I read this astonishing tweet this morning:
https://twitter.com/shaunlintern/status/1673584719412305923?s=61&t=fQEnD35XLiGihXLT1M1wyA
It would appear that a shortage of funds that arose as a direct result of austerity will result in significant harm to some children when that was entirely unnecessary.
How do Tories sleep at night?
How will the new neoliberal masters of Labour do so?
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Badly
I disagree, they sleep profoundly well (vile-tory & vile-liebore) because it has minimal impact on them.
They are not “ordinary” poeple but self-selecting elites (on the basis of “does your face fit”). Same for the upper bureaucrats who are largely insulated from e.g. their children becoming deaf. Any “care” that the politicos and their supporters profess is a pretense, they don’t care, they never have, are functionally incapable of caring & thus never will.
Words are cheap – actions speak louder than works, that deafness amongst children is a rising problem illustrates how politicos “care”.
Austerity was carried out by the Conservative to achieve two purposes.
1. Eliminate the deficits (and produce a surplus).
2. Reduce the National Debt.
They failed abjectly to achieve either. Thirteen years on, and they did not eliminate the deficits, or produce surpluses; and the National Debt is now 2.5 times what it was when they began, less because of Covid or inflation, but the way they tackled the problems that emerged; from Brexit to Ukraine. All the Conservative policies actually did was destroy living standards, trash the economy, and turn our problems into crises.
Never let Conservative anarcholibertarians run an economy. They will destroy you.
William Vickery explains the importance of deficits in the ‘Fallacy 1’ he ascribed to the prevailing conventional economic wisdom ‘in financial circles, largely subscribed to as a basis for governmental policy, and widely accepted by the media and the public, [which] is based on incomplete analysis, contrafactual assumptions, and false analogy’
Fallacy 1:
“Deficits are considered to represent sinful profligate spending at the expense of future generations, who will be left with a smaller endowment of invested capital. This fallacy seems to stem from a false analogy to borrowing by individuals.
Current reality is almost the exact opposite. Deficits add to the net disposable income of individuals, to the extent that government disbursements that constitute income to recipients exceed that abstracted from disposable income in taxes, fees, and other charges. This added purchasing power, when spent, provides markets for private production, inducing producers to invest in additional plant capacity, which will form part of the real heritage left to the future. This is in addition to whatever public investment takes place in infrastructure, education, research, and the like. Larger deficits, sufficient to recycle savings out of a growing gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of what can be recycled by profit-seeking private investment, are not an economic sin but an economic necessity. Deficits in excess of a gap growing as a result of the maximum feasible growth in real output might indeed cause problems, but we are nowhere near that level.”
It would be lauagable for the government or BoE to claim that we are facing a predicament caused by a gap as a result of approaching ‘the maximum feasible growth in real output’; although if they keep on the course they are on they will probably pulverise the economy to the point that it will shrink the economy’s capacity to fit the anarcholibertarian ideology.
Huh!!
No vision. Nothing ‘aspirational’ at all.
Just the glum acceptance of problems too big to solve apparently.
We are now in the biggest cancel culture exercise you’ve ever seen – that of the welfare state, of Clem Attlee, of the 5 giants, of the NHS. It never happened OK?
Second only to that is that real history of the creation of money is also going to be cancelled – apparently it exists as if by magic and only collects around rich private individuals and their version of ‘making money’.
This power struggle is going to be between memory and forgetting. Let’s remember well is all I can say.
How will Keir Starmer sleep at night if he becomes prime-minister? Not by supping with a devil, Rupert Murdoch, who like him fails utterly to understand the alchemy of money namely that both private sector banks and the state creates money from thin air. The latter at the very least providing this alchemy to bail out the private sector banks when the shit hits the fan! Even worse though Rupert Satan pays political hacks like Martin Wolf to repeatedly broadcast the Thatcher lie that “government has no money of its own”!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiCs_YHlKSI
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2023/06/26/is-this-the-reason-a-labour-leader-has-attended-a-party-by-rupert-murdoch/
Murdoch and Starmer are very much part of the Neoliberal Death Cult along with Thatcher very simply because they are incapable of learning that because of uncertainty in life then by definition the creation of credit in all its forms is bound to be unstable.
This of course is part of the price we pay for economic development. It should therefore be obvious the instability of this development needs managing by the state and in particular that it can act as lender/dealer of last resort. To do this requires it be an alchemist and create money from thin air and if it can do this to rescue the private sector providers of credit it can do this to provide the public goods and services the private sector market can’t make a profit from, or if licenced to do so make a hash of because a quasi-monopoly situation facilitates greed (water and sewage companies anyone?).
Going further, for example, since when did the private sector market voluntarily factor in expenditure on maintaining clean air, avoiding pollution and the big one avoiding climate change before profits are declared? And Rupert Murdoch and his wanna-be dogsbody Keir Starmer think the state can’t and shouldn’t be a money alchemist!!!
Shadow Secretary to the Treasury, MacFadden said Conservatives should not blame the Bank of England. Labour offer little improvement.
What is more annoying is that the article is in the Times, a newspaper that supported the tories all the way until it realised it was losing readership.
Another article today, out of every class of 30 children, 9 of them will be in poverty.
Hearing has always been the poor relative. I needed an eardrum graft from when I was 12. When I got the appointment I had two children of my own. The hospital was quite surprised when I turned up on the children’s ward in my 20s. At least I got a side room, and didn’t have to share the main ward.
