Craig,

I am not of the ‘left’. I am a… ‘conservative.’ However, whilst I’m critical of the utopian concept of ‘socialism’ and what are termed socialist economic theory; I am not an uncritical supporter of capitalist economics and liberal utopianism.

The problem with these cuts, on this scale, at this particular time, is, what happens to demand when one shrinks the economy like this?

I think the government’s policies will prove disasterous for the economy and society, cutting demand and leading to a downward spiral at precisely the wrong time, leading to even greater cuts to ‘balance the books’ which have been ‘unbalanced’ by the first round of cuts, and on and on… downwards.

Creating so much unemployment will suck demand out of the economy, shrink tax revenues and arguably increase government expenditure; but the wrong kind of expenditure, wasting resources, instead of investing.

Of course there are problems with the level of debt, but in the worst depression since the 1930′s, imposing cuts is madness and national suicide.

We aren’t tightening our belts, we are putting our heads in a hangman’s noose!

The idea that the private sector will magically conjure a million new jobs to take up the ‘slack’… is madness. It will not happen.

The problem is… the UK has been on the wrong economic trajectory for at least thirty years, and the current depression is the culmination of an economic crisis that’s been slowing building for decades.

Why did successive governments spend so much? One can see the welfare state as a massive form of state subsidy which actually benefits ‘capitalism’, that without massive state spending capitalism would have collapsed years ago. Capitalism has a series of in-built, structural, weaknesses; which if left to themselves lead inexorably to economic depression.

What Keynes realized was that one hand to ‘save capitalism from itself’ which meant that the state had to prop up the weaknesses of the ‘market system’ by creating demand for goods and services.

Now, I’m not an uncritical supporter of Keynes, however, I do think there is a concensus that Keynes’ methods worked in the nineteen thirties and ended the Great Depression, or was it really WW2?

What’s happening now is that the government is pursuing the same failed policies that made the Great Depression worse, not better, and that is frightening.

What’s needed now, in a depression, is to get the economy moving again, at almost any cost, and once it’s moving in the right direction, deal with the other problems.

Put very simply, one cannot cut one’s way out of a depression, that only makes things worse.

**Under New Labour there was a massive step change in … the percentage of GDP comprised of state activity.**

Absolute tosh.

For most of the NuLab years spending as a percentage of GDP was lower than it was during the Thatcher/Major governments.

http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_20th_century_chart.html

“a massive superstructure of self-interested providers and administrators”

This for me is the most worrying aspect. It doesn’t seem right that one party has effectively bought itself electoral support by having so many voters dependent on the state for their incomes, whether at the lowest levels or throughout the spectrum to the top managers. It is in the short term interest of those voters to return to power the party that pays them. Of course, Labour didn’t get back into power, but it was far closer than it should have been given the stage of the political cycle and the acknowledged problems with leadership and direction.

The Tories were rightly booted out in 1997. That Labout was trying to protect itself from the normal democratic process by having so many dependent on what they said only they would provide, is not good for democracy.

I agree the state is a massive industry that powers the economy of this country. And that is the main issue, you dont have to be an economist to understand that you cant run an economy on a welfare and state job merry go round. We pay benfits to people who spend it on pasma tv’s and play stations whos tax pays them and the 30 state employees who administer the benfits and tax who’s wage spending and tax pay the benfits etc. etc etc. If we get short of cash in the economy we pay state employees more and more benefits.

And if we get in real trouble with the economy what do the state spends huge sums of cash on building things or making things for the state. Aircraft carriers, Crossrail, Schools, Roads. But these cost too much so we pay everyone more to get more tax revenue. This lot have not gone far enough in cutting the state. We need to get off this merry go round and encourage people to make things again and sell to our neighbours.Being a nation of State employees scroungers and shop keepers is never going to work. And I know the banking industry and finance makes money but that relies on lending the shopkeepers state employees and scroungers money to buy over inflated houses that keep the whole thing moving. I have travelled extensively in Eastern Europe and during communism and immediately after you would go in a chemist (state owned). A woman would take you prescription, A man or woman would go to give the slip to the pharmicist who whould prepare the drugs. Another woman would write you a chitty and you would then pay someone else. another reciept would be hand written an stamped and you would go to another person to get your prescription. This process would take 20 mins and is a total bereaucratic job creating excercise. I went to my local chemist in East London in a new polyclinic. I qeued up gave my prescription to a lady who put it in a little red box and handed it to a man who took it to another man who punched some details into a computer. A slip was printed and put put in a little box and was passed to a cashier who took my payment. About 20 min later a lady appeared with the little plastic box with my pills in it and another slip of paper this was checked with my reciept and I was given the pills. I suddenly flashed back to Warsaw 20 years ago. Funny how things go around.,

A very sensible and timely post, Craig.

It isn’t just about how much money the state spends, but who benefits from that spending and who pays for it.

It is interesting to look at which public sector employees did best out of the last Labour Government.

In the NHS – Consultants fees rose a lot, along with their ‘gold=plated’ bonuses, GP fees increased dramatically, but the salaries of ordinary nurses, orederlies and cleaners rose far less.

In schools – Head Teacher salaries rose a lot, classroom teacher salaries rose, but not be nearly as much.

In Local Government – senior officer salaries rocketed, ordinary staff salaries didn’t.

And there is then the knock on effect that those whose salaries rose most will also have got more money put into their pensions and those on final salary schemes and even better pension as a result.

The combined result of this is that the gap between the best off and worst off increased further.

And as far as who pays in – the tax system overall became less progressive over the same period.

My point is… that the state is an integral part of what we choose to call ‘capitalism’, and always has been, one way or another, going back to the very birth of modern, industrial, capitalism.

The rise of the modern nation state and capitalism go hand in hand, arguably, one could not exist without the other; like two hands washing each other.

This early tendancy, seen in the use of military might to invade and colonize the world, and ‘capture’ markets and ‘create’ demand through imperialism and colonialism, was vital to success of European, Western capitalism.

The system we have now, is closer to a variant of Fascism, something Mussolini would have recognized as the corporate state, where, as he said, ideally there shouldn’t be a gap bigger than a cigarette paper between the state and the corporations.

One can see the United States as a form of culmination of Mussolini’s ‘dream’. Here the vast, bloated, military budget, is the very heart of the economy, an imperial economy. The military budget which ammounts to somewhere between 1.5 to 2.0 trillion dollars a year, all things considered; is what has kept the US economy moving forward for half a century. The military budget is a direct, hidden form of state subsidy, on a collosal, ‘socialist’ scale.

The question is, what would have happended to the US economy, without this form of direct and indirect subsidy?

It would, of course, have to be radically re-structured; but this is easier said than done, as the ‘free market’ and the giant corporations, profit so vastly from this form of state handout and protection from market forces.

Take away the corporate states’ involvement in the ‘free market’ and it collapses in on itself, undermined by its own structural weaknesses.

Nothing will change until the corrupt and rigged version of what is laughingly described as the ‘free market’ and associated F.I.R.E. sector has been allowed to collapse. Reform of the debt based casino monetary system is essential to bring about any real change.

Waffle about the little tweaks and corrections politicians describe as radical reform is completely missing the point. The £1 Trillion handed over to coke snorting city kleptocrats gets barely a mention.

Wake up Craig!

NoLabour pandered to the middle and upper middle classes during its reign in a bid to get re elected as much as it did, hence its lack of humanity towards kids in poverty social services and the widening gap.

I agree that the local public sector is bloated and wastes money on rigamarole like thewre is no tommorrow, but this slashing will not take my neighbour out of poverty.

Where is todays announcements of thousands of jobs, apparently to be created by those who signed the letter on monday, unless off course, their support was empty bluster.

lets wait for the first announcement of a 1 million bonus for some trader who managed to shuffle Government debts from left to right and then watch the response.

NoLabour protected itself from the lower classes with lies and lack of nous. Lies about a Euro referendum and no nous about financial controls in 2006/7, when our public borrowing deficit visa vis to what we could afford, was already 3.5% of GDP.

Blair and Brown refused to have the City regulated.

I finbd it starnge that nobody here riles against the lax tax regime that governs this country.

Should we tax all those found with carrying money in their pockets, regardless of what they carry, a nominal sum of 10%, unless they can show a chitty from their bank saying this money is taxed?

Should this apply to all financial transactions into tax havens? at a rate that equals the amount of taxes to be avoided?

Lets talk paying fair taxes, why don’t we?, no good relying to exclude the instigators of this fiancial bvlack hole from remedying it? Unless bonuses are capped/taxed/ or diverted this will mean an end to the social safetynet as it was once envisaged.

I’m with writerman on the effects of these cuts, they will hit the poorest much harder than those who could afford to siphon off some nest eggs and ivest in this that or the other.

Can you imagine what the public will say/do if this sham carries on as usual?

The problem isn’t how much is spent but what it’s spent on.

The severity of the cuts worry me because of their likelihood of deepening the recession but two things frustrate me in general and they both, imo, have contributed to this situation.

I agree with Craig – there tends to be an assumption on the Left that all public spending is ‘a good thing’ and to criticize it marks you as a ‘raving Tory.’ This attitude discourages scrutiny, which is a very bad thing.

The other frustration is that Keynesian economics seems only to be brought up by the Left during recession.

But it’s not supposed to work like that. For KE to work safely, Governments are supposed to follow it throughout the cycle, smoothing out both ends. This includes purposefully curtailing public spending and creating a surplus as the cycle begins to peak – rather than maxing out the country’s credit cards on more public spending. Granted, the banks made this downturn the crisis that it is, but we were long overdue a downturn anyway and a Keynesian government should’ve been prepared.

As far as the percentage of GDP issue goes (this is pretty much a guess, so please put me straight) but weren’t the levels of GDP under Thatcher and Major mostly low due to recession? In which case their public spending would be higher as a percentage, I would have thought.

I’m just wondering that with Labour governing during such an extended boom when GDP was particularly high, measuring the safety of public spending levels by that criteria was foolhardy.

@stuart

Read and learn

DWP’s £4.6 billion ‘handouts’ to private sector companies in 2009-10

“The scale of the DWP’s infiltration by the private sector is revealed in a list of the top 100 suppliers to the department in 2009 ?”10 who, between them, walked away with almost £4.6 billion of public funds.

At the top of the list is a company few will ever have heard of, property management company Telereal Trillium who received a staggering £783 million of taxpayer’ cash.

Next in line was American computer giants Hewlett Packard, who took almost £657 million out of the department.

Further down the list at number six, job brokers A4E walked away with over £150 million of public money, even though the Public Accounts Committee reported last month that A4E had:

“achieved on average less than half what they promised in the contracts they signed with the Department. Against an average target of 36% of participants into work, A4E has to date found work for 15% of mandatory participants.”

Equally dismaying for many claimants will be the discovery that Atos Origin also pocketed over £150 million from the public purse In Atos’ case the cash is for carrying out medicals whose findings are overturned in over 50% of appeals relating to incapacity benefit and over 40% of appeals relating to employment and support allowance.”

All figures include VAT and the source of the data is the DWP.

The full write-up (quoted above) on it is here

http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/latest-news/1259-dwps-multi-billion-private-sector-handouts

The full list is here

http://www.kable.co.uk/department-work-pensions-top-100-suppliers-11oct10

Here are the top 10 suppliers to the Department of Work and Pensions 2009-2010

1 Telereal Trillium £782,949,477.68

2 HP Enterprise Services £656,863,100.86

3 Learning Skills Council £244,979,729

4 British Telecom Plc £232,815,357.01

5 Royal Mail Holdings Plc £175,300,755.13

6 Action for Employment Ltd £150,835,957.26

7 Atos Origin £150,798,434.69

8 Working Links £134,722,405.31

9 Accenture £87,114,892.12

10 Shaw Trust £71,251,397.48

and wait and see what happens to OUR NHS when the private fatcats wsiting in the wings get their sticky hands on the money.

There is such a loathing of NuLabour here that some people will accept any crap that these ConDems from the Upper Sixth at Greyfriars hand out. Remember too that many of them are millionaires, and crooks too if you watched Dispatches Ch4 this week and Panorama last week.

