I watched this programme on BBC2 last night:
For those with an hour to spare and the ability to withstand the frustration of watching it I can recommend doing so.
You will witness Cameron, Osborne and Clegg explaining why they put in place a form of quantitative easing (QE) that they knew would increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and were happy about that. Osborne was blatant. Cameron was not interviewed. And Clegg hangs his head in despair, saying what else could they have done?
I do not blame those who were interviewed. I know how these programs are edited.They might well have told the person interviewing them precisely what the alternatives to the form of QE used might have like.
Jeremy Corbyn, who was interviewed, could, for example have explained what People's QE was, in detail, and it did not make it to the programme.
Others, like John McDonell, might have suggested that the programme of austerity was never needed. He could that was because the consequence was absolutely foreseeable in sluggish growth, greater inequality, rising poverty as indicated by the use of the food banks, and so on. If he did it did not really get in.
It was, however, rather bizarrely, left to Iain Duncan Smith to say that the Tories went too far with their cuts, and he had to resign in protest. In fairness, he was also the person who said that the Liberal Democrats constrained the Tories until 2015, and without them policy got worse.
This was, however, one of the few redeeming features of the programme. The tax justice movement was looked at, but the solutions it offered were not really explained, particularly domestically where, then as now, reform within the UK was more important than tackling tax havens. And, the fact that the impact of QE could have been compensated for by increasing taxes in wealth, better tax collection in the UK, and positive programs of redistribution rather than austerity was simply not mentioned.
The programme set out to say that the rich got richer, and it succeeded in making clear that this was the objective of the Bank of England and the 2010 government, but beyond that little was added to understanding. Call it an opportunity lost, if you like. I will still, however, watch the second programme when it comes out even if I have a little expectation that it will really seek to answer the question that the program should have addressed, which is why this was allowed to happen.
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My current view of the Beeb is that of course it won’t aid understanding – the point about an ideological driven propaganda system is that it has to operate within the terms of it’s own ideological framework, ‘truths’ and conceptualisations. That’s why this blog where little passes without critical coment) is so refreshing to me.
While “rich git” (title) is certainly apt, I suspect a typo. 🙂
Edited…
Apt Freudian slip in the title 🙂
Oops…
I too found myself frustrated and shouting at the TV at times (and having been involved in several TV programmes with the OU/BBC I also understand what happens in editing). But I think you’re being a little harsh, particularly as this was a programme aimed at a mass audience not experts. There were plenty of people who know what they’re talking about – including Mervyn King, several hedge fund/investment management people, and the senior economist at the time from the IMF, who all made it clear what was happening and used some pretty explicit language to describe it. So, on that score what we got was people involved in the whole QE rip off – and thus the rich getting richer – admitting exactly that and why.
On the other hand, we had a series of politicians doing exactly what you’d expect, and pretty much in line with their character: Clegg: what else could we have done!; Law’s: ditto; Duncan Smith: sticking to exactly what he said at the time (to his credit); and Osborne: ever the nasty bastard (what was his classic line – making the rich poorer would not have been good for the economy ergo for those poor sods getting hammered by the austerity cuts, or some such nonsense).
I thought one of the most telling lines was from Clegg or Laws saying that when they turned up at the Treasury officials gave them three options, one of which would have been political suicide and another too awful to even consider. So it would seem then – as now – senior Treasury officials are as much responsible for the rich getting richer (inequality) as any politician, particularly when they can ‘steer’ politicians with little or limited knowledge of economics, finance, etc, in a particular direction. So, a rare dissenting view from yours on this occasion, Richard.
Fair enough!
But my point was the alternative was not given
The suggestion was, I think, that from 2008 to 2010 and for a year or two afterwards, all of the parties (Labour included) were advocating cuts in public spending. The argument was more about how quickly spending should be cut rather than whether it should be cut or not. Corbyn only became leader after the 2015 general election, by which time we were on a path to Brexit.
The programme may have been aimed at a mass audience but there would still have been a measure of self selection among those who watched it. It seems unlikely that anyone who could not understand People’s QE, if it were explained clearly, would have been watching in the first place. Moreover it seems likely that a majority of viewers would have liked a discussion of the possible alternatives.
