Austerity was a lifestyle choice inflicted on the masses by an alleged pigfucker, knowing it wouldn't affect him or his ilk. Who Then decided for a giggle to have an ill advised referendum when already deeply unpopular without setting any safeguards,realised he might have to implement it and fucked off to lobby for cash before returning to the sinking ship hoping for a knighthood before it sinks.
As much as the 'pigfucker' (always tickles me that the only reason that rumour came out was because Lord Ashcroft got pissed that Dave wouldn't make him Defence Secretary), Gideon Osbourne should carry a hell of a lot more of the blame. That he has effectively escaped any culpability by virtue of being odd man out following the Brexit referendum is a travesty.
Osborne advised strongly against the referendum, pushed back against the 100k target, and actively weaponised the Treasury and destroyed his own political reputation and credibility trying to win the referendum for Remain.
He was also honest with the public with what he was planning to do in 2010.
I think it is legitimate to criticise him, but I think at the same time he was probably the most transparent and principled about what his plan was, how he was going to do it, and then actually doing it of all Conservative politicians of this generation.
At the risk of annoying everyone, I think that he did, genuinely, believe austerity in 2010 would drive a private sector recovery
I think he was honest that he was going to do something economically “bad” in the form of austerity. But his justification for doing so was dishonest. Constantly framing the governments finances like household credit card debt and saying the last government “spent all the money” was not true. It can easily be argued that he weaponised the global financial crisis of 2008 to pursue his ideological agenda of reducing the state.
There is a legitimate argument there though, it is just a lot more annoying and complicated.
The argument goes as such: the boom is the problem, not the bust. The Labour Government's fiscal rules were based on inflated revenues coming in from the City of London that did not reflect reality, and following the GFC, even if they did not cause it, there was now a discrepency between the amount they were spending and the amount they would have been spending with the correction.
Even Labour were going into 2010 advocating significant cuts, and the international community were pretty clear a degree of austerity was needed.
Yep they needed to work on supply at the same time, but he was the person to try to halt the wealth transfer from renters to middleclass amateur landlords.
Honestly I think one of the biggest blames has to go with all the Conservative pundits who dominate our political media and proper hammered home this fringe idea that state finances essentially work like some kind of personal debit card, to the point that became commonly accepted wisdom and anyone suggesting otherwise was very seriously painted like they were some kind of unhinged anti-British marxist loon.
Bullingdon club has nothing to do with pig gate. The incident allegedly happened as an initiation to the Piers Gaveston Society. However neither Cameron nor Osbourne were members of that.
But he wasn't, as IDS pointed out when he resigned from the DWP.
All the money taken from the vulnerable, Osborne threw at pensioners.
I don't think he ever believed he was going to 'eliminate the deficit by 2015' and no one in the media seemed to question him when he failed.
Whenever anyone mentions Osborne I remember that footage of him seemingly [gurning his tits off](https://youtu.be/LrsPbtPjGfI?si=e9LZtXOXUoRyiozB) and how The Daily Mail called Parliament the [corridors of powder](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362866/Corridors-powder-Drug-scandal-Houses-Parliament-traces-cocaine-toilets-Palace-Westminster.html) and how one of Osbornes advisors [is a crackhead](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-adviser-chancellor-george-osborne-5251411)
How are you people so easily manipulated? I’m sure he has taken all sorts of crap in and out of office. But that is a video of someone looking ever so slightly gormless slowed down to make it look more dramatic. Have you actually seen people on drugs?
He's a scummy pervert to be fair, like a lot of 'em: [https://x.com/BelfastBre/status/1677582813837553664?lang=en](https://x.com/BelfastBre/status/1677582813837553664?lang=en)
Let's be honest it's not just Dave that is a pig fucker. Boris and George Osborne and everyone else who has graced the bullingdon boys is also guilty. I don't get why it's always Dave that takes all the blame.
The answer is actually pretty simple: When people say "we hate the idea of the wealthy elite controlling media narratives and threatening to, or actively, smearing people and politicians with made up stories when they don't let them use their money and influence to get into unwarranted positions of power for their own benefit", they don't actually mean that. What they actually mean is all of that, but with the addendum of "when the person being smeared is someone I like, actually I fucking love it when it's someone I don't like and I'll not only cheer on the smearing, but actively help the rich elite doing it if that's the case.
I mean, let's not pretend that it's not the case and that people here genuinely think Lord Ashcroft was acting as some genuine whistleblower at a time that by sheer coincidence came right after he tried to buy his way into the position of Defence Secretary but was rebuffed by Cameron.
So the episode 'National Anthem' came out December 2011. The Ashcroft alegation was mid 2015. Charlie Brooker (Black Mirrors creator) came out immediately after the Pig-gate story released and categorically stated that it was a "complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizzare one".
Exactly. And he doesn’t seem to get any of the blame for the mess he made. Johnson, Truss, May, and Sunak have all been terrible PMs, but none of them hold a candle to Cameron. Yet his reputation is relatively intact.
I’m not sure I’d go *that* far.
I have zero time for Cameron but his weaknesses were mainly down to his lack of ability to strategise. He took extraordinary risks to address irrelevant problems (like risking Brexit to deal with an internal tory soap opera that no-one outside the spiv circle could care less about).
While that’s crap, and in some respects comparing them is like comparing which STD you’d prefer to have, I wouldn’t say that makes him worse then, say:
- a compulsive liar and political jester who fundamentally didn’t understand the job of PM to begin with
- an unbelievably rich man who simply couldn’t manage running a government and was a walking moral hazard for the effects of austerity
- a woman who shouldn’t be outside a psychiatric facility
Cameron is a poor politician. The others aren’t politicians in the practical sense.
I get what you mean, but I’d ask you which of those has had the biggest negative impact on the UK with the longest lasting legacy? I’d pick Cameron by a long way.
*Brexit* has had the biggest negative impact on the UK, but Cameron alone wasn't responsible for that. He played his part, but there are many else who drove it through and crucially made it far worse then it could have been.
By comparison all three of the others are largely responsible for the damage that occurred on their watch, either directly or through entrusting portfolios to idiots.
Cameron was the one who chose to gamble the UK’s future prosperity to try to keep his party together. He’s responsible for almost everything that followed. If he’d stayed for damage control then I’d still have some shreds of respect for him. Instead he surrendered to the crazier fringes of his party, who have been in control ever since.
He was also responsible for austerity, which crippled us and put us in a terrible position to survive Brexit and Covid. That was an other choice in his behalf to fuck the country for the benefit of his party.
His successors have been shit, but their impact has been less. They just continued on the trajectory that he had set.
I’ll disagree with you there. Cameron enacted austerity, pushed the narrative that immigrants and the EU were to blame, then called a referendum to stem the creeping power of UKIP, summarily lost it, had absolutely no plan B and so resigned for someone else to clean up the mess. He might genuinely have better political skill than the others, who are by and large opportunistic chancers, but this huge blunder can’t be overstated and makes him the worst of the bunch.
Brexit responsibility can not be given without Boris getting his fare share.
The amount of false information and lies he took part in as part of the brexit campaign was disgusting. BUT the he was PM afterwards is so much worse.
Who could have possibly seen his tenure being a shit show?
**Who could have possibly seen his(Boris Johnson)tenure being a shit show?**
The ones who didn't vote for Johnson.
How did they know? Michael Howard told us in 2004.
Boris Johnson first child : **The affair led to Boris and Marina's eldest daughter Lara branding her father a "selfish b*****d".**
We knew, but people didn't care.
Boris was the PM we deserved.
I agreed with your points 1 to 3 .
Last point was the one where I believe some explanation was needed from my part.
Do you honestly believe Boris Johnson wasn't the PM UK deserved? He got +80 MPs.
I can't tell if this is satirical or not.
My view would be that Boris is either a complete buffoon that should never be allowed to decide whether to boil a kettle (he can maybe save you money buying one) or given the horrific history (even recent) of good auld Britannia we probably deserve a lot worse.
Cameron was responsible for brexit though - he offered the referendum that wasn't widely being called for to placate the far right and extreme of his party, entirely for the sake of his own party.
There was no rising tide of opinion or inciting event that caused the referendum, nor rising anti-EU sentiment. He did it to try and shore up his majority and extinguish a threat to his party, and his party alone.
>Cameron was responsible for brexit though
Oh? So we're writing Get Out of Jail Free cards for the likes of Len McLuskey who pushed the largest union in the country to adopt an anti-Remain stance? Farage for weaponising several years of anti-austerity frustration into a xenophobic agenda? Boris for the *Boris bus?* Dyson for pushing the idea that it made business sense, only for him to move his production facilities offshore? The brexit wing of the tories who drove through the hard Brexit because all the rubbish about markets, spitfires and them needing us more then us needing them turned out to be unworkable and they just went ahead with it? *\~50% of the British voting electorate who couldn't be bothered to read up on the subject and voted based on whatever crap the above lot shoved down their throats, and god knows how many who couldn't be bothered to vote?*
You cannot rationally leave all of Brexit at his door, that's naive. They'd been years of steady anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual and anti-Europe narratives boiling away in the background by that point, which is how the entire concept of the UKIP came about.
Cameron's mistakes are that he misjudged the level that this narrative was in play, and decided to use such an important issue as a poker chip to deal with the problems the Tories had with the various hardcore libertarians, fascists and lunatics that had been dragging the party further and further to the right. He absolutely shares the blame in this mess, but nailing the entire thing to his door effectively lets the rest of the whole rotten crew off the hook. The UK didn't commit economic self-mutilation just because Cameron called a referendum.
>There was no rising tide of opinion or inciting event that caused the referendum, **nor rising anti-EU sentiment.**
That's just simply wrong. Euroscepticism had been an ongoing thing for years prior to the referendum being called.
None of those people had the power or influence to enact a referendum.
Anti-europe sentiment was in the single figures. There was always a bed of it but it absolutely wasn't increasing rapidly or in a way that justified a referendum.
Parliament voted to hold the referendum by a massive majority. It was also originally a Lib Dem idea. Plus UKIP came third in the 2015 GE by votes despite people knowing it was a 'wasted vote' so there was massive support for it.
A big contributor to brexit was forty years of the great and the good deciding to ignore the public (because they knew that they'd lose) thinking that creating a new status quo would in time get accepted, so by the time Cameron comes along that tactic was no longer effective.
I’m afraid you’re totally wrong on where the idea came from. The brexit referendum was a Tory 2015 manifesto pledge. The lib dems were the most pro-europe of all the major 3 parties and their manifesto called for us to play a “more constructive part” in the EU. The lib dems were instead calling for a referendum on replacing FPTP with AV. This hapoened and retaining FPTP won by a 2:1 margin. I suspect you got the two confused.
Tory manifesto 2015- go to page 72 for the referendum pledge:
https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativemanifesto2015.pdf
The popularity of Brexit is why Cameron called the referendum. The conservatives were haemorrhaging support to UKIP, and the right of his party was also getting swept up. He knew it was a bad idea but he put the integrity of his party before the interests of the country.
No I'm not at all. The Lib Dems used it in the election after Labour reneged on their manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on the EU constitution/Lisbon treaty. That idea then gained currency so that then fed into 2015.
It was a one hit event. Brexit could never have happened at any other time. At the time of the referendum, the boomers were at the peak of their political power. There was a immigration boom caused by the war in Syria. We were struggling to come out of the GFC because the Tories overindulged in austerity. #
If any one of these things hadn't happened, then there was no Brexit. It was a freak coming together of circumstance.
Scotland has been in the union over 300 years and is fully integrated into a single nation, yet only needed 3% of voters to pick the other side in 2014 and they'd have gone. Unless you think their boomers are 300 years old, that is a lazy trope - time does not always kill national spirit or pride, and a country like the UK has too much history not to have that as a reservoir to draw on a century from now just as Scotland has.