“I favour much greater redistribution of both income and capital than allowed by the current political consensus in the UK. But I also favour much greater cuts in public spending – perhaps four times greater, over a decade – than Osborne just delivered. The two are not incompatible.”

How do you feel about the recipe of greater cuts and *less* redistribution? Because that’s what we’re going to get…

Somebody

Where are you coming from? You have just agreed with my argument. Who was in charge when all this DWP cash was handed out? When was the election again?

6th may 2010 you say money handed out 2009/2010. How can fat cat ConDems be blamed for any of that. Get your facts right mate.

I wonder Craig if you have read the writings of the 19C American economist Henry George? (see link in signature)

Simply put, George’s premise was that the ultimate beneficiary of all wealth creation is the person who collects the rent (like the Duke of Westminster), and the only fair form of taxation is Land Value Tax on the unimproved value of land.

Income Tax discourages labour, and sales tax discourages commerce, but LVT encourages land owners to put land into useful production or else sell it to someone who will. George’s vision was that LVT would be the only tax needed. It would be cheap to administer and impossible to avoid (rich people cannot hide it away in Switzerland)

Properly implemented an LVT would be redistributive and encourage job creation, but it is very hard to get people to properly understand it. People usually cannot get past ‘Daily Mail thinking’ that house price inflation is a ‘good thing’ as a friend of mine discovered when he stood against John Redwood on a platform of tax reform at the election.

Craig’s argument rather smacks of telling someone about to have both legs amputated to cheer up, they needed to lose weight anyway.

Without doubt some public funds are wasted in the public sector. Having worked most of my life in the private sector I can assure you that funds are wasted there too – and oftentimes they are public funds. No kind of spending will ever be 100% efficient even if we could all agree on how to define that: perceived inefficiency is not an argument for cuts – it’s an argument for doing something about inefficiency.

And just how useful a figure is public spending as a percentage of GDP? Let’s ignore the many credible arguments that GDP isn’t a useful measure of anything, and assume that it matters. The portion that is public spending will appear to rise if (a) the public sector grows faster than the private (b) the private sector shrinks faster than the public. We know that real productive industry has been deliberately decimated in the last few decades so isn’t ‘high’ public spending just an inevitable arithmetic consequence?

Anyway, public spending should not be portrayed as a left/right issue – the political right is perfectly comfortable with levels of public spending which would alarm the wildest socialist, just so long as the taxpayers’ money goes to their pals in boardrooms and bombers. Take a look at the multi-trillion dollar US arms industry.

Certainly from my point of view, my objections are not to “spending cuts” (although I do kind of struggle to see how redistribution takes place without the “spending” part of “tax and spend”), but to *these specific cuts* at *this specific time*.

More than just the general unfairness of both increasing unemployment and cutting welfare, there’s also the fairly well established economic principle that government should spend countercyclically.

The last government made the public sector so large, it was hoping to bribe its way into government for ever; the so called ‘client-state’. It was a close run thing, because if the state leviathan reaches critical mass, that will be the end of our democracy, since the state will be big enough to vote itself in power in perpetuam.

JimmyGiro

You are 100% correct and I dont know other than the obvious self interest why this isnt argued more openly. Why are the present Government telling people this is why they are trimming the state back are they scared of riots or would people not believe them? If they told the truth it would be hard for Labour or the State employees and scroungers in society to argue against it?

@somebody.

Hi. I’m not saying I approve of the payments on the list as I don’t know what they were for, but I’m genuinely confused as to why they are labeled ‘handouts.’ Were these companies hired to do something or simply given the money in back-handers or something?

I would expect most, if not all, of these companies were also suppliers of DWP under Labour. I know Atos – a reprehensible outfit with an appalling record in the States – was hired in by them.

Also, the State will have to employ private companies in some cases – eg we don’t have a publicly owned telecommunications service. The only thing we can do is make sure we’re not being ‘ripped off.’

That there have been cases of being ripped off by private companies, there’s no doubt – I’d single out Management Consultants in particular, for whom the UK public sector is well known as a soft touch and has been for years.

But when Philip Green advised public departments to be far more rigorous in their dealings with suppliers to stop this sort of thing, his suggestions were roundly vilified by many on the Left.

The whole debate confuses me and I think some of it boils down to public = good/private = bad again.

Well get the tax evaders and the money problem goes away.

reduce our money to the EU until it gets it financial act into gear and the problem goes away.

Make the bank in profit buy bank their bad debts, I gotta say im not overtly happy asked some banker sitting pretty whilst the bottom feeders get screwed.

implement a law for all business working for the government alongs the line of http://www.taf.org, and nail the swindlers…

Derek

Not only read Henry George, like all good liberals I can sing the song of his movement:

The Land! The Land!

Twas God who made the land

The Land! The Land!

The ground on which we stand.

Why should we be beggars

With the ballot in our hand?

God gave the land to the people.

“There is no correlation between high public spending and social and economic equality”

Quite a lot of Scandinavians would disagree with you. Haven’t you read The Spirit Level yet?

“So I view those protesting against cuts in public spending as well-motivated but trapped in a historical accumulation of palliative devices which each attracted a massive superstructire of self-interested providers and administrators.”

OMG. Plain English, please!

Does anybody know exactly what Telereal Trillium gets the £782,949,477.68 for

from the Department of Work and Pensions?

I still think many people massively underestimate the level of demand needed to keep the wheels of a highly complex economy moving.

Not only have we seen a colossal explosion of productivity, production and consumption of resources over the last thirty years; but, paradoxically, at the same time it’s debatable whether real wages have increased at all.

This is certainly true of the US, where most peoples real wages have barely moved upwards over the last thiry years.

So how one earth has the economy ‘grown’? The answer, if wages have stagnated… is the credit explosion. Wages have been replaced by credit, in order to keep demand up.

This policy which has been followed by successive UK/US governments regardless of their nominal status as ‘left’ or ‘right’, is, of course, a fragile and highly unstable way of managing the problem of how to sustain demand.

One of the major problems in the UK is that the level of consumption and average standards of living is way too big and high compared to the objective economic base the entire edifice is built on. Especially now, when the windfall revenues from North Sea oil and gas have declined so spectatcularly.

If one looks at the UK economy over the last few decades, and excludes the revenues from the North Sea, to get a ‘realistic’ picture, one sees that things were far worse than they appeared; but the North Sea revenues allowed the real condition of the economy to be obscured and hidden from view.

Much like the North Sea, the vast credit bubble, the housing bubble, the financial bubble… were all created to divert attention from ‘reality’ and keep demand up ‘artificially… like a gigantic Ponzi scheme. A gigantic house of cards built on nothing much more than ‘confidence’… a confidence trick of massive proportions.

Yet this ‘confidence trick’ is the very essence of modern ‘capitalism’ in the major economies of the industrialised west.

What’s tragic is that this bloated, unstable, Potempkin economy… is environmentally disasterous as well. Massive over-consumption ‘financed’ by ‘air’ and at tremendous cost to the planet… building a culture of over-consumption of resources which is insanely over-optimistic about the planet’s ability to sustain exponential economic growth, infinitely.

This is the crux of the crisis of capitalism. The absurdity, madness… the impossibility of sustaining infinite economic growth on a small planet with a finite resource base.

And then we arrive at the Big Question, if the modern model of capitalist mass-consumer society, is not only unstable, unsustainable… and doomed… what do we replace it with and how?

@ stuart again. Have you got a heart or are you the Tin Man?

Read and learn

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-colder-crueller-country-ndash-for-no-gain-2112069.html

and have a look at some of the posts on MediaLens whilst you are at it.

No idea Ruth but probably buying up job centres and leasing them back with a management contract. Something similar happened with HMRC and the company they were involved with were offshore like many of the financial interests of Conservative donors and ministers.

The non executive director of Trillium is vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. Nice.

http://www.telerealtrillium.com/showpage.asp?pageid=68

We aint seen nothing yet. The ConDems will make NuLabour look like amateurs.

@ All,

If a concession were to be made that there is credence in Craig’s observation, and more particularly his comment:-

“… I view those protesting against cuts in public spending as well-motivated but trapped in a historical accumulation of palliative devices which each attracted a massive superstructure of self-interested providers and administrators”

Well ?”let’s take the comment a step further, as follows:-

i) I wager that the largest single itemmised expenditure in the budget is defence and the military.

ii) I further wager that for several years that has been the position.

iii) The observations are posited:-

a) What use is it to have nuclear weapons that can’t be deployed if humankind is to survive?

b) What use is it to produce chemical and biological weapons that if used would be in contravention of international treaties to which the UK is party to, and even if not a party to, if used would still be in violation of international humanitarian law?

c) Is there not a price tag to each of the weapons referenced at a) and b) above?

If the argument is extended to a measure of utility and value for money in the sphere of public expenditure, then we might observe:-

- The weaponry that has been built, bought and fully paid for, sits as useless pieces of armory ?” with no value to be recouped.

- Budgetary commitments to bigger guns, war ships and planes might itself be questioned on the utility and cost/benefit assessment chart.

The point is that because of traditional and deeply entrenched ideas on public policy, there is an area of massive wastage and that somehow remains unquestioned ( in any deeply probing and meaningful way) ?” thus ?” now tell me vis-a-vis ?” public servants employed; education; housing; infrastructure ?” where should the deepest cuts start?

Consider for a moment the lunacy of Tony Blair and the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US. Mad man Bush pushes for the war in Iraq and his lunatic compatriot in the UK embraced the idea and in his mendacity cannot to this day admit the manifest error. Yet, of greater moment is the fact that there is a President in the US who is not an overt war monger, but is trapped in a system that gives special meaning to what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex, and inadvertently and unintentionally, Craig has given us a very useful reference point, in this truncated quote:-

“… a historical accumulation of palliative devices which each attracted a massive superstructure of self-interested providers and administrators.”

For that if the US and Israel decided to use nukes on Iran tomorrow, then pee, pee, cluck, cluck, there would only be chickens in the entire UK political hierarchy and we would be there again in pursuit of a greater destructive military pursuit.

All, of this, both that which has already been actualised in military pounds spent, and those that would have to be spent in the speculative scenario of an attack on Iran, would inflict further devastating financial damage not only to the UK’s national budget, but would constitute a scourge on the face of all humanity. I trust that I am incorrect as regards as that which I perceive as probable.

The short point is that the UK has wasted the largest portion of its budgetary pounds on the military.

Thus, Craig might be answered as follows:-

“I view those protesting against cuts in public spending as well-motivated but trapped in a historical accumulation of palliative devices which each attracted a massive superstructure of self-interested providers and administrators” ( in the military)!

PS. Was it the left that promoted and caused these expeditures? Well if you included Blair in the arena – then there you may very well have an answer.

Here is the Ministry of Defence’s statement on what it does as regards taxpayers’ money.

“Defence Spending

Information about key areas of the Defence Budget.

The Government plans departmental spending through the process of the spending reviews. As part of most recent settlement, the Defence Budget is set to increase from a baseline of £32.6Bn in 2007/08 to £36.9Bn in 2010/11 in Total Departmental Expenditure Limit (Total DEL). In real terms (i.e. after inflation) it represents average annual growth of 1.5%. By 2010/11 the Budget will be some 11% higher in real terms than in 1997, and represents the longest period of sustained growth since the 1980s.

The Defence Budget

£million 2007-08 2008-09 2009-10 2010-11

Resource Budget 32,618 33,602 35,165 36,702

Capital Budget 7,404 7,871 8,187 8,871

Total Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) 32,579 34,057 35,365 36,890

Of which near cash 29,411 30,763 31,921 33,628

The extra resources have allowed us to proceed with two new aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, which will be the largest vessels ever operated by the Royal Navy. We will also proceed with ordering more armoured vehicles for the Army and have recently ordered a sixth C17 Globemaster for the Royal Air Force to increase its strategic lift capacity.

