That’s it really. You probably know exactly what I am thinking. So get commenting.
My thoughts along these lines were provoked by a comment on this piece in The Sun by Iain Martin, who is prophesying Corbynite doom, in the event of a Corbynite victory.
The comment, in response to what Martin and the first few commenters all say, went thus:
But standards of living are falling and poverty is increasing while those that rule over us get richer and this is happening under a Tory government, so how is this any better than the nightmare scenario that you portray. Truth is that any system that leads to the politicians thinking that the rule over us rather than govern on our behalf is flawed.
Some systems, however, are more flawed than others.
Sliding down a hill is very troubling, but the idea that jumping off a cliff is the answer is crazy. Unless, and this is my real fear, enough British voters are now so angry at the world and the way it is treating them that they are willing totally to ruin their own lives in order to at least knock a little of the stuffing out of the bastards who are doing this to them. Wreck the country would it? Boo hoo. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. The fucking country fucking deserves to be fucking wrecked. The vote as suicide bomb, you might say.
This, I believe, was the psychological fuel behind a significant chunk of the Brexit vote, and if anything could make me regret voting Brexit myself, it is the knowledge that if we get Brexit and then full-on, in-our-faces Corbynism, we really will be in a bad way, every bit as bad as the Remainers have been saying.
The result of the recent British general election was very bad. But it did, perhaps, have this mitigating feature, that it created a country full of people who are seriously scared of Corbynism (that being a link to another piece of writing very similar to Martin’s), before Corbynism has actually struck, and who are able and willing to get their act together to stop such a national catastrophe.
It may be that the electoral rise of Corbyn will, for him and for his cadre of demented followers, turn out to have been premature. From the point of view of the socialists-that-really-mean-it, the time for a country to be realising for the first time what a catastrophe socialism-that-really-means-it would be, needs to be after the socialists-that-really-mean-it have seized command, and when, from the point of view of all those of us who would prefer to live in a half decent country, it’s too late.
The core sentiment — wreak the country? feature, not bug — seems to have been one of the key factors in the Trump’s win in the US.
The tin-eared attempts to paint the trumpening as one thing or another (a Russian plot, the total destruction of democracy, a coup by the insiders (? a particularly risible notion)) all skate past this sentiment with eyes averted.
I’m of the opinion that a lot of Corbyns extra vote in the recent election was a sort of free protest vote. No-one expected him to even hold ground, let alone increase his number of MPs, so if you weren’t that keen on May (and who is to be honest?) then a vote for Corbyn was a free way of sticking two fingers up at everyone, but crucially without having to ever consider what the effect of an actual Corbyn government might be like, or whether it would impact on you.
Yes some people voted for free stuff, but again, they didn’t have to really consider where it would come from, because they didn’t think it would happen. Next time around all the free stuff will be far more scrutinised as to who exactly is paying for it, and whether the sums add up (which of course they don’t). Things like the Land Value Tax would certainly concentrate a few minds in the south and London particularly – its one thing to virtue signal by voting Labour when it costs you nothing, its another when their policy is to increase your property tax by several fold, and said policy is going to be implemented if they win.
Corbyns best chance of victory was when he had no chance, and people could vote for him free of any responsibility. Next time it won’t be like that.
Leaders versus representatives.
Politicians have the conceit to think that we’re looking for leaders, and so they style themselves as leaders.
What we really want are honest representatives. We’re tired of taking an elite lead on morality and principle from a class that seems to lack both.
We’re no longer electing Great Moral Character. Now we elect someone who seems likely to do what we want done. That’s how Trump won, and, if Corbyn is allowed to claim that mantle, that’s why he’ll eventually win.
It’s a nice thought Jim, but
Ha ha ha
Yeah I guess
I’ve got to the stage how where I have decided that I will leave the UK if I get the chance. Miracles may happen, but that possibility aside I see very little hope for the UK now.
