The Conservative Party

[mancityvstoke]

Targeting UC claimants whilst giving rich people £55,000 or more is disgusting

 

[Gareth Barry Conlon]

Gordon Brown nails it in this thread.

 

[The Future’s Blue!]

The only person I’ve heard praising this is a right-wing, libertarian brexiteer who is backed by wealthy Americans who want to sell off our country, piece by piece.

 

[Gabriel]

That will also expose how many real vacancies there actually are/were

Rising unemployment will also make it harder for the government to squeeze those at the bottom and get those 50+ers who have opted out of the market back into work.

The rate has been rising in the Netherlands over the last few months, not by huge amounts, but just enough each month to make me wonder if that is now the prevailing trend.

 

[Gabriel]

Gordon Brown nails it in this thread.

Interesting choice of expression ‘the new poor’. Accurate, alas.

 

[BrianW]

The first thing a Labour Government should do is abolish charitable status for private schools, put VAT on school fees and put top rate tax up to 80%. Fuck it. Stop being nice.

 

[kaz7]

Thought the labour response was crap , so many open goals , if they are to get the working class voters back today was it , spineless wimps

 

[city2]

Also nothing for the millions of pensioners, nothing surprises me about the tortes they have always been the party for the well off.

 

[supercity88]

And don’t forget, those public schools have charitable status.
We are subsidising them as they don’t pay any tax.
All they have to do is demonstrate that they create public benefits.
Well………don’t they???

They create the next generation of Tory MPs. So quite the opposite.

 

[supercity88]

Policies that have been shown to be utterly corrosive wherever they have been implemented.

The evidence of Kwarteng's budgetary incompetence is actually already out there in empirical form and has been since the late 90's when John Gray published the first edition of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. Gray is, of course, noted for having predicted the 2008 crash.

In that book, Gray looks in detail at four countries that have experimented with neoliberal economic policies of the kind favoured by Truss and Kwarteng: the USA, UK, New Zealand and Mexico. In each instance, the imposition of these policies demonstrably increased economic inequality (thus confirming the well-known research of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett), and reduced social mobility and cohesion.

For example, according to the Rowntree Report on Income and Wealth, inequality in the UK increased dramatically and quickly between 1977 and 1990, a period during which the poorest income groups ceased to benefit from economic growth, and there was a threefold increase in the proportion of the population earning less than half of the national income. However, by 1984-85, the richest 20% of earners enjoyed a 43% after tax share of that income, the highest since the end of the World War 2. Meanwhile, in New Zealand a previously non-existent underclass was created following the introduction of neoliberal policies (by a Labour government!), while in Mexico the size of the middle classes was substantially reduced, and the very poorest were driven into a state of even more abject poverty.

This time around I will leave it there. But I am quite happy, if need be, to author a much longer post citing multiple sources that all converge on the same conclusion, namely, that Kwarteng's brand of economics is already known to be an epic fail.

It's not failing everyone though is it. It's benefiting the rich and that's exactly what they want to do. It's setting them up for the future when their political careers are over. That's a very short term future.