We are also proceeding with a number of other equipment programmes, both to introduce new capability and replace older systems, which will ensure that our Armed Forces remain equipped to meet not only the challenges of today, but of tomorrow as well. The Settlement also ring-fenced £550m from the sale of Chelsea Barracks to be reinvested in improving Service accommodation.

The Ministry of Defence is committed to making value for money savings worth £2.7Bn over the CSR period to reinvest in Defence. Initiatives to achieve this include: a 5% year-on-year reduction in the MOD’s administrative overhead, including a 25% saving in the Department’s Head Office in London and the continued simplification of single Service Budgetary and headquarters structures.

Operations

The additional net costs incurred on operations (for example in Afghanistan and Iraq) are not paid for from the Defence Budget, but rather by the Treasury Reserve. Since 2001, the Reserve has provided an additional £9.5Bn on top of the Defence Budget to cover operational costs. This reflects over £3.6Bn that has been approved for Urgent Operational Requirements. This is a process designed to provide commanders on the ground with the equipment they need quickly.

International Comparisons

According to the latest figures (2007), the UK is the second highest spender (in cash terms) on Defence in the world behind only the United States.At 2.5% (2006) of GDP, the Defence Spending of the UK is above the NATO European average. We spend about the same proportion as France and more than Italy and Germany.Further information on international comparisons can be found in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SPIRI) Yearbook in the related links section of this page.

Government Expenditure

Long Description

Government spend by function in £bn – please click on image to see larger version.

This chart sets out Government spending by function, which means some elements of the Defence Budget (such as pensions) are stripped out. In 2006/07, spending on Defence measured in this way represents some 5.8% of total UK Government expenditure.Further information on the CSR settlement can be found in the related links section of this page. Information on historical spending on Defence is published by HM Treasury in the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) which is also linked.”

Courtenay,

The military is a glaring example. But the same thing is found everywhere in public service, including the NHS which is ridden with excess administration, particularly of artificial “internal market” mechanisms, and stupid costs like the PFI.

IFS reports on Craig’s “not great enough” cuts:

http://www.ifs.org.uk/projects/346

“Britain’s leading independent economic analysts have delivered a powerful critique of George Osborne’s spending cuts, describing them as the deepest since the second world war and saying they will hit the poorest harder than the better off.

Contradicting earlier claims by the government, the Institute for Fiscal Studies identified families with children as the “biggest losers” and said welfare cuts were the deepest since the 1970s.

In its analysis of the spending review the chancellor presented to the Commons yesterday, the IFS said the changes would reinforce the “regressive” nature of the government’s plans to tackle the deficit, including its £7bn of benefit cuts.

It said that with the exception of the richest 2% of the population, the less well off would be proportionately the hardest hit.”

I haven’t actually endorsed this specific package. And you missed outthe bit where the IFS says the cuts may not be deep enough. I am saying that tne left’s defence ofhighpublic spending ismisplaced as high public spending does not achieve the left’s ostensible interests, but does protect the interest of a public employee class.

If we have a government within a government, a deep government as people call it, then this hidden government would need finance. Maybe, just maybe the hidden government has large shares in companies contracted by the overt government. It’s very interesting to see how many of the Establishment and their lackeys get financially rewarding positions in such companies including security/ mercenary companies.

Craig, I guess that last post by ‘alan’ was by you and meant for alan campbell?

it is about nuances, isn’t it? calling for higher public spending per se is as meaningless as approving cutting it per se. the ‘public employee class’ may be the highly paid executives, or they may be the binmen. even then the chief exec of a council will earn dramatically less than a head banker, in a job with far less security. as someone who’s been around both sectors a bit, not as right, or left, i agree with Vronsky.

re the NHS: have you read Allyson Pollock? It has been deliberately run down and increasingly sold off: these cuts are part of an ongoing process of privatisation. I would prefer cleaners in a hospital to be employed directly by the hospital, for example, instead of farmed out to agencies to ‘cut costs’; better for them, the hospital and us, though not for the privatised middle management who cream off their salaries from our taxes. the idea that jobs which are useful to, and which benefit, the public should be paid for by and directly accountable to the public seems a straightforward one to me.

Fatuous discussions around left/right economic planning obscure the simple fact that we are on the brink of a sharp economic downturn because of the central banking system.

The central banks owe the commanding position they enjoy from their government-granted monopoly of the note issue. They would have us believe that a central bank like the Fed or the BOE

is a natural product of banking development. This is emphatically not the case. It is imposed from the outside or comes into being as the result of government favours. The creation of money is actually the bounty conferred on bankers by governments over which they have gained control.

Such control is wrested from the legislature by means of the extravagant donations bankers make to the major contenders in elections. Contenders who are clearly not going to play ball with the bankers see their more financially-backed opponents triumph over them at the election.

Establishing a central bank has an immediate inflationary impact because a fractional reserve system allows the creation of book-entry loans and thereby money a number of times greater than the amount the bank actually holds in its deposits or reserves.

The current restriction of the money supply will work just like it did 1929-39 to spark a leaden deflationary spiral.

Central banking wrests all control over public money from the government and the people. Forcing governments to commit to maintaining large standing armies and the inevitable wars that follow allows banks to create the inextinguishable debt on which they thrive parasitically by enslaving the people to pay the interest on the debt they (the bankers) have artificially created.

All the income tax we pay is absorbed by the interest the government pays to the central banks for its loans. In other words all the money we pay has gone before it can be spent on the public services people expect their taxes to fund. After interest payments and government waste nothing of the income tax goes towards these services.

Any discussion of the incipient economic depression that makes no mention whatever of central banking and the Rothschild Inter-Alpha group betrays those who engage in it as commentators who rely on the likes of Stephanie Flanders and the corporate media for “information”.

Craig’s post from July 11th:

“Apostate, Freeborn and Steelback (who may or may not all be the same person) are not welcome on this site, under these or any other names, for persistent anti-semitism and holocaust denial.”

This constant drip-drip demonising of the “public employee class” by Craig and his new friends from the Bullingdon/Westminster Right is worrying. Scroungers, layabouts, never doing any real work. That is the less-than-hidden message. Meanwhile we are about to enter bonus season. Bottoms up!

“If we have a government within a government, a deep government as people call it”

Worth exercising some thought as to whether this is possible. Michael David Morissey argues that a distinction between ‘government’ and ‘deep goverment’ is not meaningful. Not saying I agree, but worth consideration.

tinyurl.com/deepstate

Craig,

It depends what you mean by public spending. True, the Left tend to favour high spending on public services, but I don’t think they would include wars, PFI and the subsidising of wealthy farmers and privatised transport under that heading.

As has been said before in many other contexts, follow the money. Yes, the budgets of certain govmt departments may well have increased substantially during the latter phase of Nu Labour, but at the same time the amount of money sluicing out the back door via private sector contracts/providers/PFI payments has also increased substantially. I have no figures but the hip-deep involvement of the private sector in public provision is bountiful proof if every it was needed. Corporations in the UK have long looked with envy at the military-industrial arrangements that prevail over in the US, and when Blair came to power he made it clear that he was going to turn the public coffers into a giant honeypot for the private sector. Hence the incessant propaganda denigrating public provision, claiming that its not as efficient as the private sector while departments face cuts and reorganisations (under conditions of secrecy, as well).

Government departments can indeed be made more cost-effective but only up to a point; the core function of the NHS, for example, is to take care of the wellbeing of the population (which it does very well compared to the insanity that reigns in the States). The core function of a private sector health provider operating in the marketplace is – maximise profit, minimise loss. And here’s another thing – the NHS budget exists to pay for the health of the nation, not to provide revenue streams for private sector providers who are incapable of functioning with a government subsidy.

Doh, should read at the end – “incapable of functioning without a government subsidy.”

Exactly, Mike, Alan, Vronsky, Rick, technicolour. I agree 100%.

Good general statement Craig. Now we will look forward to the details.

Re: Chris and the massive step change in spending

“Stepchange” was not the right word but the oscillation in public spending as government swings between left to right is clear. Under Old Labor spending reached 45% of GDP, under Thatcher/Major it sank to 38%, NuLabor then raised it to a peacetime high of 47%.

Somebody urges us to look at MediaLens. Does everyone know that MediaLens just received $1 million from George Soros?

Courtenay Barnett wagers “that the largest single itemmised expenditure in the budget is defence and the military.” How much were you wagering Courtenay? You can send the cash to me. Pensions in 2011 will total 123 billion, Healthcare 122, Education 84 and Defense 46.

Writerman makes a number of important points: “The problem with these cuts, on this scale, at this particular time, is, what happens to demand when one shrinks the economy like this? ”

If government deleverages then there must be credit expansion in the private sector or there will be economic contraction. The exponential expansion in private borrowing since 1945 (see Steve Keen’s data for the US and Australian which must must more or less parallel those for the UK (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2010/09/20/deleveraging-with-a-twist/)) has left consumers over-leveraged. That leaves only the business sector to maintain economic momentum. How do you get a business investment boom going in a depression? LOL.But here’s one way (perhaps?): a massive tax-cut stimulus to investment (end corporation tax, end the national insurance tax on wages), the stimulus to be paid for by a sharp reduction in the size of government with or without a noticeable reduction in useful public services (probably with, since bureaucrats are good at making cuts painful). If new business investment is productive it will generate the income necessary to amortize the debt and pay the interest. If it is unproductive, it will hurt primarily the wealthy, i.e., the investing class.

For those who advocate more government debt instead, the question is how do you make more government spending achieve a sufficient return on investment to amortize the new debt and pay the interest, for if it cannot do that then the debt will be paid with printing press money, which will mean a reduction in the standard of living.

Otherwise, one could consider capital export controls to restrict further outsourcing, a tariff or a cancellation of debts.

It’s so depressing, it seems like Thatcher’s ghost has been running the loud discourse, received orthodoxy and the country for 30-odd years – with all the worst aspects of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ and ‘In Between’.

This is because, in my view, the perceived interests of the ruling classes (that tiny percentage of the population) are more-or-less diametrically opposed to those of most of us. The ruling classes in this country dso not behave in the best interests of the country, but of themselves. This differs from, eg. Germany. Viewed from the outside, we are a very distorted society in many respects. Deep down, the class system is probably at the heart of the malaise. And so we have class arrogance versus class envy with the hollow, tasteless food of aspirationism the ‘catalyst’.

Actually, Alfred does have a point specifically about MediaLens and George Soros and his prominent role in the imperial project. Foundation funding for oppositional organs is one way of exerting control of all sides of the discourse.

Mike:

Re: “the core function of the NHS, for example, is to take care of the wellbeing of the population (which it does very well compared to the insanity that reigns in the States).”

The US system is insane, but it is also not a free market system. There are, for example severe restraints on the number of doctors as a result of restricted entry to medical schools and great difficulties placed in the way of immigrant doctors wishing to practice in the US.

There could be much advantage in a genuine free market healthcare system. In particular, we might begin to see how advancing technology can make healthcare cheaper year by year instead of more expensive. Why not for example, drive in clinics for all the most common surgical interventions, such as hip replacement, hernia etc. — you know, along the lines of Midas Muffler: drive in, they have you up on the hoist, a team that does the procedure a hundred times a week fixes you up in half an hour and you go home with a bottle of aspirin, all for under a hundred quid.

This way, the health provider “operating in the marketplace [to] maximise profit” would be “guided by an invisible hand” to maximize public health.

Who’s the anonymous PC moonbat who hasn’t shuffled off his Frankfurt School programming yet?

People who scream “antisemitism” and “Holocaust denier” are degenerate Pavlovian dupes of the Zionist central banking cabal who instigate the depressions and wars and use the corporate media to manage the public perception of them.

Thus degenerates like anonymous above are conditioned to have no political acumen beyond their being ready act as anti-racist thought police so that we look the other way out of shame and guilt while the real ethno-supremacists pillage the nations.

P.S.Freeborn,Steelback and myself are still posting regularly on the 911 thread. So the PC thought police and their Hasbara shill overseers are NEVER going to have everything their own way.

Alfred, I’m sorry, but that’s like something out of ‘The Simpsons’. I’ve heard this type of thing since around 1989 and it just doesn’t work, I mean it really does not work.

