather glaring omission from the story.

[Stu Monty]

Given my first paragraph,Stu, I'm not sure we're disagreeing. My second paragraph merely points out the rather glaring omission from the story.

 

Missed that mate. Agree with you on the omission.

[Stickman]

What is the point in PMQ's if you don't have to answer the questions. Whats the speakers fucking job. Sick of the smarmy bastard jokes and bullshit, answer the fucking questions.  Our system is a sham.

 

You may as well do what Skinner did the other day or even go one step further and call them all a shower of cunts, so what you get kicked,out you're not going to be missing much.

As for Bercow he's just a joke, he let Benn get a round of applause for that war mongering speech which isn't actually allowed in parliament then the other day Margaret Hodge got heckled for what much have been over a minute before she could speak..and not a word from that little prick.

[Gnasher]

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/720304336480374784?s=09

[Section_31]

A picture tells a thousand words. 

 

 

[Stu Monty]

The Guardian long-read by Aditya Chakrabortty shows another example of the public and human good of a thing being hollowed out and gutted in the pursuit of big payday. Load the company with debt, watch the wealth escape out to a tax-haven, grind the employees into the ground with corporate bollocks. Boots the retailer (not the chemist).

 

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[Hades]

Neoliberalism - the ideology at the root of all our problems

 

Great article, and a great rebuttal to some of the Dawkins worshippers here but the conclusion is weak as always. The answer is global communism.

 

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks
Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

[dennis tooth]

"the problem isn't the king, it's the lords"

"you only don't like the monarchy because you think it's cool"

"One day I'll have my own feifdom"

"well if you hate fuedalism so much, why are you eating those turnips?"

"Why don't you just go back to hunting and gathering"

[JA]