What on earth is going on?
A recent exchange of emails with my MP resulted in his repeating the Low Tax, Low Welfare, High Wage economy mantra.
My response:
Your reply to my recent email is both patronising and wrong in all aspects.
We are now being subjected to the most ill considered social experiment, conducted by Millionaires , as though it were a set test at Eton.
How can you destroy 70 years of social progress in one parliament?
This Government, of which you are a part, is taking us back to the 1930's whilst protecting your friends the bankers and tax dodgers.
This is even more than the Grantham Grocer's daughter dared to imagine in her wildest dreams.
I suggested that we might meet and he responded with an invitation to meet him at one of his surgeries, even suggesting dates before Christmas.
But now it seems that with a further £27 Billion, a hypothetical £27 Billion as various commentators have noticed, being found behind a hypothetical settee or Green Bench, we are it seems being offered a high welfare, high tax (especially if you are a second home owner or buying to let) economy with wages still below the level that they were in 2008.
This Autumn Statement was a breathtaking act of legerdemain, with rabbits in hats, silk scarves being waved to deceive the eye and the political trickery outshining the economic sense and coins materialising out of thin air.
Where was the investment in the future?
Now nurses lose their grants and are offered loans.
Young people are discouraged at all levels.
A social housing programme which is ultimately without meaning.
There is little evidence of research in technology, science, engineering what we have in fact to look forward too in the light of this budget is a low investment, low return, client economy, with the investment such as its is being made by foreign governments.
The shadow chancellor's reference to Mao's little red book may have been a ham fisted but it contained more than a kernel of truth which, unfortunately the China loving chancellor was able to capitalise on. But the long view that is contained in Mao's vision of the struggle to defeat capitalism and introduce socialism continues to inform the Chinese Government in its global strategy.
What could be smarter than taking a leading share holding in Britain's energy supply in the years ahead?
As the Red Book says:
We communists never conceal our political views.
As for imperialist countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to co-exist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and strive to prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbour any unrealistic notions about them.
Even, I imagine, whilst drinking beer and eating fish and chips in a Cotswold pub.
The autumn statement was a series of sound bites designed to capture headlines and in this it was a triumph, but what will happen next?
The building industry has shortages not only in raw materials, from steel to bricks, but also a shortage in skilled workers, from bricklayers to site managers. It is doubtful whether, beyond the headlines, the houses will be built but in the anti revolutionary fervour which underpins the small state society and economy toward which the Tories seek to lead us that won't matter because as 2020 comes around, as the music stops in the game of musical chairs played at the Tory Party Conference, he will blame him or him or him or they will all blame her.
The mantra of high wage, low tax, low welfare is a smokescreen to cover the obvious and barely concealed shifting of the social and economic landscape as greater inequality is achieved through enormous and unjustifiable bonuses for bankers and huge and salary hikes for CEO's.
Alongside the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction leading to the invasion of Iraq, Peter Mandelson's comment about being relaxed about the rich contributed hugely to Tony Blair's undoing.
So there should be, in any decent, contemporary society, a relationship between the earnings of those at either end of the wage spectrum, views about what that relationship should be vary but a recent suggestion was a range of 1-20 with 1 being the lowest and 20 being the highest.
Whilst there is no evidence at all that the Tory Party shares this view, of course not! The evidence published by The Equality Trust plus other commentators is that a more equal society is a society that flourishes socially, educationally, and in the physical and mental health and well-being of its citizens.
In today's newspaper's the left suggested that there had been a U Turn and whilst welfare will still be reduced, (the devil in the detail) nevertheless the age of austerity is officially over, whilst the right decried the budget as 'socialist' more or less what Ed Miliband might have done if the public had been foolish enough to return him to power.
My view when I see Chancellor and Prime Minister side by side enjoying the joke of having caused such discomfort to the opposition, that this is simply an exercise lifted almost entirely from the edition of a Tom Brown's Schooldays that I missed.
I wrote some years ago in the Church Action on Poverty newsletter that if you replaced the word 'Victorian' with the word 'Dickensian' then the effect of Tory policies in the 1980's becomes clearer.
Victoria we are told 'was not amused' and neither should we be ........