ATOS ORIGIN

This is the outfit who carry out 1 million health assessments for the DWP each year and who will obviously see large growth in their activities. Note how many ‘solutions’ that they have on offer.

http://www.atosorigin.com/en-us/about_us/Locations/United_Kingdom/default.htm

I have just been watching Ch 4 News. Snow interviewed Duncan Smith and cited the example of a woman with breast cancer who was certifed by ATOS as fit for work several times, both just before and after operations including two weeks after a mastectomy. She offered to show them her scar but they declined the offer.

She had to go to an employment tribunal in the end to preserve her employment support allowance which is approx £95 a week. If she had lost her appeal she would have only had entitlement to Job Seekers Allowance which is £65 a week approx (and nothing if you have savings of £16,000).

Duncan Smith spoke of ‘wrapping a work programme’ around such benefit applicants whilst waving his hands around a lot in the style of Clegg and Cameron. I expect Duncan Smith’s income is many hundreds of times greater than this unfortunate but strong minded woman.

Atos Origin, a multinational based in France, has a €6billion turnover. See Wikipedia.

“I mean it really does not work. ”

Well, OK, Suhayl, not quite as described.

But I remain convinced that a competitive market could yield excellent cost-effective services in the medical field and that the benefits of such a market are presently limited by restrictive trade practice in the medical profession.

One way around the problem is to outsource the services as is already happening, with heart patients going to India for treatment.

Actually, maybe Britain should outsource everything. Pensions and pensioners to India — nice warm climate, no heating bills, plenty of low cost fruit and vegetables. Cheap housing. Could reduce UK pension costs enormously.

Then there’s the civil service. Why not outsource that along with the call centers. It may be an unfair stereotype, but somehow one imagines Indians as being peculiarly suited to managing a massive bureaucracy. And heck, with their low wages, it might be possible to re-introduce the dog license and turn a profit on it.

What amazes me is that these proposed ‘cuts’ and means tests and restructurings must be about to cost us a fortune in bureaucracy, surely. All those new benefit claims, all those interviews, examinations, prosecutions, records, evictions.. The time and organisation and paperwork it’s going to take to implement and maintain this new regime!

Btw consider the knock on effects on public health, mental and physical, which poverty and insecurity cause, and you remember that some of the richer people believe that 20 percent of ‘wastage’ at the bottom of society is quite acceptable. Those of us not in that 20 percent ie most of us need to keep our nerve and prepare to support the scapegoats, I think.

Is it at all relevant that the UK could feed itself (using a mixture of largely arable with some dairy for optimum nutrition)? I don’t know why it should be, quite. Ditto that a friend and i once worked out that a universal wage in the UK would come to about £25,000 each. I can’t remember how.

Btw of course Craig’s quite right to point out that public sector time and money has increasingly gone towards spying on ourselves, under New Labour. Rolling back the surveillance state was one of the Lib Dem’s major promises, wasn’t it? Are they?

(and thanks, Courtenay, for continuing to provide relevant & interestingly awful stats.)

Indeed, Rick. “Public spending” does not necessarily mean armies of bureaucrats passing pieces of paper to one another all day long. Nor does it have to mean giving money to professional claimants.

It could mean improving the nation’s infrastructure, such as a massive upgrade of public transport. Mainline railways to all areas of the country, monorail and trams for urban travel, all made in this country and highly affordable. That would mean vastly less car use, which in turn would see us reducing our payments to oil sheiks in dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia.

Public investment – not simply “spending” – could greatly improve schools, hospitals and other public buildings, to make them weather-proof and more energy efficient, and also furnished with micro-generation. Investment in large scale alternative energy sources further reduces our dependence on foreign sources, and again improves our balance of payments.

Investing in the next generation by educating them properly, up to their full abilities, is not simply pouring money away. Saddling graduates with huge debts does not encourage them.

Investing in sports facilities and youth centres, as alternatives to drinking alco-pops and cheap ‘cider’ in bus-stops, would benefit the country long term.

All could go on, but I suppose I’ve already identified myself as an irrational leftie who thinks the likes of the above might just improve the quality of life in this country for the majority.

Ha!!

But corporations are already being allowed to take over primary care like Tescos do the High St. It’s for profits. Local coops are being deliberately not given tenders for political – ideological – reasons. This was happening under the ‘Labour’ Govt. and continues now. We are going to be paying for PFIs for a zillion years. A massive drain on the taxpayer. It’s got nothing to do with ‘restrictive trade practice’ – that’s actually more a description of the US healthcare system. Nurse practitioners and other paramedical professionals actually do a heck of a lot of good work already.

Sorry for disjointed post above: tired.

Alfred re outsourcing: I read a very good Sunday Times report a couple of years ago which showed how the demands, hours and insecurities of working in UK servicing call centres were having a devastating effect on the lives and welfare of Mumbai families. I suppose many of us are resigned, if not hardened, to not seeing our own children/partner/parents/friends because of shift work or simply hideous hours, and quite used to bullying and abuse in offices, but they were new to it, and suffering.

Yeah, I really think it’s sad and pathetic and also embarassing – for them and us – when they can’t even use their own names! Like, there are lots of South Asian in Britain and we use our own names and it’s no problem for most people. So why do people who clearly are not called ‘Sean’ have to use fake ‘British’ names? It’s so silly. A small point, perhaps, but indicative of the demeaning nature of the whole enterprise.

Apologies… as this is probably irrelevant; but my brother, who works in the city for a large investment bank, has just be told that he is in line for a plump bonus for Christmas… wait for it… £100,000! Nice. That’s on top of his £60,000 basic salary!

What’s rather ironic, if one has a taste for the grotesque, is that he’s hinted over the last couple of years that his bank is, in reality, bust. It’s debts and other liabilities far, far, outweigh their assets. The bank is insolvent.

Funnily, this is apparently the case with almost every bank. They are all insolvent, but the vast losses, the foundation which is mere sand, is being systematically hidden off balance sheet, because the consequences of admitting the true state of affairs are too dire to go public with.

So why is my brother in line for a huge bonus? Because paying huge bonuses gives the impression that the banks are not bust, but successful and the recovery is just around the corner. Exactly how long one can keep up this charade is debatable.

When I asked Robin, in jest, if I could borrow £10,000 for Christmas expenses, without missing a beat, he said ‘sure, easy come, easy go.’ And we are all supposed to be in this together, don’t make me laugh, or maybe that should be cry?

“Local coops are being deliberately not given tenders for political – ideological – reasons. ”

Well what’s that Suhayl if not a restrictive practice. I wasn’t saying doctors were solely responsible for the continual rise in healthcare costs with advancing technology, while in every other industry cost decreases with technological advancement.

Tech,

I wasn’t totally serious about outsourcing the UK Government, although it is an intriguing thought. You might even outsource the military. The Brits always liked an Indian army, so much more colorful that the British in their dreary camouflage gear.

“Rolling back the surveillance state was one of the Lib Dem’s major promises, wasn’t it? Are they?”

Yes it was, no they’re not.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/20/imp_coalition/

glenn, v interesting. remember i heard something like this about insurance companies: they were all bust too.

it’s sounding like one big pyramid scheme? which is somehow where the uk’s ability to feed its population without having to foot the costs of importing comes in, perhaps.

mind you, we could vote as a nation to import say, ten luxuries that can’t be grown here. my vote would go to the cocoa bean.

“After the election the coalition said it would “end the storage of internet and e-mail records without good reason”. But the Strategic Defence and Security Review shows ministers now believe the massive surveillance programme is necessary.”

Jesus, MJ. Er, thanks.

Not sure OH has his business plan quite straight but his proposal is something to think about for those who think the private sector cannot compete with the welfare state.

http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/10/welfare-vs-workhouse.html

ps re self-sufficiency, have not done enough research so not suggesting it as a serious proposition, in fact. but it seems common sense that we should be investing in growing more and varied arable crops: sunflowers, sweet chestnuts, grapes.

instead farming here is increasingly set to become simply the production of fodder for giant animal factories. already it is often a dark and quite soul-destroying business, which seems wrong.

That’s what I meant – local coops composed of groups of NHS people/ GPs, etc. are not being given tenders and they are not being given the tenders purely for ideological reasons, while TESCO et al is. That’s capitalist monopoly. Not so free a market then, after all.

You’re right about the increasing costs, though, that’s multifactorial, of course. Someone is making a killing! Big pharma et al.

I know you weren’t serious about outsourcing HMG, Alfred.

“I know you weren’t serious about outsourcing HMG, Alfred. ”

Well actually, Suhayl, it would be better outsourcing the gov than the manufacturing and intellectual service jobs, don’t you think? I mean, why should the public sector be protected?

I don’t think there has to be such a ‘choice’. Public services (public transport, education, health, etc.) should be public, paid for by us; everything else should be the market. Manufacturing is the goose that lays the golden egg-sector. Unfortunately, I agree, successive govts preferred to kill the goose and plump-up the fox.

Suhayl: I’d go a bit further than that. All natural monopolies (water, public transport, energy, post, etc.) should be publicly owned and operated . I don’t recall that the state did a terribly inefficient job when they ran the waterworks and so on. Bills were reasonable, and the service good. Now service is not so good, fixing leaks and so on is treated as a cost/benefit decision, and vast profits go abroad. How can taking a huge amount of money out of a system improve it or the country? This religious belief that governments can’t do anything right, and corporations sprinkle magic efficiency-dust over everything they touch, has ruined this country’s infrastructure.

I agree: That’s what I meant, Glenn, by ‘public services’.

Sorry, Suhayl, I should have realised.

No, no, it’s good to clarify! Rock on! or should I say, Ride on!

Craig, of course, must carry on the good work. On this particular subject, however, there is a distinct issue of competence in play, namely that of Osborne’s. He lacks it. Sorry, but it is hugely obvious, and his speech was that of a man who hasn’t much idea of how it all works.

Now, there is an argument to have a smaller state, and that a smaller state serves its people better. I suggest, though, that this argument is ideological, and, as such, one to have *in a few years time*. Just now, we need a stimulus, not cuts, so Stiglitz suggests, and I agree with him. Our economy is in a mess, and putting people on the dole can’t help.

On the wider point we should I think, Craig and others, be wary of conflating ‘Blairite Public Spending’ with ‘Public Spending’. Again, the issue of competence rears. Blair, to my mind, was fundamentally lacking in the basic competence for the job, his skill with media bullshit aside. His ‘reforms’ were cack-handed, and often done with Murdoch and Big Business in mind, and so they mostly failed. This doesn’t, of itself, mean that public spending is bad, if done correctly though. In truth, the opposite of Blairism is probably the wisest path, always. Ditto: Murdochism.

Spot on, Brendan.

Wow. I basically agree.

According to Child Poverty Action there are neally four million children in Britain who live in poverty. Many of these children have parents who depend on incapacity benefit for their weekly income.

“..after years of slow improvement, last year’s figures showed the numbers[of children in poverty] rising again.” – David Cameron 9th March 2008

“The group that causes me most concern is children who depend on incapacity benefit” – David Cameron-Telegraph

In it’s analysis of child tax credit the Treasury has failed to take into account the benefit changes, including the restrictions on housing benefit. The figures in the IFS calculations show that the child poverty target for 2010 will not be met. This coalition has not even declared a strategy that by law must show that the government HAS to meet the 2020 target of eradicating child poverty. The Child Poverty Act 2010 is legally binding. Progress will be assessed using four measures, the most watched of which is likely to be the relative poverty target (a rate of less than 10%, measuring incomes BHC). The coalition government must publish according to the Act, its first strategy by 25 March 2011.

Statements received:

“The child benefit cut is a tax on children. Families are right to ask why it is just parents taking this hit rather than all taxpayers. It is the destruction of a one nation system that unites all parents under a shared national belief in childhood and the support and recognition it deserves from our government. For decades it has meant families who suddenly lose their financial security, have a life raft to carry them through the weeks before means-tested support arrives.

“Words mean little without action. So we will only know the Prime Minister is sorry when this appalling assault on family security is taken off the table. The principle of the wealthiest paying more is sound. But, most wealthy households are immune from this measure.