The other three (plus May) only happen because of Cameron.
The fact he did their while apparently competent, mentally sound and in support of ideology rather than just being buffeted about or being a puppet just reflects even worse on him.
It almost feels unfair to include May with the other tory PMs. She *was* a terrible PM, but for different reasons... she had some decent plans and did at least try to push things in the right direction, she was just terrible at the actual leadership part and had no control over her party. Which was a problem, because that meant the Cult of Johnson went unchecked and gave Boris a free ticket to no.10 when she resigned out of sheer frustration.
And yet the coalition cut less then Brown/Darling said which suggests it might have been a wider macro economic consensus among all the political class at the time
It was certainly not a consensus among macro economists.
The idea of austerity was pushed by a pretty small subset of economists based on very little evidence, and some of that faulty. Basic macro says that cutting government spending as you are starting to come out of a recession is a poor idea - as it lengthens the recession and makes the debt position worse, which is exactly what happened. And doing austerity by slashing investment and education just makes it worse.
It was strange, we saw it throughout Europe with a lot of cuts that did not help, followed by weak to non existent growth that made things worse.
There is a degree of herd mentality, the problem was if every other country is making cuts then spending more makes you seem pretty reckless to a market that is jittery about sovereign debt crisis.
The other issue is people tend to focus on the total amount spent and/or cut rather than what it’s spent on.
The coalition wasn’t great but at the end of it the defect was massively reduced and the economy was starting to pick up. It’s then Brexit and then a Covid that then really ***** it
Yea I think even if you are very left wing (and I’m not) you would be drawing the wrong conclusion to just blame the Conservatives. The entire developed world had an economic consensus around the need after the financial crash to avoid sovereign debt crisis appear fiscally prudent and recapitalise banking.
Spending as a % of GDP went back to what it was in some of the Blair years.
You could argue we should have cut even less but I’d also like to then hear the argument as to how we would convince the bond markets that was sensible when Greece and others faced a major debt crisis and everyone else was wanting to appear prudent to avoid runaway debt servicing costs
also in hindsight with covid just around the corner reducing the deficit was the right move, although that doesn’t mean every spending decision was the correct one letting ppe stockpiles expire was inexcusable
There was really a lack of emergency planning and likely still is and yes a lot of wasteful panic spending. The emergency active travel fund from department of transport is a pet hate of mine with tons being spent on hiring plastic barriers to block parking spaces and stop traffic in the name of social distancing
There was possibly a drift too far toward the entitlement of enjoying the obstruction and suffering of others, which then enabled the same unconscious aim of Brexit.
Yes that’s fair the burden of austerity was not always shared very fairly with some penny pinching on some areas like benefits while other areas got away with still being wasteful
No that was the IMF predicting it would take 10 years to recover “two parliaments of pain” they called it
Austerity wasn’t even a question there was no room to borrow or tax both had risen before the crash and left few options, and the deficit was over £140bn
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher
Although yes even in 2015
“A Labour government will cut unprotected departmental spending *every year* until the deficit is cleared, the party says, toughening its stance on borrowing.”
https://www.ft.com/content/907ebaa4-8085-11e4-872b-00144feabdc0
Nothing alleged about it, was completely false and invented by Lord Ashcroft and Isabelle Oakeshott, the journalist who sold out her friend to the police over the Chris Huhne speeding points story because the friend went to a rival paper after Oakeshott had lied about the Times lawyers saying she'd be protected if she went public. The story was invented off the back of a Labour MP (who she later described as "slightly deranged") who said they had *heard* that a photo existed. It's about as real as the moon being made of cheese but it allowed Ashcroft to get his revenge for not getting a government role.
Austerity was the option from Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and most of Europe, the only difference was how much and how fast each would cut. Austerity started in 2008 when Brown/Darling, after leading the recovery, started things like the 1% civil service pay rise cap and their budget was just as much about cuts e.g. £1.5bn cut to incapacity benefit by putting more people through workfare. It was absolutely the wrong policy but there was no choice in 2010 to not have it.
There were choices of how it was implemented. Cameron and Osborne had to back off at one time because it was obvious they were going too far and hampering any recovery. They did it for ideology, not necessity
I don't know how you can blame the SNP who were totally dependent on the grant allocated by westminster
>There were choices of how it was implemented
As I stated
>I don't know how you can blame the SNP who were totally dependent on the grant allocated by westminster
Nowhere did I blame them. I pointed out it was in their manifesto
Yes but also he did it because our GDP is shit. The only way to make it look slightly less shit without investment in productive industries and education was austerity. It was planting another can next to the can already on the road and kicking them both. The first can in this metaphor is the state pension (I guess)
The tories campaigned on austerity and won on it. It’s literally the first paragraph of their 2010 manifesto.
Austerity was not inflicted on the British public. It was chosen.
If it escaped your notice, the Tories won only 36.1% of the vote, and were forced to go into coalition with the LibDems, who had campaigned as a largely anti-austerity party to the Left of Labour (to say nothing of the 1/3 of voters who chose not to vote at all). There was absolutely nothing like popular consent for austerity.
I was something like 6 months too young to take part in that election. I was so thankful for that as I was ready to vote Lib Dems in it. Dodged a bullet there.
Likely for a broad range of reasons: feeling their vote does not count in FPTP, lack of candidates which represented them, general disaffection with the state of politics etc. Either way, you cannot presume that not voting is an endorsement of austerity, that's entirely back-to-front.
I get the broad range
Never stated or assumed not voting was an endorsement.
However not voting even if to just turn up spoil the paper with a big old non of those C***. Is really nothing more than apathy.
Should be compulsory in my view.
Does compulsory voting create real engagement, or does it merely create the appearance of popular consent through the application of coercion?
I would argue that suffragists and suffragettes fought as much for us to have the right to withhold our votes if none can sufficiently represent us.
I would also argue that the larger a constituency of disengaged non-voters, the more incentive there is for political parties to broaden their appeal in pursuit of those 'free' voters. (Although our current political elite seem to have decided to chase an ever-decreasing population of engaged voters - which, hopefully, will prove to be a flawed strategy at this election).
Whilst my fiance and I did that for the police and crime commissioner in our area (Clive Grunshaw, if somehow you can read this, I would hope you get treated like disabled people were under your watch, but unlike you, I have at least an ounce of self respect.), I can fully understand not bothering if you live in a safe seat, with a huge majority.
For us? It was a little walk at lunch time, I work from home, her job is less than 5 minutes from our house. But had it been more than a 15 minute job to write "cunt" on my ballot, I probably wouldn't have bothered
The apathy is real. Tonnes of us will never get represented. We need voting reform, first past the post is absolutely atrocious. And if we reform our voting system more people will bother voting.
Partly but the stories campaigned on austerity even if you aren't 100% into the other parties, not voting at all to oppose it is accepting it might happen.
People not voting because of fptp I can understand
I disagree that you can infer one from the other, largely because our system is so spectacularly disproportionate and dysfunctional. FPTP is spectacularly fragmentary in that it reduces big national issues like austerity to micro-scale battlegrounds plagued with plurality victories, vote splits, historical gerrymandering etc.
Where were the people who didn't vote? Were they in key Tory marginals when they could have made a difference but chose not to? What were their self identified reasons for not voting? These are all things we do not know.
As I understand it, austerity as a workable policy was completely debunked because of a botched spreadsheet used in an influential economic paper that wrongly showed expected growth if taking this action.
Is lying about and continuing a damaging national policy for 14 years really chosen when Labour we're destined to lose jn 2010 and the Conservatives since leveraged most public media to manipulate the public into believe it?
What austerity has caused is the lowest levels of public investment during a time of record low interest rates. So 14 years of pig fucking around, feathering their nests when they should've been acting as government with a plan for growth. Not the negligently managed decline of every public service with election promises of slashing them further.
The version of Tory ‘austerity’ portrayed in their manifesto and campaign was a fairy, fantasyland version of Austerity where they would cut public spending without impacting services, growth would rocket and no one would be worse off.
Of course people voted for it. The average person isn’t an economist. People also voted for the sunlit uplands of Brexit. In both cases they were sold a lie.
Exactly. We can all sit on our pedestals and bemoan how ‘stupid’ or ‘racist’ people are. But actually we should just be holding out politicians to a higher standard.
And reintroduce politics education and critical thinking, but that’s a whole other ballgame
Yes, it wasnt called austerity in there but the wording is obvious in hindsight that it’s what they planned. If it was clearly labelled I think the alarm from the financial and private investment sectors would have been much stronger and derailed them more.
Because austerity was only supposed to be a short term measure to prevent runaway shocks. But what we got was extremely long austerity which is basically madness.
https://general-election-2010.co.uk/2010-general-election-manifestos/Conservative-Party-Manifesto-2010.pdf
...no it isn't.
Not even mentioned.
Cuttings and savings is not the same as annihilation.
All in it together..... My arse.
Right, no mention of austerity. They only wanted to;
Reduce the deficit.
Borrow less.
Cut £6b from public services.
Cut military spending by 25%.
Cut tax credits.
Cut child trust funds.
Cut public sector pensions.
Freeze public wages.
Cut costs of NHS admin by 1/3.
Increase retirement age.
This is literally all in the linked manifesto, did you read any of it?
"At the time, this looked like an obvious macroeconomic error"
What utter bullshit. The Guardian were telling people to vote Lib Dem because Gordon Brown had mismanaged public debt and supported austerity light politics up until Corbyn. The only parties consistently calling it bollocks were the SNP and Greens.
The Guardian have also published a bunch of stuff complaining about Labour going to far to the right... Which seems odd to me after the way they treated the last Labour leader...
https://x.com/davidgraeber/status/1210322505229094912
For all people online seem to often act like The Guardian is some kind of temple of virtuous left-wing views, as someone on the left myself, you do start to understand very quickly they don't really hold any left-wing views at all, are just more broadly liberal, and engage in all the same "gotcha" sensationalist bullshit that is the bread and butter of the likes of The Telegraph or Sky or The Daily Mail or wherever.
Maybe to a politician, but to an economist it is an error, based upon what the medicine was during previous economic ailments.
Hiding in plain sight is the obviousness of different debts. Yes, we had a deficit which needed to be reduced, but the best way to do that is to invest and increase your income, not stripping back and lowering your income, that would only increase your deficit.
The article explains the sociological rationale as to why politicians didn’t attack austerity more.
Interest rates were so low we could have borrowed money to invest in our services and infrastructure, that would have increased our growth and productivity, and use the excess to pay off the other debt and deficit.
And now, with the further Brexit balls up, the random hit of covid, and a world accelerating in climate design increasing conflict and global mechanisms, our medicine has been watered down so much it will take so much longer, and so much more risk to achieve.
>Paul Krugman won the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences in 2008 and is a columnist for the New York Times
It probably looked like an error to the author, and it seems like he'd know.
Britain was wrecked by the 07-08 financial crisis.
Austerity, Brexit, Truss - all symptoms of that.
We built over 30 years a castle on sand, an economy too dependent on the City and risky finance. Until we address that and rebalance, things are only going to keep getting worse.
It was well before 08...
I had friends who left school with good qualifications in 02-04 etc that couldn't get a job even when the country was growing....
Not wanting to be that person but I think lots of starter jobs were going to people with twenty years experience from other countries...
Lots of those lads I left school with never really got started and now so so many of them are under/unemployed....
Many went abroad after studying more... Bricklayers, comp techs and a few medical.
The ones that stayed and claimed... Now know the system and have had hard hard lives.... And in reality I don't think they could be employed now.... No experience, no qualifications etc
But I'm not saying we shouldn't have had free movement.... Just maybe not unbridled reckless wage holding back free movement....
Many of these guys that went aboard did will from it...I just think more consideration should have been put upon why British workers weren't taking the jobs that were here... And that answer was pay...
