{"id":32988,"date":"2016-04-03T18:33:36","date_gmt":"2016-04-03T17:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=32988"},"modified":"2016-04-03T18:34:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T17:34:37","slug":"32988","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2016\/04\/03\/32988\/","title":{"rendered":"The neoliberal con-trick’s been rumbled (at last) by Peter Hitchens"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not sure how to react to this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can\u2019t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.<\/p>\n

I thought \u2014 this now seems especially funny \u2014 that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.<\/p>\n

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It comes from arch right-wing Daily Mail columnist (and one time Trotskyist) Peter Hitchens. There is much more that follows the quote I have noted. It would be easy to dismiss it as middle age nostalgia, except that, firstly, if that was the case I'd suggest he get into steam trains and get over it and, second, irritating as Hitchens is that would suggest he wasn't able to identify the true reason for his sentiment, and I think he can. As he put it:<\/div>\n
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I never thought I\u2019d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It's taken Hitchens a long time to smell the coffee on the economic con trick played on the people of this country at cost to almost all of us. But it looks like he now has, at long last. Now let's see the Mail as a whole follow suit, shall we? Many of their readers may well have lost as much as anyone.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am not sure how to react to this: I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can\u2019t deny
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