“It is the same as a basic tax rise of almost 5p for the typical family just above the higher earnings threshold. A 1p tax increase on high earnings for all wealthy people would save the same amount without the unfairness.”

Child Poverty Action Group

“The coalition has committed to ending child poverty by 2020, but its cuts are hitting the poorest families hardest. It’s not fair that children should have to pay for the cuts and shocking that the poorest families are bearing the brunt of them.

The coalition must re-consider its cuts, including changes to Housing Benefit and uprating benefits. The spending review will need to show clearly how the Government will deliver on the commitment to ending child poverty, ensuring that cuts fall on those most able to pay.”

CPAG

MJ is absolutely correct technicolour, the ‘roll-back’ has been discussed at a meeting of Agent Cameron’s baby, the National Security Council – a secretariat that takes a chunk of Home Office Budget and more.

Freedom Bill or not it seems the government still views us as an inconvenience to be tagged, tracked and monitored. It is the mentality of Whitehall at work, the “deep state” as Anthony Barnett has referred to it, murky, power-hungry and unaccountable, with a deep-seated loathing for the public.

Henry Porter recently warned on OK that “we are still building the infrastructure for a potential police state without a care in the world”.

The Secretariat:

http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/organogram/co-organogram.pdf

But take no notice of me – I’m just a conspiraloon from Absurdistan?

Good point – where is the teabagger from St. Loony – isn’t this conversation worth derailing?

This is an interesting train of thought you’re pursuing, Craig, but does feel a bit off topic in the context of this actual Spending Review.

I personally would be interested in hearing more on your thinking re a radical liberal approach to tax, spend and redistribution.

However, there is the small matter of the crisis at hand – a thuggish gang of Bullingdon Club Thatcher Youth actually smashing up our homes as we speak.

So, as has been pointed out, we need to know what you think about Osborne’s actual overall deficit-reduction strategy, budget and *these* spending cuts as well.

Osborne’s choices are not merely going to have the effect of dreadful immiseration and increased social inequality, they are intentionally designed to do this.

The question we need to have the answer to, is what does a radical liberal such as yourself do about the LibDem party being hitched to this Bullingdon Club administration?

It is a fair point that a radical liberal should not overnight forgive all the errors of Old or New Labour in government, or become ideologically a socialist or social democrat. But the matter at hand is how should a radical liberal react to a situation where he is giving cover to a psychopathic assault on the helpless by the strutting thugs of the Thatcher Youth?

Child poverty

I work in one of the most deprived areas of the country in a job that brings me in contact with the most deprived people and children in the country. Yes I agree that they are victims of a system yes I agree they dont have many choices. I have seen over the past few years millions of pounds spent on them old tower blocks torn down new beautiful homes built for them with new furniture and kitchens I could never afford. But my heart breaks when people given new chances and every break throw it away wreck the house in weeks turn what could be nice estates into slums. I have been involved in moving problem families to nice estates out of the city and into the suburds with a nice enviroment,schools and infrastructures just to see them offend again and be moved again and again until they get locked up killed or grow up eventually. I see families where neither parent works or have ever worked and they live in real luxury with a disposable income far higher than mine with plasma TV’s in every room and not wanting for anything. I know this is cliche but its true. True poverty in this country is largely self inflicted. The only truly poor people I come across are illegal immigrants or legal who choose to live and work in poverty 12/15 in 1 bed flat working far below minimum wage being exploited mostly by their fellow countrymen who get rich on the backs of these poor people so they can send a few pounds home to their families in pakistan somalia or Lithuania.

I have lost count of how many intervention conferences I have attended trying to divert young kids and families from crime or ASB. How many chances can you give someone. The old saying you can lead a horse to water but you cant make them drink springs to mind.

You cant cure poverty by throwing money at it. We have lost a generation or two now we need to start looking forward. Restore discipline at school. Let the police do their real job of upholding the law without hindrance from do gooders. Take benfits from feckless parents that sit bye and watch their kids run wild. Tough love is the only way forward. I know you will all jump in with examples of poor families and criticise my post but believe me I am not a right wing nutter or a left wing liberal I am a straight compassionate working guy with a tough job trying to do some good where I have influence but keep getting blocked by do gooders and bureaucrats.

Thanks somebody for trailing up the dross on Atos, another french interloper with their hands in our pockets.

Writerman’s very close insider account tells us that we are on a ride without holding the reigns, many will fall off after these cuts.

Steve, what happens to the kids when the money to their parents is stopped?

what will happen to them if dad/mum do not get their hand out/fix/bottle of buckfast?

Call me a do godder if you like, but how can you influence the parents and their habits, without taking the kids into foster homes?

There are truly poor people in this country, many of our OAP’s are too proud to ask for help, the annual non take up rate of bvenefits clearly shows this. This country has 4 million kids living in poverty.

yesterday on Hugh fearnley whittingstall programme, one of his chefs gave out muesli bars to kids going to school, a vast majority of them unfed and hungry.

You learn better in the morning and to leave a learning mind without nourishment can’;t be good for you, so its the parents that must be targetted.

Kids ideally should not be allowed into school unfed, imho it is so important, how can we possibly get results and achievement from our kids, if we put nothin’ into them?

Tough love. yes by all means, as long as those who have suffered from their parents, something they do not feel as suffering btw.,most kids love their parentrs, regardless,are not suffering from the ‘cure’ you might want to apply.

Quick, get on Duncan Smith’s bus before the service is cut to find the holy grail – a ‘job’. The bus has replaced Tebbitt’s bike.

Where are the jobs? Is there a factory that makes them? How can I find one? What is a ‘job’? Can we all have one?

Do you remember Gi’ssa job?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9116107.stm

Steve: what I think you’re dealing with is the underlying nihilism caused by a society where children & adults are flooded with propaganda about war and consumption. These poor people surely know they will never afford most of the things on show, and have no power over the images of death and despair they’re forced to see daily. And how many of them are on medication: the zombie drug ritalin; the SSRI’s which can cause everything from depression to hallucinations? And how many of them can afford decent, non-pesticide swamped food: a vital component of life which fundamentally alters people’s behaviour for the better?

“Restore discipline in schools” indeed: this might be possible had successive governments not crushed our teachers under the national curriculum; introduced insane targets and even madder marking systems; labelled children with crazy tags which will stick (Behaviour Emotional Social Disorder indeed) increased hours; and created a system so paranoid that teachers are told never to be alone in a room with a child. Education is of course the way through the mire of marginalisation, but not in this system.

As for not curing poverty by throwing money at it: surely it’s the only way to do it. Of course it depends what you spend the money on.

Good piece from Johann Hari which is relevant:

“There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses ?” much of it our money ?” to reward themselves for failure. That’s the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about “fairness.”

Ingo: “take the kids into foster homes”? Have you some idea of what these foster homes would be like? Have you been in any of our children’s ‘homes’?

Poor parents love their children too. If society gives them no hope and no direction; and sets an example of a greedy amoral and merciless elite instead, who do you blame?

ps ‘luxury’ isn’t a plasma tv (they are probably acquired on the black market, anyway). ‘luxury’ isn’t a new kitchen, either. it’s the choice and direction which these people need. stick with it!

Very strongly second glenn’s proposal that monopolies should be publically owned, especially where they concern essentials of life like water. Public ownership should also be automatic where there is no real market, just a few providers masquerading as competitors but acting as a cartel, e.g. in domestic energy provision.

I rather liked Alfred’s idea of outsourcing government. Nasty policies always get applied to *us* never to *them*. Why not privatise/outsource the bloody useless things – leaner, fitter, Royal Family, anyone?

Techncolor

I told you lots of these people have choices they choose not to work they choose to commit crime and they choose to buy plasma screens in currys like everyone else. And yes foster/care homes are run by millionare property developers who take up to £5000 a week to care for the most troubled children who should have up to 2 qualified social workers to care for them 24/7. But they dont get that and social services dont care they get 1 minimum wage social worker who sleeps in a locked office whilst the kids do as they please I went to one home where all the kids had pushed mattresses into one room and 8 boys and girls were sleeping together on the floor like animals with one poor gut locked in his office not caring. The owners and social services dont care but they make many people rich. Throwing more money after bad. Yes the kids are medicated sometimes and yes the parents are drug addicts sometimes but that is a choice.

I have dealt with kids who are getting straight A’s at school when they attend. But they choose to become criminals or drug addicts or both. Stop making excuses for people sometimes you have to face facts all people are not the same and all people make life choices. Look at the idiot that won 9 million on the lottery bought a beatiful house in Norfolk trashed it and spent the rest of his cash on prostitutes and drugs. He could have become a benelovent benefactor and charity worker or an entrepeneur but he chose to be a looser. Money dosnt stop crime money dosnt help poverty. Deterence, Education, punishment, rewards that can help some others will always be poor. Every country has an underclass eutopia dosnt exist.

steve, been at that home, i think. otherwise rich children become nihilistic drug addicts and tragic wasters too; so you’re right, it’s not a question of money, in that sense. it’s about having a purpose and a sense of responsibility and direction. instead these poor children (and indeed their parents) are flagrantly being used as cannon fodder (sometimes literally) to make other people rich; you are quite right there too. i’m not sure how that helps a sense of self worth.

yes, education’s an answer. if people can’t easily read, or get access to books, plasma tv’s are the only entertainment they can afford, flash looking but easy to get on credit, and often the only entertainment on offer.

by the way how is being medicated a real choice? aren’t poor parents bribed into medicating their children (if they’re on ritalin they get disability allowance i believe) and doctors are often quite insistent in prescribing it, as well as amazingly casual about prescribing ssri’s. even articulate confident parents have felt forced to go along with this.

and must make the point that you are talking about a small percentage of poor people. it must be very dififcult to deal with the results of our society at this bitter end.

Steve:

Training is key for those poor families you mention and that means getting down and dirty at grass roots with these families, instead of spending endless hours at conferences talking round the problem.

Some years ago now I was a governor at a primary school and I have attended meetings with representatives from social services, child psychiatry and the local constabulary who often referred ‘problem’ children to child psychologists who then recommended some form of drug treatment like ritalin as technicolour tells us.

In many cases we found it was the family environment that was the main problem. Some families were never taught basic hygiene and failed to even keep the house clean and tidy.

Poverty is not self-inflicted it is a reflection of societies neglect, disregard, ignorance and thoughtlessness.

I agree with technicolour that society is the cause of many family problems and money can be better spent on training those poor families who do love their children but need guidance on discipline, routine, abuse, money and hygiene.

“I have come to realise that caring in politics isn’t really about caring”

Tony Blair – Labour conference Sept 2006

I understand it is very hard to believe that people make a choice to stay poor but they do because like I said they are not poor. Most familise on the poverty line are getting incomes far in excess of £25000 a year. Its what they choose to do with that money that makes them poor. If you dont pay rent you dont pay council tax or income tax and you are getting a couple of hundred pounds a week thats disposable. We have to pay mortgages, rent tax on our income then if we are lucky we get a couple of hundred left at the end. The welfare system in this country is very generous. If you save a little buy some nice things do your RSL house up buy the kids plasms any games you can live comfortably maybe not in luxury but compared to some poor indian pissing in a bucket in a calcutta slum then in reletive luxury. If that person motivates themselves to get up shake off the depression from being unemployed or poor and get a job he/she looses this lifestyle. Hence the term poverty trap. If they engage in black work or criminal behaviour they get both a nice comparitively lifestyle and lots of cash from us in benfits. If all your neighbours are doing it it cant be bad and becomes socially acceptable. If your parents are stealing from the state why cant the kids steal? Its a cycle of misery and crime that unless you are very motivated or punished severely to dissuade you from doing it then its an easy option. Its far simpler than you are al;l making out and its the fault of us all. If you feel sympathy for criminals instead of contempt and loath then society is screwed forever.

Yes, I’m not sure that feeling ‘contempt and loathing’ is ever the way forward. If it were I might be inclined to reserve it for the people who have millions to spare each week, not just a couple of hundred quid.

