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IMO, the capitalist model has served the human race well, if you live in Western Europe, North America or Australasia, in other words roughly 1/6th of the worlds population. The other 5/6ths have seen no benefits at all and are probably no better or worse off than they would have been without it.
Given that india and china are booming due to nacent free markets…….quite a claim
Sure not everyone is benefiting there by along way…but they certainly werent under previous regimes/systems
Grimes, to say your message above is one sided is an understatement!
“A vote for Hogg is vote for Hitler”! AND HE WON THE SEAT.
This by-election was a single issue by-election, and hogg was basically put in place to supprt to ‘official’ goverment appeasment policy, in order to keep Britain out of a war. It is unfair to quote just the above, which implies he ws a Nazi supporter.Had Hitler been British, who can reasonably doubt that The Mail would have enthused at the prospect of a state funeral for Hitler just as enthusiastically, when he finally ponked it. Or Mussolini. Now thats more than just a lttle bit silly. I’m sure you are aware of Mussolini death.
Finally, it is well noted that Churcill was fanatically anti-communist, and would initially view favourably anything which was also anti-communist.
Maxilon, funny you should mention the Daily Mail. The Thatcher supporters on here seem to know little of our history between the wars. At one time, before WWII, Hitler was so popular among the monied people of this country that Hailsham (then “Hogg”) canvassed as the Tory candidate for Oxford using the slogan, “A vote for Hogg is vote for Hitler”! AND HE WON THE SEAT
Having re-read you post, I shall respond to this.
It is true to state, at one time, Hilter was veiwed in some quaters in Britain favourably. Howver, this by-election was not until 1938, by which time any support that Hitler had in Britain was diwindling very fast indeed!Given that india and china are booming due to nacent free markets…….quite a claim
Sure not everyone is benefiting there by along way…but they certainly werent under previous regimes/systems
.. and they aren’t benefitting now. Be under no illusions.
There are 1,000,000,000 people in India and the same in China. They are all poor in a happy sort of middle-ages way.
In India you step over people who have died of hunger in the street and they have nuclear weapons. There is no internal economy. When we don’t want cheap jumpers anymore they will go back to the fields.
As for the pay divide between rich and poor – what precisely is the problem with that? Those who are low paid have the opportunity to get off their backsides to improve their lot if they really want to. In most cases they won’t because they know full well they can get the state to subsidise their breeding, smoking and drinking.
Virtually all animal species have a hierarchy, call it a pecking order, some will always be better off than others. Accept it, get over it!!!
Well Paul, there are several problems with this angle of attack. For starters it depends how big the divide is, In Japan for example the divide is very small compared to a country like the US where the divide is very large. What about social mobility? Is it possible for someone from a very poor background to become well off and have a nice life through the fruits of their labours? It would appear that the escape from the life of poverty is getting harder and harder, not easier.
My whole family escaped from it in the terrible 70’s, I think a family today in a similar situation would not be able to do it, who could afford to buy a house with the Mother not working and the Father earning just above the minimum wage, bringing up two kids?
Dave, I really don’t think the size of the divide is relevant – not everyone can get to the top, so the location of the top is irrelevant to most, unless they just want to be envious and wallow in their resentment of those who are better off.
Social mobility is still possible but expectations also have to be realistic. I suppose it comes down to what people consider to be "essential"
I believe it is possible for almost anyone to improve their lot. I do concur that in the current economic environment it is more difficult, but that should not stop people trying – they just need to try harder.
I am a firm believer of the old adage "it is far better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all."
It is a reality that not everyone who tries will succeed but, not wishing to be too brutal, that’s life and life is not always fair. Never has been an no utopian ideal will ever make it so.
Sure it would be great if everyone was comfortably off and did not have to struggle – but it ain’t going to happen, human nature will not allow it for a start.
I must admit I would be absolutely daunted if I was having to "start out" now, having to get on the property ladder and I don’t envy any young couples or families who are struggling.
However I also can’t help but ask how many of these "struggling" families still spend money on non-essentials like smoking, booze, Sky TV, games consoles for kids, holidays etc. etc.. I know there are those who will take issue with me on this particular line but I am afraid I don’t consider any of the forgoing to be "essentials".
Once again, totally agree with Paul.
We constantly see stats that x% of children are living in poverty, designed to shock us into accepting an ever-larger, more bureaucratic welfare state.
