Why you should absolutely detest landlordism

Let's start off with a caveat: Not all landlords are equally bad.

The one who brought you Christmas chocolates for the kids that year is vastly superior to the one who revenge evicted you for complaining to the estate agent about their regular unannounced visits.

The one who promptly fixed the broken boiler in the dead of winter is infinitely preferable to the one who repeatedly refused to listen when you told you about the water leak and growing mould problem, then took the cost of all the damage out of your deposit at the end of the rental.

Some people do things in a decent way, and some people are absolute scum. That's just a fact of life.

This article isn't about that, it's about the economic principle of landlordism itself.

From an economic standpoint landlordism is the pinnacle of exploitation, to such an extent that it even beats capitalism.

After all, at least the output of capitalism is economically productive activity.

Under capitalist business models the materials and labour get combined to form the product, with the capitalist taking a big slice of profit for themselves based purely on their ownership of the factory and the machines.

But the landlord takes a cut for themselves without even producing anything! They just derive unearned income from property ownership, without any economically productive activity whatever to justify their cut.

Whenever the parasitical nature of landlordism gets pointed out, the landlords come out in droves to defend themselves and their exploitative economic behaviour.

Some justifications are far better than others of course. If you moved away for a couple of years for work, with the intention of coming back, it clearly makes sense to rent the house out in the short-term.

Taking out huge loans on the other hand, to buy up all the affordable property you can get your hands on in the local area, in order to extract loan repayments from all the people who you've priced out of the housing market is absolutely despicable stuff.

The most irritating Landlordism justification of all are the plaintive cries of "it's my pension".

So instead of investing in the moderate-but-safe returns of a private pension, or the higher-but-riskier returns of playing the stock market, or actually doing something economically productive like building their own business, they decided to take out a load of unsecured property loans and get some other poor saps to pay them off?

They ignored the simple economic principle that the higher the returns, the higher the risks, and now that the coronavirus crisis means the people they're exploiting might not be able to pay rent for a while, they're crying victim and demanding to be bailed out with public funds, or through even higher rates of rent extraction to pay back the rent arrears!

The absolute entitlement of it!

This "it's my pension" mob, who view homes as wealth extraction opportunities, rather than places to live, are responsible for the absolute devastation of the UK housing market.

Not only have they bought up almost all of the affordable housing for their economic parasitism schemes, they've also managed to get their filthy hands on a third of all the council houses that got flogged off on the cheap too.

this parasitical rent-seeking behaviour extends beyond housing too.

Just think of the privatised utility companies that were handed £billions worth of public infrastructure on the cheap, and now extract £billions in unearned profits in shareholder dividends and bloated executive salaries, purely because they happen to be the owners of the infrastructure that was all built at the public expense.

Our public funds built the infrastructure, their Tory mates in politics flogged it off to them on the cheap, and now we have to pay them a load of unearned rent on top of the cost of actually providing these utilities and services.

The Financial Times reported that the privatised water companies alone are responsible for the unearned extraction of £2.3 billion per year in economic rent.

The parasitical rent-seeker is an absolute blight on the real economy, because the wealth they extract is wealth that could otherwise have been spent on genuinely productive economic activities like business formation or consumption.

And don't dare try to write this critique of landlordism off as some kind of far-left analysis, here's a quote from the notoriously anti-socialist Winston Churchill:

"Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done."

Landlordism is so ridiculously parasitical from an economic standpoint that it even makes capitalism look good in comparison, and it doesn't matter how many soothing fairy stories landlords might tell themselves about them being the good and responsible ones, not the nasty exploitative slumlord ones, the fact is that what they're doing is still economic parasitism.

But the worst thing of all is the absolute entitlement of these exploiters when it comes to economic hard times.

They simply won't accept the inherent risks in borrowing cash to make unsecured property investments, and then expecting to indefinitely live off other people's backs to pay off what they borrowed.

The whole economy is taking an enormous economic hit, the second mega-crisis in the space of twelve years, and these idle exploiters expect to be bailed out at the expense of the genuinely productive economy, so that they're the only ones not to take a hit.

The worst thing of course is that our political and media class are absolutely riddled with landlordism. The liberal media outlets are just as full of landlords as the hard-right propaganda rags, and even the Labour Party front bench is stuffed with landlords.