Problem is the cost of moving; I’m relatively well paid but my job is quite specific to the UK. Also apart from Switzerland – which is boring and people work too hard – there aren’t many places to move to. New Zealand is probably the best place but too damn far away and too few jobs. US is a bit risky, could go one way but civil war seems like a possibility too. Anyway, I’ll advise my daughters to try and get out before they have made life choices that tie them down here. Why the F should they pay the pensions of retired ‘diversity consultants’? People ask me if I would have these people on the streets freezing to death. F yes. And the horse they road in on.
Let me check those election results again. Yup Labour and more specifically Jeremy Corbyn still lost, despite promising the “Free Shit Army” everything under the sun.
Instead of the 100+ majority that Theresa May was expecting, she got a vote of “not much confidence” from the electorate which has turned her from being a Poundland Maggie Thatcher into little more than a caretaker PM until BRexit is concluded.
The deal with the DUP means that BRExit is assured at a cost of 1 or 2 billion in funding for Northern Ireland and in return we get a weak government which can’t pass harmful legislation because they can’t get it through Parliament. This is especially true of the draconian bollocks that Theresa May has preference for as her time as Home Secretary demonstrated.
I honestly can’t see a problem here.
Overblown. There’ll be a lot of noise and angst, but things are going to settle down fairly soon. It’s already started – the anti-Trump coup is dissolving in embarrassment, Trump’s ratings have remained very stable, and hysterics just haven’t been accomplishing anything. Danger would have been higher had Hillary won. Most of our government apparatus – federal, state, and local – is in conservative hands, meaning that many of the minority who have most loudly decried Trump voted for non-progressives in most elections.
a caretaker PM until BRexit is concluded
I hope not. I’d like to have seen her gone yesterday. Failing that I’m holding up for ‘before Christmas’. Although I know that your holding out for the EU kicking us out without a deal, which I have to say seems likelier by the day with the clowns on the UK side of the table. Davis is a good guy but like too many of his fellow politicians he just doesn’t “do” detail.
This is especially true of the draconian bollocks that Theresa May has preference for as her time as Home Secretary demonstrated.
Because Corbyn is an icon of civil libertarianism? Also Tory right is silenced on civil rights at the moment as they don’t want to rock the boat until Brexit. So what you say may be true but it is not specifically true with respect to civil rights.
All that said I agree the outcome of the election was the least bad possible.
…who didn’t win, which is the important bit.
Normally Labour governments last long enough to end in a financial crisis that clearly is their fault. That’s very clear in 1979 and only a little less so in 1950? and 1970. However the Brown government fell after a Financial crash that they can blame elsewhere (very successfully I might add). It followed a Blair government which kept some sort of control on spending (at least compared to expectations), which reinforces the idea that Labour are reliable, and the system rotten. Therefore we have a generation who do not know that Labour is synonymous with profligate spending.
Despite the best efforts of Nick Cohen et al to persuade people that Corbyn was not a moral or consistent person, the voters were unpersuaded. Significant numbers see him as a man of peace. see this link in the Spectator to see the unexamined assumptions.
I’m afraid that people have to see that things don’t work to accept that their premises are wrong.
The Labour party moderates hated him because they saw him as an incompetent fool who would not be able to get more voters out than were members of Momentum. In the event he proved them wrong. They will now shut up and back him. We now have a Tory party divided without a majority and led by a leader who is regarded as useless, versus a Labour Party reunited under a leader who can motivate the young. Three months ago the Tories were united by support or resignation to a proper Brexit. That’s now up for grabs. In contrast Corbyn was a rare Brexiteer in his party who will now pander to his young fans and drop his opposition. The parties have virtually swopped roles.
I don’t see the Tories recovering soon. They look to me like the Major government.
Britain, like most western nations now isn’t really British anymore. It has a majority British population with a very large slice of foreigners who have no loyalty or connection to Britain except as their place of residence. Voting patterns say less and less about what British people want and more and more about what the foreign settlers want.
