Last night I wrote that the Tories really do believe that all unemployment is voluntary and if only the market were let free everyone would be in work, albeit that they were utterly indifferent to the wage rate.
I wrote before reading two articles that have appeared over night. The first is in the Telegraph, and says:
The minimum wage for millions of people could have to be capped or frozen in future if it risks damaging jobs or the economy, the Government has said.
It has told the Low Pay Commission, which sets the minimum wage, that it must formally consider its impact on “employment and the economy”, before agreeing future increases.
The second comes from the Guardian and trails a speech Osborne is to make today in which he will apparently say:
For too long, we've had a system where people who did the right thing — who get up in the morning and work hard — felt penalised for it, while people who did wrong thing got rewarded for it. That's wrong.
Except, as I pointed out yesterday, those out of work are very largely seeking work or were, (as Osborne will now admit) as a result of Tory policy in the 1980s, addressed by Labour from 2002, deemed unemployable when that was not necessarily the case.
So we have the absurd situation where a Liberal Democrat can now claim:
“The level of employment is now above its pre-recession peak, but the employment rate is below the pre-recession peak.
“This means that we believe that caution is required - particularly as the minimum wage rate is now at its highest ever level relative to average earnings for adults, and remains high for young people.”
The minimum wage is £6.19 an hour. At 40 hours a week that £12,875 a year.
Is this government really saying that's a dangerous level of pay?
Are they really saying that this pay rate is dragging the economy down?
Are they really saying this level is making work pay?
Is it really their view that if only we made the poor poorer by cutting their pay, freezing their benefits, forcing them out of their homes and increasing their cost of living this country will become competitive again?
If they are the only reason can be that they really do think that all unemployment is voluntary and if only there was no minimum wage and no beenfits system then all economic problems would be solved as exploitation ran rampant across the economy.
But if so this is the sign of what can only, and very appropriately, be described as a callous mentality that is utterly without empathy, care or concern.
But that's the modern Conservative Party, aided and abetted by too many in other parties, by neoliberal economists and a cruel media.
All of which begs the real question, which is how did we reach such a state of depravity?
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Hi,
Sadly, the answer to your question is that Labour, along with the other parties and despite introducing the Minimum Wage, has totally failed to establish the notion of a Living Wage as central to a properly functioning society and economy, and bears a considerable part of the responsibility for what is happening now.
As a result ‘cost-cutting’ and ‘marketisation/privatisation’ has enabled business to legitimise using the state to subsidise their poverty wage strategy. The answer to the benefits conundrum is located here and Labour are still doing nothing to highlight and deal with it. Landlords and Housing Benefit are another element of this toxic equation, which enables the poor to be blamed for their own plight by their peers while the richer take a hidden profit.
For the life of me, why people use the term “minimum” wage when its a “poverty” wage with 10p tax put on is beyond me. There never will be full employment, the neoliberal parties [ liblabcons] know that, so lets throw it on the weakest eh! As ever Richard Murphy stimulates the brain, thanks.
Or that actual prosperity is at best a secondary aim, and the real goals of the government’s neo-feudal class war are to entrench relative wealth and to produce an intimidated, starved slave labour force. It sounds crazy, but it is actually the facts that are crazy.
How you ask ? Couldn’t it be because UK governments have chosen to follow the US strategic partnership after WWII (http://conscience-sociale.blogspot.fr/2011/06/how-to-replace-world-trade-reference.html), and because the US is in its final step of military Keynesianism (http://conscience-sociale.blogspot.fr/2013/03/the-inevitable-counter-revolution-of.html) and then totally unable to help its former ally ?
How did we reach such a state of depravity?
The Conservatives and the right generally have never accepted the 1945 post war consensus.
They have sought to fight against all that that brought about — an NHS, social housing and a more equal society with a welfare state.
They find that sort of thing objectionable and against the natural order of things.
They really started to win the fight from 1979 onwards as unions were crushed, the state shrunk and banking deregulated, and, despite the pain and chaos these policies produce, they now have the whiff of ultimate victory in their nostrils.
As people get poorer and inequality becomes more exacerbated, there is an increasing chance of serious trouble on our streets like we saw in August 2011.
Could make the 1980s look like a walk in the park.
That’s why the Met are giving every policeman a tazer gun.
The Conservatives did accept the consensus until about 1977. That’s why it was called a consensus – pretty much everyone agreed. Then the Tories turned neo-liberal, as the wrong response to the borrowing crises of the mid-1970s. Actually the only valuable thing that was done was to let the currency float and devalue, rather than trying to hold to an absurd exchange rate versus the booming dollar.
@Martin and @Paul above – Agreed, on the success of the marketisation/privatisation campaign, and Labour’s failure to “teach and educate” (which is the real function of leadership, rather than that of mere ordering and idea of leadership as ordering people about). Agreed also on the move towards neo-feudalism, which I have long argued, along with others on this site.
For me, however, the real question – more pressing than even Richard’s – is how on earth did these forces of reaction and enslavement get back on top?
We can all remember how the veil was torn away in the aftermath of the 2008 crash and everybody was talking about the need to REAL reform, and to REALLY tame and neuter the rent-seeking financial services kleptocracy. Yet here we are, just over four years on and a) not a SINGLE City crook and card-sharp has gone to prison (yet a boy who texted – yes, texted – a suggestion to join a riot went to prison for 4 years!!!) b) All of the nonsense – the cruel nonsense – on stilts to which Richard refers is once again being trotted out, as though it were sacred writ.