My wife who was reading a gardening magazine during this programme observed how well Jeremy Corbyn came across and that IDS had some conscience.
That the others were making decisions they didn’t understand continues to be shameful.
Seems we are back in the same territory with the NI increase and BofE obsessed with inflation that they can’t control – plus Sunak “balancing the books”
I hope the next programme sets out an alternate future with e.g. Peoples QE or similar
Not holding my breath
I watched on iplayer this afternoon.
What struck me was Osborne claims, his help to buy was “incredible successful”, the bottom 20% got better off in his time at the Treasury and in 2015 ” the economy was booming”.
Not quite as I remember it. It seemed to be a version of Johnson’s boosterism.
Agreed
On a positive note QE has cheapened mortgages for working families
No it hasn’t
House prices have gone up
The BBC seem to be unwilling to tell it like it is.
For example we have them asking “Coronavirus: Where does the government borrow billions from?”
A better question is “Where do the billions come from in the first place?” In other words who has made the pounds before they are available to be borrowed or taxed?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50504151
The BBC have got form for obscuring economic realities https://positivemoney.org/2019/05/battle-with-the-bbc/
Exactly Neil. The BBC are too frightened either by the Tories coming down on them even harder than they currently propose, or they genuinely and ignorantly afraid of being mocked. But they are clearly determined not to offer a programme on which the irrefutability of MMT can be exposed. A recent radio programme on money supply was a 30 minute discussion in which no expert – Richard or Stephanie would have been ideal – was invited and MMT was mentioned and dismissed out of hand by an old-school economist in about 30 secs as if he was dealing with the moon and cheese. I suspect the basics would be so understandable by the average voter that there would be an outcry. FPTP voting is in the same scandalous league
Interesting to see Gary Stevenson on the programme, check out his Youtube here:
https://m.youtube.com/c/GarysEconomics
Hmmm………..this is one of those occasions where I think ‘The BBC is on the way out – the Tories are cutting its funding …….well bye-bye then and good bloody riddance’ with a sort of grim satisfaction that the pretentious upper middle class oafs that end up working there with names like ‘Cressida’ and ‘Tarquin’ all have to go down to the job centre.
I was once approached in and around 2014 by Unison my union to volunteer for some interviews with the BBC on the effects of austerity on the public sector. I’d been coming here I think at that time to learn and keep my sanity and what I had to say was grounded in what was being raised here. Needless to say the Beeb never got in touch with me about what I was seeing and experiencing on the front line which was horrendous and still is actually.
But I remember an awful lot of ‘poor people’ porn on TV at that time as the victims of these policies were turned into ‘entertainment’that cruelly exposed their chaotic lives.
Sorry – it brought back some open sores that I have with the BBC. I did not ever think that it was possible to love and hate an organisation at the same time.
Anyhow – all I want from the Beeb is the next instalment of Wolf Hall – and then they can all piss off down to the job centre as far as I’m concerned.
And I will have some wonderful memories……….
Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy / Smiley’s People (watched religiously once a year at around Xmas).
I Claudius – togas never looked so good. Who needs Liz Taylor and Richard Burton?
The BBC’s recording of Richard Burton’s reading of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’ which I hope that I am listening to when I breath my last.
Poldark (the original) – wonderful memories of watching this as a family – fantastic acting.
Wolf Hall – another once a year treat.
The Mighty Boosh – BBC3 was terrifically funny, creative etc (I saw that their BBC controller – a woman – died recently, and she did a good job until the Tory bastards clipped its wings).
How Not to Live Your Life (Series 2 & 3 BBC3 again!) one of the rudest most politically incorrect comedy series I’d ever seen – had me in tears of laughter on a number of occasions .
Dracula – the BBC 2 adaptation – bloody scary even today.
Monty Python – need I say more?
And there’s the radio of course – News Quiz, The Now Show and Sorry I haven’t a Clue which has made me pull over a number of times on the A6 driving home from work because I couldn’t drive for laughing.