This is just another demonstration that the coronation of a party leader rather than rising from the backbenches and fighting a winning campaign is the only way to do things, because otherwise you end up with hacks like Theresa May who are little more than effective time-servers in cabinet, but without leadership ability.
Let us not forget that the necessary boundary changes (with or without the loss of 50 parliamentary seats) which favour Labour are now long overdue. These changes should have taken place years ago, but under the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 they have been deferred until 2018.
I see no reason why both the boundary changes and BRexit can’t be implemented within the next 2-years, even with the slim parliamentary majority of the Tories and DUP combined.
What needs to happen after that is for Theresa May to resign and a proper Tory leadership contest be held, but this time it should be a proper contest, not just the coronation of another Parliamentary time server.
The new Tory leader would face a challenging time keeping the ball rolling until either a confidence vote brought down the government or they managed to scrape on to June 2022, but that is the sort of leadership that is necessary at this time.
I still think David Davis is probably the best man for the job, especially if he manages to do reasonably well with the car crash of BRexit negotiations.
As for Jeremy Corbyn, I can’t see him even surviving as Labour leader until the next election, never mind winning the next election.
That’s a lot of words to say “Truth is that any system is flawed”.
It’s almost as if the commenter believes in the possibility of a system that doesn’t lead to politicians thinking that they rule over us, rather than govern on our behalf.
The real problem is trying to persuade low information young voters that the Labour party they were brought up to believe is so nice has been taken over and corrupted by the hard left.
I don’t share the opinion that the Labour party is nice even at the best of times, but I think the priority has to be to keep on trying to point out that Corbyn is not a standard centre-left politician. It needs to be stressed constantly that what we have now in opposition is a personality cult dedicated to a dim-witted Trotskyist, not the Labour party of Attlee, Bevan and Jenkins.
It’s difficult, because the message doesn’t seem to cut through and because the alternative is the Nasty Party. But the points about Corbyn’s links to the IRA, Islamofascism and Venezuela, and Labour’s duplicity over its Brexit stance have to be constantly remade.
Economic illiterates will continue to believe that we can raise taxes without creating any disincentives, but if some of them can be persuaded to vote Lib Dem instead of for the Corbyn cult then we might have a chance.
I’m not sure. I looked at the interviews with Dianne Abbot and saw a car crash. Too many people at my work saw a victim of racist media. I think the same wilful blindness is happening with Corbyn.
It is looking unlikely the boundary changes will happen in this parliament John.
As revealed in yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph, the local political landscape would be dramatically changed under the blueprint, with the DUP losing three MPs and Sinn Fein gaining two.
The redrawing of the electoral map would leave Sinn Fein with nine MPs to the DUP’s seven, according to the UK’s leading election prediction website Electoral Calculus
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/unionism-is-spooked-by-radical-and-uncalled-for-boundary-change-plans-35835237.html
Brian….
Every time government spending (other than on defence) or regulations are mentioned in the education system or most of the media they are mentioned in positive terms – i.e. that government Welfare State spending is good and there should be more it, and that regulations are good and adding to them will solve problems. The answer to every situation is presented as more government spending and/or more regulations (or that existing regulations should be enforced more strongly)
In some ways this has been the dominant British view since the 1870s and explains the vast growth of government since then, however it has become more intense and unchallenged in recent years.
Listening to a speech by even some leading figures of the Conservative Party my response is “well if you really believe in ever more government spending and ever more regulations (supposedly to deal with X, Y, Z problems) why are you not supporting Mr Corbyn?”
The logical end of intervention being (as both Mises and then Hayek explained) socialism – the total state, the state that is “all-in-all” (to use Edmund Burke’s warning words).
Why should people vote against Labour? Where is the case made against the PRINCIPLES of Labour? Ever more government spending and ever more regulations -leading to the collapse of “capitalism”. John McDonnell knows that ever more government spending and ever more regulations will destroy “capitalism” just as well as we do – but he is fine with that, indeed that is his objective.
