Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Stu Monty]

I refute all of your fourth sentence.

 

Because there's no evidence and there's so much scrutiny. One pissed off employee, one leaked memo or recording and it's over. One Edward Snowden, one drunk dick leaving a phone or laptop on a train. Plus a bit of knowledge of how the costs are layered. If you want a conspiracy look at network charges - they are fucking mental. The issue is people see the bill going up but aren't interested in green taxes, network charges etc.

 

Plus I know he blokes in pricing, they couldn't keep a secret in a box.

 

So, take the supermarkets fixing the prices of milk was it? That goes on for years and years without anybody knowing about it, across a fair few of the big players, in an environment that is surely much harder to keep it schtum.

 

Why would your guys be any different?

 

The pissed off employee thing is definitely a consideration but also, things rarely end well for leakers, or for those who give voice to leakers - they know that.

 

I'm not going to tell you as fact that your industry is bent; I'm just going to say that you'd have to offer me something convincing before I dropped the attitude that years of reading about business has given me regarding corruption at the highest levels.

[Rico1304]

I'm confused - I thought the supermarkets fought a battle on milk as a loss leader and threatened our producers with buying overseas milk. So the consumer (of milk) win.

[Rico1304]

I've also heard a rumour that the regulator may be after switching sites next, lack of transparency on costs. Guess who is the only switching site to refuse requests to declare their charges ...Which?

[Stu Monty]

I'm confused - I thought the supermarkets fought a battle on milk as a loss leader and threatened our producers with buying overseas milk. So the consumer (of milk) win.

 

Well the consumer wins when they buy the milk. They don't win when there's jobs working in the milk industry going, so there's less people paying tax and there's more people needing government benefits. That's the thing consumers don't get - they are paying for the products to be so cheap in other ways. Your tin of beans is 8p because you are subsidising Tesco staff with benefits when they don't pay living wages (or allowing them to have free forced labour through workfare), and then again when the company and the bosses don't pay tax on their earnings.

 

I don't doubt that at some points they were aggressively competing on milk. That's hardly something to praise them for. The years where they were found to be fixing prices and given massive fines is rather more pertinent to the discussion of bent corporations.

[Brownie]

These are things that people need to survive, everyone is entitled to them the moment they're born (especially if they are white).

 

You said that Brownie - does food not fall into that category?

How are you getting on with the plutonium down at the allotment mate?

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Erm, food is being provided without profit? Food banks. I think the idea should be to make people wealthy enough not to have to provide them with free food rather than make food free from profit. It generally is free from tax, though. So that helps.

[Bobby Hundreds]

http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/apr/25/inheritance-tax-super-rich-tory-myth

[Jairzinho]

http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/apr/25/inheritance-tax-super-rich-tory-myth

 

Frightening amount of Tories in the comments section.

[Bobby Hundreds]

They want rid of the something for nothing culture don't they. Accept when that something for nothing is their something for nothing.

[Rico1304]

Erm, food is being provided without profit? Food banks. I think the idea should be to make people wealthy enough not to have to provide them with free food rather than make food free from profit. It generally is free from tax, though. So that helps.

What? Food is being provided FOC but it's been bought, so there is profit.

[Jairzinho]

They want rid of the something for nothing culture don't they. Accept when that something for nothing is their something for nothing.

 

You expect it in the fucking Mail or Telegraph, but this is apparently our most left wing newspaper. I accept there are probably a few committed trolls, but when the paper, up until about six months ago, had spent the previous four years noshing off the Lib Dems you can see why that sort of economic ideology has seeped into their readership. It's really disheartening.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

What? Food is being provided FOC but it's been bought, so there is profit.

It is donated food, so there's profit to the original vendor, but not to the person giving or the charity running it. My point wasn't that it was state funded food, it's that citizens themselves are already burdened with the cost of providing free food to those who can't afford it.

[Bobby Hundreds]

There are many farming organisations that work for non profit. Many farmers don't earn profit not through choice so receive huge subsidies. When it comes to a nations defence both energy and food production can be nationalised. Personally I don't want everything nationalised but I want a government that regulates fairly, prevents monopolies and unethical practices. A government that really does investigate what makes up a company, it's shareholders and their other finances so companies you think are separate aren't just different limbs under one huge umbrella company. You can't just let the free market sort it all out, the big fish will decimate competition all you will be left with is the illusion of competition when what you really have is a corporate kind of fasism.

