Recession has beneficial effects. Beneficial for pawn brokers, betting shops, bailiffs and the repossession business; and for driving weaker economic competitors to the wall (the list is in the Guardian of who goes down first). Leaner and meaner is not good, merely inevitable and choice restricting.
With governments it does offer the opportunity for the interventionist state to manage the misery and display fairness, decision, competence and reliability in permanence. In such unavoidable economic circumstances there can be no room for untried hands on the tiller, untried policies threatening the prudent guidance of our ship in the storm of inevitable downturn.
Labour think it's a win win. Unbridled borrowing to fund vote buying and trough guzzling, followed by managing the consequences while sustained by the frightened newly poor.
Only this is not a recession. This is a permanent alteration in global economic and, therefore, all other kinds of power. This is the permanent impoverishment of most people in the United Kingdom, worsened by Labour's abject failure to refound manufacturing industry and entrepreneurship, protect social and cultural infrastructures, regulate and profit from financial markets, install reasonable and just tax structures, encourage educational excellence and technical skills, and secure the modernisation of the state in assisting its evolution into a more effective representative democracy.
Labour's goal was permanent power. What they have achieved is mass poverty and cultural collapse, rising across undefended flood plains in our society.
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5 comments:
This is so grim HG. :-(
We may take you up on the very kind offer of a caravan perch.
They laughed at Noah is Sackerson's, but the sentiment is widespread.
The regime and its now established nomenklatura is a horrid last gasp at realised socialism. The world and its wife knows what socialism did and the desperate courage of the people who have overthrown it.
As I'm not very brave, I set off (me, the bewildered but loyal Mr HG, and intrepid life companions plus half the garden), to build an ark in 1997; I was lucky, I had the opportunity, and some of the training to understand enough to fear what was coming. Certainly there is reason to worry about energy resources, the way modern urban life is arranged etc., but it was more than that.
It is a constant astonishment to watch the New Labour project rolled out - as they would put it, across the lives and times of the people of England. The Scottish have bailed out en masse; the rest are not going to get the chance.
Newmania points at proportional representation but that is only a tiny, already realised part, of how democracy will be perverted.
Perverted is an apposite word to apply to the politics and the junta running England. Again, I am astonished to hear Bishops , arch, calling for the recognition of other faith's rituals and social expression; and bishops less arch, condemning England's bent socialism as demonic. Using the categories of faith - which I had hoped not to see used again while I am sentient - is terrifying.
People who might have expected quite reasonably to have comfortable living standards are becoming poor; people who were poor are becoming marginal, and those who are older, with little room for economic re-establishment, little room for any kind of manoeuvre, are becoming destitute. The deliberate trashing of familial and cultural bonds renders the vulnerable ever more precarious.
The young, and New Labour's offensive, unwarranted, intrusive surveillance of their infancy, childhood and youth, deserves a post of its own.
Grim, L? This is fascism, this is what it looks like, how it feels. the secret family courts, the constant low-level surveilling, the negation of opting out, to be followed shortly by the requirement under pain of first social and economic, and then penal discrimination, to opt in.
And the inefficiency and incompetence that yields gross inequality and mass poverty coupled with subservience and disgust.
New Labour, the Third Way.
Fascism: quite right. Aldous Huxley said you should judge by means, not ends. Car tax out of date? We'll crush your car. And presumably bulldoze your house if you're behind on council tax.
It feels bad being thought of as doomsayer and misery guts S. Angels started writing to say the constitution was being bent and there seemed to be intention of degrading it altogether. Since then, a year ago, it's just got worse; looking back there used to be all kinds of cheery posts and references to interesting things. Now, a glance at the extraordinary speed-up in destruction leaves no time to say anything but "LOOK"
I think daily of escape, which I didn't use to, and I think many others would say the same. Well done you for acting on your analysis.
What seems clear to me is that Big M.D. is scarcely better than Big Brother, and New Labour appear to have put the two in cahoots. We won't be free again until we return to being a nation of small shopkeepers, and small government.
I was very slow to realize that if it solved the problems it claims to address, socialism would destroy its own power base. But must I really be driven into the arms of the "Conservatives" who, as Peter Hitchen rightly (IMHO) says are no such thing? What alternative is there?
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