Pengwern
Just doesn't shut up
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2005
- Messages
- 11,159
- Reaction score
- 2,983
Just watching Tory Conference. Hammond, the second richest MP with over £8m net personal wealth, mostly drawn from his company Castlemead, which took advantage of Thatcher's Health Privatisation to start building Doctor's surgeries within Housing Developments in the early 1990s, provided more detail to flesh out what leading Tories have been saying the last few days in response to Corbyn's comment that Capitalism has lost its legitimacy.
Hammond went straight for the 1970s, calling it the type of society Corbyn and McDonnell want to return to, and arguing that the British people dumped it in 1979 because state directed economics just does not work, 'reminding' us that Labour had to go 'cap in hand' to the IMF in 1975-6 for a loan to keep its dysfunctional economics going. Capitalism, or "the free market economy" as the new narrative prefers to call it, is the only known source of economic progress which can deliver rising living standards to people. The Tory claim is that living standards have doubled since 1979 How is that measured, I wonder?), and that Capitalism has since delivered huge economic success to countries which were formally part of the 'third world'.
Most of this is grounded in nothing more than claims of self-evident truth, asserted as a "history lesson", despite its highly selective version of the 1970s, which totally ignores the monetary effects of Nixon's marketisation of the dollar in 1970 and the 29-fold rise in oil prices in the 1970s, which is what tipped the post-war mixed economies into inflationary crisis and forced Capitalism to choose its gung-ho option: neoliberal globalisation.
The Tories also rely too much on language - euphemisms for their own politically-motivated relaxation of selected austerity mechanisms, such " paying for this by the normal governmental means of issuing gilts, which are lent out to bring in funds", which very few voters understand, whereas Corbyn's suggestions of funding social spending, which would use this self-same mechanism is dubbed "irresponsible borrowing".
All this is really a re-hashing of the propaganda the Tories have used before; the key to its previous success is far less to do with the organic resonance or applicability of its core messages and much more to do with the availability to them of mass communications outlets in private hands that are willing to repeat it ad nauseam, so that it becomes lodged in peoples' minds and becomes a staple of public debate. TINA was not built in a day or by the Tories alone.
This is further grist to the mill of the argument that we are in a new era in which basic political issues centred around the kind of society and governmental mechanisms we want have returned to centre stage, displacing economistic demands characteristic of the wage militancy of the 1960s and 1970s. Developments in Catalonia confirm not only this but that the tide of history is also with the self-determination of alienated minorities within imposed nation states. Québécois are already celebrating the immense gains made by Catalans so far; Scots must surely be purring inwardly or overtly. Walloons, East Germans, Sunnis and all the other myriad groups that have been forced into nation states run by others and often discriminatory towards them are likely to press their secessionary demands with more confidence than before, leading to a new round of fracturing of the the nation state template following the 1990s one.
The world is changing very quickly indeed!
Hammond went straight for the 1970s, calling it the type of society Corbyn and McDonnell want to return to, and arguing that the British people dumped it in 1979 because state directed economics just does not work, 'reminding' us that Labour had to go 'cap in hand' to the IMF in 1975-6 for a loan to keep its dysfunctional economics going. Capitalism, or "the free market economy" as the new narrative prefers to call it, is the only known source of economic progress which can deliver rising living standards to people. The Tory claim is that living standards have doubled since 1979 How is that measured, I wonder?), and that Capitalism has since delivered huge economic success to countries which were formally part of the 'third world'.
Most of this is grounded in nothing more than claims of self-evident truth, asserted as a "history lesson", despite its highly selective version of the 1970s, which totally ignores the monetary effects of Nixon's marketisation of the dollar in 1970 and the 29-fold rise in oil prices in the 1970s, which is what tipped the post-war mixed economies into inflationary crisis and forced Capitalism to choose its gung-ho option: neoliberal globalisation.
The Tories also rely too much on language - euphemisms for their own politically-motivated relaxation of selected austerity mechanisms, such " paying for this by the normal governmental means of issuing gilts, which are lent out to bring in funds", which very few voters understand, whereas Corbyn's suggestions of funding social spending, which would use this self-same mechanism is dubbed "irresponsible borrowing".
All this is really a re-hashing of the propaganda the Tories have used before; the key to its previous success is far less to do with the organic resonance or applicability of its core messages and much more to do with the availability to them of mass communications outlets in private hands that are willing to repeat it ad nauseam, so that it becomes lodged in peoples' minds and becomes a staple of public debate. TINA was not built in a day or by the Tories alone.
This is further grist to the mill of the argument that we are in a new era in which basic political issues centred around the kind of society and governmental mechanisms we want have returned to centre stage, displacing economistic demands characteristic of the wage militancy of the 1960s and 1970s. Developments in Catalonia confirm not only this but that the tide of history is also with the self-determination of alienated minorities within imposed nation states. Québécois are already celebrating the immense gains made by Catalans so far; Scots must surely be purring inwardly or overtly. Walloons, East Germans, Sunnis and all the other myriad groups that have been forced into nation states run by others and often discriminatory towards them are likely to press their secessionary demands with more confidence than before, leading to a new round of fracturing of the the nation state template following the 1990s one.
The world is changing very quickly indeed!