However, we are no longer talking about Dickensian, workhouse style poverty – the line seems now to be drawn at whether or not you can afford to add Sky Sports to your subscription, or afford the latest trainers.
I am expecting a barrage of abuse for this, but real poverty has been all but eradicated in this country, imo.
I am expecting a barrage of abuse for this, but real poverty has been all but eradicated in this country, imo.
I’m somewhat loathe to enter the debate, as it’s increasingly clear to me that politics is all about maintenence of the status quo, and that there is neither the will nor the inclination amongst any politician to ever change it.
However, I think BennyB’s point above is interesting, and worth exploring.
For me, I think the statement is wrong, as it assumes that ‘poverty’ correlates strictly to a financial position, which I think is a false assumption.
Personally, I think this country is ridden with cultural poverty. What do I mean by that? Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure, but I’d be thjinking along the following lines:
There is a general lack of respect for our fellow human beings
We value the acquisiton of ‘things’ as the pinnacle of human achievement
The Nanny state pervades all, reducing relevance and diversity within our State education system
The Law is often an ass – particularly the interpretation of Human Rights legislation
Celebrity is king, regardless of how it is achieved
Hacks prosper at the expense of the talentedI don’t want to come across like the middle-aged git that I undoubtedly am, but basically, the country is fooked, and there appears to be no motivation to do anything about it.
I think everyone is passionately agreeing in a way. I’m probably more right wing than any of you on here and certainly more right wing than Thatcher. Thatcher was a con artist, along the same lines as Mandelson. Thatcher was real 1984 and not a right winger at all. Let me explain why I think this.
Take the right wing philosphy that the market is king and in order for the market to operate properly we must remove red tape and deregulate. The money generated by this new freedom would then benefit society as a whole and improve the standard of living of people generally. In time we would have more robust economy which wasn’t reliant on one particular industry and that could only be a good thing. The generation of wealth and proliferation of small and diverse business would also address the poverty and depravation of the ‘Inner Cities’.
So where does the Poll Tax fit into this? The poll tax activily discrimated against poor people. Someone earning £3 an hour paid exactly the same as someone earning £3 a minute. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that indirect taxes hurt the poor the hardest and reduce the chance of social mobility. Hold on, the poor will only spend the money on fags and trainers anyway, so wtf. A proper free market economist would have never introduced the Poll Tax.
Norman Lamont was on the telly last night, being presented as an expert. Does anyone remember the ERM? The day interests rates went up 6% in an hour?
I do agree the State and not just the Welfare State has got out of hand, it’s too big, too intrusive and too beurocratic. But it’s exponential growth was down to the mass unemployment deliberately caused by Thatcher .. but that’s another story.
Interesting points from Grass and Dave. I certainly agree with the social poverty argument posed by Grass.
A couple of points for Dave – "In time we would have more robust economy which wasn’t reliant on one particular industry" – this isn’t the case: the model of free trade formulated by Adam Smith and later David Ricardo said that countries should specialise in what they are relatively more efficient at producing, and then trade to everyone’s benefit. So we have specialised in financial services (because we are better at it than, say, India), and they specialise in textiles, for argument’s sake. They then purchase financial services from us, we buy textiles from them, and we are both better off than if we tried to do both ourselves.
"Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that indirect taxes hurt the poor the hardest". Not quite. It is not whether a tax is direct or indirect which matters, but whether it is progressive, neutral or regressive. Income tax as it stands is progressive (i.e. the better-off pay proportionately more of their income), and yes, the poll tax was regressive (the opposite). Your comment that a proper free-market economist would never have introduced the poll tax is largely untrue – they would try to tax as little as possible, and where they have to tax they would simply try to minimise the impact on markets.
Obviously I agree re the welfare state being too big. The transitional unemployment created by Thatcher was simply necessary in shifting resources from industries we were no longer good at to those we were.
I don’t underestimate the pain and suffering this transition caused to many, but it was a necessary evil from an economic perspective.
Hmm .. the biggest growth industry in this country over the past 20 year has been the State and should we include in this total all of the kids that can’t get jobs going to college?
I agree with the point about cultural poverty Grass.
The poll tax was something Stalin would have been proud of.
I am expecting a barrage of abuse for this, but real poverty has been all but eradicated in this country, imo.