“Most familise on the poverty line are getting incomes far in excess of £25000 a year.”

A man in a job centre once told me that they *expected* claimants to work on the black market because otherwise they could not survive. You quote this figure of £25,000. How do you get there? Where’s your evidence that ‘most families’ receive it? I agree, that is not ‘poverty’. But the JSA is going to be set at around £50 a week. Housing benefit is often less than rent, meaning that people can be £20 a week short, leaving them with £30 a week to pay for food electricity etc. Have you tried living on £30 a week? This is admittedly for a single person, who will include the lost and desperate youth (although they get less money in fact).

You are right, it is a cycle of misery, a poverty trap, as the churches pointed out in a report ten years ago. How you square this with feeling general ‘contempt and loathing’ I don’t know. Sure there are major criminals out there, who in another life would have made excellent hedge fund managers, but you seem to be reeling from their ability to play the system to their own benefit while ignoring the fact that for most people this is not the reality, at all. And indeed, Calcutta boasts some fearsome poverty, as do some housing estates in Leeds, but this is not the reality for most Indian people either.

and finally, Steve, it is not just a question of people chosing not to work: *there are not enough jobs*. Surely you know that? The last time I looked, in fact, a year ago, there were half a million job vacancies. And an official total (massaged down to the bone) of around 2 million unemployed.

An observation I have made is the amount of cash that people have in their pockets. When arrested for offences. I dont mean dishonest offences I mean minor domestic assaults or fights in street or traffic matters. You ask occupation they state asylum seeker or unemployed. You then search them. Often sums as much as £2000 in cash come from them. Where did you get that ? you ask they look at you as if you are stupid the kind of look saying dont you always carry a wad. They say with a smile “its my benefits” I know and they know its lies but you cant prove it either way. The point I am making is how much do you carry in your pocket in cash or card with clear avaliable cash not credit? This is not a minority but most poor people carry large sums of cash. We know where it comes from and why. If you put money in a bank form your dodgy job or renting your council flat to 15 Lithuanians whilst you have a mortgage with the woolwich people will ask questions. We are only scratching the surface of the dishonesty and corruption that goes on at our expense. And truly poor people go under the radar until they end up dead or in hospital. Pensioners are poor working all their lives to get a pittance from the state.

Technicolour

Stop reading reports and live and work in the communities you talk about. Dont quote unicef or churches go and see the estates speak with the people at length not the chosen ones to attend the meetings by the council who have the worst hard luck story. People are poor and live in shitholes and yes some dont have a huge choice because we are spending millions on corrupt people instead of targeting the needy. The figure £25000 is a total figure when you role in everything child support jos seekers rent rates motobility car. freedom pass worth nearly £3000. True not everyone gets it but believe me the profeesional claimant gets far more. And how can illegal immigrants I see always have a job or the drunk Lithuanain on a Saturday night manages to keep down a job who hardly speaks english but mr smith in coronation street with 5 kids cant find one? Jobs are out there and anyone looking will find something. Your friend at the Job centre should be sacked with an attitude like that. If people didnt screw the system we wouldnt be in such a mess now.

I must say, I don’t know any poor people who carry around large wads of cash. Perhaps you have a nose for the ones who do?

And I share your frustration at those ruthless inhabitants of terrible areas who skim off their helpless neighbours. Such people have always been with us, I think. And they exist in all walks of life.

And yes, councils in poor areas need to be challenged on their housing benefits policies: they will pay a private landlord £400 a week no questions asked for a deathtrap flat which its inhabitants know is hardly worth half that. Where’s the sense in that? And this government are doing nothing to address it, except to squeeze people out of the better areas.

And life in better areas is – better. More green, more trees, more services, better air, more activities, less general despair. You’re far less likely to turn to drugs or violent criminality if you live in Holland Park instead of Haringey, or a Glasgow housing estate, I suggest. No matter what your income.

“The figure £25000 is a total figure when you role in everything child support jos seekers rent rates motobility car. freedom pass worth nearly £3000.”

So your suggestion that ‘most families on the poverty line are getting incomes in excess of £25,000′ isn’t actually substantiated? I didn’t think it could be, judging by the people around me.

But Steve, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Not surprising, as I have worked and lived in such communities for years. I can therefore tell you that the drunken Lithuanian is drunk because he is in despair at being separated from his wife and family, while working 18 hours a day and living in a workhouse here to support them. Or desperate because his job has finished and now he can’t afford to get home at all. The ‘illegal immigrants’ who have jobs are equally doing the kind of jobs no-one in their right minds would do if they had a choice eg packing for £1.25 an hour.

As for Mr Smith with his 5 children: perhaps he is able to get a job, but simply unable to get a job which will pay enough to keep his family: society has made them unaffordable. This is what the churches referred to as the ‘poverty trap’; people stuck on benefits because wages in real terms have not increased to match costs.

Or perhaps he is in a bad way, after decades of poor nourishment and bad air and a lack of mental stimulation and exercise. Or perhaps he is a bloated gangster playing the system, of course. In which case it is up to our forces of law & order to deal with him and not concentrate their efforts on his victims, I agree again.

Tecnicolour

We agree at last I want to help and I do everyday in a small way but it is uphill all the way fighting through people with agendas who will never admit a person is bad no matter what, as everyone is a victim. Poor people feed off poorer people and rich people feed off everyone. Chucking money and creating quango’s paying middle class do gooders with an ology 40000+ a year to teach parents how to parent or how to claim and maximise benefit income does not help. Create worthwhile real jobs in deprived areas COOPS or collectives earning real money. Jump all over cheats and scroungers and criminals locking them up or kicking them out of houses if needed. You will be surprised how the threat of loosing their house suddenly makes mum or dad take control of ASBO kids when everything else failed previously. AS for where you live again I cant disagree with that but to prove a point in the late 1970′s Red Ken and the GLA moved a number of “problem families out of London and into the countryside. Building large estates with reasonably pleasant housing for the time. One such place was in Suffolk where I used to work. The place was full of fresh air with Thetford Forest across the road and a beautiful rural village centre. After a couple of years it became a slum ghetto where police cars had to go in twos or threes as kids chucked paving slabs through the windows when responding to spoof 999 calls. I visit the area often and a couple of generations later it isnt much better. when I was there about 80% of the crime eminated from that estate. AS you say we will always have an underclass but how do we choose the deserving ones and rescue them without wasting millions on the helpless?

Well, we sort of agree! I think the helpless are as deserving of help as anyone else. What they really need, of course, is equality.

And no, resettlement doesn’t usually work. People uprooted, ripped away from old communities, and placed in modern build estate ghettos with no established shops, pubs or services tend to go downhill quite rapidly. There may have been a beautiful rural village centre, but it will have grown to cater for the people who could afford it; not for the needs of a poor and disparate new influx?

“Create worthwhile real jobs in deprived areas COOPS or collectives earning real money.”

Absolutely! Instead they are evicting voluntary social centres in empty shops, sometimes with tasars, and threatening perfectly legal ones – for fear that they become hotbeds of self-education and cooperation, I suppose.

“Jump all over cheats and scroungers and criminals locking them up or kicking them out of houses if needed.”

There we differ, or at least ‘cheats and scoungers and criminals’ is a broad church and I can’t whip up the kind of anger those words seem to merit. Yes, technically one could go after the man on JSA not declaring his extra income from window cleaning. I think it’s a waste of public time and money, myself, as well as pointless and outside the spirit of our laws. Don’t you?

Threatening people might, in some cases work, but it’s been the growing trend generally, and doesn’t seem to have worked, generally?

Interesting discussion, and good to hear your experiences, though.

“After a couple of years it became a slum ghetto where police cars had to go in twos or threes as kids chucked paving slabs through the windows when responding to spoof 999 calls.”

- bad experiences, sounds like Belfast, but very evocatively written!

I shagged your missus up the arse and she like it.

his is why you worry about me rattling your backfuckingdoor eh yeah?

Rooney

I am scottish

Vronsky says, “I rather liked Alfred’s idea of outsourcing government.”

One problem with outsourcing is that it can only work if the bidding process is competently and honestly done; otherwise one just ends up with a very expensive mess (and a few politicians with large smiles on their faces). Now Alfred lives in Victoria, BC and he may well feel that the Victoria-based British Columbia Government (one of the first governments in the world to develop P3 programs) does meet this double criteria of competence and honesty, but can the same be said for Westminster? For example, was the privatization of British Rail a success or a failure?

Steve’s completely understandable frustration, I think, comes from working at the sharp end of the outcome of several decades of garbage economic, educational and social policies – both ‘Right’, ‘Left’ and ‘Centre’ bear responsibility for this – we all do – but the propagators of these disasters seldom have to deal with the fall-out: Steve (and the Social Worker locked in their office) does.

Teachers, for example, now are at the mercy of ‘little emperor’ children whose parents indulge them via a craven bureaucracy that’s interested only in corporatising the brain and exerting corporate bullying tactics as a means to personal career advancement. It is a licence for psychopathy: a microcosm of the system.

I noted again this morning that in the (very decent, well-off, highly-educated, etc.) area in which I live, drivers – often with children in their cars – are tending to ignore the amazingly brave and courteous ‘Lollipop’ Wardens whenever they can. They scrape thru’ at the last second as now they also scrape thru’ the initial period of a red traffic-light. This endangers the lives of the Warden and other children/ parents. As a parent (and also a driver) myself, I get furious at this and want to kick their (sadly, moving) car. But they don’t care. Across all social classes – and actually it is esp. evident among the wealthy, if one has ever interacted with them, one will learn this very swiftly – it’s dog-eat-dog and crass individualism (but with no sense of individual responsibility, only of entitlement) rules the roost. As TV constantly preaches to us all: Anything goes, as long as you win.

Steve, technicolour, let’s try to keep on working in the struggle for a better – not utopian – society. Alone, we are nothing – at the mercy of brutes and crooks of all shades and classes – but united…

conversely i’ve worked in schools (usually quite middle class town schools) where the children have been crushed and silent. eerie.

don’t get me wrong; i’m very interested in steve’s perspective and grateful to him for taking time to write it and reply.

Back to topic (sorry) I also think Craig’s point about redistribution is a fine one: perhaps obscured by its link to these stupid cuts.

Craig,

It would be interesting to know what you think of the comparision of what is being cut to what is not.

There’s another view on this here:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/10/18/britains-shock-doctrine/

What if there were no benfits for the able bodied unless they worked, and if a government agency ensured everyone wanting to work had a job, the wage subsidized by the government to within a penny of the minimum wage? At the subsidized rate, labor would be cheaper in England than in China.

Technicolor said: Suhayl: what people want need is equality.

Really? Perhaps what some of them need is a kick in the arse.

When I was a kid, England was one of the safest and most law abiding places in the World. The annual murder rate was around 50. But then discipline was furious. Mothers slapped their children in public, boys were beaten in school, “juvenile delinquents” were sent to Borstal, vandals were birched, murderes were hanged and old ladies in boarding houses were said to fantasize about castrating rapists.

Was there a connection between discipline and behaviour? LOL

Glenn said: “All natural monopolies (water, public transport, energy, post, etc.) should be publicly owned and operated ”

Thing is, though, there’s nothing very natural about most monopolies, with the possible exception of sewage.

Public transport, for example, is only a public monopoly if it is publicly owned and protected from competition. But why shouldn’t I run a bus in competition with London Transport or whoever? It is not just me, but my potential passengers who lose if I am prevented from doing so.

True, if there is only one pipe or one rail line then there will be no competition on that part of the service, although in the early days there was even competition among railways and utilities such as telephone and power. But there is no reason why you should be denied a choice of which train you take on a monopoly owned rail line or where your power or your water comes from. In some places in North America, for example, you locaI power company can supply you electricity generated from coal or from wind, the price depending on the source, the sources being independent producers.

” I don’t recall that the state did a terribly inefficient job when they ran the waterworks and so on.”