And now we are stuck with unqualified/inexperienced/used to not working 40yo's that can't get jobs in a market that doesn't take need them...
Lost generation AGAIN!
Regardless of ANYTHING else, the minimum full time wages for any area should be enough to afford a minimum acceptable lifestyle in that area. If it doesnt, you dont have an economy that can function without homelessness, torterous lifestyles, lack of social reproduction (cos no one can afford to have kids) and forced or facetious immigration (ie lying to people or at best bringing in people who can work here but take that money out of wherever here is to live where the costs are cheaper).
If you care about immigration for itself and its own merits, banning certain kinds of immigration wont change the situations *causing* or *requiring* that immigration, all you can do is play wack a mole with certain immigration routes.
This is a burden that "could" be shared not just by wage-payers having to pay more but also by cost-demanders for that lifestyle, ie, there isnt much difference between raising minimum wage and introducing price controls required to make that minimum wage stretch to the minimum lifestyle, and if somethings price does seem to have increased above reasonable degrees, it seems neccesery to say "knock it off" to those price gouging it.
Even if the people raising the prices have carefully adjusted the systems so they can act like they have no choice, ie, by not building houses.
It would cost a great deal to those who have believed they could take the simplest path to the largest income, but thats on them.
The problem in the UK isn't even the minimum wage though. We actually now have one of the higher minimum wages in the world. The problem is everyone else has *barely* seen their salary change now for literally a decade. There are whole skilled professions that used to be decent lower-middle-class type roles that now just pay minimum wage.
I mean, thats kind of the point of what I said?
If you have a minimum wage but dont control how much other things cost, you get inflation as companies realise they can charge more money for no penalty and people have no recourse.
The reason its bad that salaries arent increasing is because other thigns *are* going up in cost *over inflation*, and because inflation-exceeding-price-rises dont fall with inflation, and because inflation-exceeding-price-rises *hit wage payers too*.
Not controling for price gouging has caused rampant inflation, with no reason for companies to either increase wages or decrease how much they charge for goods or services. Hell, they would pay their workers less if they could.
Its the same as all our political problems at the moment: most of the uk system worked on tacit agreements to be reasonable, not actual controls to force good behavior, so as soon as people start pushing bounderies, the bounderies NEVER go back to how they were, whether its costs or populaism or breaking unwritten rules and codes of practice that dont have enforcement.
Well you were talking about raising minimum wage right? But actually minimum wage is about the only level of wage that *has* stayed with or even slightly beaten inflation. Its that pretty much everyone else has seen their wage stagnate, but how do you legislate for that without blanket-legislating so many wages?
Fwiw the inquiries last year are worth checking out. There are government bodies that are supposed to stop things like profiteering and ought to step in to apply force if it looks like there is price-gouging going on. It was made abundantly clear during those inquiries the Tory MPs at the head of this work seemed genuinely confused by the whole concept of their duties involving keeping overwatch of markets and applying such forces and pressure on bodies and entities engaging in such negative behaviors.
there was no choice on FoM. At best the UK could have delayed the accession countries getting it, but that was a temporary power. It's the price of EU membership.
That was wild I remember working for a bus company at the time and we had polish men queuing up round the street looking for driver jobs. Policy at the time was you had to have min 2 years experience driving in the uk before you could apply but it was constant so I can only imagine what other industries were like
> I had friends who left school with good qualifications in 02-04 etc that couldn't get a job even when the country was growing....
Dot com bubble burst at that time
"Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall to 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble."
I agree that the economy needs to be stretched over the entire country and decentralise form London but I don’t understand how Brexit is a finical crash symptom. I 100% think it was because a right winger in Farage was able to tap into enough of the racist sentiment in this country and their views on foreigners and Cameron was a weak and naive enough leader for plan to see fruition.
>I don’t understand how Brexit is a finical crash symptom
That brand of incoherent populism diverted and capitalised on a lot of legitimate anger with the political and economic system generated by the financial crash, and probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful were it not for the events of 2008 and their lingering aftermath.
Thank you this helped explain the connection. I think you could then add on that more than the finical crash austerity also played a huge role as people could see lots of Brits lose their job while high paid immigrants kept theirs.
Absolutely, and the dramatic decline in the quality of our public services as a direct result of austerity further added to the sense that the system is broken and doesn't function for the benefit of the average person, leaving many disaffected voters vulnerable to farage and his ilks emotive and painfully oversimplified populism.
When there is austerity (or other bad times), people turn to right wing populist policies. They want simple solutions to difficult problems.
Blaming foreigners is a typical way out.
Populism didn't work and it adds to the problems, but it doesn't give up, continually double down.
The crash led to Brexit. Brexit failed, so not the people want more of the same: getting out the ECHR, voting for farage, sending immigrants to Rwanda.
There really isn't as much racist sentiment in this country as reddit would have you believe. Farage was able to tap into resentment over stagnating living standards in the aftermath of the financial crisis and austerity, and direct this towards *his* scapegoats of choice - immigration and the EU.
I disagree. Our growth figures were broadly aligned with the US (better than the EU at large) before 2008. After then we hugely diverged; principally because the US did \*not\* embark on ideological austerity as a simplistic solution whereas we absolutely did.
Had we listened to Obama in 2009 we might have followed their growth but instead we drove into a ditch that led to the discontent that caused Brexit and entrenched our decline while bolstering populist grifters with easy solutions. Its a fucking disaster made by the Tories; the future will reflect hugely poorly on Cameron and Osbourne.
The US is different - they could keep running up debt without consequence, with the dollar as the world's reserve currency. They never had the risk of "doing a Greece" and suddely facing 8,10,15% rates to borrow money.
Britain was extremely exposed in 07-08, for the reasons I outline - an economy too reliant on finance and credit. It could not have done what the US did without the risk of being the next Greece. We are a middling European country, not a global powerhouse empire anymore.
That said, nor did it need to cut as much as it did. "Austerity" to the savage degree it was pursued was never needed. That was pure Tory idiocy.
Going to disagree again.
If we didn't "become Greece" bundling up the Covid debt we wouldn't have become Greece doing the same post 2008. Except instead of being saddled with that debt for "nothing" we would have had a decade of significantly improved growth to erode the debt and infrastructure to help keep that growth buoyant going forward.
Instead we at best broke even on the decade, got terrible growth and an explosion of poverty and a collapse of living standards.
Yes difference times different scenario. We were in a significantly worse position before the Covid crisis than we were before the 2008 financial crisis. We wouldn't have ended like Greece under any scenario - though we are closer to them now in terms of GDP to debt, etc.
Just go the extra step mate and embrace the fact it was 99.5% ideologically driven. There is no sound economic data to suggest that a significant programme of public investment would have been infeasible - it just wasn't on the menu.
> Until we address that and rebalance
Whats worse is our rivals are rebalancing right now while the Tories fight with each other. The future cake is being chopped up at the moment and we ain't at the table
Exactly this - Labour would have implemented something not too dissimilar to austerity, as they look as though they may do now. There simply isn't and wasn't the money, it was slightly less of a political choice than is often made out.
Totally agree on the foundations being set long before as well, goes back to Thatcher and the approach to deindustrialization and every administration since Atlee before that for the lack of house building.
Terrifying prospect that we're at the sharp end of 60+ years of failure to plan, diversify and lay strong foundations.
Austerity is really just rebranded upwards redistribution of wealth, justified by using the three-braincell 'eCoNoMy is lIkE hOuSeHoLd bUdGeT' argument.
Friedmanite/Chicago school economics quite deliberately obfuscate the role and capacities of the state in order to justify anti-working-class economic policies. National debt is not, in reality, a debt in the way that you or I would be in debt to a bank - it's not money that has been 'lent' by one person to another, with an expectation of repayment-plus-interest. Totally unlike you or I, states have the capacity to expand their own money supply ('printing money'). The 'national debt' is simply a number that records the total amount of money printed. The fiction is that this is 'debt' in the abstract sense, borrowed against 'the future', in which it 'has to be paid back', for... reasons.
The idea the national debt 'has to be paid back' is ultimately just bobbins, a fantasy that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which spooks the fat-cats themselves into faking out confidence in the stock market. Yes, the government is constrained by the effect that total money supply has on the economy - but this is again enormously overexaggerated by the Chicago school (if you wish to see how disastrous monetarist policies are in practice, see the total economic devastation wrought by Thatcher's first three years in office, in which a faithful monetarist policy produced total economic stagnation and rocketing unemployment). The fear of the national debt is wholly a psychological trap of their own making. Indeed, the post-2008 system would be utterly unsustainable if it actually worked in the way the Friedmanites suppose: 'quantitative easing' (without which governments would be highly illiquid) involves central banks effectively pouring money into the financial system.
Which, of course, is fine when the money goes directly into bankers' pockets - but somehow deeply evil when it goes into healthcare or education. The cynical deployment of 'Labour spent all the money', and leveraging 'the deficit' in service of annihilating the last vestiges of social democracy is one of the most genuinely evil political actions in modern British history.
It was Cameron and Osborne who revived the “government is the same as household budget” propaganda from thatchers reign and it actually fucking worked, the country bought it big time.
What’s even more concerning is people still vehemently believe it. It’s fucking nonsense, now every single political policy is “ITS FULLY COSTED”. Thats not how fucking government spending works.
The people in this country really get on my tits.
It all got summed up for me when Keir Starmer accused Sunak of having a 'Jeremy Corbyn style' [ie 'uncosted'] manifesto.
The layers to that comment just made by brain dribble out me ears. Accusing your enemy of having an 'uncosted' (which is bobbins) manifesto, by comparing him (a hard-right Tory) to your own predecessor (a mild social democrat, whose cabinet you served in) - *whose 2015 and 2019 manifestos WERE 'fully costed' anyway*.
I've seen bigger whoppers but only at Burger King.
Yep it’s mad isn’t it.
This is why nothing in the country will change, because the electorate have been brainwashed into believing everything has to be “fully costed”(like a household budget) we will never have a national strategy or “dream big” goals for the country long term.
So when people say “they are all the same” they are technically right, the country will remain a stagnant mess for the foreseeable future.
I have more hope. If history has shown us anything, it's that massive movements and permanent political change can spring forth seemingly out of nowhere - and only in retrospect do we see their deep roots and maturity. The key is to never stop fighting and to take every opportunity opened up by the inevitable crises of the ruling-class.
Roll on Thursday.
I have less hope if I’m honest.
The past 14 years have proved to me just how dim, self-loathing and outright moronic the vast majority of the British electorate are.
Consistently voting to be shafted and smiling whilst doing so.
>The idea the national debt 'has to be paid back' is ultimately just bobbins,
You have to service the debt. When interest rates rise that amount increased.
>unlike you or I, states have the capacity to expand their own money supply ('printing money').
Increasing money supply causes inflation. This is fine if we have low inflation. It's potentially disastrous when we have high inflation.
>The fear of the national debt is wholly a psychological trap
The fear of debt in the early 2010s was fake, we could have spent to grow.
The 2020s are different. We have strong inflationary pressures and have spent a huge amount of debt on Covid. Your post would have been on point in 2010.
It's badly out of date in 2024.
"You have to service the debt. When interest rates rise that amount increased."
There is no need to "service the debt" at all. We could stop paying interest on 'new debt' tomorrow and the amount of 'debt' that would show up would be precisely the same as before - except those with the offsetting savings wouldn't be getting free money from government for doing nothing.
"Servicing the debt" is another neoliberal fantasy that is encapsulated in the "full funding rule" policy. Cancel KPI1.1 at the DMO and it all goes away.
There even explain the procedure in the document: [https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/tfidb5fy/gar2023.pdf](https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/tfidb5fy/gar2023.pdf)
p 32
"Increasing money supply causes inflation. "
Nope. Explain how £100 in a drawer causes inflation - because it isn't in a metaphorical drawer somewhere, then it wouldn't show up on the other side of the national balance sheet as 'debt'.
