(no subject)

[fpb]

With this budget, the Tories are within sight of the job they set themselves since Margaret Thatcher being made party leader: drag Britain into the third world. Once we start summing up the number of tenants who will be evicted and unable to find housing anywhere; people who will lose their jobs and find themselves unable either to find or to keep their house on the forthcoming rates of benefit; criminals who will go unwatched because jails and the probation service will be understaffed (they already are) and the police even more impotent than it already is; and the continued inflow of clueless immigrants whose view of Britain is fifty years out of date - I say: watch for the swift rise of third world slums built of corrugated steel and cardboard, and for the unstoppable spread of rough sleepers. Hundreds of thousands of people, at the very least, will not have anywhere to lay their head - not even jail.

But at least the banks will have been saved and the bankers will still be free to award each other million-pound bonuses. And that is what really matters.

Comments

Right, it’s a fair cop. ACPO and All That.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

You’ve twigged at last. For most of my lifetime, we’ve been working for just this. Partly because it’s such fun to be simply evil, and partly of course out of personal animus. That was certainly why I signed on in my late teenaged years.

We’ve done well, I think. I mean, it’s one thing to go on for some decades keeping a solemn face whilst banging on about liberty and prosperity, when all the while we’ve been actually bent upon ruining the country; but it takes a special talent, and bloody hard graft, so to infiltrate Labour as to create a series of economic and spending disasters, and to elevate the Worst Chancellor Ever first to the Exchequer and then to the premiership, as to make a crash inevitable. It’s not been easy, you know: posing as HM Loyal Opposition even as we directed our puppets to over-regulate the markets, bend over for the EU, find the historic bottom of the gold market and sell off the whole bullion reserve, drive away production, jobs, and wealth creation by swingeing taxation, enter into procurement contracts that cannot be broken despite their resulting in HMS White Elephant, throw open the country to all comers so as to have more people on the dole and sleeping rough, sink billions into the unaccountable long firm fraud that is Brussels, create a surveillance state, cock up Northern Rock, swell the public sector like the tumour it is and thus, by taxation, transfer taxable wealth from the poorer and the productive to a gang of politically-connected bureaucrats and quangocrats who do bugger all for their pay packets but create a reliable payroll vote for our Labour puppets, sod agriculture in ways previously unimagined and unimaginable, bugger the countryside with useless wind farms, and burden an already sinking economy with ‘green’ taxation and regulation. Wot larks.

And we did it all whilst mouthing the principles of Austrian economics, which was specially clever of us, as, everywhere they’ve actually been tried, they’ve created an expansion of wealth – in all sectors – and liberty. God, but we’re cunning.

I confess, there was a bit of a cock-up when we let the mask slip with Boy Dave and his too-early admission that we weren’t, actually, Thatcherites at all; but, fortunately (ahem. Purely fortuitous, of course. [Evil laugh.]) our moles in Labour turned up trumps when the unions imposed Special Ed Miliballs on a party that really didn’t wish for him as leader. What can I say: when you’re evil, you’re lucky. I realise we’re not perfect, I make quite certain that you’d have done a far better job of managing affairs, but it’s worked out well in the end, hasn’t it. We’re not as cleverly diabolical or as diabolically clever as you Continentals, yet we have managed rather handsomely in pretending all along that we sought more liberty and more prosperity for the subject – share ownership, home ownership, an end to dependency on the dole, lower rates, stronger families – when of course our true object was to create a Third World Britain that Labour might envy, a mere satrapy of the EU. Not bad, for all that we were forced, until the Advent of Dave, to operate through what the inattentive believed – it’s too funny, really – was the ‘other party’, what?

You and you alone have had the perspicacity, the wisdom, the financial expertise, the sheer cleverness, and the raw courage, to have seen what we were really about and to have exposed us: well done (one must pay grudging tribute to so formidable an enemy, after all). But don’t let yourself become too pleased with your cleverness. You’ll never suspect what we’re up to with Pakistan cricket, Liverpool FC, Strictly (beware of Agent Widdecombe), and the Wayne Rooney contract!

Re: Right, itâ™s a fair cop. ACPO and All That.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My dear man, please work out how many people will end up both jobless and homeless under these provisions. Each public-sector sacking will probably result in a private-sector job loss, since public sector employees - this may surprise you - spend the same money other people do, and when they can't spend it, shops and businesses suffer in exactly the same way as they do when private employees are sacked. But what scares me the most is the blow to rented accommodation. When you are proposing to let an awful lot of people suffer a heavy drop in their income, you cannot at the same time cut housing benefit and shoot the price of council house rentals upwards without discovering that a very large number of people will find the underside of bridges and the inside of packing crates the only economically viable place to stay. This will also punish all the buy-to-let landlords, whose market will drastically shrink, without doing anything to diminish the abnormal and damaging percentage of mortgage holders, which is the most distorting single factor in Britain's economy.