 

Companies should be stopped from totally saturating a market. I read an article they where closing 5 tescos in a few mile area around Kensington leaving only 17 tescos left open. Look at wetherspoons the bigger it gets the more capital it makes the more in bulk it can buy the bigger discounts it can offer, killing competition. Smaller pubs little landlords hammered by tax receiving less customers raising their prices to try and make the bills they're fucked. the only real variety in pubs now is in city centres, pubs round the outskirts or in towns are all closing down or under new management every few months. I'd apply the same kind of tax I would to housing that on one property (say in a county) you buy there's no tax but the more properties you own the increases in tax become so high it's not profitable. allow succes, let people get wealthy but don't let them completely diminish many other people's chances of the same thing even on a smaller scale.

[Rico1304]

Yes, wetherspoons are bastards

 

http://www.theguardian.com/careers/weatherspoons-sweet-deal-for-staff

[Jairzinho]

So it gave employees a small bonus, but still kept 80% of them on zero hour contracts.

 

Great.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

They pay those people, 20k of them on zero hours, around 6 quid an hour, or less if they're younger than 20. Regular Tony the Tiger, they are.

[Section_31]

Used to work for spoons myself, instead of putting us on eight hours shifts they put us on two four hour shifts with one hour in between so the didn't have to give us a paid break. We had no doormen for a time despite numerous fights and one man getting threatened with a screwdriver, the area manager said 'if they (the staff) don't like it they know where the door is'.

 

Spoons tended to give managers freedom to run things their own way, but the pioneers of that 'two four shifts' bollocks was a married couple who were considered rising stars at the time.

 

Working at wetherspoons helped shape my desire to one day work somewhere where I wasn't seen as easily dispensable.

[Moo]

Used to work for spoons myself, instead of putting us on eight hours shifts they put us on two four hour shifts with one hour in between so the didn't have to give us a paid break. We had no doormen for a time despite numerous fights and one man getting threatened with a screwdriver, the area manager said 'if they (the staff) don't like it they know where the door is'.

 

Spoons tended to give managers freedom to run things their own way, but the pioneers of that 'two four shifts' bollocks was a married couple who were considered rising stars at the time.

 

Working at wetherspoons helped shape my desire to one day work somewhere where I wasn't seen as easily dispensable.

Just on the break thing I don't understand why they were considered pioneers, as unless it's written in your contract your employer doesn't have to pay you for a break. I know this because I've had it out with an employer, believe it or not an employer considered socialist, a cooperative.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Just on the break thing I don't understand why they were considered pioneers, as unless it's written in your contract your employer doesn't have to pay you for a break. I know this because I've had it out with an employer, believe it or not an employer considered socialist, a cooperative.

YOU are entitled to a 15 minute break every four hours aren't you?

 

And if you work 8 hours a day, aren't you entitled to at least an hour?

[Moo]

YOU are entitled to a 15 minute break every four hours aren't you?

 

And if you work 8 hours a day, aren't you entitled to at least an hour?

It's 20 minutes uninterrupted per 6 hours, but not paid, unless it's in your contract.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Probably more palatable to just click and read the link but i'll post the article anyway.

 

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2015/04/23/the-phoney-economics-of-balancing-the-books/#comment-221407

 

The Phoney Economics of ‘balancing the books’

BY BELLACALEDONIA on APRIL 23, 2015

 

At another election, the British electorate is yet again being offered ‘old rope for new’. The 2015 British election offers a political choice for the UK between Labour and Conservative, that beneath the banal knockabout and windy rhetoric, offers a distinction without a difference: a single, uniform, Mandevillean, neo-liberal ideology that is beyond doubt a proven, catastrophic failure for the peoples of the UK: whoever is elected you will receive broadly the same austerity economics in order to achieve a cap on the National Debt that never, ever actually materialises.

