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A new video by EL4C – made by the same film-maker behind the recent Labour party political broadcast that rattled the Establishment so much with its powerful message that the Establishment attacked him – prepares for Philip Hammond’s budget speech by ripping the ground out from under the feet of the Tories’ main pillars for their failed austerity regime that has inflicted misery on millions:
Labour didn’t leave the economy in a mess – the bankers did.
Austerity is built on a lie and it will be never be over whilst the Tories are in power – it’s in their DNA. #Budget2019 pic.twitter.com/N4ZXMYKmDk
— EL4C (@EL4JC) October 29, 2018
The Labour Party has joined in with its own video deconstructing austerity and laying bare the damage it is doing to the UK:
Let’s break down austerity, brick by brick 👇 #Budget2018 pic.twitter.com/JUbsIAzGeK
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) October 26, 2018
The Tories’ whole project is coming apart at the seams in spite of the desperate efforts of the Establishment media to hold them together.
Labour has issued a call to MPs of all parties to vote down Hammond’s budget if the Tories do not immediately halt the roll-out of Universal Credit, which has been the cause of enormous suffering even deaths, in spite of DWP Secretary Esther McVey’s willingness to lie about it.
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The idea that Labour overspent does have some credibility as so much money was wasted on nonsense such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then there was Trident.
The Labour Party’s failure to challenge the overspending myth is really what cost it the 2015 general election.
However, it could easily have been prevented if the arguments had been made as soon as Ed Miliband was elected leader. As we know, that did not happen.
This article illustrates the point very well:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562023/Tories-vow-to-match-Labour-spending.html
The arguments are related to the cause of the 2008 crash which many who worked in the City claim was nothing to do with the bankers. That lie has never been nailed and because right wing members of the PLP did not stand up against austerity and in fact voted for it in some cases, the lie continues. The Tories in opposition supported the Iraq War…..and yes Labour under Blair and Brown were keen to sell of the NHS raid Pension funds and believed all the twaddle about the dot-com revolution. But this is a socialist Labour Party now -very different and it is about time we exploded the myth.
They are still stamping all over the vulnerable. Their latest wheeze is to encourage doctors to lie to and deceive their patients thus endangering the relationship of trust which is essential to both doctor and patient (see last paragraph of letter from DWP in link below)
https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/gps-told-to-consider-making-fit-notes-conditional-on-patients-having-appointment-with-work-coach/
Amazing… great find, Steve.
The damned gall of them to pretend that an unqualified junior civil servant or contract winner’s untrained zero hours wage slave on commission is better qualified than a GP to diagnose a malingerer…
that medically-unqualified MPs believe themselves entitled to proclaim that work cures all ills – and then presume to enforce that obvious fallacy…
that they think it’s acceptable to cajole and blackmail GPs into ripping up the Hippocratic oath in furtherance of their naked neoliberal dogma…
that any government should assume the right arbitrarily to withhold treatment (rest and time are treatments) and work the sick to death as if they were WWII Japanese POWs…
Whichever neoliberal think-cesspit excreted this crime against humanity – and if it proceeds to action its perpetrators – deserve to be tried at the Hague.
I strongly recommend Kitty Jones’s blog. Her posts tend to fall into the ‘long read’ category. As well as being thought provoking they are always well researched with links to the evidence they are based on.
She has an interesting initial analysis of the budget. https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/budget-overview/
Skwawk I have seen the second video but not the myth one. I can’t find it. How do I download it., From where? I want to see it and share it and can’t do it from your page. Technically I find the page is difficult to post to and then see my post and I have to log in and follow each time it has been accepted. All convoluted. I also want to write to you Steve about some issues of credibility that has stopped some Red Labour pages sharing your stuff.,
Rosie
Visit this tweet in your twitter app or browser:
https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/1056824415307083777
Neo-Liberal politicians from across the political spectrum have propagated the myth that public is bad private is good, the reasons may not be clear to most as to what motivates them, but the MPs scandal does show who and why they supported these policies.
We might call it self engrandisement, personally I call it corruption.
