Rightwing Agenda in the UK Makes No Sense

The party in power in the UK right now is called the Condems. It’s a cross between the Conservatives or Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems have the support of about 1 The Tories ran on a platform renouncing the extremely unpopular policy of  Thatcherism. Note that Thatcher was not able to push through much of her agenda. The wildest thing she tried to do was the poll tax, basically a regressive tax on the poor and working class, and the protests against that nearly caused a street revolution in the country. She’s probably the most hated British politician of the past 100 years, although she does have some supporters. I’ve always felt she had more supporters among conservatives here in the US than she did in the UK. Since the end of Thatcher, the Tories have been backtracking on Thatcherism and saying that they want to moderate their line. The Lib Dems are some of kind new age, pro-environment, pro-gay rights, SWPL type party that’s also more to the Right of Labor on economic stuff, though not nearly as much as the Tories. Their main claim to fame was opposition to the war in Iraq. Their supporters are these hip yuppie types who make good money but don’t want to be associated with Tory assholiness. The Lib Dems basically hate the Tories, so this is a marriage made in Hell. Nevertheless, they are going along with the worst cuts to the British welfare state that the UK has ever seen. I’m not sure what the rationale is for these devastating spending cuts in the middle of an economic downturn. Maybe someone more versed in British politics can enlighten me. Spending cuts in the middle of a downturn is always a bad idea. All it does is make the downturn worse, and far from reducing the deficit, it often grows the deficit because the spending cuts harm the economy so much that tax revenues crash. Hence what we have seen in Ireland and Greece, the idiot countries who have tried to cut their way out of a deficit problems. Both countries made devastating cuts to their budgets, but the more they cut, the more the deficit grew! This is because, as I noted, the spending cuts wreck the economy, causing tax revenues to collapse, paradoxically worsening the deficit! Anyway, for whatever crazy reason they have cooked up, the Condems are determined to go ahead with these cuts. But their rationale for doing them is truly insane. According to the Condems, by making massive cuts British state spending, they will somehow stimulate the private sector, and hence begin to grow their way out of the downturn. I’m not aware of any valid economic theory on Earth in which huge cuts to the state “stimulates the private sector.” Why would it? Unless it’s some whack Libertarian theory that doesn’t even make sense on paper. Anyway, that’s the official rationale. As I noted, it makes no sense at all. Hence, it’s a lie. Thence, we wonder why they are cutting government. They must be cutting the state for some sort of ideological reasons, or perhaps they have a deficit reduction agenda. Anyway, it looks like not only a bad, but an unnecessary idea. And they dressed it up in crazy clothes to sell it to the gullible masses.

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34 thoughts on “Rightwing Agenda in the UK Makes No Sense”

  1. if i was british i would vote for the BNP. theyre anti-war, left wing socialists, and anti-immigration/anti-multiculturasm.

  2. Side note: Whenever people talk about SWPL, I think of some left wing sectarian org because the first letters remind me of Socialist Workers Party, or somesuch. I do know what it means, but it always takes me a second.

  3. That’s a pretty good summation of the state of affairs in the UK. Part of what this is about is the general world-wide ‘surge’ by the ruling elites to turn back the tide of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, universal suffrage, the welfare state… One pundit I read suggested that the aim was a return to the world of the Venetian city states – a supra-national world ‘government’ which is a carve-up by regional warlords e.g. corporations with their own armies, livery, hierarchies etc. You can sort of see this picture emerging.
    But whether that’s so or not, certainly we see a general pattern, much discussed by Marxists, of ‘capitalist crisis’. The Marxists see this as a sort of mechanical process inevitably thrown up periodically by the contradictions in capitalism. Others argue convincingly that to an extent the crises are deliberately engineered by the financial elites, because they always seem to come out smelling of roses – disaster strikes, instant cash is desperately needed, everything’s for sale at fire sale prices… Lo and behold, every time disaster strikes a smaller and smaller elite ends up owning a bigger and bigger part of everything. Of course, this is all a conjuring trick, totally dependent on the indoctrination of the masses into accepting that some clever book-keeping and social/political networking entitles anyone to own EVERYTHING. Hey, but that’s what the tv’s for! ‘Disaster Capitalism’ as Naomi Klein put it.
    So that’s a part of what the Tories are up to. Wreck the state, then the IMF is called in, everything’s up for sale, and their pals get it all for a song. It doesn’t matter if they never win another election. They don’t need to, because there’s nothing left to steal.
    ” Rule Brittania, Brittania Rules the Waves,
    Britons never, never, never will be slaves… ”
    which brings us to the specifically British version of this. Who ARE the Tories? Go back a bit to the beginning of the 11th century. Alfred the Great had crafted the best-organised state in Europe, welding the disparate Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norwegians, Celts and their kingdoms into one coherent, efficient, well-audited and taxed whole. In 1066 William the Conqueror and his Normans from France (google it) took it over, killed or castrated all the local bigshots and potential leaders, parceled the place up and distributed it amongst themselves, and the ‘English’ became serfs singing “Britons never, never, never will be serfs ” for the next 700 years or so, until INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM, and all that bothersome stuff that started creeping in like the gradual encroaching of the electoral franchise on the ‘natural rulers’ – first the bourgeois, then the proles, then women, then pansies and nig-nogs ” My God, pigeons will want the vote next! ”
    The Tory party was the party of the landed aristocracy, the inheritors of William the Conqueror’s dispensations; plus of course the new bourgeoisie, and their ‘ cosmopolitan’ financier exotic types. But there is a ‘mood’ of the Tory party that is still heavily redolent of the old landed aristocracy, and possibly never more so in recent times than this current crop of useless millionaire brats who’ve never worked a day in their lives. They see the British people the way some of the Southern gentry see black people: their property that’s escaped, like cattle who have broken out of their pen. If they can’t get us back in the pen, they’d just as soon kill us off and use the country as a private park to chase foxes around.

