I have been asleep most of my life in relation to the level of control exercised by the Right in western politics. Just doing work on the United States at the end of WW2. Roosevelt had fought the moneychangers in the Temple, faced a Fascist coup, fought the Nazi linked munitions people during the War and in 1944 was going to be elected with his Vice President, Henry Wallace. In April 1944 Wallace warned in the New York Times about American Fascism and the way it was operating. They were outed, associated with the Nazis, and did not like it. They set out to get him and moved him off the Vice Presidential nomination though he was the most popular and shooed Truman in to be President when Roosevelt died. A lot of it was anti-black racism which Wallace also exposed. Then a red scare, McCarthy, Nixon, villify a few people who were USSR sympathysers or US Communists, and anything socialist was automatically damned on a scale which made the masses distrust socialism. Stalin was villified even though the USSR had lost 25 million people while the US and UK had lost half a million in WW2. Churchill gave the Fulton Iron Curtain speech to prevent US co-operation with the USSR. Evangelicalism was courted to lurch to the right. The Cold War kept the military companies in business. Since then the Right has controlled, taking out influences like Jimmy Carter and Obama who might do something different.
The Right, including the Fascist Right, fight dirty also in Britain, as they did in the fake Zinoviev telgram to get rid of Labour in 1924, as they tried during the War with the Hesse flight, as they did against Foot and CND and as they are doing now with Corbyn. They need to prevent real democracy breaking out, and they will. They can tame and take over any attempts to reform them. Corbyn is being sewn up and the Labour establishment are also doing the darning. We have not started to address the moneychangers in the Temple, and they are in the Temple, running it.
Category Archives: Blog
Autumn Statement Review
This is, if you want it, another review of the Autumn Statement. Osborne is giving away £6.2 bn more next year, half on tax credits. It is a slight anti-austerity move. His basis for so doing is an Office for Budget Responsibility forecast of a £2.9bn improvement in tax receipts. £6.2 is more than twice £2.9, but they are small amounts in the bigger scheme of things. The key question is the forecast which is of 2.4% growth for the next three years or so. There are problems with this.
1. The OBR’s forecasts on exports and the overall trade position look very optimistic both in terms of external demand for our exports and our ability to increase them.
2. We depend on incoming investment. That could reverse.
3. There is a vast amount of personal debt. Sooner or later it will tighten consumption.
4. It assumes the South-East bubble will not burst, but quite a lot of that bubble is speculative.
5. It seems not to factor in the effects of BofE base rate rises for all this Parliament.
6.It does not address the disarray and understaffing of HMRC.
7. It assumes stability in the banking sector.
If growth falls (it is nearly zero in real terms now) the deficit will not fall much (which does not matter a great deal as it would not under Labour)
The underlying reality (obscured by Osborne’s theatricals) is that the whole economy is geared towards the rich in the South-East and is draining the ability of young, poor people to live and work properly. The trend towards selling off the family silver continues. Over £1 trillion of public assets have been sold off cheaply, mainly to the rich, over the last few decades and now we owe hospitals, schools and houses to the private finance sector.
It is worrying that the move towards stronger Council Tax will protect propertied areas and impoverish further the already poor areas.
Self-righteousness and the Council Tax
Jesus’ life and teaching towers over human history and politics. He is the light that shows us what is going on in clarity and true perspective. First, we listen to him and then we see, darkly at first and then more clearly. More than this, the truth is not easy. We have to fight for it, inside and out. So when Jesus addresses self-righteousness among the political leaders of his day – the Sanhedrin, law-makers and Temple Party and accuses them of self-righteousness, it is not merely a local skirmish but one of the universal sins of politics. We can escape it, with God’s help, but it lurks at the door, or takes up residence in the living room, especially of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Self-righteousness is linked with hypocrisy, with being a gleaming tomb full of dead men’s bones – right on the outside and corrupt inside.
So when David Cameron writes to his local Council castigating them for their cuts, when the Council’s grants from government have fallen from £194m a year in 2009/10 to £122m this year, outwardly it righteously attacks cuts when inwardly it has caused them, and the media smells the whiff. The quest for truth, itself in danger of self-righteousness, smells out the full story as a dog sniffs for drugs. This is part of the Christian calling. We are called not to be wimps, as bishops and archbishops have often been, but to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and that is no passive supplicant business, but out there with the prophets avidly truth-seeking and outing hypocrisy.
Thus, when Osborne praises the Conservatives and himself for putting the economy right, he is hiding the bones. His “eliminating the deficit” is asking lots of poor people and organisations to take cuts so that his Government may glow with self-righteousness. It has happened before. In the Thatcher era employers sacked loads of people, destroyed the unions to depress working class pay, and told the rest to work harder, and then took the credit. They started to pay themselves mega-money, as “wealth creators”, but were extracting it from others.
It so happens that Osborne, for good economic reasons, like the fact that we are spending net 6% of our income abroad, will probably fail in this Parliament, as he did last, to balance the books. Nevertheless, the self-righteousness of the Tory establishment will not wane. Being right can always find an excuse.
But the quest for truth also leads us to ourselves. There are three main financial distortions to wealth in our economy. The first occurs through the electronic creation of money by banks which has hefted them a vast windfall of £1 trillion and more and led to the long-term City of London bonanza and the 2008 crisis. The second is the successful evasion of tax by the rich, both individuals and corporations, which has led to these groups receiving over £1 trillion they should not have, but the third, of a similar size involves many of us.
A vast majority of house owners have experienced house price rises averaging well over £100,000. Those who own these houses, some 20 million including privately rented properties, have therefore received a windfall, taking into account ordinary inflation, of well over £1 trillion, a vast transfer. This windfall does not come from no-where.
Who has paid? The processes are complex, but largely this money comes from the young who are paying vast amounts for houses or renting. Part of the story is the late middle aged beneficiaries who had lots of houses built for them, but failed to build them for the next generation. Much of the blame lies with Thatcher and Lawson who sold off Council Houses but did not use the income to build more houses. If this is deeply unfair, how can it be remedied?
Actually, there is a focussed, fair and economically sound answer. Council Tax Property Revaluations have not been done since 1993, largely because the rich who have benefitted considerably from house price rises, would also make a fuss about what is the required move in relation to paying this tax. Council Tax does not even tax the rich fairly now; someone who lives in a multi-million pound mansion only pays about three times more than someone who lives in a bedsit. Revaluation can be done now. At present Council Tax raises about £28 billion; it could easily raise twice that amount, solving most of George Osborne’s problems. It would also take the steam out of the dangerously overheated housing market in the South East. We who have had windfalls from house price rises should advocate this policy to help put right the injustice from which we have benefitted. Let’s do it and solve the Government’s problems.