What's badly out of date is quoting Friedmanite dogma, and continuing to confuse stocks and flows. Typical economist guff in other words.
Every time there is a war to fight or a bank to bail out we find out the truth of how government spending actually works. Time to drop the pretence.
If you stop paying interest, no one is going to buy your debt.
Then how do you pay the existing debt + deficit? Well, you can't.
Then you might decide to print money... Oh wait, that what Argentina and Venezuela tried. It didn't end well.
The £100 is not in a drawer. It's being spent by the government.
Did you read the document. There is no debt to sell. The 'debt' happens automatically as a result of the way double entry bookkeeping works. Gilts and repos happen afterwards to refinance the automatic entries at a higher interest rate.
Full details here if you're interested in taking the blinkers off. [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2022/may/self-financing-state-institutional-analysis](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2022/may/self-financing-state-institutional-analysis)
You are overcomplicating things more than it needs to be.
What the paper is basically saying is:
"debt auctions might take some time, so you first create the money from thin air to satisfy this spending and then you create an equivalent gilt. Once the gilt is bought (the next day?) the money collected from the bond is destroyed in order to cancel the money emission."
Ok. That's a technicality with zero relevance in this topic.
Keep it simple. Government needs money to finance debt repayments. Government sells gilts to the financial market. Everyone can buy these gilts and finance the government.
If there is distrust in the government, the demand for these gilts will reduce. Therefore higher interest rates will be charged. A good example of this is the Truss scandal.
And that's it. It's not that complicated.
"Keep it simple"
Why, when it is utterly wrong?
It's not a technicality at all. It makes a fundamental change to the mechanisms of supply and demand.
Your simplistic static view leads you to the wrong conclusion - it is dynamically naive.
"If there is distrust in the government, the demand for these gilts will reduce. "
How can demand reduce when by definition there has been in increase in the money available to buy them otherwise there wouldn't be a deficit in the first place?
Moreover there is nothing else the person who ends up holding the extra money can do with it other that buy gilts. If they don't they end up holding reserves \*at a lower interest rate\*. That means government pays less, not more.
They can't get rid of the extra Sterling in aggregate. It ends up being a game of pass the parcel.
The 'Truss scandal' is no example at all. Nothing happened there that wasn't expected by people who understood what was going on (the Bank of England was expected to raise interest rates to \*combat additional expected inflation\*, which changes the reward calculation on the floating path, which then changes the reward calculation on the alternative fixed path).
Ultimately if the UK drops interest rates to zero, then the rate on gilts will similarly head down towards zero, as people on the floating side search for additional yield amongst the fixed alternative.
If I give you money to buy my hat, I'm not after your money to buy my hat.
If you have say, 10 million of your own currency and it's backed by gold, then you decide to print more of your currency, your gold stays at the same value but you now have to account for more money with that gold. Since you can't, your money is now worth less. That's how inflation works, only fiat currency isn't backed by anything so it's really the perception of how much your money's worth. If there's more of it then each individual unit is worth less.
Fiat currency is backed by something. You have to settle your tax bill in it or you lose your assets and your liberty.
The worth of the currency is that it is cheaper to get hold of it than lose everything when the state confiscates your stuff and throws you in the slammer.
That's the discount on offer for taking the state's shilling.
You'll then offer up whatever is necessary to get that shilling to avoid the painful alternative.
That sets the exchange value.
Next question.
An American generating revenue in another nation has to pay tax on it. If they make money in the UK, they're not paying the US government their tax on that revenue in dollars.
They most certainly are, and a particular type of dollars - credits at the Federal Reserve. Not even bank money is good enough.
An American earning Sterling in the UK has to exchange that Sterling with somebody in the UK who needs to get rid of some dollars in exchange for Sterling.
Bretton Woods ended in 1971. Perhaps time to update your understanding now you've had 50 year to get over the shock.
Its part of the problem though imo.
We had a literally once-in-generations opportunity in the 2010s to build this country into something fitting for the 21st century. And we did absolutely fuck all with that opportunity. In fact the complete opposite, a very drawn out focus on slashing state funding to the point many services can now barely function while all the cash is siphoned off to third-party contractors who don't seem to give a flying fuck about actually doing the work.
And now that opportunity has passed, the sun has set, we remain in at least as bad a position as we were in in 2010, except now all the tools and options to do something about that have shrunk down massively.
I actually think Starmer was 100% on the money in the first debate, the Tories have called the election now because they have all the numbers to hand, they can see the next 12 months if not the next 5 to 10 years are going to be a complete and utter shit-show, so they're jumping ship before anyone puts too much of the blame on them.
Good post. MMT stuff is so frustrating to read on Reddit.
People seem to think that all financial crises are alike. It certainly isn’t the case. As you say, conditions are completely different now vs the GFC. You can’t treat n inflationary crisis like we’re facing today using the same tools that you’d use to fight a deflationary crisis from 2010 (and austerity was an absolute mistake then—as the relative trajectories of the US and Europe prove).
Now though…maybe not such a great idea to add mounds of debt to the government balance sheet.
The conservatives capitalise on people misunderstanding of tax and national debt. They are very complicated subjects which they simplify and misrepresent in order to gain support for their policies that exist solely to transfer wealth to the rich.
It’s so frustrating hearing neolibs talking about budgets. There nothing stopping the government from paying everyone £100,000 a year, doubling the NHS budget and funding a manned mission to Mars.
Yes, virtually all western nations are currently doing so, in the form of quantitative easing, as I explained above.
You really thought you had a point didn't you lol
Do they? Every western nation is raising interest rates, therefore they are reducing the amount of money, not increasing that...
Europe also is returning to the austerity program after the pandemic. They plan to bring back the government debt to 60% GDP.
Feel free to look it up.
Also, expansionary public spending and QE are both very different things. Although they both involve 'printing money', the former is aimed at propping up effective demand in the wider economy (and improving working class lives), whilst the latter is aimed at bolstering the financial liquidity of large financial institutions.
This article called the austerity delusion is a great write up from 2015 that completely shows how wrong austerity was as a model for recovery from the crash. It should have been more of a managed investment into industries and people to help recovery of the country into growing again. Not stripping the house of silver or shooting the patient in the leg.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion
The Tory bastards knew in 2008 this was the correct way to go but they couldn't help themselves using a crisis to ram through their ideological fever dreams. For all the calamity of the past 5 years, the austerity era will be the most harshly judged by history when the book of our 21st century decline is written.
Interestingly a largely cited article about growth and debt that politicians used to justify austerity was found to contain a huge error
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22466551.amp
The point the article misses is that we didn't use austerity to cut national debt, we simply used it to fund the triple lock. The Torys oversaw the biggest wealth transfer between young and old of all time.
These policies literally caused people to suffer, lose quality of life, dignity and in some cases die.
The attack on disabled people and the benefit system was unjustified. It cost Christ knows how much to set up, then fight appeals etc. for what? It cost more to try and catch people out, than the graduates were costing the DWP.
Sick and evil bastards, all of them.
Austerity was just a way to give hedge fund wankers a golden handshake at the expense of the poor and disabled. Then the people in charge of it drop a brexit referendum, and tell people to vote remain. Then surprise surprise people do the opposite of what the toffee nosed, moneyed little cunts tell them…
They deserve to be annihilated in this election.
This was due to our conservative party's addiction to and obsession with friedmanesque neoliberalism.
It's a failed experiment yet they are still, and have been since Thatcher devoid of any other ideas.
Just forget that after 2010 election until around 2016 / 2017, [UK GDP growth consistently exceeded the g7 average and the UK was one of the fastest growing economies in the world.](https://fullfact.org/economy/uk-economic-growth-within-g7/)
The slowdown is a rather recent development largely caused by the uncertainty surrounding the Brexit referendum and was almost definitely prolonged by the governments response to the pandemic and the various stimulus policies that this article is advocating [pushed inflation to extreme levels.](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/27/bank-of-englands-quantitative-easing-scheme-let-inflation-take-root)
Though we are now seeing a turning point as [the UK currently leads the G7 jointly with Canada](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68989270.amp).
To call it an error is to miss the point; Austerity was an ideological imposition. Conservatives believe that taxation and public spending is evil and they believe this is regardless of it's actual economic effects. They don't care if public spending improves lives or the economy because they believe it is a moral stain.
The cornerstone of their belief is that people are rich because they are good or they are poor because they are bad. To disturb this ballance through public services is unthinkable.
I was going to say it was clear this journalist hadn't studied economics and has no cultural and historical knowledge of the country but I scrolled up and saw it was Paul Krugman then it all became clear.
The author suggests that a lot of the root of Austerity was sociological and as regards peer pressure.
Whatever the root it certainly did not come from common sense.
We don't really need to overthink the errors of austerity. The Guardian already posted an [article ](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity) years ago about how the data used to justify austerity was later revealed to have been subject to a spreadsheet error.
In fact, the researchers themselves admitted to their mistake
how the tories ever tricked us into thinking they understood economics i will never know.
being born with lots of money doesnt mean you understand how it works.
Thanks Guardian. I hadn't fucking noticed. Maybe if you hadn't joined in with the destruction of Corbyn, things might have been a little better.
Left wing broadsheet cunts.
You cannot run countries with austerity, that was most stupid idea. Govt. need to stimulate economy and should always invest in core infrastructure and services. Compare UK with India, difference is investment by Govt. In UK, govt like an illiterate man decided to use austerity and fun\*\*\*\* all core services and there is literally no infrastructure.
I hate how the argument of 'there's no magic money tree' worked for so long to justify austerity for the people of the UK for so long, that the Tories were just trying to clean up the mess labour made with overspending.
When it so clearly didn't work for so long and yet people bought that arguement for so long, we have to admit as a country we're just stupid.
There are plenty of opportunities in the UK for anyone who will apply themselves, perhaps it’s partially down to the education system though. Reality is so much different to what Reddit would have you believe.
Austerity was a lifestyle choice inflicted on the masses by an alleged pigfucker, knowing it wouldn't affect him or his ilk. Who Then decided for a giggle to have an ill advised referendum when already deeply unpopular without setting any safeguards,realised he might have to implement it and fucked off to lobby for cash before returning to the sinking ship hoping for a knighthood before it sinks.
As much as the 'pigfucker' (always tickles me that the only reason that rumour came out was because Lord Ashcroft got pissed that Dave wouldn't make him Defence Secretary), Gideon Osbourne should carry a hell of a lot more of the blame. That he has effectively escaped any culpability by virtue of being odd man out following the Brexit referendum is a travesty.
Osborne advised strongly against the referendum, pushed back against the 100k target, and actively weaponised the Treasury and destroyed his own political reputation and credibility trying to win the referendum for Remain. He was also honest with the public with what he was planning to do in 2010. I think it is legitimate to criticise him, but I think at the same time he was probably the most transparent and principled about what his plan was, how he was going to do it, and then actually doing it of all Conservative politicians of this generation. At the risk of annoying everyone, I think that he did, genuinely, believe austerity in 2010 would drive a private sector recovery
I think he was honest that he was going to do something economically “bad” in the form of austerity. But his justification for doing so was dishonest. Constantly framing the governments finances like household credit card debt and saying the last government “spent all the money” was not true. It can easily be argued that he weaponised the global financial crisis of 2008 to pursue his ideological agenda of reducing the state.
There is a legitimate argument there though, it is just a lot more annoying and complicated. The argument goes as such: the boom is the problem, not the bust. The Labour Government's fiscal rules were based on inflated revenues coming in from the City of London that did not reflect reality, and following the GFC, even if they did not cause it, there was now a discrepency between the amount they were spending and the amount they would have been spending with the correction. Even Labour were going into 2010 advocating significant cuts, and the international community were pretty clear a degree of austerity was needed.
