The financial crash of a decade ago was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Hungry Thirties.
No it wasn’t. We don’t have capitalism, nor do we have free markets. It was government interference that led to the crash, not capitalism. Jones, as usual, is an idiot. In our case, the Brown Gorgon and his decision not to save during the good times left the cupboard bare when the bad times hit. So much for no boom and bust…
Yet the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare.
Well, yes? And?
Under the leadership of Tom Kibasi, the thinktank has attempted to embrace the spirit of our time: the latest report, published by its commission on economic justice, is a critical contribution to a left intellectual revival. Its underlying message is inarguable: the current system is broken. “The UK economy is not working,” it declares. British workers have suffered the longest squeeze in wages for generations; young people face a worse lot in life than their parents; most who languish in poverty are in low-income work; and Britain is Europe’s fifth most unequal society.
Around half our income is hoovered up by the state to piss away on such lunacy as think tanks, fake charities and unnecessary government departments, useless IT projects and so on. Take that away and allow us to have more of the money we have earned. Oh, and stop the government tinkering with the economy. After all, anything is better than that bunch of incompetents messing about with it.
The commission recommends that a genuine, higher living wage should be introduced;
Easy, stop taking so much in tax.
and proposes that a target should be set to double the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining – which has been in a state of collapse since the late 1970s – to 50% by 2030.
Because that worked so well last time. There was a time when it was a necessary tool. That time is long gone. We do not need to return to the nineteen seventies. It’s not just the left that is intellectually bereft, Jones is a fine example of the creed.
and the self-employed – poorer today than they were two decades ago, and lacking basic rights – would be granted work-related benefits.
I’m self-employed and I’m telling you and the thinktank you rode into town on to fuck off. I’ll look after myself, thanks. If you want to help, stop trying to tax me into penury and stop pissing my money up the wall.
The report also recommends reversing recent cuts to corporation tax, which have failed to increase investment as promised, and a cooperative development act to encourage the mutualisation of the economy.
What did they expect? If there is more money available to corporations (who don’t really exist) then some will be ploughed back into the company, some will be given to shareholders in increased dividends and some will be given to employees in one form or another. Who pays corporation tax? Repeat after me, “tax incidence, tax incidence, tax incidence”. Tinkering with corporation tax will never do anything to the economy, it will merely mean less money in the pockets of ordinary people and more money to be pissed up the wall by governments drunk on spending other people’s money.
The IPPR’s polling shows that, from a radical clampdown on tax avoidance to publicly owned investment banks, to borrowing to invest, there is overwhelming support for the junking of the old neoliberal order.
Ah, yes, the old tax avoidance canard. Tax avoidance is merely managing one’s finances efficiently. There is nothing wrong with tax avoidance. Indeed, it is a moral duty. Yet the idiot Owen Jones is deliberately conflating it with tax evasion – so not just an idiot but mendacious with it.
They keep saying this sort of thing, but it isn’t actually true, is it? The young people I see around are way better off than I was at their age – more and better stuff, more free time, and more cash to splash around.
Yes, indeed. They have access to stuff I could only dream of. I don’t want to go all Python’s Yorkshiremen, but yes, really, it’s bollocks.
Aye, kids today, don’t know they’re born. 🙂
Do any of you actually know any young people? Yeah sure they have fancy mobile phones and whatnot but they are just toys. Ask any young person about their chances of ever owning a property and then you will see that they are worse off. Right wingers always bang on about the 70s being bad yet a single wage earner could pay a mortgage and support a family. Compare that to now and you may, if you are not so completely in denial, realise that on this subject he has a point.
Yes, I do and Pete is correct in his statement. They are definitely better off than I was at their age. As for owning a house – well, I couldn’t have done it without help and two incomes back in the early eighties, so that’s not really a measure.
Next question?
Oh, and I’m not a “right-winger”. I’m not any wing.
I have two, both making their way in the world. We also see their friends doing likewise. And when the time comes to buy a house I’ll do what my parents did for me, help our two out with a small but tidy sum to get their first foot on the property ladder. If they’ll take it.
Yet, as LR and Pete point out, they’re both a lot better off than my wife and I were in our mid to late twenties. More free time. More disposable income. Better technology. Better social lives. We didn’t get started buying any property until our late 30’s. Just like my parents and their parents before them.