Ditto the deluded young (and not so young) persons who wildly scream with joy when Comrade Jeremy makes a speech at Glastonbury or elsewhere.
“But Paul these people are from wealthy families – they would go to Death Camps under socialism”.
They either do not know that – or they do not care.
After all in a densely populated country like this life outside the Death Camps would not be much fun either – indeed many people in Britain would starve to death under fully socialism.
But it will happen – unless real counter arguments are made against it. And presently no arguments are made against the PRINCIPLE of ever more Welfare State spending and ever more regulations.
There is not a single pro smaller government television or radio station in Britain – they are actually illegal. C4, ITV and Sky News are as bad (as leftist) as the BBC.
Of all the universities only one (Buckingham) is in favour of smaller government.
The schools?
Even many of the private schools are pro ever-bigger-government – which must collapse into socialism as “capitalism” is destroyed.
There are areas of the Western World were there is serious opposition to ever-bigger-government (Eastern Tennessee springs to mind – the 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts), but Britain just is not one of those areas. At least not at the moment.
Let us hope this changes – and that in future there are (for example) anti ever bigger government television and radio stations, and anti ever bigger government schools and universities.
The more palatable aspects of boundary changes could be accepted (getting rid of Labour gerrymandering inner city constituencies), while the more unpalatable aspects, such as the reduction in parliamentary seats down to 600 could be further deferred until the seventh boundary review (2023?).
Since this might mean the difference between a Labour government and a Tory one, the Tories should be well motivated.
This problem has been allowed to continue for nearly 20-years and there is still no end in sight.
@Paul, there are some alternative voices out there, and even some young ones at that.
Check out Paul Joseph Watson on YouTube. His “Why Capitalism is Great” video has had 783,000 views. Some of his other videos have had over a million. He’s quite a hit apparently with the so called “Generation Z” – the generation after the waste of space Corbynite millenials – so perhaps there is some hope for the future.
In another video “Conservatism is the NEW Counter-Culture” he goes into this Gen-Z thing further, and even defines this ‘conservatism’ as cultural libertarianism…
Worth a watch.
My tuppence worth.
Some people voted for Corbyn because they thought he’d block Brexit. AC Grayling for one. He’s woken up and the others will have by the next election. Probably 3% of the electorate stay home instead of voting Labour.
As above another 3% were more concerned to express their dislike for May than in favour of Labour. They could be persuaded to switch.
That’s enough to give the Tories a solid majority.
Seems like this time round the Tories are taking their time picking a new leader. That will mean a better choice.
I’m sure that they won’t again call an election without all the candidates in place, or without a well checked manifesto. And they’ll tailor the campaign to the talent they have, not round a charismatic leader who isn’t.
In brief they will set out to beat Labour, rather than taking victory for granted.
I understand Watson’s appeal, but I still wouldn’t recommend anyone associated with Alex Jones. Also, for anyone who may care, his attitude towards Israel probably makes him feel at home in the Zerohedge comments section. FWIW.
But yes, there are many alternative voices out there, and a lot of young people listen to them – so the glass is not necessarily as half-empty as Paul would have it.
In the one person one vote system it helps if there is only a small minority who are having real difficulty making ends meet.
They can be ignored and left to suffer.
Things are not like that now.
“This, I believe, was the psychological fuel behind a significant chunk of the Brexit vote”
Brian Micklethwait.–absolute piffle and something that only a London Bubbler could possibly believe. And a wobbling Bubbler who sounds like he decided to support the cause of greater freedom only just before he touched pencil to paper.
People voted to get rid of the EU. Simple as that.
As for wreckers–Corbyn was a free ride for ReMainiac wreckers and those who didn’t like May. Which is almost everybody tho’ not everybody abstained or voted away.
Next time even the ReMainiacs know–and lots of them are well-heeled enough to have plenty to lose from Corbog winning–that there is no Remain millage in Corbyn getting in.