And Jeremy Hardy…………………….how did we lose him? I miss him, I really do.
🙂
I thought the title a bit confusing.
Is there a decade where the rich have not won, one way or another?
Well – I watched it through gritted teeth.
Guy Hands:
“The Government seemed to expect QE to filter through to all levels of the economy”.
But what happened was that it got stuck in the banking system, where it stayed and didn’t even manifest itself as loans to business start ups post crash.
This was New Labour – ‘the Government’.
As the QE swilled around the banks, it was used to back riskier investments, loans on the acquisitions of assets to those who already had assets. It turbocharged the housing sector and other asset markets and made huge amounts of money for traders an clients and banks.
As I remember his nibs saying (Richard) that it would have been better targeting QE at specific areas of the economy. Vindicated I think there Richard.
Wither New Labour I say. They were let down by the banks they’d just helped. The banks have a case to answer there. But New Labour just end up looking naive too. Gordon Brown is not as clever as he would like you to think he is.
You know what, if I got in, I’d regulate the banks SO HARD that they’d never fuck with Government again. I mean it.
Old Merv wants us to love him because QE was his idea. Oh alright then.
Whitehall – toxic debts – the politics of fear yet again. Is Whitehall capable of rational thought any more?
The IMF – Olivier Blanchard – austerity in the UK – ‘the wrong decision’ and ‘Courageous decisions can be the wrong ones’. Big thumbs up there.
Christine Lagarde however (his boss) seemed infatuated with the little bastard Osbourne. It’s not that good looking for God’s sake.
Occupy : ‘We were not there to provide a solution, just to protest and tell people what had happened’. Duh! So you don’t think that they’d worked that out for themselves?
Oh – and so that’s why you tailed off. Extinction Rebellion – are you listening?
Clegg we had to ‘Take decisions as fairly as possible’. Really?
Osbourne: ‘You cannot lie and tell people that you can make the 99% better off by being harder on the 1% as the maths does not work’.
I’m sorry – run that by me again – and this maths you talk about – can we see it?
They knew in 2012 THAT AUSTERITY WAS NOT WORKING. And then doubled up on it after 2015 after the coalition ended. And they’re still at it!!
And Osbourne is such a smug liar – more jobs in 2015/16!! Inequality narrowed!! What metrics is he using? He is definitely self deluded – he’s been on the speaking circuit for too long.
It was Osbourne who brought in Help to Buy which even I know just helps people who could afford a house buy bigger more expensive houses and has put up house prices because the bleeders who make can make profit!!
It’s nice to see Yanis Varoufakis – noting how austerity paved the way for BREXIT – agreed.
And I never thought I’d ever agree with – wait – Steve Bannon – but I do.
And what’s all this about a beverage called ‘Kool aid’ ? I don’t think they sell it here do they?
The doc’ shows a number of things to me:
1) Politicians seemingly every where believe that spending Government money is debt that has to be paid back. Put simply, they do not understand the fiscal policy or fiscal power of Government. And none of them tell you to whom it is owed.
2) People and politicians adhere to the view that tax pays for everything. There is no indication that they understand the role of tax in fighting inflation therefore.
3) The lack of load sharing of austerity required by Government on the rich shows that Governments world wide still believe in trickle down – it persists.
But what gets me once again is that I thought that to be in these positions of authority you had to be really clever and capable.
And it turns out that I’ve been genuflecting to some of the most ordinary, unimaginative and bland people EVER.
People who have to have advisors to tell them what to think. I mean – who rules eh?
The politicians just come across as avatars of ideology – that’s what they are.
Animated husks with no thoughts it seems of their own and guided by the ‘unseen hand’ of the market up their arses.
And the BBC simply does not challenge the politicians like (say) they get challenged in the documentary ‘Inside Job’.
Resigned sigh……………………………………………….
As I understand it, Kool-Aid is an American fruit-flavoured drink, usually sold as a powder to mix with water. A bit like, er, Nesquik powder added to milk.