Benefits, especially housing benefits, were not designed as a device to rob the poor unfortunate rich on behalf of the undeserving idle shiftless poor. To the contrary, they were set up on the clear understanding that it was better for the whole country that the lowest levels of society be housed decently and with a minimum of consideration for health. When there wer such things as slums, everyone was eventually forced to understand that the ill health, the crime and the disorder they fostered were not kept within a cordon sanitaire, but affected the whole of society. To make sure that some damned unemployed tinker did not live five at a room with other equally miserable creatures or spend his nights in a ditch also diminished the chances that the Duke who lived three miles down the road might die of a disgusting contagious illness or be knifed one night at random by some sturdy beggar who would never be identified or convicted (because his likes were too many in one place). Well, council estates may be unpleasant places, but they are certainly, even now, incomparably better (and safer) than the things they replaced. And to deliberately indulge in a kind of politics that will result in placing people on the street - literally - is a crime not only against them, but against society at large. Add to this that the Ministry of Justice had its funds slashed while the budget insured that its services will be more needed than ever, and you will begin to have an idea of what I see coming down the road. AND ALL OF THIS BECAUSE A BUNCH OF FUCKING BANKERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO GO BUST AS THEY DESERVED.

Not at all, my man. (1)

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

It would behove you – it should at least be slightly less shame-making – to hold, rather than to shift, your ground. If your complaint is that, as I as a good Hayekian have long insisted, Northern Rock ought never to have been artificially ‘saved’ and that failing institutions must be allowed to fail, make that argument: but you cannot possibly blame the Conservative Party, much less the Thatcherites such as myself in it, for that – or not with any intellectual honesty you can’t. As it stands, to use an analogy that is quite deliberately near the knuckle, your initial argument – that the Conservatives have spent decades setting out to destroy Britain and have now succeeded by, oh, actually attempting to stave off national bankruptcy caused by Labour (as it inevitably is) – bears the same relation to your reply to my remarkably mild (all things being considered) comment, that an attack upon the Roman church as an institution should bear to a response, after a dissenting comment, that decried instead all religion generally and drew most its examples from Nonconformism.

Your contention that a reduction in the increase of public spending – and that is all that is going forward: the term ‘cuts’ is not so much captious as flagrantly dishonest – will cause a drop in spending and thus an economic contraction, is not your finest moment. If one were to assume that the public sector must be propped up artificially lest nice, more-or-less educated administrators not lose their places and thus spend less at the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, one has no grounds for not making the very same argument in favour of artificially propping up banks and failing industrial concerns. You have in fact merely shifted the ‘too big to fail’ argument from sectors that do actually provide the tax base, to that which absorbs it and then lets a moiety of it trickle back down to the plumber, the fruiterer, and the fishmonger (I daren’t note the thatcher, as you appear to be allergic to the term). What you are failing to account for is the simple, central, and incontrovertible fact is that the plumber, thatcher (sorry), fishmonger, greengrocer, fruiterer, and butcher – far more than any number of dukes – are in fact paying their public sector customers’ salaries to begin with, as well as providing all the other benefits you wax so eloquent in favour of. A reduction in the growth of government expenditure – if it is only managing to leave off paying interest upon interest upon interest upon the insane borrowing to which Labour subjected the realm – let alone an actual reduction of government expenditure, leaves HMG in a position, which it must then take, to lower rates and taxes on the plumber, thatcher (you simply must get used to the word), fishmonger, greengrocer, fruiterer, and butcher. These will then have more money to spend on the actual creation of wealth, such that lower rates of taxation actually result in higher revenues even as the said tradespeople have more disposable income to invest, to create jobs and wealth with, and, for that matter, to give to charitable purposes. They will indeed, if thus set free from crippling taxation, be able to create jobs to hire the displaced managerial and admin. hordes – and into jobs that actually create rather than redistribute and reduce common wealth. The knock-on effect upon interest and lending rates is too obvious – as indeed all of this ought to be too obvious – to want discussion.

Not at all, my man. (2)

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

No one likes the stark choices the government is faced with – and that any government that might have resulted from the last General Election should have been faced with, due to Labour’s profligacy. No one relishes the prospect, however brief it may be, of dislocation. But I remind you that you began by accusing my party, and indeed my wing of my party, and indeed, not to put too fine a point upon it, me, of seeking deliberately to destroy this country, and your bases, so far as you have one, are the errors of the previous, Labour government, and the response that must now be made to the mess those incompetents created (and you are even now accusing me and mine of ‘crimes’ against the poor and against ‘society’). You really want to consider just how far I am going, under those circumstances, to be exceptionally civil in replying to this rubbish.