This was in a city where poverty was rife back then and is worse now.
Sorry to learn that
Its especially ridiculous once you realise that deafness is going to cost more in the long run for both the economy and the government if allowed to persist…
Should subscribing to the Neoliberal Death Cult which includes stating the state has no money alchemy powers of its own (creating money from thin air like private sector banks) be a punishable offence because of the evil it does?
Along with permanent deafness here is another one increasing difficulty for some wanting to put a roof over their head:-
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/27/just-5-of-private-rentals-affordable-on-housing-benefit
What are Neoliberal Death Cult politicians like Sunak and Starmer going to do about an increasing problem like the following potentially deadly developments:-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/27/heatwave-human-caused-climate-crisis-texas-louisiana-mexico
Are they going to compound the problem by carrying on claiming the state has no alchemy powers to create money from thin air?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiCs_YHlKSI
This video clip is part of a 2009 American TV programme “Sixty Minutes” wanting to explain the GFC bail-out by the US government and the Fed to the American public. Unfortunately as usually happens the TV journalist interviewer Scott Pelley was way out of his depth on understanding financial and monetary matters. Didn’t worry Scott though he he’s reputably made $18 million from his TV journalism and taxes will be a big issue for him hence the look of incredulity on his face when Bernanke tells him the American Federal State can create money by the equivalent of waving a wand! Abracadabra!
Want to know whether the UK government has alchemy powers to create money from thin air? Don’t put in a Freedom of Information request! Under the Tories it will be endless delay because either we can’t afford to employ enough staff to answer the public’s questions or it’s a state secret!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/27/rishi-sunak-accused-of-concealment-culture-after-record-number-of-foi-blocks
It gets worse.
Tory austerity is leading to a nation of shorter children, especially from poorer backgrounds.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/25/britains-shorter-children-reveal-a-grim-story-about-austerity-but-its-scars-run-far-deeper
Average height of boys and girls aged five has slipped due to poor diet and NHS cuts, experts say.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study
That’s even before the current cost of living crisis and Austerity 2.
I found this uite staggering
Whilst a student and then community worker, during the mid 1980s, in one of our great northern cities poverty was widespread. We noticed that the same kids (varying from 10 years old right up to older teenagers, could be seen, day after day, queuing at the local chip shop for chips and gravy. I enjoyed a fair quantity of chips and gravy myself but not as a mono-diet and not every night for tea. But back then it was cheap and filling. We noticed that the same kids looked quite small, and some of the older generations looked a little short too, we used to refer to them as the chips and gravy generation. This isn’t meant to be patronising, I could add that I lived in relative squalor for a number of years too, but growing up I was never hungry enjoyed decent food even if it came with a portion of tedious expectation and competition. And I could, I suppose, have returned home at any time. Which reminds me some of Pulp’s ‘Common People’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM
(Please forgive the edit at 2:32. not my doing)
I can’t say that having chips and nothing else for tea most nights stunts the growth or that there are no other factors having an effect but the visual evidence was compelling.
Fast forward nearly 40 years and it looks like poverty, austerity and the rest are having their way again. Poor care at every level. Of course its a complicated picture but surely a lot of it is self explanatory? The isolation, frustration and stunting effects of ‘untreated’ hearing loss is going to have a long term effect on health and well being. Poor dental care throughout lie leads to a life in pain. And as we all know a poor diet can lead to all sorts of problems from diabetes, heart problems, obesity and social difficulties.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/25/britains-shorter-children-reveal-a-grim-story-about-austerity-but-its-scars-run-far-deeper
For all their failures Blair and Brown got several million children out of poverty, this shabby lot all the way back to that chancer Cameron have put them right back into it.
Diet does have a massive impact on development, both physical and educational. It is well documented. The government appears not to care.
My late father and family were a classic example of this. He was born in 1928, the 7th of 8 surviving children. His father, a pipe-fitter in the North-East dockyards, was unemployed for 6 years in the 1930s and also suffered an industrial accident which severely impacted his health. They struggled for food and my father always said that for them, war rationing actually improved their diet. All his family were very short, he was the tallest at 5’7″ and put that down to being evacuated to a Yorkshire farm at age 11, and the better “war ration” diet during adolescence. The next generation are all normal height.
Duncn Selby, CEO Public Health England, 2013-2020 has been answering questions at the Covid Enquiry. He said the one thing that really matters, and I paraphrase (I confess freely) from memory; if you are going to claim you care abour Paublic Health, “show me your budget”.
The Conservatives preferred Austerity. The Covid Enquiry is re-writing our politics. The Conservatives will not survive it; their much shredded (if always improbable) reputation for competence is already stone dead in the water …. …. and it has hardly begun.
‘ The Conservatives will not survive it; their much shredded (if always improbable) reputation for competence is already stone dead in the water’.
Let’s hope so.
But let’s also hope that Laboured do more than just be heirs to the Tories toxic stupidity.
And that’s a big hope judging by what I see.
The Conservative politician mentality is that having a lot more money than others protects them from everything so why worry about those who’ve never made sufficient effort to acquire it!
I’d love to think that the Conservatives won’t survive the Covid enquiry.
I don’t hear much coverage on the BBC – anything in the DM / Sun etc? I rather doubt it. All part of what feels like an increasingly self censored MSM coverage of anything detrimental to the Conservatives.