"A Smaller State is the Only Way Forward"

[AngryOfTuebrook]

This is what the current pensions dispute is really about. Just like the miners' strike was all about breaking the unions, de-industrialising the economy and shifting power away from the workers (the creators of wealth) to the ruling class, so the current dispute is, at heart, about the Tory class warriors' attempts to dismantle the welfare state and privatise the lot.

 

This is a radical reversal of progress achieved by working people, acting together, over the last couple of centuries. This is the culmination of the work started by Thatcher (with the craven consent of Kinnock) and continued by New Labour, now reaching its nadir by a Tory Government that achieved 23% of the democratic vote, but is relentlessly forcing through these destructive and unnecessary attacks on working people, thanks to the presence of empty suits filling up the chairs next to them.

 

The link to the pensions dispute is the attack on the "Fair Deal" (whereby any outsourced public sector workers can remain in their pension scheme) and Osborne's announcement (in the Autumn Budget Statement) that he intends to weaken TUPE regulations (which grant some protection of pay and conditions for outsourced workers). Taken together, this will mean that, in cases where a current public sector service provider is "invited" to compete with the private sector, the private sector will always be able to undercut the public by casualising contracts, cutting pay, welching on pension agreements, etc. Osborne and Cameron have also made it clear (and have set the enabling legislation in motion) that every public service should be considered up for grabs.

 

Of course, privatisation of public services are rarely, if ever, true privatisations. Profits are privatised, whilst all risks remain with the taxpayers. A fine example is given by our "private" rail services, which cost the Treasury three times as much (in real terms, per passenger mile) as when it was a genuine public service. Privatisation does nothing but suck money out of my pocket and your pocket and channel it to the pockets of the millionaires in and around Government.

 

This all-out assault on the (still, vaguely) decent society that we have enjoyed since the end of the Second World War requires some careful preparation of the ground. Hence the article (below) from today's Telegraph (and, I believe, a similar one in today's Times).

 

After all, "there is no alternative."

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A smaller state is the only way forward - Telegraph

 

We learned this week that we are in the midst of a slump in living standards unprecedented in modern times. So it was surprising, even uplifting, to discover how happy most of us claim to be. According to the first official index of the nation’s well-being, three in four of us are satisfied with our lot. Whether such levels of contentment can be sustained in the coming years is another matter. To begin with, there is the immediate crisis of what is happening in the eurozone to deal with; and Angela Merkel’s refusal yesterday to countenance any of the measures being urged upon Germany by its European partners and by America holds out little hope of a resolution. If there is a disorderly collapse of the euro, then a calamity could become a catastrophe with an outcome that is hard to predict.

But even if such an apocalyptic prospect can be averted at the EU summit in Brussels next week, we must learn to cope with less money to spend on public services. For far too long we have spent way beyond our means, both individually and as a nation. The moment of retrenchment has come. The monumental task facing the Government – and the Tories in particular, since this accords with their ideological instincts – is how to manage this readjustment without causing widespread pain and dislocation.

We have long argued in this newspaper, even during the Blair/Brown boom years, that the state was growing to an unsustainably large size. But for Labour, preaching the merits of a smaller state while GDP was growing was neither politically nor ideologically attractive. This was a missed opportunity. There has been much talk this week of a “lost decade” for the economy; but, in truth, the 10 years before the credit crunch in 2008 fit that description better.

And now there is no choice. As Liam Byrne, the Treasury chief secretary in the last Labour government, put it in a supposedly jocular note left behind for his Coalition successor: “There’s no money left.” Yet over the next five years, the Treasury will borrow £500 billion to maintain the pretence that things can go on much as before, when clearly they can’t. Mr Osborne’s statement, intended primarily to convince the bond markets of his continued prudence, failed to address this bigger picture. His only concession to a changing world was to acknowledge that the Government’s green targets must be scaled back to avoid pushing UK energy prices to uncompetitive levels. The biggest threat to Western economies is posed less by the collapse of the euro than by the end of cheap energy. This was true in the Seventies, which was the last time real incomes fell so precipitously. The Tories responded in the Eighties with a programme of denationalisation that proved popular and on which subsequent prosperity was built. Thirty years on, they need to find a similar prescription – but one that involves a far greater cut in state spending than occurred under Mrs Thatcher.