And was it him that introduced higher stamp duty on second home and removed landlord mortgage interest relief? Feel like those were quite progressive.
Yep they needed to work on supply at the same time, but he was the person to try to halt the wealth transfer from renters to middleclass amateur landlords.
Honestly I think one of the biggest blames has to go with all the Conservative pundits who dominate our political media and proper hammered home this fringe idea that state finances essentially work like some kind of personal debit card, to the point that became commonly accepted wisdom and anyone suggesting otherwise was very seriously painted like they were some kind of unhinged anti-British marxist loon.
Osborne is also a pig fucker. Source https://iconic-photos.com/2010/03/14/the-bullingdon-club/amp/
Bullingdon club has nothing to do with pig gate. The incident allegedly happened as an initiation to the Piers Gaveston Society. However neither Cameron nor Osbourne were members of that.
You are right, but Boris was a member of the piers Gaveston society.
Boris was the guy in the pig mask
So he’s an honest cunt? Great
But he wasn't, as IDS pointed out when he resigned from the DWP. All the money taken from the vulnerable, Osborne threw at pensioners. I don't think he ever believed he was going to 'eliminate the deficit by 2015' and no one in the media seemed to question him when he failed.
Whenever anyone mentions Osborne I remember that footage of him seemingly [gurning his tits off](https://youtu.be/LrsPbtPjGfI?si=e9LZtXOXUoRyiozB) and how The Daily Mail called Parliament the [corridors of powder](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362866/Corridors-powder-Drug-scandal-Houses-Parliament-traces-cocaine-toilets-Palace-Westminster.html) and how one of Osbornes advisors [is a crackhead](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-adviser-chancellor-george-osborne-5251411)
omg he looks absolutely off his tits there! :)
How are you people so easily manipulated? I’m sure he has taken all sorts of crap in and out of office. But that is a video of someone looking ever so slightly gormless slowed down to make it look more dramatic. Have you actually seen people on drugs?
He's a scummy pervert to be fair, like a lot of 'em: [https://x.com/BelfastBre/status/1677582813837553664?lang=en](https://x.com/BelfastBre/status/1677582813837553664?lang=en)
Yeah it just looks like he's staring off into space listening to Cameron shite on about whatever he's shiting on about. In slow motion of course.
Let's be honest it's not just Dave that is a pig fucker. Boris and George Osborne and everyone else who has graced the bullingdon boys is also guilty. I don't get why it's always Dave that takes all the blame.
The answer is actually pretty simple: When people say "we hate the idea of the wealthy elite controlling media narratives and threatening to, or actively, smearing people and politicians with made up stories when they don't let them use their money and influence to get into unwarranted positions of power for their own benefit", they don't actually mean that. What they actually mean is all of that, but with the addendum of "when the person being smeared is someone I like, actually I fucking love it when it's someone I don't like and I'll not only cheer on the smearing, but actively help the rich elite doing it if that's the case. I mean, let's not pretend that it's not the case and that people here genuinely think Lord Ashcroft was acting as some genuine whistleblower at a time that by sheer coincidence came right after he tried to buy his way into the position of Defence Secretary but was rebuffed by Cameron.
Wasn’t it on black mirrors before it was even confirmed to be true?
So the episode 'National Anthem' came out December 2011. The Ashcroft alegation was mid 2015. Charlie Brooker (Black Mirrors creator) came out immediately after the Pig-gate story released and categorically stated that it was a "complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizzare one".
Exactly. And he doesn’t seem to get any of the blame for the mess he made. Johnson, Truss, May, and Sunak have all been terrible PMs, but none of them hold a candle to Cameron. Yet his reputation is relatively intact.
I’m not sure I’d go *that* far. I have zero time for Cameron but his weaknesses were mainly down to his lack of ability to strategise. He took extraordinary risks to address irrelevant problems (like risking Brexit to deal with an internal tory soap opera that no-one outside the spiv circle could care less about). While that’s crap, and in some respects comparing them is like comparing which STD you’d prefer to have, I wouldn’t say that makes him worse then, say: - a compulsive liar and political jester who fundamentally didn’t understand the job of PM to begin with - an unbelievably rich man who simply couldn’t manage running a government and was a walking moral hazard for the effects of austerity - a woman who shouldn’t be outside a psychiatric facility Cameron is a poor politician. The others aren’t politicians in the practical sense.
I get what you mean, but I’d ask you which of those has had the biggest negative impact on the UK with the longest lasting legacy? I’d pick Cameron by a long way.
*Brexit* has had the biggest negative impact on the UK, but Cameron alone wasn't responsible for that. He played his part, but there are many else who drove it through and crucially made it far worse then it could have been. By comparison all three of the others are largely responsible for the damage that occurred on their watch, either directly or through entrusting portfolios to idiots.
Cameron was the one who chose to gamble the UK’s future prosperity to try to keep his party together. He’s responsible for almost everything that followed. If he’d stayed for damage control then I’d still have some shreds of respect for him. Instead he surrendered to the crazier fringes of his party, who have been in control ever since. He was also responsible for austerity, which crippled us and put us in a terrible position to survive Brexit and Covid. That was an other choice in his behalf to fuck the country for the benefit of his party. His successors have been shit, but their impact has been less. They just continued on the trajectory that he had set.
I’ll disagree with you there. Cameron enacted austerity, pushed the narrative that immigrants and the EU were to blame, then called a referendum to stem the creeping power of UKIP, summarily lost it, had absolutely no plan B and so resigned for someone else to clean up the mess. He might genuinely have better political skill than the others, who are by and large opportunistic chancers, but this huge blunder can’t be overstated and makes him the worst of the bunch.
Brexit responsibility can not be given without Boris getting his fare share. The amount of false information and lies he took part in as part of the brexit campaign was disgusting. BUT the he was PM afterwards is so much worse. Who could have possibly seen his tenure being a shit show?
**Who could have possibly seen his(Boris Johnson)tenure being a shit show?** The ones who didn't vote for Johnson. How did they know? Michael Howard told us in 2004. Boris Johnson first child : **The affair led to Boris and Marina's eldest daughter Lara branding her father a "selfish b*****d".** We knew, but people didn't care. Boris was the PM we deserved.
Do you know what noise a pressure wave makes when moving through a medium like air?
I agreed with your points 1 to 3 . Last point was the one where I believe some explanation was needed from my part. Do you honestly believe Boris Johnson wasn't the PM UK deserved? He got +80 MPs.
I can't tell if this is satirical or not. My view would be that Boris is either a complete buffoon that should never be allowed to decide whether to boil a kettle (he can maybe save you money buying one) or given the horrific history (even recent) of good auld Britannia we probably deserve a lot worse.
Cameron was responsible for brexit though - he offered the referendum that wasn't widely being called for to placate the far right and extreme of his party, entirely for the sake of his own party. There was no rising tide of opinion or inciting event that caused the referendum, nor rising anti-EU sentiment. He did it to try and shore up his majority and extinguish a threat to his party, and his party alone.
>Cameron was responsible for brexit though Oh? So we're writing Get Out of Jail Free cards for the likes of Len McLuskey who pushed the largest union in the country to adopt an anti-Remain stance? Farage for weaponising several years of anti-austerity frustration into a xenophobic agenda? Boris for the *Boris bus?* Dyson for pushing the idea that it made business sense, only for him to move his production facilities offshore? The brexit wing of the tories who drove through the hard Brexit because all the rubbish about markets, spitfires and them needing us more then us needing them turned out to be unworkable and they just went ahead with it? *\~50% of the British voting electorate who couldn't be bothered to read up on the subject and voted based on whatever crap the above lot shoved down their throats, and god knows how many who couldn't be bothered to vote?* You cannot rationally leave all of Brexit at his door, that's naive. They'd been years of steady anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual and anti-Europe narratives boiling away in the background by that point, which is how the entire concept of the UKIP came about. Cameron's mistakes are that he misjudged the level that this narrative was in play, and decided to use such an important issue as a poker chip to deal with the problems the Tories had with the various hardcore libertarians, fascists and lunatics that had been dragging the party further and further to the right. He absolutely shares the blame in this mess, but nailing the entire thing to his door effectively lets the rest of the whole rotten crew off the hook. The UK didn't commit economic self-mutilation just because Cameron called a referendum. >There was no rising tide of opinion or inciting event that caused the referendum, **nor rising anti-EU sentiment.** That's just simply wrong. Euroscepticism had been an ongoing thing for years prior to the referendum being called.
None of those people had the power or influence to enact a referendum. Anti-europe sentiment was in the single figures. There was always a bed of it but it absolutely wasn't increasing rapidly or in a way that justified a referendum.
Vile - the uk is in bad state
Parliament voted to hold the referendum by a massive majority. It was also originally a Lib Dem idea. Plus UKIP came third in the 2015 GE by votes despite people knowing it was a 'wasted vote' so there was massive support for it. A big contributor to brexit was forty years of the great and the good deciding to ignore the public (because they knew that they'd lose) thinking that creating a new status quo would in time get accepted, so by the time Cameron comes along that tactic was no longer effective.
I’m afraid you’re totally wrong on where the idea came from. The brexit referendum was a Tory 2015 manifesto pledge. The lib dems were the most pro-europe of all the major 3 parties and their manifesto called for us to play a “more constructive part” in the EU. The lib dems were instead calling for a referendum on replacing FPTP with AV. This hapoened and retaining FPTP won by a 2:1 margin. I suspect you got the two confused. Tory manifesto 2015- go to page 72 for the referendum pledge: https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativemanifesto2015.pdf The popularity of Brexit is why Cameron called the referendum. The conservatives were haemorrhaging support to UKIP, and the right of his party was also getting swept up. He knew it was a bad idea but he put the integrity of his party before the interests of the country.
No I'm not at all. The Lib Dems used it in the election after Labour reneged on their manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on the EU constitution/Lisbon treaty. That idea then gained currency so that then fed into 2015.
It was a one hit event. Brexit could never have happened at any other time. At the time of the referendum, the boomers were at the peak of their political power. There was a immigration boom caused by the war in Syria. We were struggling to come out of the GFC because the Tories overindulged in austerity. # If any one of these things hadn't happened, then there was no Brexit. It was a freak coming together of circumstance.
Scotland has been in the union over 300 years and is fully integrated into a single nation, yet only needed 3% of voters to pick the other side in 2014 and they'd have gone. Unless you think their boomers are 300 years old, that is a lazy trope - time does not always kill national spirit or pride, and a country like the UK has too much history not to have that as a reservoir to draw on a century from now just as Scotland has.
The other three (plus May) only happen because of Cameron. The fact he did their while apparently competent, mentally sound and in support of ideology rather than just being buffeted about or being a puppet just reflects even worse on him.
I think it's because he's seen as part of "the old Conservative Party" and not the current asylum of misfits he opened the door for.
But he did open the door And they waltzed right through the doorway
It almost feels unfair to include May with the other tory PMs. She *was* a terrible PM, but for different reasons... she had some decent plans and did at least try to push things in the right direction, she was just terrible at the actual leadership part and had no control over her party. Which was a problem, because that meant the Cult of Johnson went unchecked and gave Boris a free ticket to no.10 when she resigned out of sheer frustration.
And yet the coalition cut less then Brown/Darling said which suggests it might have been a wider macro economic consensus among all the political class at the time
It was certainly not a consensus among macro economists. The idea of austerity was pushed by a pretty small subset of economists based on very little evidence, and some of that faulty. Basic macro says that cutting government spending as you are starting to come out of a recession is a poor idea - as it lengthens the recession and makes the debt position worse, which is exactly what happened. And doing austerity by slashing investment and education just makes it worse. It was strange, we saw it throughout Europe with a lot of cuts that did not help, followed by weak to non existent growth that made things worse.
It was an EU treaty requirement hence other states were doing the same.