That’s arguable. Before it was privatized, it is said that the London waterworks lost more than half their water to leaks! But more seriously, things may work differently now than they used to. Those old established public utilities had a low paid workforce that was guaranteed a job for life and whose members derived their sense of self worth from performing an essential public service. On the whole, therefore, they were well motivated, conscientious people with a wealth of experience. Now we all know such people are hopeless losers. So how do you recreate that kind of an organization?

What I believe we are seeing in Britain, and Steve’s experience provides vivid evidence for this contention, is a civilizational collapse, hastened by a ruling elite who are stuffing their pockets with whatever isn’t nailed down before they take flight to their havens in Switzerland, Bermuda, Hong Kong, etc.

Roderick, re outsourcing government, I was mostly thinking in terms of bureaucrats “filing sawdust through a knot hole” to use a vivid phrase of WAC Bennett’s. I thought the Indians could do that with as much inefficiency as the British but at lower cost.

What has happened in British Columbia with the P3 thing is obscure. The media are too pathetic or too wedded to the corporate interest to investigate. But the essence of the policy seems to be to take old fashioned public monopolies run by good old boys who do a fairly decent job for a fairly modest wage and sell it off to some New York financiers who promptly double prices, cut wages and pay the chief exec millions. Most people assume we’ve been ripped off, which is why the Provincial Premier’s approval rating recently dipped into single digits. We’ll have the socialists back after the next election and they will no doubt screw up just as they always did before.

“old ladies in boarding houses were said to fantasize about castrating rapists.”

just too weird.

“Was there a connection between discipline and behaviour? LOL”

spanky, spanky eh, Alfred? what made you into the supremely disciplined person that you are, I wonder?

less flippantly, i do wonder what makes someone in des res Canada so excitedly authoritarian. Murderers were hanged – yes, the death penalty went after the wave of revulsion caused by the wrong man being hanged for Christie’s murders, and seeing Bentley effectively murdered by the state. What a shame the Birmingham 6 missed out, I suppose.

“Perhaps what some of them need is a kick in the arse” – of course, to get out there and find jobs which do not exist.

Steve is quite right – poor does not equal automatically “good”; why should it? Dora Russell maintained that it is actually easier to be ‘good’ when you’re not at your beam ends and frantic with worry and instability. Would you agree?

Technicolour – I don’t think that whether one is good or bad has anything to do with one’s wealth, though I will say this – when the rich and powerful go wrong, they are apt to go very wrong indeed.

Techie,

I think it was Bertrand Russell who mentioned to old ladies in boarding houses, but I may be mistaken.

Why do you take a statement of fact for a statement of opinion? What I stated about hanging is a fact. It was not a statement of advocacy. Whether the death penalty is a deterrent is something we could discuss. But to infer from what I said that I am for it is either due to very careless reading or shear prejudice.

I am well aware that many innocent people have been hanged, which is why I have always argued against the death penalty.

But none of that bears on the argument I made, which is that England used to be a heavily disciplined society, which worked quite well, and now is a bizarrely permissive society, which is fast disintegrating.

Led like sheep by the corporate media it doesn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind that we might have been here before.

The corporate media encourages people’s thinking to remain within an hermetically-sealed ahistorical vacuum.

Santanyana predicted that those who fail to learn anything from history will be condemned to repeat it.

Reading the above one gets a sense of just how accurate he was.

Read the speeches of Robert LaFayette and Louis MacFadden and discover just how much our situation today resembles the one they lived through a century ago.

http://www.milestonedocuments.com/documents/full-text/robert-la-follettes-speech-on-the-amendment-of the-national-banking-laws/

In the twentieth century there were numerous depressions and panics. The issues involved were probably more honestly and openly discussed than they are today.

Alfredo: yes, it was a fact, but it was a selective fact – innocent people were hanged too. Also you were using it as an example of a ‘heavily disciplined’ society which ‘worked quite well’ as opposed to ours, which is ‘dinsintegrating’. It was therefore loaded with opinion.

If this is a case of you moving away from your previous position (you say you’ve argued against the death penalty) I assure you that as someone who has no axe to grind I would not wish to live in a society which officially executed people whether it was a ‘deterrent’ or not. In fact the murder rate in the UK is at its lowest for 20 years, apparently.

Craig’s post from July 6th:

Apostate, Freeborn and Steelback (who may or may not all be the same person) are not welcome on this site, under these or any other names, for persistent anti-semitism and holocaust denial.

Listen, Technochio,

You’re a genius at insinuation:

“it was a fact, but it was a selective fact”

Bollocks, I stated that in the 50′s Britain was a severely disciplined society in which, among other things, murderers were hanged. This is a fact. And in the context, it would have been entirely irrelevant to go into the issue of capital punishment, a topic on which I am probably as well informed as you, and on which my moral position is probably as good as yours.

“Also you were using it as an example of a ‘heavily disciplined’ society which ‘worked quite well’ as opposed to ours, which is ‘dinsintegrating’. ”

So what are you saying, a society with a murder rate of 50 a year did not work better than one with a 20-year low of 648 homicides (U.K. 2009)? Or that a society with 12 indictable offenses per thousand was not better disciplined than one with, as in Britain today, ten times that many?

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf

There’s a great talk here by Chris Hedges on how liberals betrayed every principle they ever possessed.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26658.htm

It explains what Technochio cannot understand, that there is nothing inevitable about progress, that society can go to the dogs as readily, no probably much more readily, than it can rise to a high state of civilization, and that the present descent of man, as readily witness in Britain has been propelled by liberals and all those who never heard of a social program they didn’t support.

Oh Alfred. The demographics way back when were different. If you can’t see that 648 murders a year out of a population of 60 million people is not still pretty amazing, leaving murderers, as it does, as a drop in the ocean, and affirming the non-psychopathic nature of humanity in general when allowed to live in relative peace, then what?

But you don’t have to live with the fear spread by the propaganda here, I suppose.

Btw why did you bother mentioning murderers and hanging if the issue of capital punishment was ‘irrelevant’?

“…cannot understand, that there is nothing inevitable about progress, that society can go to the dogs as readily, no probably much more readily, than it can rise to a high state of civilization”

Oh, I do understand. My definition of a civilised society is one which does not execute its own people, or launch attacks on others, among other criteria. What’s yours?

“Going to the dogs” – yes, going to a state where force (Alfred would say ‘discipline’) rules, and where big men kicking arses roam the streets.

above was me

“why did you bother mentioning murderers and hanging if the issue of capital punishment was ‘irrelevant’? \”

I didn’t say it was irrelevant. I mentioned it because it was illustrative of a severely disciplined society. I was stating a fact. How many times do I have to point that out?

And the existence of the death penalty was highly relevant. It was an indication of an attitude: the belief that people are responsible for their actions. Hence most supported the death penalty. The fact that the police usually got the wrong person was not then generally understood.

As for demographics, the fact remains that the number of homicides and indictable offenses per thousand has risen ten-fold since the 1950′s. You think that’s insignificant?

What is amazing to me is that there are so many people who think things are going in the right direction and that if only the rich were taxed a lot more everything would be perfect.

Anon,

You ask my definition of a civilized society, but I have already given it. It would not include the kind of welfare bums that Steve describes above (who Techie thinks suffer only from a lack of equality, and self-esteem no doubt, poor bastards), or the corporate/banking welfare bums who own the present British government. That is why I proposed above a scheme that would ensure everyone able to work had an opportunity to work and a powerful incentive to do so.

As for the elite, I haven’t a prescription. Saying they should be taken out and shot, doesn’t count since there’s no way to effect such a policy. Progress just is not inevitable. Societies fail. Britain is failing. Near bankrupt, industrially uncompetitive, ruled by a fraudulent elite who regard the masses as scum:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FnmnuDiVno

and with a huge middle-class employed by government and feeding off the crumbs that fall from the bankers tables.

Chris Hedges thinks fascism, what he calls inverted fascism, has arrived. I am not so sure it marks the end of the road, however. We may still see the real thing climb out of the gutter, when a charismatic leader convinces the working poor to turn against the parasites that blight their existence.

Alfred: there were fewer murders in 1950 than there are now, and you perhaps think that this says something.

What you think it says, I don’t know. The figures are rather too small to attempt a conclusion; other than that murderers are extremely rare. Admittedly, we do not make it easy for people to kill accidentally or casually (with guns, for example); perhaps you would agree that this is a good thing?

Anyway, the fact that the murder rate drops regardless of punishment is surely relevant, if those figures are.

Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that it is good per se for a society to be ‘highly disciplined’. Whether it ‘works’ in cutting murder etc or not. Let me see. Which examples of such ‘highly disciplined’ for the sake of it societies can I think of? And would I like to live in one?

“when a charismatic leader convinces the working poor to turn against the parasites that blight their existence.”

Mmm. Perhaps he’ll have a small moustache.

“Mmm. Perhaps he’ll have a small moustache.”

If you keep driving down the Weimar road don’t be surprised if you come to the expected destination.

Gosh, Alfred, you’re being so revolutionary and divisive. Take a chill pill, Lenin.

The middle-class thing is a myth. The middle classes are struggling as much as anyone, as far as I know, they’re just doing it in slightly better built houses. They’re being faced with eviction and food parcels too. And I think it’s a bit cheeky of Alfred to adopt the voice of a struggling inner city dweller when a) he is not and b) they are usually much nicer.

sorry, Alfred, but it’s true. Perhaps this is the filter of the web?

Again, Techie, you mistake statement of fact or belief with the assertion of principle, or policy. Of course I do not, and did not, urge revolution. I urge, um, repentance. LOL

As for “The middle-class thing being a myth”, what is this “thing” you are talking about?

Are you saying that there are not millions of civil servants who consider themselves middle class?

And are you saying that those in the public sector are not paid largely from the taxes on the wealthiest section of the community (well plus printing press money), hence my reference to crumbs from the bankers table.

“sorry, Alfred, but it’s true.”

Well something may be true, but it beats me what you are talking about.

I suppose i’m not so interested in working people up to a fever pitch of indignation, Alfred. I’m more interested in solutions than in blaming the people currently trapped in this system. From what I’ve seen it’s fun for very few of them, barring the media and artists and that far less so now.

But I believe when I mentioned ‘equality’ you suggested a ‘kick up the arse’.

alfred 8.43: I was referring to my previous comment, as people do. Apologies; I’ll spell it out next time.

“But I believe when I mentioned ‘equality’ you suggested a ‘kick up the arse’. ”

Steve was talking of benefits recipients who seem to despise those who work. Metaphorically, public policy that requires such people to work for a living would amount to a kick in the arse. It would also mean greater equality for the working poor whose taxes go, in part, to cover the welfare costs of those who evade work.

Alfred, I think our general problem is that, when faced with a financial problem, I think in terms of gently liberating excess income or land from those who can’t possibly need it and to whom, from my experience, it’s generally a burden not a joy (I agree with glenn: I’d leave them a million so they didn’t get angsty). You seem to thinking in terms of screwing the people at the bottom of the income pile even further.

Correct me if I’m wrong. Otherwise, we’ll have to agree to differ, since it’s late.

Technicolour – It seems we already have a man with a small moustache in the guise of the Conservative leader of Harrogate Council!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-11609438

“You seem to thinking in terms of screwing the people at the bottom of the income pile even further. ”

Come on. How can you infer that from what I’ve said. What I said was largely in response to what Steve said about people who chose a life on welfare, which is consistent with what other observers have reported, e.g., Theodore Dalrymple who has written about the way in which doctors are often intimidated by those insistent on living “on the sick” and won’t be refused a sick note.

What I have said repeatedly about the working poor is that their taxes should be lowered, actually that they should pay no income tax. So how can you accuse me of wanting to screw people at the bottom of the income pile.

What I did say is that those who held work in contempt should be given powerful incentives to change their attitude. Such a change would be a step toward the regeneration of society. The idea that because there are rich people, everybody else can lol around watching tel, or boozing at public expense is beyond my comprehension.