Attempting austerity economics again after the election, a British Government would be faced by the imminent ruin of the British economy, as Cameron’s Government discovered in 2010-12, and in the end they would do the same with Deficit and Debt that they did from 2013; change tack, pretend they hadn’t, and kick the can down the road. The City is pulling the strings of this Westminster Cartel policy in its own interests, and certainly not in yours; and the strings the City likes best to pull are your heartstrings. Conservative and Labour follow their City masters and set out to persuade the electorate not to leave future generations, your future generations, with a heavy burden of debt; an objective, it must be pointed out, that no British government can possibly meet in any immediate future.

Meanwhile, reality is another country; the one we all live in. For well over a century, sooner or later British Governments always leave future generations with large debts to pay-off; usually larger debts than they found when they entered office. In 1707 the new ‘Britain’ had to pay Scotland a large cash sum, called ‘the Equivalent’ to take on its share of the onerous accumulated English National Debt. The obsession of historians with emphasising Scotland’s economic difficulties at the beginning of the 18th century leads on to the fact that Scotland was not then burdened by Debt, simply being overlooked. Without this ‘Equivalent’ sum (calculated largely by the mathematician David Gregory) the negotiations for Union would quite probably have failed. The cash used to pay the Equivalent, like everything else in Britain, was borrowed. This was the world of ‘burdensome’ state debt Scotland entered in 1707, and it was never going to change thereafter; not then, not now.

The accumulation of large debts to be paid by future generations is the distinctive British way of financing the state; indeed we wrote the masterscript of being a Debtor Nation, and we have been pushing the envelope to the limit for over three hundred years. The deepest of all ironies is that part of the Equivalent became the seed-capital for – none other than RBS. Could we all please stop ‘kidding ourselves’ about prudence, about book-balancing, about deficit-free, negligible debt Britain? It is all an illusion.

The proposition that suddenly either Conservative or Labour (or Lib Dem) are going to change either their political genetic nature or this intrinsic debtor reality is, frankly, absurd: for Britain’s debt is their political responsibility, their scheme, their legacy and nobody else’s. Nothing is going to transform this anytime soon, except the manipulation of political ‘spin’ to pull your strings.

So let us examine some of the basic facts about the deficit and debt.

First, Cameron prefers to trade, quite irresponsibly, on understandable public confusion between the terms ‘deficit’ and ‘debt’; as if they were the same thing. They are not. Even Fraser Nelson felt obliged to point out that “David Cameron tells porkies about Britain’s national debt” (Spectator, 23rd January, 2013). Nelson quoted Cameron’s words in a 2013 political party broadcast:

“So though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts”.

It is difficult to improve on Nelson’s conclusion:

“David Cameron’s policy is to increase Britain’s debt by 60 per cent, more than any European country. To increase it more over five years than Labour did over 13 years …. …. By no stretch of the English language can this be described as ‘paying down Britain’s debts’”. 

Nelson also noted that Cameron has also claimed that he is “dealing with the debt”; a somewhat adventurous claim if we see fit to dwell long on what this vacant idea might actually mean.

Second, on a visit to Scotland, 7th April 2015 we find that Cameron was claiming that “We have one month to save Britain from [Ed Miliband’s] mountain of debt”.

This is rich. In the HM Treasury, Budget 2015 (HC1093, March 2015) the debt position is made clear:

“As a result of the Great Recession, public sector net debt is forecast to have risen by more than 40% of GDP since the financial crisis, to a peak of 80.4% of GDP in 2014-15. The peak in debt will be the highest level of debt since the late 1960s” (Budget, 2015; Section 1.65, p.25).

The debt is now the highest since the 1960s, but it is not the highest in Britain’s history; not by a long, long way. Indeed given that Britain has a history of funding long wars (against France, Germany, United States to name but three) and various crashes, crises, recessions and depressions, we have spent large parts of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries with net debt at over 90% or even 100% of GDP (at times far north of 100%).

Third, the periods in modern history when Britain has had debt below 60% of GDP are relatively short. This should provide an alert to electors that the claims of politicians given to hand-wringing over Britain’s current debt levels, or demanding sudden, drastic reductions, should be handled with considerable skepticism.