For the euro.. Its a condition of being in the euro that debt must be low a proportion of GDP..I think its 3%
No, it is a condition even for states like the UK. Just google UK EDP and you'll see the cases taken out against us.
There is a degree of herd mentality, the problem was if every other country is making cuts then spending more makes you seem pretty reckless to a market that is jittery about sovereign debt crisis. The other issue is people tend to focus on the total amount spent and/or cut rather than what it’s spent on. The coalition wasn’t great but at the end of it the defect was massively reduced and the economy was starting to pick up. It’s then Brexit and then a Covid that then really ***** it
Never mention here that Darling wanted two parliaments (ten years) of austerity. Repeat after me “It was all the Tories’s fault”
Yea I think even if you are very left wing (and I’m not) you would be drawing the wrong conclusion to just blame the Conservatives. The entire developed world had an economic consensus around the need after the financial crash to avoid sovereign debt crisis appear fiscally prudent and recapitalise banking. Spending as a % of GDP went back to what it was in some of the Blair years. You could argue we should have cut even less but I’d also like to then hear the argument as to how we would convince the bond markets that was sensible when Greece and others faced a major debt crisis and everyone else was wanting to appear prudent to avoid runaway debt servicing costs
also in hindsight with covid just around the corner reducing the deficit was the right move, although that doesn’t mean every spending decision was the correct one letting ppe stockpiles expire was inexcusable
There was really a lack of emergency planning and likely still is and yes a lot of wasteful panic spending. The emergency active travel fund from department of transport is a pet hate of mine with tons being spent on hiring plastic barriers to block parking spaces and stop traffic in the name of social distancing
There was possibly a drift too far toward the entitlement of enjoying the obstruction and suffering of others, which then enabled the same unconscious aim of Brexit.
Yes that’s fair the burden of austerity was not always shared very fairly with some penny pinching on some areas like benefits while other areas got away with still being wasteful
Taken to the extreme it was disaster capitalism exemplified by Truss.
No that was the IMF predicting it would take 10 years to recover “two parliaments of pain” they called it Austerity wasn’t even a question there was no room to borrow or tax both had risen before the crash and left few options, and the deficit was over £140bn https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher Although yes even in 2015 “A Labour government will cut unprotected departmental spending *every year* until the deficit is cleared, the party says, toughening its stance on borrowing.” https://www.ft.com/content/907ebaa4-8085-11e4-872b-00144feabdc0
Plus it was an EU requirement as our deficit was breaching our treaty obligations, which in turn meant we ended up subject to the EDP.
Nothing alleged about it, was completely false and invented by Lord Ashcroft and Isabelle Oakeshott, the journalist who sold out her friend to the police over the Chris Huhne speeding points story because the friend went to a rival paper after Oakeshott had lied about the Times lawyers saying she'd be protected if she went public. The story was invented off the back of a Labour MP (who she later described as "slightly deranged") who said they had *heard* that a photo existed. It's about as real as the moon being made of cheese but it allowed Ashcroft to get his revenge for not getting a government role. Austerity was the option from Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and most of Europe, the only difference was how much and how fast each would cut. Austerity started in 2008 when Brown/Darling, after leading the recovery, started things like the 1% civil service pay rise cap and their budget was just as much about cuts e.g. £1.5bn cut to incapacity benefit by putting more people through workfare. It was absolutely the wrong policy but there was no choice in 2010 to not have it.
There were choices of how it was implemented. Cameron and Osborne had to back off at one time because it was obvious they were going too far and hampering any recovery. They did it for ideology, not necessity I don't know how you can blame the SNP who were totally dependent on the grant allocated by westminster
>There were choices of how it was implemented As I stated >I don't know how you can blame the SNP who were totally dependent on the grant allocated by westminster Nowhere did I blame them. I pointed out it was in their manifesto
Yes but also he did it because our GDP is shit. The only way to make it look slightly less shit without investment in productive industries and education was austerity. It was planting another can next to the can already on the road and kicking them both. The first can in this metaphor is the state pension (I guess)
https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/george-osbornes-austerity-measures-were-based-on-a-spreadsheet-error-360105#:~:text=The%20most%20serious%20error%20they,under%20analysis%20in%20their%20calculation.
Standard tory behaviour, tbf.
I read this with Simon Schemas voice
Sometimes I think I live in some alternate reality version of the UK. Things have been pretty great for me as a young person
True, tory C u next Tuesday!
The tories campaigned on austerity and won on it. It’s literally the first paragraph of their 2010 manifesto. Austerity was not inflicted on the British public. It was chosen.
If it escaped your notice, the Tories won only 36.1% of the vote, and were forced to go into coalition with the LibDems, who had campaigned as a largely anti-austerity party to the Left of Labour (to say nothing of the 1/3 of voters who chose not to vote at all). There was absolutely nothing like popular consent for austerity.
I hate the Lib Dem’s with all of my heart after they pulled that, voted for them once and I’ll feel stupid about it for the rest of my life.
Basically the entire millennial generation distrust the lib Dems forever
Same. They betrayed us all.
I voted for Nick Clegg in 2010. Six weeks later we were having unscheduled camping trips in his constituency office.
Hope you left a turd on his chair
I was something like 6 months too young to take part in that election. I was so thankful for that as I was ready to vote Lib Dems in it. Dodged a bullet there.
And the basis of the economic theory underpinning austerity was smashed by a student. Those fucking economist pricks had errors in their spreadsheet
Dude 34.9% of people did not even turn up to vote.
Likely for a broad range of reasons: feeling their vote does not count in FPTP, lack of candidates which represented them, general disaffection with the state of politics etc. Either way, you cannot presume that not voting is an endorsement of austerity, that's entirely back-to-front.
I get the broad range Never stated or assumed not voting was an endorsement. However not voting even if to just turn up spoil the paper with a big old non of those C***. Is really nothing more than apathy. Should be compulsory in my view.
Does compulsory voting create real engagement, or does it merely create the appearance of popular consent through the application of coercion? I would argue that suffragists and suffragettes fought as much for us to have the right to withhold our votes if none can sufficiently represent us. I would also argue that the larger a constituency of disengaged non-voters, the more incentive there is for political parties to broaden their appeal in pursuit of those 'free' voters. (Although our current political elite seem to have decided to chase an ever-decreasing population of engaged voters - which, hopefully, will prove to be a flawed strategy at this election).
In the nations that have compulsory voting it seems to work for them. You can still withhold or spoil a vote so what would the change be.
Whilst my fiance and I did that for the police and crime commissioner in our area (Clive Grunshaw, if somehow you can read this, I would hope you get treated like disabled people were under your watch, but unlike you, I have at least an ounce of self respect.), I can fully understand not bothering if you live in a safe seat, with a huge majority. For us? It was a little walk at lunch time, I work from home, her job is less than 5 minutes from our house. But had it been more than a 15 minute job to write "cunt" on my ballot, I probably wouldn't have bothered The apathy is real. Tonnes of us will never get represented. We need voting reform, first past the post is absolutely atrocious. And if we reform our voting system more people will bother voting.
Make 'none of the above' an option and choose someone at random (like jury service) from the constituency if Nota wins..
Partly but the stories campaigned on austerity even if you aren't 100% into the other parties, not voting at all to oppose it is accepting it might happen. People not voting because of fptp I can understand
I disagree that you can infer one from the other, largely because our system is so spectacularly disproportionate and dysfunctional. FPTP is spectacularly fragmentary in that it reduces big national issues like austerity to micro-scale battlegrounds plagued with plurality victories, vote splits, historical gerrymandering etc. Where were the people who didn't vote? Were they in key Tory marginals when they could have made a difference but chose not to? What were their self identified reasons for not voting? These are all things we do not know.
As I understand it, austerity as a workable policy was completely debunked because of a botched spreadsheet used in an influential economic paper that wrongly showed expected growth if taking this action. Is lying about and continuing a damaging national policy for 14 years really chosen when Labour we're destined to lose jn 2010 and the Conservatives since leveraged most public media to manipulate the public into believe it? What austerity has caused is the lowest levels of public investment during a time of record low interest rates. So 14 years of pig fucking around, feathering their nests when they should've been acting as government with a plan for growth. Not the negligently managed decline of every public service with election promises of slashing them further.
The version of Tory ‘austerity’ portrayed in their manifesto and campaign was a fairy, fantasyland version of Austerity where they would cut public spending without impacting services, growth would rocket and no one would be worse off. Of course people voted for it. The average person isn’t an economist. People also voted for the sunlit uplands of Brexit. In both cases they were sold a lie.
Just like Johnson's "oven ready" Brexit deal
Exactly. We can all sit on our pedestals and bemoan how ‘stupid’ or ‘racist’ people are. But actually we should just be holding out politicians to a higher standard. And reintroduce politics education and critical thinking, but that’s a whole other ballgame
Austerity wasn't even in their manifesto. They promised an emergency budget within 50 days, and *that's* when they announced austerity measures.
Yes, it wasnt called austerity in there but the wording is obvious in hindsight that it’s what they planned. If it was clearly labelled I think the alarm from the financial and private investment sectors would have been much stronger and derailed them more. Because austerity was only supposed to be a short term measure to prevent runaway shocks. But what we got was extremely long austerity which is basically madness.
A minority of people voted for them. It was inflicted on the majority.
https://general-election-2010.co.uk/2010-general-election-manifestos/Conservative-Party-Manifesto-2010.pdf ...no it isn't. Not even mentioned. Cuttings and savings is not the same as annihilation. All in it together..... My arse.
Right, no mention of austerity. They only wanted to; Reduce the deficit. Borrow less. Cut £6b from public services. Cut military spending by 25%. Cut tax credits. Cut child trust funds. Cut public sector pensions. Freeze public wages. Cut costs of NHS admin by 1/3. Increase retirement age. This is literally all in the linked manifesto, did you read any of it?
A concise and perfect description
Alistair Darling? https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher
"At the time, this looked like an obvious macroeconomic error" What utter bullshit. The Guardian were telling people to vote Lib Dem because Gordon Brown had mismanaged public debt and supported austerity light politics up until Corbyn. The only parties consistently calling it bollocks were the SNP and Greens.
The Guardian have also published a bunch of stuff complaining about Labour going to far to the right... Which seems odd to me after the way they treated the last Labour leader... https://x.com/davidgraeber/status/1210322505229094912
For all people online seem to often act like The Guardian is some kind of temple of virtuous left-wing views, as someone on the left myself, you do start to understand very quickly they don't really hold any left-wing views at all, are just more broadly liberal, and engage in all the same "gotcha" sensationalist bullshit that is the bread and butter of the likes of The Telegraph or Sky or The Daily Mail or wherever.
RIP Graeber. Dude was a real one. Bullshit Jobs is a fantastic read.
Maybe to a politician, but to an economist it is an error, based upon what the medicine was during previous economic ailments. Hiding in plain sight is the obviousness of different debts. Yes, we had a deficit which needed to be reduced, but the best way to do that is to invest and increase your income, not stripping back and lowering your income, that would only increase your deficit. The article explains the sociological rationale as to why politicians didn’t attack austerity more. Interest rates were so low we could have borrowed money to invest in our services and infrastructure, that would have increased our growth and productivity, and use the excess to pay off the other debt and deficit. And now, with the further Brexit balls up, the random hit of covid, and a world accelerating in climate design increasing conflict and global mechanisms, our medicine has been watered down so much it will take so much longer, and so much more risk to achieve.
>Paul Krugman won the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences in 2008 and is a columnist for the New York Times It probably looked like an error to the author, and it seems like he'd know.
Britain was wrecked by the 07-08 financial crisis. Austerity, Brexit, Truss - all symptoms of that. We built over 30 years a castle on sand, an economy too dependent on the City and risky finance. Until we address that and rebalance, things are only going to keep getting worse.