The slightly jarring reference to “drink the Kool-Aid” refers to nearly 1000 followers (including around 300 children) of Jim Jones who were killed at Jamestown, Guyana in 1978: most of them were persuaded to imbibe a fruit-flavoured drink poisoned with cynanide. It seems it was actually a different brand, but the phrase has come to mean something like “foolishly/uncritically accepting a bad/dangerous idea”.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
Should have said Jonestown, of course.
I was cured of the illusion that you had to be really clever and capable to be in a position of authority years ago. The preferred degree for aspiring politicians, both on the left and the right, in Oxford when I was there in the late 60’s and early 70’s was PPE. Many of us considered it something of a joke degree. There were people who seemed to spend their whole time partying or speaking in the Oxford union, who would openly joke about how few lectures they attended and how few books they had read, who would end up with a first. To get a good second, let alone a first, in my subject, mathematics, you had to put in a lot of hard graft.
The Oxford PPE seems like the closest thing to a degree in general studies that there is to me
I am not sure a degree can usefully have that breadth
Ivan hit the nail on the head, when he said all the Bankers working in the system knew what they were doing and knew the outcomes from it. So why didn’t the politicians know?
I believe some did and some didn’t, but most politicians (careerists) think their job is to tell people what they want to hear whilst doing whatever satisfies the elites interests.
What wasn’t raised in this video was the influence of people like the Koch Brothers who spent huge sums of money promoting their own interests against climate change and taxation etc., funding bogus right wing Neo-Liberal institutes such as Cato, that transformed the academic institutions into accepting the dogma created in so called think tanks, even ones that pretended to be radical like IPPR but spewed out market dogma as though it was a natural science. Whilst pushing public education ever closer to the private sector with posh names like acadamies.
Osborne’s policies were broadly accepted by both the Libdems and New Labour you need only read the Orange Book to hear David Laws for example talking of Co-Payments and a national private insurance scheme to fund the NHS to realise that unfortunately they are all in it together. when we look at the so called deficit it was clear to New Labour that during their period in office, it was not public expenditure that created the massive increase, but the banker’s crash. So why did they go along with the Tories lie that we need to cut it, the obvious conclusion for me, is their complicity in deregulating the financial sector and complicity in privatising all public services. Witness today how Starmer’s shadow health secretaries are silent on the Tories dismantling our NHS and opening up to American health companies.
I am of the opinion, that the so called elite always have served themselves, and whilst they were content to accommodate some level of democracy to operate, with the fall of the Russian communist bloc and the advent of increasing technology, people become less important to them than in the past, and they can even buy machines to ensure their security, i.e. Drones. So, so long as they control finance they can control everything and have rigged the system to ensure their wealth and power increases, the current political situation accommodates that simply because most politicians serve their interests. Lagarde wasn’t frightened to upset Osborne she is like the rest around the world at one with him and the Tory establishment. There is also evidence to back this up, Where Gordon Brown boasted to the world’s bankers in his 2006 Mansion House speech, where stated how he and his team toured Europe inviting them to deregulate the financial sector, just as he had, and that Ed Balls was working with Ed Cready of the City of London to ensure more liberalisation was to come. Then of course the crash and suddenly Alistair Darling doesn’t know how things could have possibly gone wrong and was shocked to hear the banks were hemorrhaging money.
The simple facts that won’t appear in the next programme is that the financial sector, is irrelevant to the real world, and its people that create wealth not financial institutions. They like the private sector generally extract wealth they don’t create it.
Not much to disagree with there.
I do think that politicians are people too and they can be misled by the financial sector.
I mean what do the words ‘Credit Default Swap’ mean? Or ”Collateralised Debt Obligation’? And what exactly is a ‘financial derivative’ ? Most politicians seem to be generalists who then get a specialised brief and have to deal with this sort of stuff.
However, there is one other group whose malign influence cannot be ruled out and indeed seem to be the people to whom politicians rely on – Economists or ‘economic advisors’ (like the one I think Richard edited out of my missive above).
It is these people more that any others who in many opinion have been captured by finance and cannot be relied to guide politicians. Their use should quite frankly be banned.