A recent exchange of emails with my MP resulted in his repeating the Low Tax, Low Welfare, High Wage economy mantra.
My response:
Your reply to my recent email is both patronising and wrong in all aspects.
We are now being subjected to the most ill considered social experiment, conducted by Millionaires , as though it were a set test at Eton.
How can you destroy 70 years of social progress in one parliament?
This Government, of which you are a part, is taking us back to the 1930's whilst protecting your friends the bankers and tax dodgers.
This is even more than the Grantham Grocer's daughter dared to imagine in her wildest dreams.
I suggested that we might meet and he responded with an invitation to meet him at one of his surgeries, even suggesting dates before Christmas.
But now it seems that with a further £27 Billion, a hypothetical £27 Billion as various commentators have noticed, being found behind a hypothetical settee or Green Bench, we are it seems being offered a high welfare, high tax (especially if you are a second home owner or buying to let) economy with wages still below the level that they were in 2008.
This Autumn Statement was a breathtaking act of legerdemain, with rabbits in hats, silk scarves being waved to deceive the eye and the political trickery outshining the economic sense and coins materialising out of thin air.
Where was the investment in the future?
Now nurses lose their grants and are offered loans.
Young people are discouraged at all levels.
A social housing programme which is ultimately without meaning.
There is little evidence of research in technology, science, engineering what we have in fact to look forward too in the light of this budget is a low investment, low return, client economy, with the investment such as its is being made by foreign governments.
The shadow chancellor's reference to Mao's little red book may have been a ham fisted but it contained more than a kernel of truth which, unfortunately the China loving chancellor was able to capitalise on. But the long view that is contained in Mao's vision of the struggle to defeat capitalism and introduce socialism continues to inform the Chinese Government in its global strategy.
What could be smarter than taking a leading share holding in Britain's energy supply in the years ahead?
As the Red Book says:
We communists never conceal our political views.
As for imperialist countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to co-exist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and strive to prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbour any unrealistic notions about them.
Even, I imagine, whilst drinking beer and eating fish and chips in a Cotswold pub.
The autumn statement was a series of sound bites designed to capture headlines and in this it was a triumph, but what will happen next?
The building industry has shortages not only in raw materials, from steel to bricks, but also a shortage in skilled workers, from bricklayers to site managers. It is doubtful whether, beyond the headlines, the houses will be built but in the anti revolutionary fervour which underpins the small state society and economy toward which the Tories seek to lead us that won't matter because as 2020 comes around, as the music stops in the game of musical chairs played at the Tory Party Conference, he will blame him or him or him or they will all blame her.
The mantra of high wage, low tax, low welfare is a smokescreen to cover the obvious and barely concealed shifting of the social and economic landscape as greater inequality is achieved through enormous and unjustifiable bonuses for bankers and huge and salary hikes for CEO's.
Alongside the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction leading to the invasion of Iraq, Peter Mandelson's comment about being relaxed about the rich contributed hugely to Tony Blair's undoing.
So there should be, in any decent, contemporary society, a relationship between the earnings of those at either end of the wage spectrum, views about what that relationship should be vary but a recent suggestion was a range of 1-20 with 1 being the lowest and 20 being the highest.
Whilst there is no evidence at all that the Tory Party shares this view, of course not! The evidence published by The Equality Trust plus other commentators is that a more equal society is a society that flourishes socially, educationally, and in the physical and mental health and well-being of its citizens.
In today's newspaper's the left suggested that there had been a U Turn and whilst welfare will still be reduced, (the devil in the detail) nevertheless the age of austerity is officially over, whilst the right decried the budget as 'socialist' more or less what Ed Miliband might have done if the public had been foolish enough to return him to power.
My view when I see Chancellor and Prime Minister side by side enjoying the joke of having caused such discomfort to the opposition, that this is simply an exercise lifted almost entirely from the edition of a Tom Brown's Schooldays that I missed.
I wrote some years ago in the Church Action on Poverty newsletter that if you replaced the word 'Victorian' with the word 'Dickensian' then the effect of Tory policies in the 1980's becomes clearer.
Victoria we are told 'was not amused' and neither should we be ........
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