It's difficult to see how we ever begin to move away from this economy-sapping model of parasitical landlordism when the establishment class is absolutely riddled with the idle beneficiaries of it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Sajid Javid is totally unfit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer

Boris Johnson's cabinet is full of extraordinarily inappropriate people like Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Gavin Williamson, and Liz Truss, but perhaps the most egregious appointment of all is Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Before his move into politics Javid was a banker at Deutsche Bank, where he sold complex financial derivatives called Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs).

In order to have any coherent understanding of what caused the 2008-09 global financial sector insolvency crisis, you need to know what CDOs are, otherwise you could end up believing any old economically illiterate shit (like "Labour bankrupted Britain" for example).

CDOs were economic alchemy schemes designed to turn toxic bad debts into fake gold-plated investments.

The way they worked was to collect together thousands of bad mortgages (the kind of mortgages people are highly likely to default on if there's any kind of economic downturn) then grade them into bands from worst to least bad.

The lower ranked bad mortgages remained risky investments, but the top tranche of "least bad" sub-prime mortgages were packaged up together and sent to the Credit Ratings Agencies to be classified as AAA rated investment grade financial products, meaning that major banks, insurance funds, national and local governments, and pension funds bought them up in their £billions believing them to be safe investments rather than carefully repackaged junk.

The whole thing defied economic logic: High return investments are riskier, low return investments are safer.

But Sajid Javid and the other financial sector alchemists selling these toxic products convinced their customers that they'd managed to rewrite the basic laws of investment to create these high return + supposedly low risk investments.

But while they were singing their praises to their customers, loads of CDO merchants were secretly referring to them in the most derogatory of terms, like "shit breather" and "piece of shit" in private chats, because they knew they were junk investments that were bound to implode sooner or later.

Furthermore, several of the banks selling these ticking time bomb CDO "investments" were secretly buying up £billions worth of financial insurance on the products they'd just sold, looking for huge payouts when the junk products they were selling finally exploded (this special insurance is called CDS and you can find out more in this article).

So given that it was an open secret amongst CDO merchants that they were selling toxic junk that's bound to fail, and that several of the banks selling this stuff were opportunistically speculating on the inevitable failure of the junk products that they were selling to unsuspecting customers, what was Sajid Javid playing at?

There are only two explanations, neither of them good.

If we're charitable to Javid, then we could argue that he was a clueless dupe, naively selling a load of toxic junk in good faith simply because he was too stupid to investigate the products he was actually selling, and so poorly connected within the CDO industry that he was unaware of the open secret amongst his peers that the products he was selling as safe investments were actually bound-to-fail financial Weapons of Mass Destruction.

So what on earth is Boris Johnson doing promoting a clueless idiot like this to the most important economic job in British politics just a decade later?

The other explanation is, of course, much worse. If Javid was smart enough to realise that the CDOs he was selling were bound-to-fail junk, and he was in on the open secret within the trade that they were certain to implode one day, yet he carried on selling them as safe investments to oblivious customers like other banks, pension funds, local and national governments, and insurance funds as low-risk investment opportunities, then he's a cynical and duplicitous fraudster.

If he didn't know, he was an idiot and certainly shouldn't be running the UK economy, but if he did know, then he's a fraudster and should probably be in jail for wilfully selling toxic junk to unsuspecting customers, rather than running the UK economy.

It's absolutely extraordinary that Boris Johnson and the Tories have promoted one of the shady derivatives traders who caused the economic crisis to the top economic job in British politics, and whichever way you look at it, his damning history clearly indicates his unfitness to hold such a crucial role.

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OR

What is ... "centrism"?

One of the huge mistakes people make with the term "centrism" is imagining that it's actually a moderate central position between capitalism and socialism like the name implies, when it's nothing of the sort.

In reality modern "centrism" is an orthodox neoliberal strategy of shifting ever further rightwards in order to position yourself ever so slightly to the left of whatever ideological insanity the political right are up to.

Historical context

For proof that there's been a decades long rightwards shift of the "centrists" just consider what was the central political ground from the 1940s through to the 1970s.

Conservative governments all through the era ran vital public infrastructure, services, and industries as state enterprises, built and maintained social housing, and regulated the financial sector in order to prevent devastating crises like those of the 1920s and 1930s.