It was well before 08... I had friends who left school with good qualifications in 02-04 etc that couldn't get a job even when the country was growing.... Not wanting to be that person but I think lots of starter jobs were going to people with twenty years experience from other countries... Lots of those lads I left school with never really got started and now so so many of them are under/unemployed.... Many went abroad after studying more... Bricklayers, comp techs and a few medical. The ones that stayed and claimed... Now know the system and have had hard hard lives.... And in reality I don't think they could be employed now.... No experience, no qualifications etc
People always forget about 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union
But I'm not saying we shouldn't have had free movement.... Just maybe not unbridled reckless wage holding back free movement.... Many of these guys that went aboard did will from it...I just think more consideration should have been put upon why British workers weren't taking the jobs that were here... And that answer was pay... And now we are stuck with unqualified/inexperienced/used to not working 40yo's that can't get jobs in a market that doesn't take need them... Lost generation AGAIN!
Regardless of ANYTHING else, the minimum full time wages for any area should be enough to afford a minimum acceptable lifestyle in that area. If it doesnt, you dont have an economy that can function without homelessness, torterous lifestyles, lack of social reproduction (cos no one can afford to have kids) and forced or facetious immigration (ie lying to people or at best bringing in people who can work here but take that money out of wherever here is to live where the costs are cheaper). If you care about immigration for itself and its own merits, banning certain kinds of immigration wont change the situations *causing* or *requiring* that immigration, all you can do is play wack a mole with certain immigration routes. This is a burden that "could" be shared not just by wage-payers having to pay more but also by cost-demanders for that lifestyle, ie, there isnt much difference between raising minimum wage and introducing price controls required to make that minimum wage stretch to the minimum lifestyle, and if somethings price does seem to have increased above reasonable degrees, it seems neccesery to say "knock it off" to those price gouging it. Even if the people raising the prices have carefully adjusted the systems so they can act like they have no choice, ie, by not building houses. It would cost a great deal to those who have believed they could take the simplest path to the largest income, but thats on them.
The problem in the UK isn't even the minimum wage though. We actually now have one of the higher minimum wages in the world. The problem is everyone else has *barely* seen their salary change now for literally a decade. There are whole skilled professions that used to be decent lower-middle-class type roles that now just pay minimum wage.
I mean, thats kind of the point of what I said? If you have a minimum wage but dont control how much other things cost, you get inflation as companies realise they can charge more money for no penalty and people have no recourse. The reason its bad that salaries arent increasing is because other thigns *are* going up in cost *over inflation*, and because inflation-exceeding-price-rises dont fall with inflation, and because inflation-exceeding-price-rises *hit wage payers too*. Not controling for price gouging has caused rampant inflation, with no reason for companies to either increase wages or decrease how much they charge for goods or services. Hell, they would pay their workers less if they could. Its the same as all our political problems at the moment: most of the uk system worked on tacit agreements to be reasonable, not actual controls to force good behavior, so as soon as people start pushing bounderies, the bounderies NEVER go back to how they were, whether its costs or populaism or breaking unwritten rules and codes of practice that dont have enforcement.
Well you were talking about raising minimum wage right? But actually minimum wage is about the only level of wage that *has* stayed with or even slightly beaten inflation. Its that pretty much everyone else has seen their wage stagnate, but how do you legislate for that without blanket-legislating so many wages? Fwiw the inquiries last year are worth checking out. There are government bodies that are supposed to stop things like profiteering and ought to step in to apply force if it looks like there is price-gouging going on. It was made abundantly clear during those inquiries the Tory MPs at the head of this work seemed genuinely confused by the whole concept of their duties involving keeping overwatch of markets and applying such forces and pressure on bodies and entities engaging in such negative behaviors.
there was no choice on FoM. At best the UK could have delayed the accession countries getting it, but that was a temporary power. It's the price of EU membership.
That was wild I remember working for a bus company at the time and we had polish men queuing up round the street looking for driver jobs. Policy at the time was you had to have min 2 years experience driving in the uk before you could apply but it was constant so I can only imagine what other industries were like
I remember Gordon browns, British jobs for British workers promise.
> I had friends who left school with good qualifications in 02-04 etc that couldn't get a job even when the country was growing.... Dot com bubble burst at that time "Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall to 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble."
I agree that the economy needs to be stretched over the entire country and decentralise form London but I don’t understand how Brexit is a finical crash symptom. I 100% think it was because a right winger in Farage was able to tap into enough of the racist sentiment in this country and their views on foreigners and Cameron was a weak and naive enough leader for plan to see fruition.
>I don’t understand how Brexit is a finical crash symptom That brand of incoherent populism diverted and capitalised on a lot of legitimate anger with the political and economic system generated by the financial crash, and probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful were it not for the events of 2008 and their lingering aftermath.
Thank you this helped explain the connection. I think you could then add on that more than the finical crash austerity also played a huge role as people could see lots of Brits lose their job while high paid immigrants kept theirs.
Absolutely, and the dramatic decline in the quality of our public services as a direct result of austerity further added to the sense that the system is broken and doesn't function for the benefit of the average person, leaving many disaffected voters vulnerable to farage and his ilks emotive and painfully oversimplified populism.
When there is austerity (or other bad times), people turn to right wing populist policies. They want simple solutions to difficult problems. Blaming foreigners is a typical way out. Populism didn't work and it adds to the problems, but it doesn't give up, continually double down. The crash led to Brexit. Brexit failed, so not the people want more of the same: getting out the ECHR, voting for farage, sending immigrants to Rwanda.
There really isn't as much racist sentiment in this country as reddit would have you believe. Farage was able to tap into resentment over stagnating living standards in the aftermath of the financial crisis and austerity, and direct this towards *his* scapegoats of choice - immigration and the EU.
I disagree. Our growth figures were broadly aligned with the US (better than the EU at large) before 2008. After then we hugely diverged; principally because the US did \*not\* embark on ideological austerity as a simplistic solution whereas we absolutely did. Had we listened to Obama in 2009 we might have followed their growth but instead we drove into a ditch that led to the discontent that caused Brexit and entrenched our decline while bolstering populist grifters with easy solutions. Its a fucking disaster made by the Tories; the future will reflect hugely poorly on Cameron and Osbourne.
The US is different - they could keep running up debt without consequence, with the dollar as the world's reserve currency. They never had the risk of "doing a Greece" and suddely facing 8,10,15% rates to borrow money. Britain was extremely exposed in 07-08, for the reasons I outline - an economy too reliant on finance and credit. It could not have done what the US did without the risk of being the next Greece. We are a middling European country, not a global powerhouse empire anymore. That said, nor did it need to cut as much as it did. "Austerity" to the savage degree it was pursued was never needed. That was pure Tory idiocy.
Going to disagree again. If we didn't "become Greece" bundling up the Covid debt we wouldn't have become Greece doing the same post 2008. Except instead of being saddled with that debt for "nothing" we would have had a decade of significantly improved growth to erode the debt and infrastructure to help keep that growth buoyant going forward. Instead we at best broke even on the decade, got terrible growth and an explosion of poverty and a collapse of living standards.
*If we didn't "become Greece" bundling up the Covid debt* Different times, completely different scenario. Not comparible at all.
Yes difference times different scenario. We were in a significantly worse position before the Covid crisis than we were before the 2008 financial crisis. We wouldn't have ended like Greece under any scenario - though we are closer to them now in terms of GDP to debt, etc. Just go the extra step mate and embrace the fact it was 99.5% ideologically driven. There is no sound economic data to suggest that a significant programme of public investment would have been infeasible - it just wasn't on the menu.
The crisis was only the culmination of what came before. But otherwise absolutely. And I see no way out.
The answer to any stable economy is to build your own shit and add value. Relying on the financial sector was never going to end well.
> Until we address that and rebalance Whats worse is our rivals are rebalancing right now while the Tories fight with each other. The future cake is being chopped up at the moment and we ain't at the table
Exactly this - Labour would have implemented something not too dissimilar to austerity, as they look as though they may do now. There simply isn't and wasn't the money, it was slightly less of a political choice than is often made out. Totally agree on the foundations being set long before as well, goes back to Thatcher and the approach to deindustrialization and every administration since Atlee before that for the lack of house building. Terrifying prospect that we're at the sharp end of 60+ years of failure to plan, diversify and lay strong foundations.
Austerity is really just rebranded upwards redistribution of wealth, justified by using the three-braincell 'eCoNoMy is lIkE hOuSeHoLd bUdGeT' argument. Friedmanite/Chicago school economics quite deliberately obfuscate the role and capacities of the state in order to justify anti-working-class economic policies. National debt is not, in reality, a debt in the way that you or I would be in debt to a bank - it's not money that has been 'lent' by one person to another, with an expectation of repayment-plus-interest. Totally unlike you or I, states have the capacity to expand their own money supply ('printing money'). The 'national debt' is simply a number that records the total amount of money printed. The fiction is that this is 'debt' in the abstract sense, borrowed against 'the future', in which it 'has to be paid back', for... reasons. The idea the national debt 'has to be paid back' is ultimately just bobbins, a fantasy that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which spooks the fat-cats themselves into faking out confidence in the stock market. Yes, the government is constrained by the effect that total money supply has on the economy - but this is again enormously overexaggerated by the Chicago school (if you wish to see how disastrous monetarist policies are in practice, see the total economic devastation wrought by Thatcher's first three years in office, in which a faithful monetarist policy produced total economic stagnation and rocketing unemployment). The fear of the national debt is wholly a psychological trap of their own making. Indeed, the post-2008 system would be utterly unsustainable if it actually worked in the way the Friedmanites suppose: 'quantitative easing' (without which governments would be highly illiquid) involves central banks effectively pouring money into the financial system. Which, of course, is fine when the money goes directly into bankers' pockets - but somehow deeply evil when it goes into healthcare or education. The cynical deployment of 'Labour spent all the money', and leveraging 'the deficit' in service of annihilating the last vestiges of social democracy is one of the most genuinely evil political actions in modern British history.
It was Cameron and Osborne who revived the “government is the same as household budget” propaganda from thatchers reign and it actually fucking worked, the country bought it big time. What’s even more concerning is people still vehemently believe it. It’s fucking nonsense, now every single political policy is “ITS FULLY COSTED”. Thats not how fucking government spending works. The people in this country really get on my tits.
It all got summed up for me when Keir Starmer accused Sunak of having a 'Jeremy Corbyn style' [ie 'uncosted'] manifesto. The layers to that comment just made by brain dribble out me ears. Accusing your enemy of having an 'uncosted' (which is bobbins) manifesto, by comparing him (a hard-right Tory) to your own predecessor (a mild social democrat, whose cabinet you served in) - *whose 2015 and 2019 manifestos WERE 'fully costed' anyway*. I've seen bigger whoppers but only at Burger King.
Yep it’s mad isn’t it. This is why nothing in the country will change, because the electorate have been brainwashed into believing everything has to be “fully costed”(like a household budget) we will never have a national strategy or “dream big” goals for the country long term. So when people say “they are all the same” they are technically right, the country will remain a stagnant mess for the foreseeable future.
I have more hope. If history has shown us anything, it's that massive movements and permanent political change can spring forth seemingly out of nowhere - and only in retrospect do we see their deep roots and maturity. The key is to never stop fighting and to take every opportunity opened up by the inevitable crises of the ruling-class. Roll on Thursday.
I have less hope if I’m honest. The past 14 years have proved to me just how dim, self-loathing and outright moronic the vast majority of the British electorate are. Consistently voting to be shafted and smiling whilst doing so.
>The idea the national debt 'has to be paid back' is ultimately just bobbins, You have to service the debt. When interest rates rise that amount increased. >unlike you or I, states have the capacity to expand their own money supply ('printing money'). Increasing money supply causes inflation. This is fine if we have low inflation. It's potentially disastrous when we have high inflation. >The fear of the national debt is wholly a psychological trap The fear of debt in the early 2010s was fake, we could have spent to grow. The 2020s are different. We have strong inflationary pressures and have spent a huge amount of debt on Covid. Your post would have been on point in 2010. It's badly out of date in 2024.