Your concern about abuse would indicate that you think your words are both ultra right-wing and those of a small minority. Loath as I am to align myself politically I generally side with left-of-centre doctrine (indoctrination?) So it may come as a surprise to learn that I agree with you.
There seems to be little distinction today between being in ‘poverty’ and being ‘poor’. Poverty means going hungry, going barefoot, being homeless, having no clean water, no access to health services, no fuel on tap, high infant mortality rate etc: all of which remain common in the third world. Being poor means having no disposable income, having to carefully budget and having to do without inessentials but otherwise living a satisfactory if drab and uncomfortable existence.
An example of what isn’t poverty but is talked of as such is ‘fuel poverty’ defined, unless I’m mistaken, as being more than 10% of income spent on Utility bills. Well sorry but those in the aforementioned third world would give their eye-teeth for a wage large enough to require only 10% of it to ensure cooked food, warmth, light and the weekly hot bath.
Does it not seem strange that there is a positive correlation between poverty (modern ‘western’ definition) and obesity?
Grasshopper’s tangential points about ‘cultural poverty’ are well made and I find myself in agreement with that too. The ruthless pursuit of material possessions bring little but a fleeting satisfaction necessitating its endless repetition. The pursuit of knowledge, the feeding of the mind, deep immersion in a hands-on hobby, or just watching the river flow bring a lasting satisfaction and cost sweet f a
If anything good is to come out of this collapse of spiv-capitalism then it will be the realization that much of the personal debt burden built up during the ‘never never’ credit bubble was money spent on inessentials peddled as essentials, without which we could all have lived perfectly comfortable and fulfilling lives
Do I really need 15 Fred Perry polos?
Marb, with NuLab, you have the worst of both worlds. You have both right-wing economics and left wing morality, social liberalism.
Despite the polls, I don’t believe today’s Tories have a hope in Hell of getting back into government. It’s a protest vote. We poorer folk tend to wise up quite smartly when our very survival is at stake.
The New Tories are a facsimile, today, of NuLab, with the sole difference that they are wild animals (if your conscience reproaches you, don’t blame me: I’m talking about their policies. I’ve no interest, still less desire, in hurting people’s feelings), primitive beyond belief. NuLab are just as primitive and brutish fundamentally but they were always more subtle and crafty than Thatcher and the New Tories; they have been prepared to throw the public a few bones in exchange for the nice little Communist set-up they have among themselves. Nor would a NuLabourite have had the gall to quote the Prayer of St Francis on the steps of no 10, or delivered a highly idiosyncratic exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan to the assembled ministers of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland – who incidentally had not wanted her as their guest. Maybe it was God’s payback for their promotion of the so-called "work ethic".
The jibe that NuLab have been throwing money away like a drunken sailor is a grotestque misapprehension, due to swallowing capitalist propaganda whole. For example, when considering the NHS, the crooks in Government and corporatist talking-heads gibber on about their record spending on the NHS. In fact, it is scandalously low in comparison with our European peers, such as France and Germany (never mind Scandinavia), when viewed as it should be, in terms of the respective countries’ Gross National Product.
Of course, under this corrupt, right-wing govt, the use of the tax payers’ money is shockingly misused, to privatise whatever it can, and give pay-back to (or hold hostage) a burgeoning bureaucracy, at the expense of customer treatment and care. Long ago, a head of the BMA suggested that rather than lie to the people about underfunding, it would be more honest if they just shot them.
Who bailed out the railways? The tax-payer. (I don’t pay tax now, by the way). Why? So that shareholders dividends wouldn’t suffer!
What this country needs is a govenment of the old Christian Tories, such as MacMillan, Prior, etc, Thatcher’s so-called "wets", who appreciated the welfare state, and saw privatisation of the utilities, for instance, as "selling the family silver." Of course, as born right-wingers, they did still have a hang-up about money, and it would be necessary for them to look a little closer at the Second Commandment, not just the First.
I used to be to the left of Karl Marx, but I have seen with my own eyes how the Labour Party have betrayed the mass of the British people in every imaginable way, sacred and profane. As a matter of fact it is known that MI5 groomed Blair to take over the Labour Party, while he was at university. He had apparently said while at school that he would be PM, though it didn’t matter which party.
