Even when Capitalism and right-wing orthodoxy are shown to have worked, these days the impact in denied. It is a truism today that the culture war started in the US is over in the UK; the left have won. Defeated at the ballot box, they have returned in social media, education and on the streets to reclaim their power.
I don't say this lightly as it is a sad endictment of the right, so good at winning elections but so bad at spelling out policies and facing up to dishonesty with the truth.
The example today is a typical one. Not long ago, Sajid Javaid was Chancellor. Boris and others were always keen to distance themselves from George Osborne, who was personally never very popular in power or policy. But the austerity policies from 2010 to 2018 worked a treat. The UK faced a dire macro situatio in 2010 and the path to reducing the burgeoning public debt was to decrease structural spend whilst also increasing immiediate social security spending to prevent poverty and starvation.
Labour and the communists started a long-campaign which has proved fruitful to say this austerity killed 100,000 people. Total fake news based one left-wing report which extrapolated average deaths over too long a time period.
Nonetheless, at the ballot box this has failed but in the minds of many it has succeeded. Even Javid here is a victim of the mind meld. He is now saying no to more austerity and let's go with more Laour inspired-spending. The fight is over. We are seeing this in a range of areas such as the BLM protests etc too that the left wing viewpoint prevails.
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I agree with the end result, but not the journey there.
I had a small example today. Involved in a (for me) largish sw project.
I wrote the manual / proposal / contract for one part.
Someone else did similar on some reporting.
Heading towards implementation.
5% of members have a special 2-step process. My pillar dealt with processing once transition is over. Other person's dealt with reporting. I also wrote the data transition.
1% of that 5% will be mid-transition at point of transfer.
As things stand they will be correctly transferred in structure X.
Client wants structure Y.
This was not agreed, not discussed (notes from meetings indicate X was proposed) and despite all attempts by the client to expand scope by referring to the docs, no support there.
But we are running behind generally and do not want to p*** them off even more so they get this for £0.
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Looking out to the wider world of politics, I see a group of people who want something to benefit a small minority. There is no proper evidence that this is justified. But they are vocal and have some leverage due to things in the general environment being not great.
So they get bought off / get some free stuff.
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So it is not really left / right etc, it is groups taking advantage where they can - a purely and eternally human pattern.
Or perhaps I am just old, worn, and cynical.
Buy low, sell high, Andrew
if the left did only realise it, they are behaving like people do the world over when they find they have the freedom to do so
when you can find something undervalued, and are allowed to bag it at low cost to yourself, and keep it
like capitalism, in fact ...
100% agree.
The magic money tree.
We'll see.
And the BBC...
The Left have a strangle hold on the broadcast media. The first thing any revolutionary must control.
BLM (a front for Communism) didn't have to storm the broadcast networks - their agents were ready and waiting.
The genius of Cummings (and Trump) was that he circumvented the broadcast media.
The BBC was enraged and has been fomenting a very real war. Only today there were 7 items on racism on BBC text news. They are trying to stoke up race rioting in the heatwave.
They are making the country ungovernable and we must all march under the Rainbow flag of NHS/Sexuality/BLM (never mind that 44 white people - including 8 young girls - have been killed as a direct result of BAME hatred since Lee Rigby.)
Is there no rich "right winger" who fancies himself as High Chancellor willing to setup a proper Conservative party and take over the country. I'd prefer a (not even benevolent) dictator to the parade of shite politicians we have now.
Matt - errrr, yes. Farage: can't contain himself
"Only today there were 7 items on racism on BBC text news. They are trying to stoke up race rioting in the heatwave. "
Same with the Guardian - half the UK and US news is race-related. And yet they told us immigration would make our lives better.
But the only thing they can do to revive the economy is to monetise government debt and spend, spend, spend.
Record consumer debt repayments in March. Then double that in April.
The consumer is in no mood to spend, so government will have to. And government will have to have the BoE print the money. The alternative is a depression.
I'm a capitalist and would prefer that we hadn't trashed the pound so badly since 2008. But we are where we are. And austerity, even the tiny bit of austerity experienced previously, won't help us now.
The BBC,BLM etc are on a roll and think they have history on their side, at some point the law of unintended consequences will kick in and things will become even more unpleasant. Who in their right mind would now not avoid any contact with the diversity if they could manage it? My dislike of the usual suspects has gone from mild annoyance on occasion to something much much deeper and I will try to do whatever I can to further the cause of all that I believe in, I'm not alone in this.
blokeinbrum - in their deluded minds, absolvement for the blame they have internalised. It is a religous thing.
Charlie - Wo there, if the government has to spend then there have to be taxes to pay for it. Not all spending is good, random payrises and more money for reparations etc wont help. yes spending on infrastructure might, but that sectoris tight on capacity anyway. The choices have to be carefully made and the spending limited to what is affordable in the medium as well as the short term (we can all agree government don't give a toss about the long-term). Turning on the taps is always leads to a reduction in producivity and wasted spend for large parts of the investment - see new labour.
Charlie has it right as we are at an inflection point between a disinflation (from 1982) to a reflation. It will be similar to 70s and the MMT will be paid for with inflation mostly rather than taxes. The government have and are borrowing at very low interest rates and will direct money to infrastructure spending. This is the right thing to do at present or we would have had systemic collapse. Expect interest rate rises in a few years time.