As for the young and dumb–well haven’t we heard for decades that there aren’t enough of them hence the “greying” of society and all the migrants. There were more voting but not that many more are left to turn out.
The danger of Corbog is that once voted in he and McNasty like their Venezuelan heroes Chavez and Maduro would never allow themselves to be voted out of office.
They must not be allowed to get in.
tdk–if the shower–public sector?– you work with are squarking about racism at all you need a new job.
Shirley Knott–“The core sentiment — wreak the country? feature, not bug — seems to have been one of the key factors in the Trump’s win in the US.”
More tripe. Americans wanted something resembling America back. Those who see that as wrecking are part of the problem.
Pete –who exactly is “suffering” at this time?
There is a shitload of “suffering” on the way when the mess caused by decades of statism and socialism –debt, money-printing and the damage done by a legion of wealth and production-destroying laws and regulations comes home to roost.
But today’s circs will seem blessed when the above happens.
EdMj – I am aware of Mr Watson.
I am not a fan of Alex Jones – but Mr Watson is not so bad.
Stefan Molyneaux (another of the “sceptic” community) really offended me with his wild hatred of women – I do not know what one has done to him (other than give birth to him) to make him hate them so much. And the Tin Foil hat stuff about the United States “funding Al Qaeda” “in order to prolong the war” (given in the middle of his review of the “Wonder Woman” film – of all places) was the last straw.
That is the thing about Youtube – a man seems reasonable, and then one works out he is a nut.
Mr Watson has a different view of Syria to me – but that is fine.
He may be correct – and I may be utterly wrong.
It would not be the first time I have been utterly wrong.
I voted Corbyn and would likely do so again in another GE, although unlike many of his more misty eyed supporters I dont see Corbynism as the prelude to a new Socialist Jerusalem.
However I am young (early 30’s) and like most of my age have very little to lose, and I think a Labour government under Corbyn would be a wrecking ball to the establishment
and the whole rotten ‘strong and stable’ edifice of the current system. A system which rewards not the true producers of wealth but the rent seeking of the financial and property sectors, and which leaves in its wake the social calamities of atomisation and rampant alienation.
Corbyn is making plans for a Chavez style takeover of his own party, he has already used the Brexit vote to weed out any dissent, hopefully a few more cleansing operations will encourage the stupid party apparatchiks to get sensible for a change and do an SDP, and this may well happen before Brexit even.
Comrade Corbyn has a lot of support because a lot of people depend on his style of politics to put money in their pockets, whether its via welfare, public sector pay or immigrant subsidies, the great vote buying scam that Blair/Brown initiated, there will be some Labourites who were cheerleaders during those years but are now badly regretting how it has all turned out.
The other outcome is he might do a “John Smith”.
Well you are right about that, in that Corbyn will spectacularly undermine property rights in such a way that any private sector investor would have to be out of their tiny minds to invest their money in the UK.
And who do you think those true producers of wealth are?
To be honest I can take my dosh and bugger off somewhere else, but I would rather not. That said, having lived through the 1970s the first time, part of me wants you to get exactly what you are voting for, and I mean get it good and hard, whilst me and my money watch with morbid fascination from afar.
re those boundary changes
1. It’s true that the current boundaries enormously padded Labour’s majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and prevented Cameron getting a majority in 2010
2. However in 2015 and 2017 the current boundaries have not been at all unkind to the Tories. In 2017 they won 2.3% more votes than Labour and 20% more seats. If you flip the 2017 vote shares of Labour and Conservative on electoral calculus, Labour takes over as the biggest party, but it’s much further short of a majority than the Tories are now
3. On electoral calculus, the Tories would still be in a minority on the 2017 result, even on the proposed new boundaries (though only 3 short rather than 8 short)
So unlike in the Blair era, the current ancient boundaries are not now particularly anti-Tory and the new boundaries wouldn’t necessarily help that much. Of course with shifting vote patterns who can say for sure, but on the 2017 results the Tories have nothing to complain about.