The politics of austerity are difficult for the Conservatives: already, they are being accused of wielding the axe with relish after spending years trying to disabuse the voters of their alleged nastiness. But this debate does not have to be conducted in a negative way. Handled creatively and boldly, it could lead to a healthier political settlement for the decades ahead. But it involves rethinking at every level what the role of the state should be: how much it should spend; whether it needs to be the monopoly provider of health care and education; and to what extent welfare benefits are any longer sustainable. So far, senior Tories have not taken to the field even to begin making this argument. They need to find the vision and rhetoric that has so far eluded them.

[Anubis]

Who did they poll to get those happiness numbers, Conservative MPs?

 

I've heard this sort of rhetoric before. Now where was it? Oh, I know...

 

 

 

"The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word from Coruscant that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away forever...

 

...The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station."

[Section_31]

Who did they poll to get those happiness numbers, Conservative MPs?

 

I've heard this sort of rhetoric before. Now where was it? Oh, I know...

 

Was the other way around in Star Wars though, the Emperor was well into state-run collective farming according to this:

 

[YOUTUBE]PsDE7o_o26E[/YOUTUBE]

[Anubis]

I'd liken that to the feudal system. For regional governors read earls, barons and sheriffs. They set local laws and collect tithes from the peasants on 'their' land, before turning taxes over to a single figurehead. The governors/barons/earls/sheriffs are responsible for local health, welfare, and law enforcement, and the only time the state/emperor/king interferes is when he's raising an army. That is quite a small state in the sense we know it.

[Section_31]

He does say 'nationalising commerce in the central systems' though, and the Empire is anything but small - it's got Stormtroopers coming out of its arse even on little shitpot planets like Tatooine. I think we have to conclude this is a major analogy faux pas by your good self SM.

 

The tories are more like the Visitors from V, a study in the centralisation of power to which collaborators ralley in order to protect their wealth adn status, while selling out those around them who the Visitors consider non-essential to their plans. They then leave the society to fend for themselves while they plunder its resources.

 

Donovan's mum is the quintessential Daily Mail reader.

 

[tokyojoe]

The headline of this thread sums it up. Government solves no problems, government is the fucking problem. All layers of it.

[Anubis]

He does say 'nationalising commerce in the central systems' though, and the Empire is anything but small - it's got Stormtroopers coming out of its arse even on little shitpot planets like Tatooine. I think we have to conclude this is a major analogy faux pas by your good self SM.

 

Nah. This is Lucas using the word 'nationalising' without any idea what the word means, as in the same converstaion he says Luke's uncle Owen will become a tenant on his own land. And the scene was edited from the film and discarded - although I suspect that was by people who understood his vision better than he did.

[KopOut]

Salaries of middle / upper management within government have gone up and up with the excuse that 'we have to attract the best people from the private sector, so we have to pay them well'. At the same time we're getting a message of 'The State should not be involved in anything', and yet with all the expert management in place on high salaries, the State should be able to tackle EVERYTHING with super efficiency.

[Chocoholic]

Code is going to go into spontaneous self-combust mode when he misreads this as 'Smaller stats is the only way forward.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

The headline of this thread sums it up. Government solves no problems, government is the fucking problem. All layers of it.

Yeah - if we stop making provision for universal access to education, social care, healthcare, the water/sewage system and the transport network and we then close down the Police, the judiciary, the armed forces, business and environmental protection regulators, etc. and we also remove the welfare safety nets that stop people from starving to death in the streets, wouldn't the world be a happier place?

 

Vote Tory, TJ, and all this could be yours!