Friday 14 February 2020

Pursuing a new career?


There were suggestions yesterday that, following his sudden resignation from the cabinet, the former chancellor might also be about to resign from parliament and pursue an alternative career.  In the light of his surprise discovery yesterday of the fossilised remains of a human backbone, perhaps he could be guided towards an exciting new career in archaeology.  Almost anything would be better (for the rest of us anyway) than for him to return to his former life selling the sort of dodgy derivatives which caused the 2008 financial crisis.
The reactions to his departure have caused me to question my memory.  I was sure that the slogan on the barn read ‘four legs good, two legs bad’.  I have a vivid recollection that, for the last ten years, the Tories have been telling us that a balanced budget was absolutely essential, and that the markets wouldn’t stand for unfunded expenditure.  Yet the immediate reaction in the financial markets to a suggestion that replacing Javid with someone who will do whatever Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson tells him to do, including abandoning the aim of a balanced budget so that Johnson can ‘splash the cash’, was very positive, and the pound soared.  I don’t think I dreamt the bit about the party (Labour) that is now looking like the fiscal conservatives being regularly accused of being profligate for urging rather less expenditure than the PM is now proposing.  Either my memory is seriously defective, or else the Tories have simply been lying to us for the last decade.  It’s not exactly a tough call between the two.

1 comment:

dafis said...

You have cycles like business cycles, economic cycles, political cycles, bicycles, motor cycles etc etc This is a hybrid of as many cycles as you care to construct in that it is a case of "make it up as you go along" and with a liar at the helm the capacity for unrestrained statements and inconsistent behaviours is expanded geometrically.

I am sometimes accused of being paranoid although my defence is that I have a highly attuned sensitivity to any deviant behaviours. My take on this sudden surge in spending is that it is superficially a major shift but in its dark reality it is just a mere continuation of policy.
Since before the intro of "austerity" in 2008 -10 there was a focus on privatisation where public assets were acquired by the corporate sector at a discount ( = theft from the public purse).
With austerity public spending was curtailed and very rich individuals and corporates were rewarded with tax breaks etc while the rest got screwed (= shift of wealth from poor to rich).

Boris' big spend on ultra big budget projects is a continuation of this in that major corporates and their seriously rich stakeholders will benefit from contracts while the rest of the country will fund these overpriced vanities. Thus shifting more wealth into the coffers of the rich and the major corporates.

Impoverished and enslaved by stealth.