“Mila s”–Are you aware that socialism has murdered 150 million human beings–so far?
Are you aware that while your hero Grandpa Death was sucking up political capital out of horrible fire deaths he ignored the 80+ people shot dead in Venezuelan streets over the last 3 months–with guns handed to socialist thugs just like those who hang around with McNasty–for the crime against the people of wanting food in their belly.
Age 30? At that age to still be talking such adolescent tripe either you are stupid beyond all measure without the slightest desire to look one inch beyond the end of your nose–or you are another troll. All the Marxian crap about “atomisation” and suchlike leftist cockrot suggests we are being trolled by one of the faithful.
As I said before ZaNu is pulling out all the stops because its now or never for them. Corbyn can’t hold the line forever.
mila s
June 30, 2017 at 10:19 pm
“However I am young (early 30’s) and like most of my age have very little to lose, and I think a Labour government under Corbyn would be a wrecking ball to the establishment.”
Having seen some not-so-stable places, let me assure you that you have a LOT to lose.
You likely consider that you don’t have too much to lose because, being in your thirties and living in a stable place, you can’t really conceive of forces that could cause you to actually lose a lot. You could lose far more than you’re suspecting might be at risk, and electing a socialist government at this particular stage in your country could realistically trigger those losses. The wrecking ball wouldn’t stop once it wrecked “the establishment.” Look around and figure out what you’d eat should the stores and restaurants close for a week or two.
While the popularity of PJW and his cohorts is a little heartening, I get the impression that most of his followers are in the United States, not the UK.
mila s
Well, under socialism you might end up eating a stray cat for a bit of meat, like in Venezuela, or in a good proper labour camp you woukd have equality and perhaps the chance to sift through others’ faeces for any nuts or other undigested nutrition, iirc that was in a Chinese labour camp, one of the many choice horrors of socialism you might gain as a life experience as you curse the survival instinct that drives you on to hopeless ends.
So you may gain as well as lose if you and others manage to vote in the Marxists. The Marxists know these things happen, and part of their anger is that they cannot yet force such horrors on those they hate, like you.
I think so much of Corbyn’s support comes down to housing. If you stand no chance of owning your own home but have to put up with the pressures of competing in a market economy,then why not give the state the power to be your parent and look after you?
And then there are the comfortable public sector home owners on static salaries and decent pensions who know that Labour will put them ahead of private sector workers, so what have they got to lose?
The problem is that our ideology relies on it not being a zero sum game. But when you have a small country with a large population and the housing stock now dealt out, it is a zero sum game where it matters.
The Tories could turn it around by massively deregulating house planning, reducing immigration, and making public sector salaries more market driven and regional rather than fixed nationally.
They’re not going to do any of those things. So prepare for socialism.
Mila S said:
“However I am young (early 30’s) and like most of my age have very little to lose,”
If you’d allow a 40 year old to respond to the sentiment I’m seeing expressed here…
If you’re saying this in the spirit of I’m “still” young with “plenty of time” then I’d suggest that early 30s is certainly not young.
Early 30s and you’ve probably worked coming up to a third of your total work time. But, more crucially, you’ve probably acquired most of the human capital and unchangeable bad habits you’re going to rely on for the rest of your life.
If you haven’t built any financial capital from more than 10 years working then you’re going to struggle.
More importantly, if you plan to have kids your window is fast closing and when you do at this point that is going to expose if you’ve not made better use of the years up to that.
I worry that we are creating a generation that does for 15 years after they leave education what you can really only afford to do for 2 or 3 years in reality. It’s likely this generation would probably be better off under Corbyn.
“It’s likely this generation would probably be better off under Corbyn.”
Nobody would be “better off” under Corbog.
Even those who get the stolen handouts of socialism don’t prosper.
As has been pointed out on here lots of peasants and less-well off in Venezuela have giant-screen TVs in their houses as a result of Chavez’s generosity with stolen oil money. Shame the leccy is only on 2 hours a day. And urbanities will have to spend 60 compulsory labour days a year in the fields to try and stave off socialist famine.
