The democratic recession does not begin when a far-right party takes office. It begins when a centrist party crushes hope in democracy. When Keir Starmer’s government takes a chainsaw to people’s aspirations for a fairer, greener, kinder country, he cuts off not just faith in the Labour party but faith in politics itself. The almost inevitable result, as countries from the US to the Netherlands, Argentina to Austria, Italy to Sweden show, is to let the far right in.
So what’s the game? Why adopt policies that could scarcely be better calculated to prevent your re-election? Why stick to outdated fiscal rules when projections suggest they’ll make almost everyone worse off, especially those in poverty? Why impose devastating attacks on wellbeing, such as sustaining the two-child benefit cap, freezing local housing allowance and cutting disability benefits?
Why pursue austerity when the country voted so decisively to end it? Why cut and cut when years of experience show this will undermine the government’s primary (and ill-advised) goal, economic growth?
Why taunt, insult and abuse a crucial part of your political base: people who care about life on Earth? Why trash environmental commitments, abandon protections, expand airports and tie down green watchdogs? Why sustain and defend the most extreme anti-protest measures in any nominally democratic country?
Why seek to nix the financial regulations inspired by the 2008 crash, when the likely result is a repeat performance? Why reject a wealth tax, when a 2% levy on assets of over £10m could raise £24bn a year? Why not adopt the measures proposed by Patriotic Millionaires, generating £60bn a year? Or those suggested by political economist Richard Murphy, worth £90bn in tax revenue? Why abandon plans to tax non-doms properly? Why not demand an end to the Bank of England’s destructive quantitative tightening?
Why bury policies that might help restore democracy, such as proportional representation? Why introduce new political funding rules without actually addressing the capture of politics by the rich?
Why adopt Reform’s messages, Reform’s branding and Reform’s cruelty, to compete over who can most brutally beat up asylum seekers? An abundance of evidence shows that when centre-left parties take radical-right positions, they lose more voters on the left than they gain on the right. Adopting far-right messaging helps far-right parties win.
These policies might seem incomprehensible. But there’s a thread running through them. They all arise from the same doctrine: neoliberalism. This ideology, which has dominated the UK since 1979, demands austerity, the privatisation and shrinkage of public services, curtailment of protest and trade unions, deregulation and tax reductions for the rich. Justified as a means of creating an enterprise society, it has instead delivered a new age of rent, as powerful people monopolise crucial assets, from water to housing to social media. It leaves a government with few options but to scapegoat asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups for the problems it fails to address.
Genuine question;
How can anyone argue that privatisation has any benefit to government whatsoever?
Private enterprise exists to make money above all else. In some cases they are legally obligated to choose the path of greatest profit, no matter what.
This, by definition, means that any service provided will be of the absolute minimum viable, so as to make the maximum profit. It means that profit is the driving factor, not providing an excellent service or product.
That means that everywhere private enterprise has a job for the government, they will charge as much as they can, and provide the absolute least possible in return. Contracts will be gamed and exploited for maximum profit, and the service will be the barest possible to meet contractual obligations.
How can anyone even pretend that private companies leeching every penny at every available opportunity is less wasteful than doing it yourself and actually getting what you’ve paid for?
To play devil’s advocate;
The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.
The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.
Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.
The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.
E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.
The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.
The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.
The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.
I may misunderstand the situation, so please correct me, but isn’t the issue due to the separation of the energy production from the home suppliers?
The rules as I understand them are that there is a “most favoured nation” rule, so energy production from Octopus (for example) has to go onto the national grid where they are paid for their production, because that’s how you get electricity into homes (unless you want to build our own electricity “alt-net”). Octopus the consumer sales then have to buy the electricity at the wholesale rates which they then sell to you.
Why you can’t get a credit on your account for the excess Octopus are paid for their cheap wind instead of expensive gas, I don’t know but I can only assume its because they aren’t actually the same company. What it also means is that we will never have cheap electricity until we are 100% moved off any and all expensive electricity sources.
What I’m disappointed in as well is that councils can’t get involved with turbines. Any monies generated could be put towards everyone’s council tax, it may help get past NIMBYs if they know they are getting a tax break because of it and it improves energy independence.
Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished
This is precisely it.
A: several businesses competing to provide the service
This is really the main argument, if two companies supply a widget then they will both keep undercutting each other to gain custom. Hopefully that will come from identified efficiency gains through better production methods or removal of middle management who drain the budget without providing value.
However what is more likely to happen is that quality will decrease, think bulking out chocolate with palm oil, which then depends on the informed customers part to avoid reduced quality and support those that identify real cost savings. But that is unlikely to happen here as everyone jams crappy palm oil in their products and we can’t easily reward those that provide a proper chocolate.
You can see the support for this on the
c/buybritishandc/buyeuropeangroups but it requires real effort, an effort that most people don’t have the time for.Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.
But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.
The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.
Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?
How can anyone argue that privatisation has any benefit to government whatsoever?
Politicians do - they often say they need to do it to bring in more investment. Gordon Brown gave it a shot with PFIs which was stealth privatisation or just another means to direct government money into the pockets of businesses.
The argument never actually makes much sense as the companies aren’t charities and are duty bound to take out more than they put in. The counter-argument is that their profit comes from efficiencies they can make but it never stands up to scrutiny.
So, yes, the argument is made, it just isn’t a good one.
Have you even tried blaming Biden, UK ?
Sleepy Joe? Yeah, fuck that guy!
Guardians, smearer of Corbyn, decries neoliberalism .
Oh my.
This isn’t the official Grauniad line, it is a comment piece from George Monbiot.
Unless the laws of the land have power to slap down the greed inherent in human beings, whatever form governance takes, it will fail.