Fourth, the politicians have no capacity to deliver sharp or rapid falls in Britain’s deficit or debt; or secure long-term deficit free financing. Save for relatively short periods or special circumstances, that would require an unprecedented revolution in British economic history: and looking at Britain today, it is safe to say that it will not happen.

All the current politics of deficit and debt Austerity are ever likely to deliver is political posturing, human suffering, followed sooner or later by frantic Government backpedaling that will lead the party/parties responsible eventually to run hastily from the policy; in the case of the Conservative Party usually just before the stolid British public finally snap and run them out of office, if not out of town.

Fifth and more immediately important than historical precedents however, notice that it is acknowledged in the recent Budget 2015 that the Debt/GDP ratio before the Crash was only 40%; this was just before Cameron and Osborne inherited the debt from Labour. According to Cameron’s own standards it was therefore Conservative (mis)management that increased the debt by 40% of GDP (by over £700Bn) in five years; think what they could do in five more years! Think, rather of the real lesson from this outcome that we urgently require to learn; and it is not the cynical, self- serving lesson that the Conservatives choose to draw. According to the Conservatives, Net Debt at 40% of GDP is a Labour disaster, but Net Debt at 80% of GDP is a Conservative triumph; explain that.

Sixth, we can draw one simple conclusion from the facts; the ‘Great Recession’ was not “caused” principally by Labour Government spending; in spite of the Conservatives grotesque cynicism in still calling it “Labour’s Great Recession” in their 2015 Manifesto; presumably lest anyone notice that it was actually ‘The City’s Great Recession’: a Crash that was the product of a private-sector, bank induced Credit Crunch (many of the most egregious excesses spawned in London and typically prosecuted with greatest vigour by the US courts or regulators); excess cheered on with equal, irresponsible vigour by both Conservative and Labour. The real failure of Labour was to compete with the Conservatives to see which could be the more abject, Tolkeinesque grovelling Creature of the City: a City that still requires to be curbed but that has easily evaded all political threats to its hegemony, which remains intact and a lethal danger to everyone else. Fatefully, the meretricious 1997-2010 Labour Government chose instead to set aside responsible management of the economy (market oversight and regulation), to follow the fantasies and avarice of the City – and to abandon the people. And ‘No’, nobody who voted ‘Yes’ in 2014 is willing to forget, or forgive either Party for the still unsolved, unredeemed Credit Crunch; or the gross inequity, the brute distributive injustice towards all (but especially the weak or helpless), that has followed.

Back in the real world Ramen Patel, the Huffington Post economics contributor has criticised what he calls David Cameron’s “Deficit Myth”, pointing out that;

“in 1997 Labour inherited a deficit of 3.9% of GDP (not a balanced budget ) and by 2008 it had fallen to 2.1% – a reduction of a near 50% – Impressive! Hence, it’s implausible and ludicrous to claim there was overspending. The deficit was then exacerbated by the global banking crises after 2008” (Huff Post; first posted 24th April, 2012).

As Patel succinctly summarises the issue:

“The IMF …. reveal the UK experienced an increase in the deficit as result of a large loss in output/GDP caused by the global banking crisis and not even as result of the bank bailouts, fiscal stimulus and bringing forward of capital spending. It’s basic economics: when output falls the deficit increases.”

When Conservative austerity began to bite in 2010-12, but the economy still did not grow (need it be pointed out that austerity is not a natural catalyst for, or concomitant of growth, but rather the begetter of recession?), the deficit began to increase sharply, and in turn the debt inevitably increased. One is the reciprocal of the other; unless of course, the Government is plain daft.

Seventh, the debt will now continue to increase even when the deficit reduces; and the deficit is proving slow to reduce. The debt will continue rising until the deficit is eliminated; then at that ill-defined date we will be left with the accumulated debt. Of course the deficit is very unlikely to be eliminated in any foreseeable future.

Here are some relevant figures:

Table 1 (see first table below this article) provides UK Net Debt (£Bn), with outturns for the five years from 2009-2014, compared with the OBR Budget Forecasts provided by the Government over the years 2011-15 (Sources: HC836, HC1853, HC1033, HC1104, HC1093).