  4. “The Lib Dems have the support of about 14% of the population.”
    Well, 23% of those who voted, voted Lib Dem…and 36.1% of those who voted, voted for the Tories, and 29% for the Labour Party, 11.9% other.
    So 63.9% of British voters DID NOT VOTE for the fiscal sadism of the current government in the UK (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/10/power-sadism-government).
    That’s democracy, folks. Whoever you vote for, The government always gets in…

  5. WTF, Im an asshole for liking a political party in the UK? Fuck you, you an asshole for not liking them. What party is in the UK is better than the BNP?

  6. They make the cuts so they can pay off their debts and not lose their bond rating. If they default on their debts, they can lose investors permanently and their economy can nosedive. It’d be better not to have to make the cuts, but it’s not entirely without a rationale. “Without unpopular spending cuts and tax increases, unmanageable deficits may choke their economies. But those same spending cuts and tax increases also threaten economic growth.” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/10/11/the_age_of_austerity_107504.html At least in the UK anyway, they’re not even making cuts, they’re just planning to have smaller future growth of government spending and are calling these cuts.

    1. I’d prefer to read an analysis from somewhere other than a rightwing website (Realclearpolitics) and someone other than the rightwing asshole Jew Robert Samuelson.
      However, I am concerned with the question. The UK currently has a pretty low debt burden if I am not mistaken.
      I am pretty confused about this whole debt issue to tell you the truth. I really want to learn more about it.
      The massive cutting in the context of a poor economy is already going to send the economy into a nosedive.

      1. “The UK currently has a pretty low debt burden if I am not mistaken.”
        This is correct. One of the lowest in the EU.
        The cuts in public expenditure are ideologically driven. The justifications are propaganda, distortions and fibs. it’s all about establishing a new right wing consensus, and the bourgeois media are slimily concurring in the new feeding frenzy of bashing Labour for financial mismanagement, The Independent newspaper (hardly Left) and the Morning Star (www.morning staronline.co.uk : if American readers of Robert’s blog were to read this newspaper it would gladden my heart) excepted.

    2. Yeah, but they are lying about the rationale. That’s the thing. They are not saying they are doing to keep up their bond rating. They are saying they are doing it in order to “stimulate the private sector” LOL.

    3. Samuelson is a lying POS rightwinger.
      It’s thought that at 100% of GDP, you may be in for a debt crisis. At current projections, the US will have debt at 100% of GDP in 2074, and those figures are unnecessarily pessimistic about economic growth.
      Are you kidding? These guys need to gut the US budget deficit so we won’t have a debt crisis in the year 2074?
      Answer: *They are lying*. Conservatives always lie. This is the thing to learn about them. They must lie due to the nature of conservatism, plus they are generally shitty human beings who don’t care if they lie or not or think it’s worth it.

      1. Yes, I didn´t really pay attention to where the article came from… not really one of my strong points, but either way the fear of defaulting on debt is one of the main reason for cuts, if not the. I think the UK is alright, mainly for historical reasons, along with Japan and the US, even if they went over 100 percent, but “newer” economies such as Spain and Greece dont have as much credit history to back themselves up and are therefore making the cuts to show that they´re serious about fiscal stability.

  7. jacob, you still didnt explain whats so bad about the BNP. theyre socialist, theyre anti-immigration, theyre anti-war, anti-rape, anti-pedophilia, anti-crime, and patriotic. Whats not to love?