The answer has got to lie partly in our totally corrupted media and academia, which have all submitted to, or been suborned by, not just the Siren voices telling us that neo-liberalism is natural, and “the way things are” etc. but even more by the fact that the post-1973 oil crisis economic order has been profoundly beneficial to the rent-seekers, and profoundly toxic to everyone else. The REAL Benefit and Welfare junkies – big business, landlords, the vulture friends of the Government esconsced in the Big 4, and HMRC, and the private health and care sectors – they have done too well out of the “shock”, and have no intention of forgoing their daily “fix” of easy public money.
No wonder the establishment cried blue murder over Leveson – a tiny, tiny, tiny move in the right direction, towards a responsible media. Alas, I fear that in the end the ONLY way out will be to follow the route of 1917, and “expropriate the expropriators” – not something a relish, since injustice always results from such actions, but people may feel they have no other recourse, and – most significantly – nothing to lose by doing so.
Appalling English “could have to be”.
Should read “may have to be”.
Still it’s the Torygraph!
You know the answer to the question.
The current ‘state of depravity’ has been achieved only after a lot of hard work by very rich people spending a lot of money and time to convince us of these economic ‘truths’ such as the negative effects of the minimum wage.
The revolving-door careers of the most highly-paid economists in the world depend upon repeating the party line and producing papers that back up the austerity status quo.
The Republicans in The USA, The Troika in the EU and the Coalition in the UK have worked for years in tandem for this, helped by blatantly paid-for (USA) or cowed (UK) media. The harder the Right work at this, the richer they get.
Under `Labour` governments –
1. Debt bubble fueled artificial and unsustainable `growth`.
2. Globalisation of production.
3. Importation labour.
4. Wars.
Were used to hide the fact that our welfare and tax systems systems were unsustainable.
Combine demonisation of the poor, concealment of the fact that the rich aren’t `strivers` or `worth it`, the absence of a spend policy that includes controls on imported goods and labour, and you end up in a situation where the neo-cons’ policy is not clearly worse than the alternative.
I admit to bemusement
What are you trying to say?
It means that increased spending will have to be balanced with import controls on goods and people.
I think the neo-liberalist agenda is winning out because of the increasing domination of an evolutionary biological model of the human by people like Dawkins and Steven Pinker. These biological models pretend to be scientific truth but hide all sorts of unstated vested interests in the notion that vicious capitalism is somehow part of our genetic makeup rather than a cultural phenomenon we can change. Just wait, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The British will swallow it all because the ‘man-in-the-street’ has been primed to feel low self esteem and unconsciously believes the rich to be biologically superior. This is Herbert Spencer and Malthus revisited.
@Simon
evolution by natural selection is a fully fledged scientific theory that has 150 years of observation and experimental evidence behind it. Its scientific rigour is not in any doubt.
Social darwinists and eugenicists have, down the years, deliberately or otherwise misunderstood or misrepresented the theory to forward their own agenda and (flawed) theories.
Understanding that H sapiens *can* be selfish or malevolent is not the same as saying let the poor go to hell. Both Dawkins and Pinker have both countered this point many many times down the years.
They both make clear that as a species we have also evolved to co-operate, to be altruistic and to sympathise. The biological evidence actually shows how connected we are – barriers of race, colour and nationality break down when you see the evidence of our genetic kinship.
Your argument then is exactly back to front – its because we know evolution is true (and i use the word true in the common, not the scientific sense), its because we know a great deal more about human nature, and its because we have evolved higher faculties of reason that allow us to see the world from somebody else’s (less fortunate) perspective that we are motivated to help them.
Opposing the assault on welfare and the public sector is right because the evidence is on our side, from biology, psychology and an economic point of view.
Minimum wage=£6.19. Energy bills doubled since 2008. Staple foods up at least 50% since 2008. Petrol prices up 50% since 2008. Rents still rising. Oh and it seems suicides are up as well. I wonder why…
I agree with Simon’s sentence “The British will swallow it all”.
But more importantly: How will British people be able to quit this state of depravity ? I mean: which movement will be strong enough to build enough UK people’s consensus ?
I do not speak about party. I’m speaking about ideas.
If nobody can answer this, isn’t it a clue of the United Kingdom next failure ?
The public will turn when they wake up one morning to find the banks have raided their accounts a la Cyprus. I believe the bank account guarantee can be got round if account holders are given an equivalent amount to that taken in bank equity. When the banks implode shortly after, these involuntary shareholders will find their equity worthless but the government will simply shrug and say their guarantee was only regarding the actual money. Since that was replaced, they’ll say, with equity of comparitive value the guarantee itself held as intended. They won’t count themselves responsible for anything taking place after that exchange though, so you’ll lose regardless. I suspect that roundabout then even the indifferent and myopic British public might start wondering what’s going on, this to the Coalition’s enormous disadvantage… I forsee banks taking money from accounts unannounced causing people to miss mortgage payments and then chasing people for those same mortgage payments… similarly with credit cards and loan repayments… we’ve ever so much fun to look forward to and it’s all getting closer by the moment 🙂
The problem again is that the state is in thrall to ‘business confidence’ and that prevents them from taking action to ensure that the people are looked after.
Individual businesses should not be the concern of the state. If they try to abuse the system, try to become indispensable or abuse the population with low wages then they should be killed mercilessly.
Business needs to realise that it is permitted to operate – because it is likely it will lead to a better outcome overall than the alternative.
The point is that there has to be an alternative to keep them in line.
A soft war is being waged. This may be of interest:-
http://economicwardiaries.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/awakening-to-reality/
This commentary is also interesting:-
http://economicwardiaries.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/reflecting-on-the-spirit-of-45/