That’s because they were. Much worse than today. I guess you weren’t around then. And this:
…wasn’t true for the majority of people. Not even in the inexpensive North of England.
He was, he just has a selective memory. See the conversation about Militant Tendency. According to Tony, the poor dears were victims of bullying.
The problem with house prices isn’t anything to do with the crash or the economy in general anyway. The problem is caused by housing being in short supply and the issue of supply and demand. Some of this shortage has been caused by uncontrolled immigration which the older generation tend to be against and younger people tend not to have a problem with. A couple of generations back ordinary working people often had no hope of owning a house anyway, non of my grandparents did. If you take houses out of the equation, pretty much everything else is cheaper in real terms than it was when I was in my twenties (I’m now sixty) so on balance I would say that young people are better off. I would add that consumer goods are better made, work properly and last longer now than they did way back in the past too.
Funny thing, when i was a young chap there wasn’t time for all the social life the youngsters have today, because i was working all hours the good Lord sent to get enough money to buy our first house when we got married.
A few years later we had children, and yes my wife was a stay at home mother because that seemed the best way to us to raise a family, and yes money was tight, so guess what, i worked 90+ hour 7 day weeks regularly to keep everything going, as did thousands of other genuine working class bods.
For a while we didn’t have the money to replace the old car when it went bang, but after about a year of managing without i bought a Landcrab with a knackered clutch for £80 and set about putting a new clutch in on my driveway, and it was rusty as buggery so hand painted it, but it did the job and tided us over till i got better paying work.
Wot no brand new car with inbuilt blooootooth.
Yeah we had it so bloody good didn’t we, the poor little buggers now sometimes have to work a whole 39 hours in a week, how do they manage.
Just to finish off this minor, by my standards, rant, where i work now there’s a handful of us carrying various sick notes general hangers on that can’t manage to do anything right, and the usual ”childcare” excuse crew, i haven’t taken a single sick day in over 45 years of work, i work with people who struggle to manage 45 half arsed days between sickies, and they expect to be as debt free and set up as the genuine backbone of the country the way they ponce about, on yer bloody bike.
sorry for going off on one, but these entitled buggers and that bloody Owen Jones who fancies hisen as their self appointed spokesperson, another bugger probably never done a days hard graft in his life, get on my nerves.
A Land Crab? You had a Wolseley 18/85 / Morris 1800? Now there was a tank of a car. I knew one guy back in the day who claimed to be the only person ever to roll one.
Either Morris or Austin badged 1800 not sure which, certainly not the posh 18/85version, and it sadly wasn’t an S model either, which had the higher compression head from the MGB IIRC and twin SU’s and was quite a rapid car in its day.
Good roomy family cars they were, that B series engine went on forever and was decent on fuel.
Hubby and I are boomers. When we bought our house in about 1978, it took both of us working full time to get our mortgage, the Building Societies had very strict criteria governing total mortgage to annual income ratio. Plus you had to have saved up a significant deposit. For the early years we lived in one rented room, a bedsit. Toilet, bathroom and laundry room shared with several other tenants. No kitchen of course, just a kettle and a Baby Belling in our room. No TV, didn’t take holidays, saved every penny we could spare. Wasn’t unusual.
For the first few years of our mortgage, we worked overtime, to be able to pay off the loan faster. Just as well, because after the ERM fiasco mortgage interest rates went sky high, and masses of home loans were foreclosed, only for the hapless mortgage holders to find they were in negative equity as the property prices crashed- they could neither pay their mortgage nor clear it by selling up. We had dodged a bullet by our early repayment strategy, but thousands of others lost everything.
There was a saving grace for my generation, but it wasn’t financial or material prosperity. It was the absence of the attrition and devastation of total warfare in Europe.The real legacy of our parents and grandparents.
I keep hearing the youngsters claims that their parents had it easy. I know that they didn’t, but then parents and grandparents have always faced the most fearsome stresses and hazards together, in private moments, to protect their children from worries about money and the security of the family. And the more the adults have grafted, and sacrificed, to provide the best for their kids, the more those kids believe it was all so very easy. I guess that’s always the way it goes.
Jones is a hilarious buffoon. Everything he advocates in terms of industrial and economic strategy seems based on a desire to return back to 1880 with an NHS added on top. That’s not progress, it’s retardation.