The position of the Tory party in the 1950s and '60s is clearly significantly to the left of the "centrist" Labour government between 1997 and 2010,which introduced privatisation in our schools and hospitals, refused to build more social housing (or even reverse the disastrous Tory policy of selling off social housing without replacing it), and catastrophically deregulated the financial sector to enable the reckless sub-prime gambling that triggered the run on Northern Rock and eventually the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis ("centrist" Democrats did the same kinds of regulation in the US leading to the same insolvency crisis and bailouts situation over there). 

Anyone back in the '50s or '60s talking about privatising schools, hospitals, the Royal Mail, and even police services would have been considered a raving ideological extremist, but these days it's the political norm, and actual government policy.

And just imagine what would have happened to someone in the '50s or '60s if they'd proposed selling off our entire nuclear industry and letting it fall into the hands of the French government, then bribing the French and Chinese governments with public cash into building our new nuclear plants for us!

They'd have strayed so far from the political centre ground that the vast majority of people would condemn this kind of ideological lunacy as "treason".

But since the advent of the neoliberal era in 1979 this kind of absurd ideological extremist is absolutely commonplace, and the nuclear sell-off and bribery of the French and Chinese has actually happened under Tory rule.

In fact someone like Jeremy Corbyn who proposes a mix between socialist policies and regulated, properly taxed capitalism would obviously have been a political centrist in this pre-neoliberal era, but in modern Britain, as we know, he's routinely portrayed as a terrifying political extremist with radical and unpopular economic policies.

He's portrayed this way by the self-declared "centrists" because he's refused to jump on board the radical hard-right neoliberal bandwagon like they all have.

He's stayed on the traditional centre ground as the "centrists" rapidly steam towards the radical hard-right and yell "extremism" at him out of the window as they fade into the distance!

Modern context

Now think about the political position of the self-declared Labour "centrists".

Remember Labour losing the 2015 general election by pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than opposing it. That's "centrism".

Remember the Labour right-wingers and mainstream media hacks parroting the ludicrous myth that Labour lost because they were too left-wing under Miliband in order to justify their absurd theory that Labour should imitate Tory economic radicalism even more closely? That's "centrism".

Remember all 3 of the Labour "centrist" candidates cementing Corbyn's win by actually abstaining on the vote on £12 billion worth of Tory social security cuts for the poorest people in society during the Labour leadership election? That's "centrism".

The Labour "centrists" lost the party the 2015 General Election with their policy of pathetically imitating Tory policy, and then their immediate response was to claim that the solution to this self-inflicted defeat was yet another huge rightwards lurch towards the policies of the the most radically right-wing Tory government since universal suffrage!

In the minds of modern self-appointed "centrists" moderation and pragmatism clearly involves continually imitating the Tories, even when they're busy outright defying the public will by privatising schools, hospitals, and police services, trashing the economy with hard-right austerity dogma, destroying local government with unprecedented funding cuts, overseeing the longest period of collapsing wages and living standards in living memory, and using public cash to bribe foreign governments into building national infrastructure for us!

A basic grounding in political reality reveals that modern day "centrists" are not people who actually take a central position between capitalism and socialism, they're right-wing people with an interest in misleading the public into believing that the radical hard-right economic dogma of neoliberalism is somehow a moderate and pragmatic approach that exists in on the political centre ground!

Labels

It should be pretty obvious that "centrism" is a misleading political label that bears absolutely no relation to the hard-right neoliberal policies that modern "centrists" tend to support and imitate.

Another example of this kind of increasingly misleading political label is "Conservatism".

These days there are very few actual (small c) conservatives left in the Conservative Party. There's absolutely nothing "conservative" about the radical hard-right, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, cult of the individual bollocks they've been pushing for the last 4 decades.

And this is before we even bother to mention the Liberal Democrats and their numerous votes in support of grotesquely illiberal Tory party policies between 2010 & 2015 (secret courts, dripa, the gagging law, bedroom tax, sanctions and disability assessment regimes ...)

All three are examples of desperately misleading political labels.

At least Jeremy Corbyn is more or less exactly what he says he is on his label: a democratic socialist.

And at least the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru (Welsh Party), and the Green Party tend to offer more or less what their labels imply too.

But conservatives, "centrists", and liberals have shifted position so dramatically over recent decades that the policies they promote bear almost no resemblance to the political labels they self-apply.

Criticising centrism

One of the most difficult things about criticising the kind of self-appointed "centrists" who push radically right-wing neoliberalism is that an awful lot of people are so politically naive that they take the "centrists" at face value.