The idea that if the rich were looted we could all live a fine easy life is simply a mistake in mathematics. Some rich people live very well but most actually have their money invested in productive things that create the wealth on which we all depend. Farmers, for example, work the land and produce food. Bill Gates has money invested in MicroSoft, presumably. He may live better than me, although when I used to commute on the ferry between Victoria and Vancouver, I spotted him a couple of times, a geeky fellow with a laptop sitting with everyone else in the public lounge. As a percentage of his total wealth, his personal consumption is almost certainly negligible. So if you loot the likes of Bill Gates to feed the poor what happens is capital is consumed with a consequent reduction in GDP. Then the poor will be even poorer.

I think you are getting into a poor state when you start measuring up to others on grounds of willingness to accept remunerative work.

Much of the efforts and attention by which people can benefit others are non-remunerative, while much remunerative effort is only parasitic.

AND – You might work hard to earn a wage and pay your way in an ecomony (with its deep cruel roots), and you might also generaly be an unpleasant or unhelpful or ruthless shit.

In a stressed, word weary state, *many* people do function like that, while resenting the people who dont, who are apparently spoiling their economy, and contributing to their burden.

But to live happily and healthily, if it were not for taxes, industrial and commercial excesses, most people would *need to consume* and produce very little. Food and shelter could be trivial to provide in this age of emense production technology, of battlegroups and substandard product cycles, and everything… surely you know?

Apart from the occasional gadget and harmfuly cheap heavily taxed booze, ‘scroungers’ consume very little of the countries scarce resources.

Many ‘scroungers’ are much nicer people -have a much better effect on their society – than the ‘remuneratives’ who consume orders of magnitude more environmental resources and of other peoples services.

Of course there is shocking squalor and destructiveness in the poor and unwanted. I see that as a product of their history and the ignorance of us? -the circumstantialy solvent.

The demonisation of the type is an ego-centric, materialistic trap.

Crybaby said:

“Many ‘scroungers’ are much nicer people -have a much better effect on their society – than the ‘remuneratives’ who consume orders of magnitude more environmental resources and of other peoples services.”

However, Steve said:

“I understand it is very hard to believe that people make a choice to stay poor but they do because like I said they are not poor. Most familise on the poverty line are getting incomes far in excess of £25000 a year. Its what they choose to do with that money that makes them poor. If you dont pay rent you dont pay council tax or income tax and you are getting a couple of hundred pounds a week thats disposable.”

How many of the people Steve describes exist is unknown to me. But it was the putative existence of such people that prompted this discussion.

Further, the notion of the good “scrounger” is hard to accept. If you are pennyless due to no fault of your own, why certainly you could expect your fellow creatures to help you out. But if, as a matter of principle you maintain that work is for suckers, or that people who do the world’s work, are all self-serving shits and over-consumers, then I for one would not voluntarily contribute to your “benefits.”

>Apart from the occasional gadget and harmfuly cheap heavily taxed booze,

-oh no, that sounded bad. I mean those are the sort of things which the workshy are resented for aquiring. But i think they are quite trivial.

“Most familise on the poverty line are getting incomes far in excess of £25000 a year.”

That doesn’t sound right at all, especialy if it is supposed to be on top of rent and tax.

“But if, as a matter of principle you maintain that work is for suckers, or that people who do the world’s work, are all self-serving shits and over-consumers, then I for one would not voluntarily contribute to your “benefits.” ”

Work is for fulfillment.

Remunerative work is for…

“The world’s work” -there is a concept..

Ive toiled for cash, and worked for nothing. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the minimum tokens required to survive in our monetarised reality, who is not guilty of an actual crime. And yeh some of the best people i ever met were ‘scroungers’

Anyway, ain’t spending plans tremendous.

If you are on £25,000 you are not on the poverty line. It is defined as £268 for two adults and 2 children a week, which comes out at about £13,000 a year.

“What I have said repeatedly about the working poor is that their taxes should be lowered, actually that they should pay no income tax. So how can you accuse me of wanting to screw people at the bottom of the income pile.”

Removing income tax on a wage of £250 a week (a careworker’s wage) would be an extra £25 a week. That’s three cinema tickets for a family, or a take-away. I don’t think it counts as taking the screws off.

“The idea that because there are rich people, everybody else can lol around watching tel, or boozing at public expense is beyond my comprehension.”

Yes, rich people lol around watching tel & boozing too. They just do it in larger places, with more expensive wine.

Anyway, what has happened to Microsoft since Bill Gates gave that money away? Has it collapsed?

Alfred at October 22, 2010 9:33 PM ?” It’s not the rich who are in danger of being looted today, but the middle classes. As Leona Helmsley so honestly said: “Only the little people pay taxes”. You don’t need to worry about the super rich being looted with a resultant destruction of their capital; they never are ?” not in the UK, and not in BC either. Indeed, I don’t know of any Western society where the rich pay anything close to their fair share of taxes; they know how to work the system, or at least hire the people who do.

Surely, the biggest consumption (destruction) of capital in recent times is the City’s banking fiasco where though it’s the rich bankers (and their clients) who have lost the billions of capital; it’s the middle class UK taxpayer who will be looted to finance the resultant bailouts. As you will recall this comes only a decade after Britain’s middle classes were looted to bailout the City’s “Lloyd’s of London” insurance fiasco. So, yes we are experiencing a destruction of capital, but it’s the wealth of the middle classes that is being destroyed. I too used to commute between Vancouver and Victoria on a regular basis, but that was a long time ago.

thank goodness there are more important things in life than money.

great artcle .

What’s going to be ‘interesting’ is how the comfortable middle-class is going to react to be squeezed and pauperized; it’s their turn now, the traditional working-class have already been done.

As the economy shrinks over the coming decades, and the mass, consumer-led, capitalism is replaced by austerity and want, with no state intervention to soften the blows, the middle-class will face a big question; do they sit passisively by and watch, or do they react?

It’s not a left obsession, Craig. It is common sense for a country to have its people in work.

I could never understand the economics behind the Thatcherite approach. If someone loses their job providing services to the public almost everyone loses:

1. the public – fewer or no services

2. the individual – no job

3. the govt… the state has to support the individual they put out of work

4. those remaining in work in public services (e.g. ploice, teachers, nurses) who have to cope with the consequences of unemployment.

I’ll go further – I’ll say that the general media glee and rubbing of hands about the cuts (and the inevitable consequences) is an indication of what a sick society we are being encouraged to become.

If you really do condone the unnecessary loss of people’s livelihoods, Craig, then shame on you for supporting this.

LOL re HMS Astute, however.

@Roderick

I was joking about outsourcing government. Besides, I think we have already outsourced it.

Armando Iannucci on the cuts: “I think the cuts were fair. It’s about time bedbound homeless people with learning difficulties were taken down a peg or two.”

Here’s the sort of public spending that raises no complaint from the right:

“The Pentagon has paid the manufacturer of BioThrax $1.3bn, for a vaccine that an independent report calculates cost only $250m to produce.”

tinyurl.com/3868pfo

Ruth – there is no veracity in that piece about Dr Kelly/nuclear weapons. It has been oft repeated and comes from someone with a bee in his bonnet and has been discredited.

An inquest is what is requested and what is needed.

http://www.poten.com/NewsDetails.aspx?id=10726686

“the general media glee and rubbing of hands about the cuts (and the inevitable consequences) is an indication of what a sick society we are being encouraged to become.”

It is astonishing, isn’t it, that in the most technologically advanced society there has ever been it is now accepted as a matter of inevitability that everyone must be pauperized.

This is of course rubbish. But extremely vicious rubbish. The elite have decided they do not need billions of massively consuming plebs to service their needs, so first they are cutting your living standard so you take up less space, use fewer of the resources that people like Al Gore need to service their executive jets and mega mansions. Then they’ll teach your kids that their parents are unfit to instruct them. You know, parents who expect their kids to be disciplined, properly educated, get married have kids of their own. That’s all crap now, you know, bourgeoise, sexist, reproductionist, homophobic, whatever. Soon the mere idea of having a job will be a joke. Everyone’ll be on the dole with a plasma TV in every room: a people in the final stages of self-destruction: the fulfillment of a programme of autogenocide.

I am looking forward with huge interest to the next installment in the unfolding of Craig’s economic plan. I absolutely agree with him that most government spending is wasteful and therefore detrimental to social welfare. But how to offset the spending cuts without further shrinking the economy.

The Economist, incidentally, thinks there’s no alternative. See here:

http://tinyurl.com/36dgjyv

“First, the reductions in gross national product from the UK public spending cuts are inevitable …” Sir Andrew Large writes.

This is total crap, actually. If the economy is operating at less than capacity it means that there are resources (factories, infrastructure, people) that can be employed at essentially no cost, since if they are not employed they will simply be wasted.

So what to do? Find opportunities for investment that yield a sufficient return to amortize the capital and pay the interest. Now obviously government is very bad at doing that. Very few things the government does yield a positive return on investment. Government is a necessary evil and a constant danger to the public’s economic health.

So what is the alternative?

The private sector, obviously. That means you, maybe. But in any case what is needed are incentives to massive new private investment in manufacturing, transportation, construction, and infrastructure. Hence my proposal for immediate elimination of the corporation tax and the National Insurance tax (benefits equivalent to those provided under the national insurance scheme to be provide in future on a means tested basis. I am sure that Writerman does not need the old age pension).

Probably much more than those tax incentives are needed and could be implemented. For example, procedures for the rapid assembly of urban land for redevelopment, so that Britain can get on with the essential task of rebuilding the industrial wastelands and crap post-war commercial and residential developments that deface the land. Huge public investment in research on, e.g., energy conservation, urban transportation, combined with legislative action to facilitiate rapid transformation of urban transport: get cars out of cities, to be replaced by small, coin-operated electric buggies with inductive power transmission embedded in the roadway, and using robot guidance. You jump in, use a touch screen map display to indicate your destination and sit back: almost silent, no air polution, no parking problems — cool, hey.

But no. You’re all stinkers and deserve to be punished.

Steve

After recovering from a breakdown caused by feminism/ Thatcherism/ despair at UK foreign policy in dismantling Yugoslavia as if it were somewhere beyond outer space, I tried social work and I spent three years volunteering in a drop-in centre for homeless people.

But I realised that if I had understood for my own personal situation that I needed spiritual solutions to my external problems, then it would be hypocritical to suggest external solutions for others.

I found Islam and I jettisoned the entire burden of my own culture, namely that state or private financial generosity could possibly compensate the individual for the damage done by the donors lying through their socialist or capitalist teeth.

Lying is what grinds us down as human beings and unfortunately some of the biggest liars are Muslims. They think that they have to lie in order to survive in a world addicted to lying.

That is far, far, far from the truth. In fact God mentions two punishments. First for not practising Islam oneself – lying being incompatible with being a Muslim – and second punishment for not showing the non-Muslims what Islam is.

anno, peace be with you, man, peace be with you.

Surely, the two go together, in a kind of a unified way – the external and the internal. You’re right, there is inherent in modern society, a certain death of the spirit. It’s something I’ve tried, in my own, confused way, to explore many times.

Perhaps it is partly because of the perceived failure of religion to properly and convincingly answer new questions, perhaps it is because of an inherent flaw in the cerebration of religious belief itself, or perhaps it is simply that the celebration of the human being as quasi-divine subject ultimately is destructive. Or perhaps it is this central focus on materialism that is rotten. I know you’ve found that universal system in Islam. I know many others who have done the same, in whatever faith in which they have found it.

I’m pleased you feel that peace and strength and I wish you well. Your story really moved me.

Disturbing if true, it will really get you going Alfred, its psychological, apparently, the poor mites didn’t know what they were doing. Grrrrhhhh.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/8081594/Bankers-caused-credit-crisis-for-kicks.html

Ingo, It’s just the usual academic rubbish. You can bet that the traders and banksters who were thrilled by the crash held short positions — like Joseph Patrick Kennedy during the crash of ’29.

They guy in the picture holding his head shorted BP at $26.75 just before it rebounded to $45.00.

They’ve tried one way, then another nd have decided on this – flooding, as they’ve been beaten in every other way. Their trolls are useless and have been exposed. They do not want CM to remain an active political figure – that much has been clear for years. Now he’s resumed blogging, suddenly these massive spams arrive: “I’m looking through you.” Rubber Soul.