The handouts are one time only. Once the market is all fucked up by the left that’s the gravy train derailed for good.
Until tax revenues from their elders start to dry up. How much value disappears from just the London real estate market if someone in favor of confiscating underused investment properties wins?
It becomes obvious that the younger voters, never having experienced a Labour/socialist government, think it is all roses. It is not, you will be hammered with regulations, taxes and a quasi totalitarian system that wants control over your life. If in doubt, just look at Venezuela without the rose tinted glasses you appear to have. I suspect that Corbyn got the votes of the young by the votes of the ill educated fallout from our education system which has for years been “not fit for purpose”.
Unfortunately we have an invisible conservative party who, just as Camoron did, had no clue as to how to fight an election.
It is very young by today’s standards – which are abysmal, but here we are. A lot of today’s 30-year-olds are where most 18-year-olds were just over half a century ago.
At 19 I was a senior coordinating producer at a Canadian TV station, supervising a staff of 6.
By my early 30’s I was a Technical Director at a major Canadian Professional theatre.
Had a wife (and I’ve happily kept her these 53 odd years) and two children.
Derek Buxton–The entire trouble is that there will be nothing “quasi” about the totalitarian system Corbog & McNasty subscribe to and would bring in.
Ask the Venezuelans.
Mancur Olsen – if I recall correctly – said that societies progressively bind themselves in rules until they get to the stage when they can no longer function. At that point they lose a war, the rules get swept away and progress can once again be made. For example, West Germany after the Second World War.
It seems to me that the West has bound itself. Everywhere you look there are shibboleths such as pensions, home ownership, human rights, political correctness, environmentalism etc. These, and more, lead to deficits, debt, financial collapse and identity politics. It needs the system to collapse and war will probably be involved.
Still better than Corbyn.
It will still probably involve him, or someone much like him.
From last year but relevant. Full link below.
Children of Thatcher era have half the wealth of the previous generation
People born in the early 1980s are the first post-war generation to reach their thirties with smaller incomes than those born a decade earlier
The children of the Thatcher era have reached adulthood with half as much wealth as the previous generation, finds a major study published today.
The report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies concludes people born in the early 1980s are the first post-war generation to suffer smaller incomes in early adulthood than those born 10 years before
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-thatcher-generation-80s-children-wealth-half-amount-ifs-study-a7338076.html
“Peter R”: The 80s generation are those suffering the effects of socialism. Which Thatcher did next to nothing bring a halt to.
The political scum have been on a spend, spend, spend mania since 1945. The welfare state has expanded vastly beyond its origins until we now live in a leftist shithole where parents are literally scared that some social security or council jobsworth scum can take their kids off them. Legions of women now have the state as their consort and taxpayers pay for the poor life choices of low morals and low IQ deadbeats. Where the crappy NHS gets 120 billion a year and still can’t provide a decent service. Where saving bring you near zero interest. Where the fucking state tells you who you can employ and at what wage and if they can be fired or not. The scummy state itself has expanded like a cancer to stick its nose into every aspect of life. Where useless and overpaid bluebottles are more interested in your Twitters than they are in crime and terrorism. Where debt, taxation–by which the native British support large numbers of useless and hostile imported freeloaders ( not all migrants—but plenty are )–and inflation have rotted the guts out of our society. Where left-indoctrinating schools and Uni’s turn out ill-educated leftist stooges.
So don’t come here with your Corbynista crap, It is the classic socialist sneer–statism and socialism fuck everything up so the call goes out for more statism and socialism as the “cure”.
And you are still a troll.
The New York Times assures me that its all the fault of ‘the British State in ‘its relentless pursuit of less government…’ and ‘the infatuation with austerity and deregulation of British governments for the past four decades’
Then Ye New Yorke Thymes doth speak out of its collective ass.
