havemehavana

On the Tory cuts, some interesting comments on an article by Julian Glover.

The following are both from user heverale, the second really just for context:

Neoliberalism is supposed to deliver growth, and on the back of that, trickle down. Well, it can deliver growth some of the time, but trickle-down, not so much when it delivers structural unemployment that leaves many out of the loop and depresses wages for the rest.

Here’s Alan Budd, darling economist of the right, recently head of the OBR, and economic advisor to Thatcher when she started her “programme”….

Curtis: For some economists who were involved in this story, there is a further question: were their theories used to disguise political policies that would have otherwise been very difficult to implement in Britain?

Budd: The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. Now, my worry is … that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions … who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.

They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes — if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.

Now again, I would not say I believe that story, but when I really worry about all this, I worry whether that indeed was really what was going on.

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We tried letting the private sector create the jobs, but unfortunately they are all too happy to asset strip and offshore, and the banks have virtually stopped lending to business. We’ve had decades of neoliberalism and structural unemployment remains because they like it… it depresses wages. And then the banks took out a chunk of the economy.

Even the Americans saved their car industry.

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Via CiF.