Politically naive people think that just because "centrists" self-declare as "centrists" that their political position is actually in the moderate centre, rather than lying ever so slightly to the left of the most radically right-wing Tory government in living memory.

So if you criticise "centrism" this complacent James O'Brien-listening, BBC-watching, Guardian-reading demographic is liable to think that you're only criticising the moderate political centre ground because you've been brainwashed into supporting the radically left-wing "cult of Corbyn"!

What they're completely and utterly unprepared to accept is the idea that hard-right neoliberal dogma is actually the ideological cult which has completely infested the Westminster political establishment and the mainstream media, and that the few who haven't got on board with this hard-right, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, anti-worker, deregulation frenzy are the last remaining "centrists" from the pre-neoliberal era!

So be careful when you end up criticising "centrism". If your audience doesn't understand that you're criticising neoliberals trying to give themselves a veneer of legitimacy by self-applying the label "centrist" then they're liable to imagine that you're actually attacking the old conception of a "centrism" that offers a compromise between socialism and capitalism.

They're liable to take your criticisms as confirmation of their absurdly warped view that people like you are the radical ideological extremist and continue believing that neoliberal self-labelling "centrists" and Tory ideological extremism represent the moderate centre ground!

  If you found this article interesting or informative,      

  here's another article about the "centrist" delusion that 

  their ideology is flawless and everything bad is always    somebody else's fault.

  

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The shockingly inadequate reaction to the bankers' crisis is the reason Britain is in such a state today

It's 10 years to the day since Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy and practically nothing has been done to rein in the excesses of the mega-rich speculator class who created the Bankers' insolvency crisis.

First the entire establishment class rallied around to ensure that their mega-rich speculator mates wouldn't lose out as a result of the crisis they caused with their reckless gambling, with bailouts, and quantitative easing cash galore to prop up the value of the assets of the rich.

Then Tories cynically used the bankers' economic crisis as an excuse to impose ruinous austerity dogma as a means of pushing the cost of the crisis onto ordinary people through wage repression, in-work benefits cuts, welfare cuts for sick and disabled people, local service cuts, etc.

Meanwhile the Tories actually rigged the economy even further in favour of the mega-rich by slashing corporation tax, slashing taxes on the mega-rich, and lavishing the speculator class with ridiculously one-sided outsourcing contracts, and handing them massive chunks of public infrastructure and services at bargain basement prices (like the Royal Mail) or even for free (like the state schools given away to private academy profiteers).

The bankers' insolvency crisis called for decisive action to ensure such a meltdown could never happen again. Action like breaking up the "too big to fail" banks, restraining the ridiculous short-term bonus culture to make financial rewards dependent on the long-term sustainability of the institutions paying them, jailing the most reckless and fraudulent of the financial sector gamblers, increasing competition and diversity in the financial sector, reducing the amount of wealth that gets funnelled into non-productive areas of the economy like property price speculation and the vast global derivatives casino ...

But instead of decisive action nothing was done, so that the property bubble and the the global derivatives casino have continued sucking vast amounts of wealth away from the real productive economy.

But what's even worse is what the Tory response to the bankers' crisis taught the mega-rich speculator class.

It taught them that financial crises are absolutely fantastic news for them. Their losses will be protected through bankers' bailouts and obscene policies like quantitative easing, while the cost of the meltdown is borne by the poor and ordinary.

And now, instead of waiting for the next crisis to come along (when the housing bubble bursts, or major banks gamble themselves into insolvency on the global derivatives casino again) the mega-rich speculator class are seeking to deliberately cause the next crisis.

They know that they can plunge the entire UK economy into a much bigger crisis than the bankers' meltdown if they can ensure that the UK conducts a "no deal" flounce out of the EU.

If they know exactly how and when the crisis is going to occur, the opportunities for making £billions by betting against Britain are obviously absolutely huge.

Then once they've made a killing by betting against Britain, and against the elements of the real economy they know will suffer huge losses in a "no deal" meltdown (manufacturing, haulage companies, leisure and tourism, aviation, shipping, agriculture, the automotive industry ...) they can pile back in with the £billions they made by betting against Britain in order to buy up masses of distressed British assets on the cheap.

The UK establishment response to the bankers' crisis created moral hazard by proving that the state would not let the mega-rich speculator class fail under any circumstances (even when they gambled themselves into insolvency).