Well, our situation over here also worsens every time there’s a new round of “deregulation.” The only thing that saves us is, that more new regulations are instituted than are removed, sort of. Thank heavens for the Legislature.
Our austerity programs are definitely working, as standard-of-living statistics indicate.
We are certainly infatuated with these things. Alas, the object of the infatuation seems unwilling to actually* put in an appearance. :>(((
.
*Yes, I did split an infinitive. 😥
PS. It is not only the Law that is an ass.
Indeed, Julie. All that “deregulation” and “austerity” is the proximate cause of the current economic condition of your home state, isn’t it?
Tsshhhh, Laird, you didn’t hear it from me! OR SHOULD I SAY THAT LOUDER ? 😈 😆 👿
All I know is, the president of the local bank in my hometown (pop.1800-2400, depending) in his last State of the Bank letter to shareholders, included this gem:
Truer words were never.
Can’t resist this.
The company that prints Chicago Police Department vehicle citations (tickets!) hasn’t been paid for quite some time, and has refused to supply any more.
Chicago police are being told to use the few remaining supplies sparingly.
bobby,
While I give it an A for plausibility, are you sure there’s not a hidden link to The Onion in there? LOL
On the other hand, evidence favoring credibility….
What else is new.
Alisa, this struck me as a particularly egregious piece of rectal ventriloquism, even by the high standarda of the gray lady.
I dare not click, so I’ll take your word for it, Jay…
Didn’t mean to post a link. I meant the NYT oped about the British states obsession with shrinking the size of government I quoted earlier.
…which is a fantasy…
The most that can ever be said is that the acceleration of the ever expanding size of the state has occasionally grown slower than the wider economy, but that is about it.
There has not been a single year where the size of the UK government has actually contracted in absolute figures (by cost or number of personnel employed)
Don’t be fooled by graphs which show government as a percentage of GDP, in the best years that shows the government growth was slower than GDP growth, that is all.
Patrick – M. Olsen was repeating the message of Tacitus “the more laws there are – the more corrupt the state is”.
Centuries before this – Plutarch had pointed out that the Greek City States had turned “the law” into an ever increasing set of rules trying to control every aspect of life (Plato “the law” being orders from above trying to determine how people should live) whereas among the (Republican) Romans “law” was still mostly a matter of settling disputes between people (did Cassius steal an apple from Brutus….), not something that distributed income and wealth or told people how to live (although some Romans wanted to change the law into such a plan).
Roman Praetors were, at their best, not following the 12 tables (or the other stuff that school boys used to be taught) – they were trying to apply the rules of justice in individual cases. And where did they get the rules of justice from? Partly from experience over centuries (the Hayek position), but also by exercising their natural moral reason (which Hayek denied existed). Originally only outsides to the city of Rome had been under the “law for aliens”, but the Romans over centuries had increasingly chosen to be under it themselves, as it was based on both natural reason and the test of experience. And it was based on doing justice in individual cases – not in some “plan for society” that the Greek City States (and ourselves) had collapsed into.
John Galt – yes, I believe the last time when less money was spent on the Welfare State than the year before was either 1977 or 1978 (after the bankruptcy of 1976).
People who cite the New York Times or who think the British government wants to “shrink the size of the state” (still less has an “obsession” with doing so), have left the path of reason.
In terms of barometers for the economy, one possibly interesting ‘canary’ has come to my notice. Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome has cancelled this August’s Cold War Jets Day (basically a chance to lose your hearing at close quarters to ground-running Cold War jets, with a few getting airborne). The reason given is that they have so many second-hand cars building up at the airfield that there is insufficient capacity for the Jets event. Taking this at face value, it may be that there is a glut of ‘end-of-lease’ cars getting stored as the second-hand market (driven in the main by credit) is drying up.
So we might be in 2008 all over again, but with all the essentially unliquidated unviable business situations left over from 9 years ago coming round again, along with all the new ones.
It was around 2002 that a Yorkshire businessman told me to buy a field.