  8. Bob,
    You cannot escape from the fact that Britain’s previous Labour Party administration massively incresed public expenditure, and what’s more wasted it on all sorts of useless, worthless projects (Olympics, Crossrail, ‘Building Schools for the Future’, ‘Surestart’ etc etc), and incresed the public pay-roll to a ridiculous extent, so that MOST of Scotland, Wales and northern England works in the public sector.The Labour Party actually did very, very little during its tenure for real downcast and impoverished in Britain, it pitted the low paid and unemployed against a ‘reserve army of paupers’ from all over the world with its ‘open borders’ policy, forcing wages down to poverty levels and forcing rents sky-high whilst cunts like Peter Mandelson hob-nobbed with multi-billionaires on yachts in the Aegean.Plus they got involved with George Bush’s insane neo-con adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    Basically, the (American made) financial meltdown – that’s a story for another day – knocked the stuffing out of Britain’s finances, to the extent that ALL major parties (including Labour) were committed to cuts.The finances were fucked due to the private liabilities of the fucked-up banking sector (Labour had relied upon dividends and tax from finance in the good times to fund insane spending projects), being dumped on the taxpayer as public liabilities.Socialism, if you will – but of the most perverse and fucked up sort, here the poor are robbed to pay for the rich.
    Yes, the Tories are shits ideologically committed to slashing the state and kicking the poor when they are down – but don’t let Labour (which had degenerated into a ‘Thatcher-lite’ party, NOT the old-school ‘cloth cap and beer and sandwiches party’ of the great Harold Wilson), off the hook so easily.
    Those bastards were fully paid up globalists/capitalists and not socialists at all.Their policy was pure Thatcherism with a ‘human face’ – globalism, a survival of the fittest cockfight, mollycoddling big business, tolerating and revelling in massive inequality, but with a few ‘namby-pamby’ window-dressing lefty policies, to con mugs into thinking ‘they care’.
    As another correspondent wrote, ironically the BNP are the only real mass socialist party left in Britain, if you can stomach their avowed and overt racism, that is.

  9. It’s hard for the average guy to face up to the stream of elite propaganda on his own. The rich have thousands of pundits, hack economists etc to flood their controlled media with their bullshit. On the other side, the rare voices that are coherent are hard to find. Most serious economists nowadays will admit that economics is basically bullshit, with no more predictive power than astrology, and frankly that includes so-called Marxist economists – these all seem happy just to prove that it’s all down to the declining rate of profit, and recommend revolution. That leaves the ‘modern monetary theorists’ ( like Bill Mitchell of Billy Blogg) who I find plausible but too counter-intuitive to make much headway with; and the neo-Keynesians whose approach has the merit of being based on a track record of success, and who talk a language accessible to the average educated punter – so stick with the latter, and a few ‘not sure what you’d call ’ems’ like Mike Hudson, Ellen Brown, and Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Stiglitz…
    I reckon the average Joe can get as much understanding as practically necessary from Hudson, Brown and Galbraith – if I can understand them, most folks can. Try these ( keep them and look at them a few times and ponder what they say):
    There Is No Economic Justification for Deficit Reduction
    by James K. Galbraith
    Statement to the Commission on Deficit Reduction
    by James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, and Vice President, Americans for Democratic Action, June 30, 2010
    http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/galbraith160710.html
    What Happens When Deficit Hawks Set Policy
    Meltdown in the EU – Mike Whitney (he’s usually very turgid, but here he’s readable and spot on)
    http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05212010.html
    EU Today, US Tomorrow
    Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: the “New Austerity” Road
    By MICHAEL HUDSON
    http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson06252010.html

      1. I don’t believe that for one bit! They do it because the masses want them to? LOL, come on, man, give it up. They do it because they are elites and this has been an elite project since day one, dismantling social democracy, getting rid of social spending and taking out the safety net. The elites hate all that stuff, and they are always trying to get rid of it. Now’s their chance.
        As far as the US goes, you may have a point. Your average dipshit American thinks we need to “git that derned deficit down.” Then he waddles off to get another beer and slice of pizza.
        This doesn’t affect Republicans as they want to do it anyway, but it does put pressure on Democrats who are not so keen on deficit reduction like Obama. Because the media is screaming, “The public demands deficit reduction right now!!!!!!!!!!!” That’s the Far Right AP every single say now. So there’s pressure on Obama to go along with that, yes. But I don’t think that is happening anywhere else on Earth.

  10. The BNP is more left wing economically than any other party. Im not crazy about them, and Im aware of their neo-nazi roots, but I maintain my opinnion, that if I was British, they would the party I votefor.