Tory austerity dogma made the moral hazard even worse by demonstrating that the Tory party would deliberately load the cost of the crisis onto ordinary people, whilst actually rigging society even further in favour of the mega-rich speculators who trashed the economy in the first place.

And Brexit is the culmination of this truly outrageous response to the bankers' crisis.

First the Brexiteers used the wave of public anger at the consequences of austerity madness to deliver the Brexit vote, by attacking immigrants and the EU as the reason wages were collapsing, public services were failing, and poverty was rising ...

And now they're seeking to use this Brexit vote as an excuse to deliberately trigger another economic meltdown so that their greedy billionaire speculator mates can make even bigger fortunes on the social and economic suffering of the rest of us.

You'd have to be a fool to not see how the shockingly inadequate response of the establishment class to the bankers' crisis, and the imposition of ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma are responsible for the absolute state of Britain ten years later.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Working class support for the Tory Brexit farce is collapsing

It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of political history to understand that the people who suffer the most from political cockups are always those with the least: The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable.

Neither does it take a political super-nerd to understand that when the Tories are in power this effect is multiplied, given that the absolute core of the Tory political ideology is the upwards redistribution of wealth to the millionaires and billionaires who bankroll the entire Tory operation.

When there's an economic crisis going on, it's obvious that the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth massively exacerbates the social and economic problems.

Take the Tory austerity dogma that was imposed in the wake of the bankers' insolvency crisis. Extremely wealthy bankers crashed the UK economy with their utterly reckless gambling on complex financial products they didn't even understand ... Yet Tory austerity dogma saw pretty much the entire burden of this crisis loaded onto the shoulders of poor and ordinary people (wage repression, in-work benefits cuts, local government cuts, social care cuts, NHS and emergency services cuts, trashed workers' rights ...) while corporations and the super rich were lavished with handouts (top rate Income Tax cut, Corporation Tax slashed, masses of corporate outsourcing handouts, public services and infrastructure sold off at way below their real market values, Quantitative Easing shoring up the assets of the super rich).

The results of this have been devastating. The NHS and social care cuts have come with a death toll of an estimated 120,000 avoidable deaths, the police cuts have resulted in soaring rates of violent crime, local government cuts mean we're all paying more Council Tax in return for significantly fewer council services, food bank dependency is soaring, child poverty is soaring, in-work poverty is soaring, NHS queues have grown exponentially, ordinary British workers are still getting the worst deal in the developed world ... and to top it all off, the Tories haven't even got remotely close to eliminating the deficit, despite their promises that austerity dogma would have wiped it away before May 2015!

And now, despite not having recovered from the last crisis, we're facing another even bigger one. The looming spectre of a Tory administered Brexit.

Every day that passes makes it look more likely that Theresa May's shambolic Chequers proposals are going to collapse, resulting in the disastrous "no deal" flounce out of the EU that she's been threatening since the beginning.

The Tories' own regional impact assessments show that a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a devastating recession, far worse than the 2007-08 bankers' crisis.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out who Tories would load the cost of their own "no deal" Brexit crisis onto:

The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable. As usual.

The only people who will ever get a 'Brexit dividend' out of a Tory Brexit will be the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Steve Baker, and the mega-rich investment class who will cash in on it by betting against Britain, then flooding their cash back in during the crisis to pick up £billions worth of distressed British assets on the cheap.

The mega-rich will make a Brexit killing while the poor and ordinary pay the price. That's exactly what happened with austerity dogma, and you'd have to be shockingly naive to imagine a different outcome under a Tory Brexit.

Perhaps this is why the latest polling figures indicate that working class people are turning against the idea of Brexit.

Perhaps they can see the Tory Brexit farce approaching.

They can see it's their jobs, and the public services they rely on that are on the line.

And as the prospect of a Brexit recession draws closer and closer, they're ever more aware that the only possible winners under a Tory administered Brexit will be the mega-rich speculator class the Tories are bankrolled by.

It certainly takes a level of intellectual bravery to admit that you have been fooled by a political con.

But thanks to Jeremy Corbyn actually opposing it (rather than pathetically imitating it like Ed Miliband and Ed Balls did) ever more people are waking up to the fact that Tory austerity dogma was never really about reducing the deficit, and was instead just a hard-right wealth transfer con.

