Then and Now: The Thatcherite Legacy of Totalitarian Plutocracy
Since Mrs Thatcher came in with her fraudulent promise of a national revival, British "prosperity" has been achieved as follows:
The banks, enabled by the political wing of the ruling class, create huge amounts of money. Some of this is lent to politicians to secure their client base, some of it to the well-connected to spend on themselves or their business ventures. Those who have first spending of the money are able to appropriate resources from everyone else in ways that look like ordinary purchase, and not the theft that they really are.
This process enables and requires a bloated financial services sector. This is further enlarged when inflation and heavy taxes push the rest of us to hope for any return at all on our savings by putting it in the hands of coke-fuelled gamblers.
Productive activity is taxed and regulated into decline. This has the effect of destroying economically secure and politically engaged middle and working classes that would otherwise protest at the looting. Because, at however basic a level, industrial workers have daily experience of applied science and of the underlying rationality of things, the decline of industry turns people back into superstitious sheep, addicted to astrology and in awe of lying statistics. The working classes are further immiserised by state-sponsored mass immigration. This reduces wage levels, and promotes further deskilling, and makes the kind of solidarity of dissent last seen in the miners strike impossible, and justifies a police state to deal with any remaining dissent.
The result is an overclass of very rich people, who splash money round places like London, and who legitimise their wealth by hiring intellectuals to argue that it has been acquired through the "free enterprise system." Go outside these enclaves, and you see growing impoverishment, disguised for the moment by debt.
I can just remember the 1960s, when most ordinary people had secure employment and could look forward to real increases in their standard of living. Dave Barnby is luckier, in that he benefitted from the old order of things.
Saying this doesn't mean that I approve of nationalised industries and overmighty trade unions. However, when I compare the liberal social democracy that ended c1980 with the increasingly totalitarian plutocracy that is the real legacy of Margaret Thatcher, I know which I prefer. SIG
Becky Barrow writes in The Daily Mail: Young UK workers lack get up and go to beat foreigners to jobs, employment minister warns
Dave Barnby responds:
The banks, enabled by the political wing of the ruling class, create huge amounts of money. Some of this is lent to politicians to secure their client base, some of it to the well-connected to spend on themselves or their business ventures. Those who have first spending of the money are able to appropriate resources from everyone else in ways that look like ordinary purchase, and not the theft that they really are.
This process enables and requires a bloated financial services sector. This is further enlarged when inflation and heavy taxes push the rest of us to hope for any return at all on our savings by putting it in the hands of coke-fuelled gamblers.
Productive activity is taxed and regulated into decline. This has the effect of destroying economically secure and politically engaged middle and working classes that would otherwise protest at the looting. Because, at however basic a level, industrial workers have daily experience of applied science and of the underlying rationality of things, the decline of industry turns people back into superstitious sheep, addicted to astrology and in awe of lying statistics. The working classes are further immiserised by state-sponsored mass immigration. This reduces wage levels, and promotes further deskilling, and makes the kind of solidarity of dissent last seen in the miners strike impossible, and justifies a police state to deal with any remaining dissent.
The result is an overclass of very rich people, who splash money round places like London, and who legitimise their wealth by hiring intellectuals to argue that it has been acquired through the "free enterprise system." Go outside these enclaves, and you see growing impoverishment, disguised for the moment by debt.
I can just remember the 1960s, when most ordinary people had secure employment and could look forward to real increases in their standard of living. Dave Barnby is luckier, in that he benefitted from the old order of things.
Saying this doesn't mean that I approve of nationalised industries and overmighty trade unions. However, when I compare the liberal social democracy that ended c1980 with the increasingly totalitarian plutocracy that is the real legacy of Margaret Thatcher, I know which I prefer. SIG
Becky Barrow writes in The Daily Mail: Young UK workers lack get up and go to beat foreigners to jobs, employment minister warns
Dave Barnby responds:
Why should UK's youth have to compete with unrestricted immigration from countries where often wage levels are rock bottom where there are any jobs.
When I was in final year sixth form in 1956, employers were flocking to schools (well my Grammar) desperately looking for people to come and work for them.
I was offered a three day visit to English Electric Stafford (where they made tranformers and electricity generators for export) to see whether or not I would like to join an engineering apprentice. After 3 days they asked me what I though.
I told them I would prefer to work in something less dirty and less overwhelming, so they arranged for me to visit their radio electronics group at Marconi Chelmsford, where I was offered a five year graduate apprentice training job (two years at Marconi and two years at university). This lead to a forty year career where I latterly started my own very successful telecommunications consultancy.
Today Marconi no longer exists having been gambled away by Lord Simpson (who left with a massive payoff) and there is very little in the way of worthwhile jobs as they have mostly been exported and we have instead imported unemployment from abroad. So much for the global economy and the European Union which promised much and delivered what we've got - low wages, dead end jobs and despair.
If I was in the predicament of the poor school and university leavers today, I would have no interest in what is on offer. as it is these lads and lassies are joining the army to fight Tony Blair's and David Cameron's wars rather than stack shelves in Waitrose (that's a quote).
So rather than make it seem like young British people's fault, why don't you look to the real causes.
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Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance (Carbon Positive since 1979)sean@libertarian.co.uk Tel: 07956 472 199 Skype: seangabb
Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance (Carbon Positive since 1979)sean@libertarian.co.uk Tel: 07956 472 199 Skype: seangabb
Postal Address: Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, London W1J 6HL, England
Donate to the Libertarian Alliance
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What would England and the world have been like in 1959 if there had been no Second World War? For one possible answer, read Sean Gabb'snovelThe Churchill Memorandum. If you like Bulldog Drummond and Biggles and the early James Bond, this will be right up your street. Or look here to see other books by Sean Gabb, or here to see books by Richard Blake.
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