  11. They way I see it, Britain is being colonized and the BNP is the only party willing to put up any serious resistance. Yeah they have flaws and a questionable Nazi past, but I think the gravity of the situation warrants looking past that. Even Judeo-Christian anti-anti-semite (anti-anti-non-non-gentile) gatekeeper Lawrence Auster is willing to give them a fair hearing despite their Nazi past.

    1. All over Europe zionazis are giving ‘ a sympathetic hearing’ to their kindred-spirits the racist (anti-anyone darker than Italian) far-right; and giving them money and sympathetic media coverage. As long as they stick to Muslim-bashing, support Israel, and submit to the jewish colonisation of Europe, they find a way out of obscurity into mainstream electoral respectability. They’re not only nazis; they’re TRAITORS!
      Sure, the BNP have got the most left-wing economic policies of all the UK electoral parties – they talk a good fight. I don’t believe a word of it. They’d no more be bound by electoral pledges than the rest of the slimy politicos. They’ve already shown that they’d do anything for ‘the sweet smell of success.
      The only thing to be said for the BNP is that if they gained power they might round up the Trots, and the trade union bureaucrats, and drop them out of a plane over the Atlantic, like Pinochet did. That could be the best thing to happen to the British left for a long long time.

  12. BTW, which commenter was it on this site who started using “non-non-gentile,” as the new way to say Jew?
    It’s the best name for Jews ever thought of IMO, just want to credit the source.

  13. Well, Thatcher certainly did one major thing: change the political consensus in the UK towards neoliberalism and making things work in the interests of bankers and financial services. Even the so-called Labour party went in this direction, though they did spend a lot on public services. Hence I think now is why you are seeing the Corbynite backlash with a lot on the old left fighting back against the old centrist viewpoint.
    However I’d agree that she didn’t do as much for the good of the country as the rightwingers might like you to think. And there are certain things this government are doing that Thatcher would never do; really scraping the bottom of the privatization barrel. Thatcher appraently said she’d not dream of selling off the Royal Mail as it would involve ‘privatizing the Queen’s head’ or words to that effect (the Queen’s head is found on all British stamps).
    As for the benefit changes, broken clock principle in effect there are one r two good things about it, but the way in which it is being done is extremely punitive and utterly cack-handed. From the so-called “Work Capability Assessments” for the disabled which in practice are not all that good at proving who is actually fit for work, and the fact has allegedly driven some to suicide.
    Whilst trying to change the rules for actual jobseekers to make those of us less than serious about their jobseeking work harder at it is possibly not altogether bad, it is again very punitive: increase the level of sanctions to a maximum of three years, and apply sanctions at the drop of a hat in many cases. On the other hand, after so long unemployed you get put on the so-called “Work Programme” which means you get farmed out to a private company which does very little for you- I got about as much support as I probably would have at the Jobcentre- and the Jobcentre kind of turns a blind eye.
    Universal Credit is not entirely a bad idea as it avoids the so-called “benefits trap” where it actually made less sense to work part-time as you would lose benefits and be worse off, but again he implementation meant some new fancy IT system which went way over budget.
    And the list goes on. Ultimately it’s good for a few very rich people, not so good for everyone else.
    The real kicker is the way the Tories and the right-wing media have essentially propagandized people into actually accepting this- for many ordinary folks to blame each other instead of the people who are really to blame. Benefit “scroungers”, the unions, immigrants… again, broken clock principle, there is a grain of truth there but it’s basically an excuse to divide and conquer and distract from those at the top.
    Mind you, the support for UKIP, partly as a result of this is an interesting thing which I won’t go into too much right now. Suffice to say Robert would probably hate many of their policies (generally economic right, leaning towards libertarian, climate skeptics) but at the same time addressing the failings of the establishment and much of what the Left has become.
    Would hardly describe the Lib Dems quite as Robert does – they’re pretty centre-left – but they did have some radical policy proposals up to 2010 which attracted a lot of the protest vote back then, when they seemed to make a lot of sense with people very disgruntled wth both the two main parties and (given this was in the wake of the expenses scandal, the middle of a recession etc.) politics in general. They really did get very badly burned in 2015, winning less of the vote share than UKIP and viewer seats than the Scottish National Party or as many as the (Irish loyalst sectarian and ultra-conservative) DUP. The supposedly cast-iron pledge to abolish tuition fees being one of the key parts to this- get into bed with the Tories and they went along in raising them to £9000, the opposite of what they promised. Ultimately, they were a radical sounding but otherwise common sense party that turned out to be little better than Yellow Tories and equally untrustworthy as anyone else when they got a shot at power.

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