There is always something a little sad but also hilarious about power villains being identified by their counterparts in another team. The new Tories have understandably always been furious at the way in which Blair has got away with imposing THEIR policies on the people, and yet getting
re-elected. We prefer to clutch at straws, rather than walk over a cliff.Arch-imperialist, Churchill, was a better man than most of his contemporaries, but he understood Hitler best, because he knew history and the fascistic inspiration of imperialism all too well himself. Though it was a very lucky break for us, though he was to suffer rejection after the war. People had come to know his strengths and weaknesses.
As regards politicians, it should always be borne in mind that they are all, in their most fundamental (albeit unregenerate) nature, right-wingers. It is in the nature of the worldy intelligence to predispose its possessors towards right-wing goveernment. I used to scorn the old Tory jibe about Socialism being the politics of envy, because an economically-oppressed people has a right, a duty even to envy the wherewithal to support their family in a modicum of dignity. But of course, with most putatively left-wing politicans, we have seen with our own eyes that the passion for justice of almost all of them was never more than skin-deep. They envied the wealthy personally. They didn’t want an adequate sufficiency. They wanted to be rich, themselves. I began to understand the saying, "Put a beggar on horseback, and he’ll ride it straight to hell." Never mind that he’ll find the rich more than well-represented there.
Sure, some NuLabourites, came from prosperous backgrounds, and the motivation of most of them would have been power, hopefully, without too much shame. They ended up with power, but more shame than they could have imagined. They were not going to get power in the Tory party, though their shame, being a little more honestly earned, might have been less.
Incidentally, by the time you reach your fifties, the pressure experienced towards political cynicism is considerable.
Anyway, there are clearly people who know how to get us out of this crisis:
Grassy’s post is a wee gem. Could not concure more as another middle aged git!
It used to be that when the country was in crisis we all stood to together. This country is probably in the worst crisis since the 2WW and all we get is political oportunism and press sensationalism. I am so tired of this Punch & Judy show that is politics. Politics is all now about playing to the press. The press now make the news rather than report it. I am fed up with some plonker standing outside of 10 Downing Street making it up as they go.
We as a country have no concept of real poverty.
To quote the wise one "the country is fooked, and there appears to be no motivation to do anything about it"
Well, marble, like the rest of the US, Obama seems in a very strange and unpredictable position.
In a half normal country in normal circumstances, I would have expected Obama to be another FDR – although more progressive, in view of the extraordinary harm that the far right has inflicted on the country and the change it will have made to the American psyche.
However, there are very significant factors that make any kind of favourable predictions regarding what Obama can do, assuming he wants to (he has tended to keep his cards close to his chest), hazardous, to say the least.
There is, of course, the economic crisis which promises to be catastrophic, an accurate estimate of the value of the toxic paper produced by the City’s "rogue-trading" City culture is apparently impossible; within a few tens of billions or trillions of pounds, I expect….
Then you have a fraudulently-elected President and administration which has arrogated to itself all but full dictatorial powers, and threatened to impose martial law on the whole country, and an upcoming election in which the Neocon Republican fraud has already begun. The only thing that can save the country is a pro Democratic turnout so enormous the Neocons daren’t defraud the Dems of the victory.
But will they dare do so, and martial law be declared if people take to the streets? Will the infantry trained to put the uprising down obey or disobey their orders? Will good Republican politicians and high-ranking Establishment individuals and officials step into the breach? Who knows?
The Neocons virtually own the State Department, Pentagon and military-industrial complex, so upsetting the villains who have been and are still plundering the country, together with Big Oil, will presumably be hazardous. JFK, Robert Kennedy and a Democratic senator called Wellstone found out at the cost of their lives, as well as many others of lesser public stature.
Consequently, on the face of it, it doesn’t look as if Obama would have an easy ride – to put it mildly. But the more you find out about him, the more you tend to think that his extraordinary charisma is not an empty illusion, and his extarordinary worldly intelligence (he’s a professor of constitutional law) is based on very sound spiritual assumptions. In short, he possesses a rare wisdom.
What they consider "moderate Democratic policy" is actually pretty far to the right. The DLC or Beltway crowd, as I believe they call them, are not far removed from the Republicans. Although many of the Republicans before Nixon were like our better Tory grandees of yore: very decent souls who cared about people and the country, much different from the cold, callous pre-war Tories.
The sensible Socialism of the Scandinavians, favoured by Kucinich is probably a bridge too far, even after this profoundest disgrace of the far right, so I expect Obama will be pulled in two directions more than a Democratic president would be, ordinarily.
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