LDB wrote:Never Outgunned wrote:
They're not marketed as socialist but massive expansion and loosening of credit lines so that banking profits could be used to bloat the public sector and feather the labour electoral nest was socialist. That Labour became some second tory party is the cleverest political deception this country has ever seen.
Feathering Labour's electoral nest? Oh my aching sides! A cliche ridden observation if ever there was one. From working within the public sector I've seen no clear electoral bias toward the Labour party that you speak of - I met as many working class Tories as I did Labour voters.
Same with this welfare receipiants voting Labour through bribery rubbish - most of those living off benefits don't even vote.
Plus you could equally say selling off council houses and making people home owners is bribing people to vote Tory. And equally responsible for cheap credit and casino capitalism - people earning just £11,000 per annum were actively encouraged to buy their own home to purchase this myth of becoming middle class FFS!
And what deception involved in making Labour the second Tory party? They were quite upfront about being the New Tories from the very off. It never fooled anyone into thinking they were left of centre - they actually won in 2001 with less votes than they lost in 1979 and 1992 when they claimed they were socialist. As well as losing over half of their membership to boot.
Your last paragraph misses the point i was trying to make entirely. I know standards of living have (up till now) done pretty much nothing but rise and rise. Im talking about the way the politicians have gradually pissed away our relative global competitiveness within the capitalist system and have accepted our decline. Dont be fooled into thinking that because our economy has been "growing" that we are not in decline, we've been in relative decline as an economy since the war.
One of my lecturers who was the most left wing bloke I've ever met recognised that Britain has been declining since the war and i would say its not because we've embraced too much capitalism.
Well lets have a good look at who are burgeoning economies - China, India, Brazil.
Big countries with big, relatively poor populations. Their rise has not come from the ingenuity of inviting things like an ipod or a laptop or whatever, it comes from providing the cheap labour to build it. Workers working stupidly long hours in dangerous conditions not seen since the early industrial era here in Britain.
So the future of competing with these nations is to strip the living standards of the West - remove work place safety, remove limits on the number of hours per week people work, remove union laws, remove welfare payments for those slung on the scrap head by capitalism, remove minimum wages.
In fact, the capitalist system needs it more than we do as a National economy. The Chinese, the Indians and the Brazilians will only work with those conditions for so long before doing what we did and what the Arabs are currently doing now - actively rounding to fight it and abolish exploiting workers.
So the capitalist system has to act now - attack the basis of the post-war settlement, attack western living standards, attack Western employment regulations, attack western workplace health and safety standards.
It's called a race to the bottom and capitalism can't live without it.
So pardon me, but I really couldn't give two shits about a relative decline in Britain's power. It means nothing if I have to work like some sort of Victorian prole as a result.
Don't be fooled into bollocks about a 'national' interest - the interests of a Duke of Westminster, a Richard Branson or a Lord Ashcroft are not my interests - they never have been and they never will be.