Do you support the RMT?

[give it to gordon]

The Tories government has a pattern. Screw the workers, strikes and soon to follow riots.

 

[urban genie]

you’re
bailout

I may disagree with halfmist and think he talls a load of nomsense, but I must defend him here as one who often get's corrected for my sossig finger posts.

Annoys me this constant correcting grammar on social media, it ain't school or a valued piece of writing, just a post on a forum and if you understood what it meant, does it matter? ;-)

 

[urban genie]

The Tories government has a pattern. Screw the workers, strikes and soon to follow riots.

Yeah but this lot probably want to re establish the yeomanry to keep the peasants in check

 

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

But that can also backfire. If the floaters and undecideds don’t like any of the other parties but know they are likely to get in to bed with Labour it could be the deciding factor for them to go with the Tories.
Their best hope is to modernise, get a Charismatic Leader, not shout down or talk over the Government or call them Tory Scum.
Also more realistic policies what they would do in the real world and less money tree politics on the hoof we had under Corbin.
What sort of idiot leaves a note for his successor saying sorry no money left. Was that supposed to be some sort of joke.
Finally they need to get rid of the rent a mob brigade they seem to have following the Tories around, no place for it in a Democracy.
Strangely, you never see it the other way round where the Tories bus in the protesters to Labour meetings.
Can’t see it happening somehow, too many of their supporters stuck in 1950’s ideologies.

A return to the Keynesian economics that resulted in higher economic growth than has ever been achieved through the adoption of the neoliberal ideologies of Hayek and Friedman would certainly be most welcome. Didn't that start in the 1950's and go on until the period of stagflation in the 70's?

A bit of more recent economic history:

Thatcher got elected on the back of the Saatchi slogan 'Labour Isn't Working'. This is because there was, at that time, one million unemployed in the UK. For Friedman and Hayek, the focus of macreconomic theory should be on controlling inflation. So Thatcher raised interest rates. This should lower demand as it then costs more to borrow money. Unfortunately, those higher interest rates attracted foreign capital, driving up the value of the British pound and making British exports uncompetitive.

The result was a huge recession. Unemployment soared to 3.3 million people, a significant chunk of British manufacturing was destroyed, and many traditional industrial centres were devastated.

Reaganomics didn't work either. As in the UK, interest rates were jacked up in an attempt to reduce inflation. Between 1979 and 1981, interest rates more than doubled from around 10% to over 20% per year. A significant proportion of the US manufacturing industry, which had already been losing ground to Japanese and other foreign competition, could not withstand such an increase in financial costs. The traditional industrial heartland in the Midwest was turned into 'the Rust Belt'.

Neoliberals subscribe to what is known as the D-L-P formula (De-regulation of the economy, Liberalisation of trade and industry, Privatisation of state owned enterprises). Financial deregulation in the US at this time laid the foundation for the unstable and morally egregious financial system we have today, which involves hostile takeovers, asset stripping, and so on. To avoid this fate, firms at the time of Reagan had to deliver profits faster than before, otherwise impatient shareholders would sell up, reducing the share prices and thus exposing the firm to a greater danger of takeover. The easiest way for a company to deal with this was through downsizing, reducing the workforce, cutting overheads and minimizing investments, even though these actions diminish the competitiveness of the business in the longer term.

Here's a damning statistic from Ha Joon Chang: '...distributed profits as a share of total US corporate profits stood at 35-45 per cent between the 1950's and 1970's. Between 2001 and 2010, the largest US companies distributed 94% of their profits [to shareholders] and the top UK companies 89% of their profits.'

And here's another: '...in the UK, the average period of shareholding, which had already fallen from 5 years in the mid 1960's to two years in the 1980's, plummeted to about 7.5 months at the end of 2007.'

The D-L-P formula has also proved disastrous for developing economies too. One of the latest examples is India (often held up as a neoliberal economic success story) where 250,000 farmers have committed suicide because of what the novelist Arundhati Roy has called the 'Privatisation of Everything.' For the back story on that, read her recent book Capitalism: A Ghost Story.

Let's also consider the instability of the financial markets that has been a consequence of the deregulation of them.

Start of 1990's - banking crises in Sweden, Finland and Norway
1994/95 - 'Tequila' crisis in Mexico
1997 - crises in 'miracle' economies in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea
1998 - Russian crisis
1999 - Brazilian crisis
2002 - Argentina
2008 - We all know about that one

Virtually no country was in banking crisis between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970's, when the financial sector was more regulated. Between the mid-1970's and the late 1980's, the proportion of countries who experienced a banking crisis rose to 5 to 10%, weighted by their share of world income. The proportion then shot up to around 20% in the mid-1990's. The ratio then briefly fell to zero for a few years in the mid-2000s, but went up again to 35% following the 2008 global financial crisis.