This little video spells out why life just does not have to be this way. There is never a problem with money for these politicians when they want to fight in Americas wars, but when it comes to the NHS, suddenly we are broke.
I clearly recall David Cameron’s answer to the question “when the deficit is paid back, will you reinstate the cuts” posed by a journalist in 2010, no he replied. Proof if ever it were needed that ‘small government’ was the intention all along.
An interesting fact: In 2006 the deficit was the same as it is now and productivity was higher than now. So it just goes to show that more government spending doesn’t necessarily harm the economy.
There’s nothing wrong with austerity! Except when it is used as a tool to screw the poor. Let those with the broadest shoulders take the strain. lest we forget that we’re all in this together, isn’t that right Maybot!
I don’t have a problem with the concept of austerity, if that means eliminating wasteful gov’t practices but I do have a problem when it is used as a stick to beat the poor. Quantitative Easing i.e. printing money & lowering interest rates to zero, allows banks to recapitalise @ no cost to themselves & powerful organisations/institutions to ‘borrow’ money again @ no cost to them & major companies to buy their own shares, again @ no cost. Strange, that when interest rates are so low, banks do not lend to stimulate the housing market or the economy, they have no need to ‘make’ money because it is provided for them @ no cost. You on the other hand? The abolition of the gold standard was an error. There are financial repercussions for any gov’t that endlessly prints money as that currency eventually becomes worthless & the bond market collapses & no financial institution will lend to that gov’t, making 2008 look like a picnic.
There’s nothing wrong with fiat money, any money printed will eventually be taxed back to nothing. It makes everything easy to understand, government debt is our savings to the penny and vice versa. As long as inflation is controlled through taxation no one will lose confidence in a sovereign currency. You are the first leftist (?) I’ve ever heard backing the gold standard, in fact, I can’t find a single economist who would want to return to such inflexibility that caused the great depression.
You should read some Keynes, old Thatcher used to liken the economy to a household budget, but she knew better than to believe such nonsense herself. These days we have the tools for targeting inflation and deflation.
I want to relate some stories to illustrate that money, prices and value are all relative and can be determined as much politically as economically.
Cap Haïten, Haïti 1977 – A boy aged about 13 called Alex with serious cataracts offered me 12 avocados in exchange for an empty coke bottle. Although this was only an opening gambit, I accepted straight away. He needed the deposit on the bottle towards saving up for an eye operation.
Berlin, GDR, 1987 Entering the metro, I put my 1 mark in the box and tugged at the protruding ticket: apparently too hard because the whole roll of tickets starting to spew out. A friend put me right: “the box on the left contains coins, the box on the right contains the roll of tickets: you put your mark in the left box and you carefully tear off 1 ticket from the right box.” “What if I don’t put any money in the left box and take all the tickets from the right box?” “Well, you could do that but it would just prove that you were an antisocial cunt, wouldn’t it?” All around in the metro were displays of expensive art and pottery that anyone could have nicked if they felt like it – but they hadn’t.
Novosibirsk 1988. Department store entertainment section: Pianos and Televisions mostly, the latter 10 times more expensive than the former, despite the fact that a vast amount more labour had gone into the former. Asked why, the assistant explained: “Playing the piano or other musical instruments is a worthwhile and socially useful activity: watching television is not so useful, nor is it socially productive or good for the health.” A little while after I bought a set of tea cups, the price of 1 kopeck was baked into the bottom of the cup and had been apparently ever since 1928, when the price was also 1 kopeck. If the USSR still existed, the price would still be 1 kopeck.
In 1972 Alanis Obomsawin, who was an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve, seventy odd miles northeast of Montreal, said:
“Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”
Since 1985 when I first heard bank deregulation mooted I’ve been banging on that it would not just allow but would force the banks to compete ever more recklessly and that that would inevitably lead to a bubble.
It was Brown’s responsibility to make the case that Thatcher and Reagan were to blame – but that would have meant him also losing credit for the boom years and admitting to his complete failure to appreciate the cause and inevitability of the crash.
Unforgivable.