Gavin Kelly, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation and a former senior adviser to prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, writing in the FT this morning argues:
Reforms cost money. All the more reason, you might think, for Mr Cameron to be clear about his governing purpose and relentless in focusing on his key long-term ambitions for the country. Yet this hasn't happened. Even his most ardent and articulate supporters struggle to communicate his higher goals beyond deficit reduction.
This is very unfair to Cameron. It also suggests Cameron once really believed the PR puff about Progressive Conservatism, to which only Demos appears to subscribe these days. Cameron is of course dedicated to deficit reduction but there is behind that a very clear plan:
- Reduce the size of the state;
- Reduce support for the vulnerable;
- Push down low wages by forcing people into work;
- Increase the income gap;
- Increase unemployment until objectives 3 & 4 are achieved;
- Pricing people out of housing so that wealth is concentrated in few hands;
- Increase the wealth gap;
- Pass control of as much of the income of the state as possible to private companies fort the benefit of an elite;
- Tie this process up contractually for many years so that the future democratic will of the people can be subverted;
- Ensure tax havens survive so that the resulting gains can be hidden from tax;
- Alienate Scotland so that a perpetual English, Welsh and Northern Ireland parliament can be dominated by Tories for good.
That's the plan.
Let's not pretend otherwise.
And by the criteria he's succeeding.
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Excellent blog, Richard. Hearing it all the time when out and about but not so clearly stated as this.
The things you list are likely effects but I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so stupid as to plan list, because it will end in a crime wave and riots on the streets.
There is undoubtedly a neo-liberal agenda. If you look you would find that it is being driven by people in CSO who have had their heads filled up with stuff by Murray Rothbard, Benson and Ayn Rand. It is very dangerous.
We in the LVT movement can reveal the internal contractions in the doctrines, reduce them to absurdity and expose them ridicule. It all begins with Locke’s false theory of land ownership. But if you do not not start from the same position it is difficult to get a hold on what is going on here and dismantle what is an intellectual terror weapon.
You can see the origins of this thinking
You recognise it is the neoliberal agenda to which the Tories subscribe
But you don’t think that’s deliberate?
Why not?
I think this is a rather desperate ‘last chance saloon’ to lock the UK into the Washington Consensus which is why it is so draconian and obvious. Over the past 30y, governments have moved much more slowly but inexorably .. privatisation by stealth … but that stopped being an option given Lehmans, the banking crisis and the challenge to New Labour by the grassroots and Unions.
This is a ‘wrecking government’ which does not expect to be re-elected and is thus uninhibited from going the whole hog. The big bills, H&SC, WRb, Education and Legal Aid, plus Osborne’s easing access to tax havens, are now in statute and are intrinsically designed to lead to Richard’s list of outcomes.
I think that these neolibs really believe that it will be good for everyone in the end. Of course it is a crazy belief I am attributing to them. But if they are really intent on causing poverty and social division they are going the right way about it but they surely also realise that there will be a price to pay in social unrest and possible collapse. Even if they all chose to live in gated compounds they will still need to rely on the outside world and its continuing stability.
I really think it is a set of nutty ideas that has taken hold.
They think their gated communities will save them
And the police
They may not have noticed the German police marched with Occupy recently
Or the London protest
They may well have noticed the German police. They may well have sniggered at the thought of the police in this country being replaced with private security companies loyal only to their paymasters. What, you missed that?
It is most definitely deliberate. But we need to see it as part of a global movement or a global picture – to wreck national economies and hand over as much of each nation’s assets to the multinationals and global corporations (largely anglo-american I might add).
As such, the wars going on at the moment have little or nothing to do with terrorism or our security – they have to do with the control of the world’s resources. This was alluded to in Z Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard. This will inevitably bring us in to conflict with China, just as the scramble for territory in the 19th century led to the conflict with Germany. When we look at political/economic events in Britain (and elsewhere) from this angle it makes sense.
I am not even sure it is neoliberal any more. It is begining to look atavistic. They are starting to remind me of the nineteenth century reactionary regimes that carried on with the same thinking until half way through the first world war, and then…
It is not just in Britain. The whole way the financial crisis is being handled in most of the countries affected is affected by a similar dumbness. The difference between now and 100 years ago is that Marxist economics has lost its credibility though the problems are ultimately similar. This is not going to end well.
Not simply the size of the state is being reduced but the size of the population too. Access to benefits, work, healthcare, education, housing, energy and food is being withdrawn from an increasing percentage of the population. What’s supposed to keep these people alive? There’s no obvious provision. And this is *before* the banks have started speculating on water futures.
I forgot to mention acess to justice is being withdrawn also, as legal aid is being made far less available in particular to the poor.
There are air futures too. Extract all the oxygen in the atmosphere and sell it back to people. If they can’t pay they can suffocate. It’s the power of the holy market.
I think you’ve hot the nail on the head and we are in for more of the same. Can’t see he’s planning to anything for me.
http://lifeafterdebts.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/girl-power.html
I can see various Tory and (Coalition albeit through gritted teeth) giving statements on TV in the near future expressing their sadness and surprise as more rioting and disorder breaks out in our cities. And some of them will be genuinely shocked.
Something has to happen to puncture their smug complacency before that happens.