Simple inspection of Table 1 shows that the accuracy of every forecast the OBR has made, decays rapidly with time; five years out the OBR forecasts are almost worthless, but the underlying pattern of systemic decay in the reliability of the Forecasts nevertheless persists through the five years, 2010-15. Meanwhile the Net Debt rises inexorably, into all our futures. This weakness is a function both of the underlying Government economic policy, and in forecasting terms, of the econometric model being used (note the word ‘model’; this is not hard-science). The pattern suggests the underlying principles of forecasting, the modelling (the theory) is as unreliable as the iterations. This should also tell us something about the nature and reliability of thinking in the Treasury and OBR.

The Forecasts (produced by the OBR but effectively owned by the Government) consistently underestimate the Net Debt outturns: by around £50-60Bn for 2011-12; a gap rising to circa £150Bn in 2013-14. These are shortfalls, further, unforeseen additions to our Net Debt. In consequence each year over the last five years the forecasts of debt in turn require to be increased significantly over time to keep up with the increasingly recalcitrant reality; and no doubt as a function of reality gradually sinking in, even at the Treasury: the current Budget 2015 Forecast Debt for 2014-15 is now £124Bn above the same Forecast made only the previous year.

Ironically the Forecast of Net Debt made in 2014, for 2013-14, underestimated the Budget outturn for that same year by £144Bn. This is almost a definition of imprecision; but it tells us much about the knowledge-state of both governments and financial markets. In two successive years the debt underestimate totaled £268Bn; this is almost double the additional amount that (unexpectedly) was required to be borrowed in two years that Nicola Sturgeon has proposed to plan to increase public expenditure over no less than five years (£140Bn). Yet nothing changed because of the unexpected borrowing. The British Government is already borrowing more to cover its forecasting errors, than the SNP propose to raise through planned public expenditure.

The roof did not cave in on Britain’s finances although we failed badly to meet the Cameron Government targets of deficit reduction, and had to borrow additional amounts to cover significant shortfalls. Britain continued borrowing and spending as if nothing had happened: because nothing had happened. Indeed, for no good reason at all, and as they demit office, the Conservatives declare this forecasting shambles a “triumph”. They could have made this growth in debt a matter of political policy, and nothing would have happened; and we could have spent the money to good effect, rather than effectively hand investment to banking institutions in the City that caused the economic catastrophe in the first place. All Nicola Sturgeon proposes is to make this fairly obvious financing reality a part of policy, but with one significant adjustment; make sure the policy that is implemented (and the investment it allows) is designed to work for ordinary people – and not against them. The only effective criticism that could be advanced against the Sturgeon proposal is that it is insufficiently bold. The caution is understandable, but rather more for political than inherent economic reasons.

Notice that this disastrous forecasting performance is being presented by Cameron and Osborne as a triumph of good management. The Forecast Osborne relied on in 2011 for the Net Debt in 2015-16 is almost £200Bn below the Net Debt prediction the Government is now making in 2015 for next year – only twelve months ahead (this should gives us zero confidence in Conservative government forecasts four or five years down the pike). The sheer scale of the differences between starting-point and end-point; between forecasts and outturns does not provide a simple statistical ‘margin of error’ framework that justifies Osborne’s clearly lame economic management, but instead provides quite the opposite conclusion to the Conservative scare-mongers; there is scope for radically different policies to the intellectually bankrupt Austerity programme. This offers us the opportunity to choose investment rather than austerity; and even more rare in Britain – investment beyond London.

What the Conservatives are claiming to be a triumph of planned management, nobody should doubt is nothing of the kind; the same Cameron and Osborne would claim in outrage that this 2015 debt and deficit position was the Apocalypse, if their 2015 Budget had been presented at the close of a Labour Government after five years in office, had it been Labour that had claimed they would eliminate the deficit and halt the increase in Debt in one Parliament. The Conservatives are peddling crude partisan politics and not wise government; it is all a matter of ‘spin’. In short, the Conservative position on debt and deficit is absurd; unsustainable. It is quite astonishing that Labour should have drawn the conclusion from this policy farce, that the clever thing to do in the 2015 Labour Manifesto is to promise to eliminate the Deficit by 2020; but that is the nature of the modern Labour Party.