And hopefully enough people will figure out that a Tory administered Brexit is likely to be even more devastating than austerity dogma was when it comes to the wellbeing of poor and ordinary people.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Neoliberalism is to blame for the state of modern Britain

How did Britain come to be in such a mess?

It should be clear to anyone that the looming threat of a catastrophic "no deal" Tory strop out of the European Union didn't just happen in isolation, and that there are numerous factors at play.

Probably the biggest factor of all is the Westminster political establishment's ideological obsession with hard-right neoliberal dogma.

Ever since 1979 neoliberalism has ruled the roost in Westminster. The only period in the last four decades where it's not been Tories pushing hard-right, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, social housing wrecking, bank deregulating neoliberal dogma was 1997-2010 when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pushed the same ideological madness, but with doses of welfare economics and public service investment to soften the consequences of their adherence to Thatcherite economic dogma.

While policies like tax credits, the minimum wage, and investment in the NHS were admittedly far better than anything you'd expect from a Tory government, New Labour's refusal to reverse the worst aspects of neoliberal dogma meant they were absolutely complicit in the ensuing disaster, which came about when the private banks collapsed under the weight of their gambling debts in the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis (you know, the crisis we still haven't recovered from).

Instead of allowing the reckless and insolvent banks to go under and be replaced in the marketplace by less reckless institutions (as neoliberal economic theory suggests), the British state decided to institute the biggest state bailout in history.

In an unprecedented display of crony capitalism the government pumped £hundreds of billions into the financial sector directly while the Bank of England began magicking money out of nowhere via quantitative easing in order to artificially prop up the value of assets held mainly by the mega-rich.

These massive state interventions to save the neoliberalised financial sector from the consequences of their own reckless gambling should obviously have sounded the death knell for hard-right anti-state neoliberalism.

If you've spent the previous three decades pushing the lie that state intervention is bad, then you couldn't get a more obvious invalidation of your agenda than an unprecedented state intervention to save the economy from the consequences of your ideological experiment.

However, when the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010 the Coalition government immediately set about implementing an audacious strategy of prescribing the cause of the financial sector crisis as their so-called solution to the crisis.

So instead of a much needed rebalancing of the economy away from hard-right neoliberal dogma, the Tories actually doubled down on neoliberalism with their ideologically driven austerity agenda.

The results of this double-down on neoliberalism strategy were appalling: The slowest post-crisis recovery in Centuries. The longest sustained collapse in the real value of workers wages since records began. Savage local government cuts. The lowest levels of new house building since the 1920s. Home ownership rendered an impossible dream for millions as the private rental slumlords cashed in through the exploitation of people with nowhere else to turn. The NHS is crisis. Social care in crisis. Police and emergency services cut to the bone. Public assets being flogged off at fractions of their true values. Soaring child poverty. Soaring in-work poverty. An exponential growth in food bank dependency. Millions trapped in low-pay insecure Zero Hours Contract and gig economy jobs.

Once again the Labour right-wingers were complicit in the ensuing disaster. Instead of standing up and opposing ruinous Tory austerity dogma with all their might, Labour right-wingers like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie actually decided to pathetically imitate it with "austerity lite" (a decision that cost them the 2015 General Election and led to the Brexit vote).

If Labour had opposed Tory austerity dogma, it's likely they would have cruised into power in 2015 on a massive wave of public anger. But they refused to oppose it, and left the door open for hard-right opportunists to once again use the consequences of their own hard-right ideological fanaticism as a Trojan Horse to push even more of it.

The fact two of the Westminster establishment parties were pushing ruinous austerity dogma in government, while the third pathetically imitated it instead of opposing it left the door wide open for the right-wing fringe of the Tory party (and their Ukipper mates) to pin the blame the consequences of this devastating ideological attack on poor and ordinary people onto immigrants and the EU in order to whip up support for Brexit.

Had there been any opposition to Tory austerity dogma whatever, then it's unlikely Brexit would ever have happened. Just look at Scotland where the SNP ran a strong anti-Tory, anti-austerity campaign in 2015, and how the Scottish public overwhelmingly rejected Brexit the following year.

Now that the UK is facing the ever-increasing likelihood of a ruinous "no deal" Tory flounce out of the EU (which would trigger an economic crisis even worse than the bankers' insolvency crisis we still haven't even recovered from), surely it's time to accept that the four decade long Westminster fixation hard-right neoliberal dogma is the root cause of Britain's problems, and that the only sensible solution is to actually fight back against it?

