From my twitter account this morning
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Just what I have been saying for a while. It goes, at least, back to 1925 and Churchill putting the country back on the gold standard at pre-WW1 rates. It continues through the May report of 1931, the struggle to keep the exchange rate of the pound when Wilson came to power, to monetarism. the ERM the light touch regulation of the City and austerity.
The second from the top is why we blindly follow the US into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, aid to Saudi Arabia in the Yemen and seem to intend to send Assange to the USA for exposing their war crimes in the wikileaks disclosures.
Although the British live in a monetary economy they don’t recognise as such that they do and what the implications are. This ignorance puts them in a sort of Dark Age!
For example, they’ve kept a Conservative government in power for ten years that could never prove why government couldn’t create money of its own like the private sector banks or for that matter the economy automatically self-equilibrated on the latter money creation alone.
This has led to ten years of austerity cuts which amongst many issues has had a negative impact in particular on tackling the coronavirus pandemic. For example, the government sponsored Test and Tracking scheme is only 50% effective. Some local authorities are now having to second staff to visit homes to make up that extra 50% since the government scheme doesn’t fund that. Such penny pinching has resulted in more coronavirus deaths than necessary!
@Helen – I am quite despondent about this government in particular, that they willingly put some kind of warped ideology before any sensible planning. How much better placed we would have been if gov’t had just taken one thought that maybe local communities/authorities were capable of getting on top of Covid, rather than giving out contracts to all and sundry just so they can appear to be in control.
As Merkel has said on Brexit – a shitstorm. Only with Covid it is many more lives and livelihoods that are affected/lost.
Helen, it is worse than we can imagine.
The Guardian website has this as a main post today:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/05/englands-contact-tracers-making-handful-of-calls-a-month
This is nothing short of an absolute national disgrace. And it is costing, I believe £10 billion in handouts to the outsourcing sector.
But, as I say increasingly these days, it’s what people have voted for. Isn’t a manipulated, over-propagandised democracy a wonderful thing?
Michael Hudson argues the Western world has put rent seeking bankers and other financial sector operators in charge of national economic policy. He’s right but given most voters barely recognise they live in a monetary economy and how this works the “rentiers” as Keynes called them are allowed to flourish!
I recommend The Juice Media – Honest Government Ad for a few minutes cynical entertainment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWl7kQZHZE0