Bloke in Brum: 'what's in it for them?' Some combination of raw power, money and shagging your children.
It won't be similar to the 70s as there is nothing left to sell. Gone are the government owned utilities, state owned enterprises, council housing. All the country's silver (not to mention gold, Mr B) has been sold.
The only item left to sell is future tax receipts based on the premise of a golden future uplands. Boris better be right.
Not saying past decisions were right or wrong, just pointing out the cupboard is bare.
The natural consequence of Whitehall centralism - what do you expect when you devolve only the rationing decision for a cake whose size is pre-decided in SW1? Sooner or later people will blame not the ration-distributor but the cake maker, and demand bigger cakes.
Some 95% of UK taxes are still determined by the centre (including effectively Council Tax - which council has ever been brave enough to hold a local referendum to tax more than the determined headroom?)- seems pretty stupid to me.
Now that things are happening in big increments, it's time to take big decisions. Devolve at least 50% of taxation downwards.
The Swiss centre imposes only some third of taxes - to pay for defence, justice, air traffic control, intelligence, diplomacy and functions that can only be managed at a national level. Plus a bit for levelling-up, i.e. greater cost of postal deliveries in Scotland.
Everything else - education, child care, social services, roads other than motorways, local transport, local police, the whole lot - allow local democratic structures and voters to determine tax and spend levels. If local people want more libraries, free child care etc. they can vote for them - and for the taxes that pay for them.
Whitehall has caused the blame-game for 'Austerity' - send it back where it belongs. To the Town Hall.
I disagree.
The reason that central, rather than local, government has the money. Is the abuses of the ratepayer, in left wing councils.
The tragedy is that few blacks follow BLM either. We would have seen many more out in force in London if that were not the case.
I blame the white leftist middle class entirely. And so did Malcolm X (an outright racist was he.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYcxvnh4YtM
They have used blacks, a little girl (Thunberg) and the NHS to force Communism on a people who clearly voted against it time and again.
The ballot box is worthless.
What alarms me is the difficulty of seeing somewhere else in the world that might offer protection from all this filth. Uruguay? Switzerland?
I hesitate to say Singapore because you always run the risk of the Chinese Singaporeans deciding they hate ex-pats. Or at least that they'd like to loot ex-pats.
It would only need one General Election campaign to look close and then one side or the other might play the race card.
RE: BlokeInBrum
"What I don't understand are the seemingly large numbers of white people who seem absolutely hell bent on bringing this about. They infest our media, our educational institutions, the civil service. Whats in it for them?"
I don't know the answer to that any more than anyone else does for sure, but I'd like to float another possibility.
They are surrounded by the achievements of far better men - indoor plumbing, antibiotics, electricity, a complete absence of famine, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering etc ad nauseam - and not only could they never, ever, originate even the simplest of these things for themselves, they can't even understand any of it when it is explained to them - and they absolutely HATE the realisation that they are just ballast. Not even important enough to be worth getting rid of. So their behaviour is a gigantic temper tantrum aimed at the people they envy and resent for being so accomplished - ironically people that are almost all now dead.
I wonder how many of the rioters are STEM students/graduates or trades.
I'd wager very very few indeed.
" the left have won. "
The left have been on their long march through the institutions since I worked underground in 1979.
As part of our Mining engineering day release, we had a session with humanities. And the lefty little twerp used it as a forum to agitate with the dirty workers and try to get us to down tools.
Thatcher did nothing about the Schools and Universities, instead she faffed around with the legal profession.
As a counter revolutionary force, the Conservative party has been a right pile of shit.
It couldn't conserve a fart in a balloon.
I certainly have the perception that the non productive part of society seems to be growing and growing.
All the incentives seem to favour the feckless and the dishonest.
I think we have to look at the likes of Hungary and Poland for family friendly policies that benefit those that would like to keep traditional (and functional) social structures.
It is getting a bit Trumpian in that just winning elections doesn't seem to be enough any more. You can be in office without being in power.
Blair, as Peter Hitchens pointed out, worked/modified the levers of power pretty much non stop. Boris must do the same. I'd like to see the HRA repealed and an end to judicial activism. However it's early days, Brexit first, don't fight all your battles at once.
I don't see why not (don't fight all your battles at once).
Throw an enormous wall of shit at the usual suspects with the aim of overwhelming them with the sheer quantity of initiatives.
Severely reduce foreign aid, push free schools even harder. Bring back Grammar Schools. And so on .
Whilst the left are having conniptions about whatever it is that is pissing them off, beaver away in the background getting what you want to get done, done.
Trump is a master at this, throwing out tweets left, right and center to discombobulate those that oppose him, while quietly getting things done in the background.
As a strategy, I don't see why they don't try this. They have little to lose.
The media, Civil Service, educationalists, they all hate the Government.
Oppose them at every turn, no matter what they do.
Just do it. Give them something to really whinge about..
Been saying for some years now - all our institutions are infested with parasites. So whilst we may have a "conservative" government (chance would be a fine thing) all the ancillary bodies and agencies set up to do the work of government are marching to the beat of their own drum - and it's not a drum we the people voted to be banged on our behalf.
I've got to the point of believing it will get a lot lot worse before it gets better. If it ever does.
Great set of comments, nearly all of which I agree with. Even Private Eye is run by Hislop, turned by Brexit into a lefty and conservative....prviate eye!
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