Of course the majority of the Westminster establishment, mainstream media, and corporate executive class will fight tooth and nail to defend the ideological orthodoxy that they've done very nicely out of indeed. They'll fight back against a change of direction because they fear that undoing some of the damage to ensure that everyone in Britain gets a fair chance might mean that the privileged few lose out a bit.

And they're right. The mega-rich should have to pay their fair share of tax rather than stashing their wealth in Panama or the Cayman Islands. Exploitative private sector slumlords should have their profiteering curtailed by decent living standards and rent controls. Greedy property speculators should lose out as the government launches a massive house building drive to ensure that everyone who works for a living can afford a decent home to live in. Private profiteers who have made untold fortunes siphoning wealth out of our public utilities should see their money tap turned off as vital public infrastructure and services are bought back under public ownership. And perhaps most importantly of all, those who have monopolised the top jobs in society thanks to their privileged backgrounds should face some real competition from people from ordinary backgrounds armed with an education that is provided free of charge under a new National Education System.

Of course it would be impossible to undo the damage caused by four decades of neoliberal economic dogma overnight (especially against a tidal wave of establishment hostility), but surely it's time to reverse course rather than simply accepting the endless Westminster prescriptions of more of the exact same toxic dogma that caused the problem as the cure to the problem?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Now we know why the Tories were so keen to hide their regional Brexit impact studies

The regional Brexit impact assessment figures that the Tory government were trying to hide have been leaked, and they spell disaster, especially for the North East, North West, West Midlands, and Northern Ireland.

The Brexit assessment looked at the regional impact of three different Brexit scenarios, a Single Market Brexit, a free trade deal, and a "no deal" reversion to World Trade Organisation rules.

In every single region it turns out that "no deal" is by far the most damaging option, ranging from a 3.5% fall in the London economy to an astounding 16% collapse in the North East.

The analysis suggests that aside from London and the South West, a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a financial collapse that is worse than the recession that followed the bankers' insolvency crisis.

The terrifying thing is that as a result of ruinous Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression the UK still hasn't recovered from the last recession, yet the Brextremist faction of the Tory party are pushing for a "no deal" Brexit which would hit us with another, even worse recession.

The second worst scenario is a free trade deal Brexit, which would still see significant economic contraction across every single region.

The least bad option is the Single Market option which would cause a slump of between 1% in London, to 3% in the North East.

It's important to recognise that the least bad Single Market scenario is off the table as long as Theresa May and the Tories are running the negotiations for their own purposes, because they have continually ruled it out.

Whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour could be convinced to adopt a pro-Single Market/Customs Union stance remains to be seen.* 

One of the standout things about the analysis is the way London is projected to suffer the least under every Brexit scenario, yet London voted heavily in favour of Remain, whilst some of the strongest Leave-voting areas like the North East look set to suffer the most extreme economic downturns from the Brexit they voted for.

This contrast certainly adds some more statistical weight to the Turkeys voting for Christmas narrative.

However it's not all totally clear-cut, because Wales and Scotland look set to suffer very similar levels of economic damage as a result of Brexit, despite Wales voting in favour of Brexit and Scotland voting very heavily against it.

Anyhow, the reason the Tories wanted to keep this analysis secret is beyond obvious. There's no way they can pretend that there's any economic benefit to Brexit now that their own evidence says that it would cause an economic downturn/recession in every single part of the UK.

Another reason they must have been desperate to keep this research under wraps is that it completely destroys their endlessly repeated propaganda trope that "no deal is better than a bad deal".

Their own evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that "no deal" is the worst possible deal, so they'll surely have to bin that appalling nonsense for good after this.

It's important to recognise that anyone still pushing for Brexit under these circumstances is aiming to inflict damage on the UK economy, so the onus is on them to clearly explain what it is that is so damned important that they consider it worth triggering a recession for ...

And no, blue passports (that we could have had anyway without quitting the EU) just won't cut it.

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* = If I were to give advice on how to achieve such a change of approach I'd suggest that politely pointing to the facts and evidence to request a change of Labour Party policy in order to "protect jobs and the economy" is more likely to succeed than a relentless barrage of #FBPE abuse, revisionism, misrepresentations, and lies from Lib-Dems, Tory concern trolls, and the very same people who were shrieking anti-Corbyn nonsense during the spectacularly failed chicken coup of 2016.