Now let's move on to look at the consequences for mental health of decades of neoliberalism, taking Mark Fisher as an example.

Fisher notes in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative that a correlation has been found between rising rates of mental distress and illness and neoliberal economics as practised in the UK, USA and Australia. For example, in Britain, depression is now, Fisher claims, the condition that is most treated by the NHS.

Additionally, families are buckling under the pressure of a neoliberalism that requires both parents to work just to make ends meet (and frequently to work long hours as neoliberalism promotes a 24/7 working culture).

Fisher goes on to conclude that, ‘The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional.’

He isn't a lone voice, either. Paul Verhaeghe has taken a very similar line in his book What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market Based Economy.

Lastly, Wilkinson and Pickett have provided a statistical foundation for the above arguments in their well-known publication The Spirit Level, and also in their newest book, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being. According to their research, in societies where there is more of a gap between rich and poor, levels of trust between citizens tend to be lower, people have fewer friends, more people tend to suffer from mental health issues and obesity, and levels of self-reported happiness are lower.

Welcome to modern Britain.

And what do the Tories have to offer?

A choice between what Tim Snyder calls the 'politics of inevitability' (effectively more deregulated 'capitalist realism') and the 'politics of eternity' (Make Britain Great Again by attempting to get back to a mythical 'green and pleasant land' where there are no migrants and old weights and measures are back in use).

Can't really say that I am inspired by either of these whacked-out visions that are being endorsed by a spectacularly mendacious PM and his corrupt and clueless cabinet, one that is pretty much bereft of moral decency, and maybe does deserve to be labelled as 'Tory Scum'.

 

[East Level 2]

"I disapprove of of Angela Rayner calling Tories scum therefore I'll vote for a PM that calls gay people "tank topped bum boys", black people "piccaninnies" and Muslim women "letter boxes"."

But that's OK as it's just Johnson being Johnson.

 

[Vic]

I wouldn’t necessarily say they were bad, who wouldn’t say put more money in to Public Services if there was no cost of doing so.
What they did however, was make reckless promises just before the Election, say for example, promising to backdate the State Pension for women to 60.
Never mind the cost of doing it, but there is the ever so small problem of the Equality Act introduced under Labour.
If you do it for women, you have to do it for men, because the fundamental principle of that Act is we are all treated the same.
No way could the Country afford that and Corbin and his sidekick lost all credibility as to a Party who could run the Country without quickly bankrupting it.

They were backdating the pension for women who suddenly had their pension date changed. It was nothing to do with the agreed equalisation, just another grubby Tory policy.

You really don't do detail, do you?

And I never thought I'd hear anyone say again "we can't afford it". What's the national debt? What's the current tax take?

 

[ell]

I admire your stance, the industry I work in is not protected or represented by any union and as a rule we get treated appallingly.

I work in shipping and im in a union

 

[BobKowalski]

I presume the Govt‘s stated mission to deliver a ‘high wage economy‘ has been junked.

Ah, well, the five minutes it was Govt policy will be fondly remembered.

 

[BrianW]

Wages, in a capitalist society, are decided by supply and demand. That's why KDB is on £300k a week, because you won't find a dozen KDBs standing in the dole queue.

We now have a labour shortage (caused largely by Brexit) plus raging inflation on a scale that anyone aged under about 50 has never known. In such circumstances, pressure for higher wages is inevitable. The Tories and their fans don't like it, but it's their system. They wrote the rule book. Going on strike is no different, in essence, to Tesco putting up a tin of peas by 20p. No one calls that 'holding the country to ransom' do they? Come to that, they haven't said it about the oil companies ripping us off with their ridiculous prices. No, that's OK, because they aren't workers, and have their dividends and directors' fees to consider.

Thatcher resolved an issue of high inflation and high demand for wage increases by creating a pool of three million unemployed. I doubt that trick can be repeated any time soon.

 

[halfmist]

I may disagree with halfmist and think he talls a load of nomsense, but I must defend him here as one who often get's corrected for my sossig finger posts.

Annoys me this constant correcting grammar on social media, it ain't school or a valued piece of writing, just a post on a forum and if you understood what it meant, does it matter? ;-)

I think it depends on who is saying it.
If it was one of his cronies, he would not have dared correct it.
We must stick together, no dissension in the ranks.
I have even had one of the cronies having a dig in an unrelated so called more light hearted thread.
I can see why the majority can’t be arsed posting.
True to form the poll is now down to 5.9% oppose the strike and if that reflects reality, I would personally fund the pay rise.