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My first statement was the result of sheer white-hot rage at the obscenity of the brutish provisions of this budget. It seemed to me all too typical of the worst kind of machismo in politics, effectively rejoicing in making others suffer and going on about the need for difficult choices - at others' expense. (As for something called New Labour being part of the horror, I never regarded them as anything but Thatcherites with some extra PC for colour. Look whether I ever had a good thing to say for Mr.Brown.) Your elaboration on the unproductive nature of the public sector strikes me as unthinking; when you are in need of such unproductive bodies as the fire brigade, the police, or the jails (which have taken one Hell of a hit in this literally criminal budget, to the great pleasure of dope dealers and other professional villains), will you lecture them on their unproductiveness? That is pure windbaggery, in other words. People don't pay tax because they want to, but because they need to, and they know it. Without all those unproductive persons, you would not be able to be productive.

Besides, once these people are sacked, they aren't just going to jump into the Thames, you know. At least, most of them won't. They are going to stay around, and if they were unproductive before, they will be ten times as unproductive now. The social services budget will leap up, however many ukases you pass to keep it down.

Finally, the trash about the wonderful miracle-working private sector, so brilliant at creating jobs when the public sector doesn't. I have spent most of my life on the edges of the private sector, working in various areas from private education to magazine distribution, and I can tell you for a fact that this miracle will not happen. The private employer does not employ unless he sees growth, and employs as little as he can. There is no area in modern economics in which a swift growth in employment can be confidently forecast, except perhaps private security guards for rich guys whose security is going to be compromised by the assault upon police and jails. If you imagine that the next couple of years are going to witness anything but a swift increase in the long-term unemployed - of which this country has the Devil's plenty already - I tellyou that you are living on the Moon.

Oh, come, come.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

Look here, we're getting to where we're simply talking past one another. If I am to be drawn into discussing economics - wh is well and good - I shall be forced to do so in less choppy format, the more so as I cannot deal in succession with the series of red herrings being trailed here. I imagine I may have some time over the weekend to do so, although I'm rather busy just now w the new books. Ad interim, I merely state again that you began by decrying the Tories, full stop, and Lady Thatcher; I know you thought little of Blair and Brrrroun, but you did NOT begin by assigning them or their lot any blame, whatever you now say.

Approving, grudgingly, in the current crisis, reductions in spending growth for the police, the gaolers, and the fire brigade is not of course windbaggery, and, again, it will require me, I see, to explain why, in Very Simple Words. And that is true of all of what you are pleased to call yr 'points'.

Finally, I really do think it unseemly, under the circumstances, for you to take the tone and tack you are taking here, 'righteous indignation' or no 'righteous indignation': upon reflection, don't you?

Re: Oh, come, come.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What, I should grin and bear it? Can you give me a single reason why which will bear a second's examination? Let me explain something to you: in the next few months, even if you restrict your experience to strict Daily Mail reader observance, you will still hear things that make me sound mild and moderate. If nothing else, few people in England, let alone the fringe, will be unmoved by the delicacy with which those poor souls in the City have been touched when the ordinary citizen has been belaboured with bludgeons.

Re: Oh, come, come.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.S.: since when is a budget not to be discussed in economic terms?

Oh, good, you've made a choice.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

Let us discuss it, then, in economic rather than political terms. I suggest dispassion, economic literacy, no partisan or parti pris shrieking, and a certain, if acrid, decorum, then.

Re: Oh, good, you've made a choice.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, you mean economics is not about the lives and livelihoods of real human beings? In that case I regret to say that I cannot meet you on that ground. If people don't get angry about economic wrongs (and wrong economics), there is very little they can get angry about. And the difference between first and third world is a matter of economics.

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.S.: You said nothing at all to contradict my contention that this budget will lead to a monumental increase in homelessness and the start of third-world type slums of the kind that had been got rid of in Britain a century ago, nor that the assault upon police and jail will make the streets even less safe than they are.

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.P.S.: And another thing. The thing that most enrages me about this abortion and abomination of a Budget - apart from the way that it in effect spares the bloody bankers and the sinister City from any pain, in spite of the fact that they are the No.1 culprits in our current situation - is the assault upon rented accommodation - another thing on which you said nothing. Now the enormous over-investment in property is one of the biggest distortions in the British economy, and is directly to do with the current crisis (as it is, for that matter, in the similarly distorted American market). Renting should be encouraged, not discouraged; this budget will do precisely nothing for that, and so continue the unproductive obsession with brick and mortar which devours so much private capital.

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Did I just fall into Henry James' LJ?

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, why? But our Gervase does like to sound a bit old-fashioned. And I try to keep up the standard of invective that was set long ago by the great insulters from Pope to Churchill.

Re: Not at all, my man. (2)

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

LOL, that's exactly it. This whole conversation sounds like something from a nineteenth century novel. I'm just easily amused, I guess.