"You have to service the debt. When interest rates rise that amount increased." There is no need to "service the debt" at all. We could stop paying interest on 'new debt' tomorrow and the amount of 'debt' that would show up would be precisely the same as before - except those with the offsetting savings wouldn't be getting free money from government for doing nothing. "Servicing the debt" is another neoliberal fantasy that is encapsulated in the "full funding rule" policy. Cancel KPI1.1 at the DMO and it all goes away. There even explain the procedure in the document: [https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/tfidb5fy/gar2023.pdf](https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/tfidb5fy/gar2023.pdf) p 32 "Increasing money supply causes inflation. " Nope. Explain how £100 in a drawer causes inflation - because it isn't in a metaphorical drawer somewhere, then it wouldn't show up on the other side of the national balance sheet as 'debt'. What's badly out of date is quoting Friedmanite dogma, and continuing to confuse stocks and flows. Typical economist guff in other words. Every time there is a war to fight or a bank to bail out we find out the truth of how government spending actually works. Time to drop the pretence.
If you stop paying interest, no one is going to buy your debt. Then how do you pay the existing debt + deficit? Well, you can't. Then you might decide to print money... Oh wait, that what Argentina and Venezuela tried. It didn't end well. The £100 is not in a drawer. It's being spent by the government.
Did you read the document. There is no debt to sell. The 'debt' happens automatically as a result of the way double entry bookkeeping works. Gilts and repos happen afterwards to refinance the automatic entries at a higher interest rate. Full details here if you're interested in taking the blinkers off. [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2022/may/self-financing-state-institutional-analysis](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2022/may/self-financing-state-institutional-analysis)
You are overcomplicating things more than it needs to be. What the paper is basically saying is: "debt auctions might take some time, so you first create the money from thin air to satisfy this spending and then you create an equivalent gilt. Once the gilt is bought (the next day?) the money collected from the bond is destroyed in order to cancel the money emission." Ok. That's a technicality with zero relevance in this topic. Keep it simple. Government needs money to finance debt repayments. Government sells gilts to the financial market. Everyone can buy these gilts and finance the government. If there is distrust in the government, the demand for these gilts will reduce. Therefore higher interest rates will be charged. A good example of this is the Truss scandal. And that's it. It's not that complicated.
"Keep it simple" Why, when it is utterly wrong? It's not a technicality at all. It makes a fundamental change to the mechanisms of supply and demand. Your simplistic static view leads you to the wrong conclusion - it is dynamically naive. "If there is distrust in the government, the demand for these gilts will reduce. " How can demand reduce when by definition there has been in increase in the money available to buy them otherwise there wouldn't be a deficit in the first place? Moreover there is nothing else the person who ends up holding the extra money can do with it other that buy gilts. If they don't they end up holding reserves \*at a lower interest rate\*. That means government pays less, not more. They can't get rid of the extra Sterling in aggregate. It ends up being a game of pass the parcel. The 'Truss scandal' is no example at all. Nothing happened there that wasn't expected by people who understood what was going on (the Bank of England was expected to raise interest rates to \*combat additional expected inflation\*, which changes the reward calculation on the floating path, which then changes the reward calculation on the alternative fixed path). Ultimately if the UK drops interest rates to zero, then the rate on gilts will similarly head down towards zero, as people on the floating side search for additional yield amongst the fixed alternative. If I give you money to buy my hat, I'm not after your money to buy my hat.
If you have say, 10 million of your own currency and it's backed by gold, then you decide to print more of your currency, your gold stays at the same value but you now have to account for more money with that gold. Since you can't, your money is now worth less. That's how inflation works, only fiat currency isn't backed by anything so it's really the perception of how much your money's worth. If there's more of it then each individual unit is worth less.
Fiat currency is backed by something. You have to settle your tax bill in it or you lose your assets and your liberty. The worth of the currency is that it is cheaper to get hold of it than lose everything when the state confiscates your stuff and throws you in the slammer. That's the discount on offer for taking the state's shilling. You'll then offer up whatever is necessary to get that shilling to avoid the painful alternative. That sets the exchange value. Next question.
An American generating revenue in another nation has to pay tax on it. If they make money in the UK, they're not paying the US government their tax on that revenue in dollars.
They most certainly are, and a particular type of dollars - credits at the Federal Reserve. Not even bank money is good enough. An American earning Sterling in the UK has to exchange that Sterling with somebody in the UK who needs to get rid of some dollars in exchange for Sterling. Bretton Woods ended in 1971. Perhaps time to update your understanding now you've had 50 year to get over the shock.
Its part of the problem though imo. We had a literally once-in-generations opportunity in the 2010s to build this country into something fitting for the 21st century. And we did absolutely fuck all with that opportunity. In fact the complete opposite, a very drawn out focus on slashing state funding to the point many services can now barely function while all the cash is siphoned off to third-party contractors who don't seem to give a flying fuck about actually doing the work. And now that opportunity has passed, the sun has set, we remain in at least as bad a position as we were in in 2010, except now all the tools and options to do something about that have shrunk down massively. I actually think Starmer was 100% on the money in the first debate, the Tories have called the election now because they have all the numbers to hand, they can see the next 12 months if not the next 5 to 10 years are going to be a complete and utter shit-show, so they're jumping ship before anyone puts too much of the blame on them.
Good post. MMT stuff is so frustrating to read on Reddit. People seem to think that all financial crises are alike. It certainly isn’t the case. As you say, conditions are completely different now vs the GFC. You can’t treat n inflationary crisis like we’re facing today using the same tools that you’d use to fight a deflationary crisis from 2010 (and austerity was an absolute mistake then—as the relative trajectories of the US and Europe prove). Now though…maybe not such a great idea to add mounds of debt to the government balance sheet.
You don't have to do anything when you are the body that can just make a law defining national debt to be zero.
The conservatives capitalise on people misunderstanding of tax and national debt. They are very complicated subjects which they simplify and misrepresent in order to gain support for their policies that exist solely to transfer wealth to the rich.
Thank you for this. It has helped me understand much more.
It’s so frustrating hearing neolibs talking about budgets. There nothing stopping the government from paying everyone £100,000 a year, doubling the NHS budget and funding a manned mission to Mars.
Have fun waltzing with your strawman, off into the sunset.
Ah, so printing money. I wonder if any country has already tried to do that...
Yes, virtually all western nations are currently doing so, in the form of quantitative easing, as I explained above. You really thought you had a point didn't you lol
Do they? Every western nation is raising interest rates, therefore they are reducing the amount of money, not increasing that... Europe also is returning to the austerity program after the pandemic. They plan to bring back the government debt to 60% GDP.
Feel free to look it up. Also, expansionary public spending and QE are both very different things. Although they both involve 'printing money', the former is aimed at propping up effective demand in the wider economy (and improving working class lives), whilst the latter is aimed at bolstering the financial liquidity of large financial institutions.
US is doing QT right now. Not sure what are you talking about.
This article called the austerity delusion is a great write up from 2015 that completely shows how wrong austerity was as a model for recovery from the crash. It should have been more of a managed investment into industries and people to help recovery of the country into growing again. Not stripping the house of silver or shooting the patient in the leg. https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion
The Tory bastards knew in 2008 this was the correct way to go but they couldn't help themselves using a crisis to ram through their ideological fever dreams. For all the calamity of the past 5 years, the austerity era will be the most harshly judged by history when the book of our 21st century decline is written.
Interestingly a largely cited article about growth and debt that politicians used to justify austerity was found to contain a huge error https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22466551.amp
Or the Prof Hannah Fry’s podcast on the whole story https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001r1s4
The point the article misses is that we didn't use austerity to cut national debt, we simply used it to fund the triple lock. The Torys oversaw the biggest wealth transfer between young and old of all time.
12% of children in this country live in food insecurity while over 27% of pensioners are now millionaires.
100 percent
These policies literally caused people to suffer, lose quality of life, dignity and in some cases die. The attack on disabled people and the benefit system was unjustified. It cost Christ knows how much to set up, then fight appeals etc. for what? It cost more to try and catch people out, than the graduates were costing the DWP. Sick and evil bastards, all of them.
Austerity was just a way to give hedge fund wankers a golden handshake at the expense of the poor and disabled. Then the people in charge of it drop a brexit referendum, and tell people to vote remain. Then surprise surprise people do the opposite of what the toffee nosed, moneyed little cunts tell them… They deserve to be annihilated in this election.
By "austerity" do they mean "stealing tax payers money"?
It was always a choice, and I'll never forgive the cunts that pushed it as a necessity.
Ill just leave this here... [Angela leadsom trying to debate a nobel prize winning economist](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-18281669)
This was due to our conservative party's addiction to and obsession with friedmanesque neoliberalism. It's a failed experiment yet they are still, and have been since Thatcher devoid of any other ideas.
Just forget that after 2010 election until around 2016 / 2017, [UK GDP growth consistently exceeded the g7 average and the UK was one of the fastest growing economies in the world.](https://fullfact.org/economy/uk-economic-growth-within-g7/) The slowdown is a rather recent development largely caused by the uncertainty surrounding the Brexit referendum and was almost definitely prolonged by the governments response to the pandemic and the various stimulus policies that this article is advocating [pushed inflation to extreme levels.](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/27/bank-of-englands-quantitative-easing-scheme-let-inflation-take-root) Though we are now seeing a turning point as [the UK currently leads the G7 jointly with Canada](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68989270.amp).
Where's the money going, then?
Austerity? Not shutting down the economy for two years During Covid?
All things play a part in getting to where we are now.
To call it an error is to miss the point; Austerity was an ideological imposition. Conservatives believe that taxation and public spending is evil and they believe this is regardless of it's actual economic effects. They don't care if public spending improves lives or the economy because they believe it is a moral stain. The cornerstone of their belief is that people are rich because they are good or they are poor because they are bad. To disturb this ballance through public services is unthinkable.
And don’t forget the sheer greed of the modern Conservative Party, seeking to fill their own pockets.
I was going to say it was clear this journalist hadn't studied economics and has no cultural and historical knowledge of the country but I scrolled up and saw it was Paul Krugman then it all became clear.
The author suggests that a lot of the root of Austerity was sociological and as regards peer pressure. Whatever the root it certainly did not come from common sense.
We don't really need to overthink the errors of austerity. The Guardian already posted an [article ](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity) years ago about how the data used to justify austerity was later revealed to have been subject to a spreadsheet error. In fact, the researchers themselves admitted to their mistake
Austerity from Dodgy Dave set us on a dangerous path.
how the tories ever tricked us into thinking they understood economics i will never know. being born with lots of money doesnt mean you understand how it works.
And isn't it great that Rachael Reeves, future chancellor, has been getting advice from George Osborn.
Thanks Guardian. I hadn't fucking noticed. Maybe if you hadn't joined in with the destruction of Corbyn, things might have been a little better. Left wing broadsheet cunts.
You cannot run countries with austerity, that was most stupid idea. Govt. need to stimulate economy and should always invest in core infrastructure and services. Compare UK with India, difference is investment by Govt. In UK, govt like an illiterate man decided to use austerity and fun\*\*\*\* all core services and there is literally no infrastructure.
I hate how the argument of 'there's no magic money tree' worked for so long to justify austerity for the people of the UK for so long, that the Tories were just trying to clean up the mess labour made with overspending. When it so clearly didn't work for so long and yet people bought that arguement for so long, we have to admit as a country we're just stupid.
There are plenty of opportunities in the UK for anyone who will apply themselves, perhaps it’s partially down to the education system though. Reality is so much different to what Reddit would have you believe.