Why are Cameron and Osborne able to ‘get away’ with this patent absurdity? Why are Labour so spineless? The support of the City and the media for this policy are both significant factors, and this in turn is a product of the ridiculous, prevailing neo-liberal ideology. With the public, the common- sense attraction of what we may call ‘household economics’ is also a factor (the shibboleth of ‘balancing the books’); but there is a much more fundamental reason.

Cameron and Osborne can cover-up their total failure of planning, management and even basic economic understanding – only because the deficit and debt were not in reality the critical, knife- edge, precarious economic problem that they, even now continue to claim. They have conflated a dangerous threat of contagion in a banking crisis in 2007-8 with a quite separate deficit and debt issue that is an inevitable consequence of Government being required to shore-up the economy after a catastrophic private sector banking collapse. The deficit and debt were more manageable than the Conservatives realised in 2010; or now wish the public to understand was the case all along. The Conservative ‘triumph’ is the proof that they have comprehensively failed.

The Conservatives have survived the disaster of their own economic ineptitude because they exaggerated the nature of the deficit and debt problem that they sold to the British people. They have presented as ‘science’ and as ‘fact’ what is mere ideology; and they are still selling the British public a discredited snake-oil ideology into the bargain.

The Conservatives have thus deprived Britain of investment and economic growth over the last five years that would in turn quite possibly have on balance reduced the deficit over the period and have at least slowed the rate of the rise in debt. During this wasted period in office they might have pursued aggressive tax avoidance and evasion measures, or tackled the tax-haven status of ‘offshore’ Britain. They could have raised substantial tax revenues from these sources alone, and perhaps even reduced nominal tax rates for the many: but they didn’t. They sanctioned the poor instead. They cut welfare to hapless people who had never participated in the boom and had no hand in the bust. Five years late, and long after the horse has bolted, they now promise to half-close the tax avoidance door. This is Conservative planning in action.

Eighth, the Deficit provides the same misleading and sorry tale as the national debt.

Table 2 (see second table below this article) provides a comparison of the outturn Deficit, (cyclically-adjusted deficit as %age of GDP) presented in comparison with the 2010 and 2015 Government Deficit Forecasts. Remember that each 1% of GDP represents around £18Bn (based on 2014-15 GDP levels). It seems that while George Osborne thought he was involved in a titanic struggle with the Deficit, in fact he has been managing air, or was as well managing air, for the last five years.

Again the important point in Table 2 is not the poor record in forecasting (the improvement that never happens), nor even that this outcome is fecklessly being presented as a triumph of economic management; but rather the fact that this outcome can be presented as a triumph by politicians only because the consequences of the failure to eliminate the deficit is simply not what the Conservatives (or neo-liberals in Labour) insist in claiming. We have comfortably survived the abject inability of a Conservative Chancellor to manage the Deficit; because only the Conservatives and Labour were obtuse enough (or the city cynical enough) to believe that was the single critical variable.

If the consequences of a rising deficit were what the Conservatives have loudly claimed since 2010, then the last five years of ‘austerity’ government would have sunk the British economy, along with its appalling, basket-case financial system that in 2008 nearly brought us all down. It didn’t. Nothing happened. The deficit-debt problem was manageable after all; or at least with Conservatives at the helm, the problem was self-correcting; it managed itself. The deficit continues to ‘manage’ itself, whether it is £90Bn per annum, or higher, or lower; and the debt has ‘managed’ itself, whether it was rising towards £1.0Tn, £1.3Tn or £1.6Tn.

This is just the plain facts: the Conservatives promised the Deficit would be eliminated by 2015-16 (next year). On that date they Forecast Net Debt at £1.3Tn; this was therefore effectively setting the Net Debt ceiling going forward at £1.3Tn; indeed the argument implied a reduction in Net Debt below £1.3Tn thereafter. This was the basis of Britain’s deficit borrowing.

None of this happened. The Net Debt is already £1.4Tn (2013-14), and heading toward north of £1.6Tn, even if the Conservatives were elected and meet their Forecast by 2020; a Forecast they have never achieved once in five years – or even close. We may expect that a further five years of Conservative government will produce Net Debt above, perhaps significantly above £1.6Tn. This has been the actual basis of Britain’s deficit borrowing, in spite of the failure to meet or even approach promised targets. Nothing has changed. Lenders lend to Britain, and we go on borrowing.

The Conservative position on Debt and Deficit is palpably absurd.

Ninth, in spite of all this, George Osborne has now told us that this utter failure to achieve his most deeply held aspirations to reduce Deficit and Debt; that this ever larger mountain of debt proves that he has triumphed:

“We set out a plan. That plan is working. Britain is walking tall again” (George Osborne, Budget 2015 speech).

Be in no doubt; George Osborne is attempting to insult your intelligence. To the degree that Britain has not been completely derailed, it is because Osborne’s plan did not work; and could not work, because he was fundamentally wrong. He must know that he was wrong because the policy has already discreetly changed. Plan A is already ‘Plan B’.

Finally, the economic orthodoxy of the Reagan-Thatcher era is coming to an ignominious end that is proving to be as dismal and recalcitrant as its birth – a cesspit of folly and rancor; an orthodoxy

finally and irrevocably exposed for its vacuity by the Credit Crunch (there is no hiding place for this exploded ideology); revealed as a dangerous vehicle for unregulated greed, promoted and pursued by a motley collection of the gullible, the credulous, the unenlightened and the downright ignorant; nature’s human sheep; or exploited by a variety of spivs and charlatans. All of it packaged and sold to the British people by the Conservative and Labour Parties: the Westminster Cartel.

The British economy is severely unbalanced, distorted to the point of dysfunction by the political and financial dominance of the City. The ill consequences of this, however are to be found not in ‘headline’ issues, or the economics of debt or deficit, but in the insidious side-effects this nasty poison has on ordinary people and the values our country espouses.

The benchmarks of our real values are to be found in our new vocabulary. I do not refer to the new vocabulary of ‘social-media’, ‘tablet’, ‘4G’; the software mechanics of the age. I refer instead to the vocabulary of our social values. Our country has become synonymous with ever more refined ways of ripping everyone off: the commonplace words that have come to explain, direct and inform our world (I shall ignore the intricate sub-text of financial technical jargon, or is it the alchemy of the financial derivatives market, which facilitates the transformation of an ounce of lead into a bucket of gold, tax-free?); but rather the everyday words that are the sum and substance of our transactional 21st century society, and with which we can typically associate contemporary Britain: the only too familiar words that were rarely heard before 2007: such as – mis-selling, usury, rate- rigging, tax evasion, tax havens, scams, money-laundering, cheap-labour, zero-hour contracts, market-rigging, and the one we all know so well (all the way back to Thatcher), “light-touch regulation”; to name only a few. The techniques this vocabulary represents, appear to sum Britain’s distinctive contributions to the modern world: economic debasement and the death of Trust. This, we should remember, is the result of thirty years of neo-liberal political effort and schooling to achieve.

Neo-liberalism has brought out the worst, and not the best in people. That should be its epitaph. 

The Great Deficit and Debt Myth requires to be jettisoned, and Austerity with it.

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

Double post

[Bobby Hundreds]

Yes, wetherspoons are bastards

 

http://www.theguardian.com/careers/weatherspoons-sweet-deal-for-staff

 

 

At no point did I mention wetherspoons being a bad or good employer but as an example of a company thats becoming so big the competition gets smaller by the day, finds it harder to compete. Monopolizing of markets isn't good for anyone but a small few. 

[Strontium]

At no point did I mention wetherspoons being a bad or good employer but as an example of a company thats becoming so big the competition gets smaller by the day, finds it harder to compete. Monopolizing of markets isn't good for anyone but a small few. 

 

I agree about the monopolising of markets, and I suspect most people agree.

 

I wonder how people square this belief, however, with their belief that various markets should be monopolised by the state.

[Stu Monty]

Quite easily.

 

The same way you square the idea of other national services not being privatised.

 

Unless you're going to offer a defence of privatising the army?