13 reasons you'd have to be absolutely cracked to believe the Tories are "the party of law and order"

The Tories absolutely love to pose as "the party of law and order" so in this article I'm going to detail the policies they've pursued in relation to policing and the justice system since 2010 (much of it wilfully enabled by their Lib-Dem chums).

21,000+ police jobs axed: 

You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last decade not to have heard about the Tories austerity cuts to the police force, not just slashing all those jobs, but shutting down 600 police stations, and absolutely gutting police budgets too.

The resulting violent crime wave and surge in gang culture was widely predicted as they were making these cuts, but Theresa May and the Tories dismissed all the experts' warnings about their police cuts agenda as "crying wolf" and "scare-mongering".

Privatised front line policing:

If you ask the British public about privatisation of public services, the things they're most vehemently opposed to are privatisation of the NHS, schools, military, and police.

Just 4% of people who expressed an opinion thought that privatisation of the police sounds like a good idea.

This public revulsion at the idea didn't stop the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks privatising a bunch of front line police services (and other massive swathes of the criminal justice system) during the austerity coalition.

This police privatisation frenzy included a £200 million deal for G4S to take over Lincolnshire police (G4S are the useless tossers who screwed up the 2012 Olympic security preparations and had to be bailed out at the public expense by drafting in off duty army and police officers to clear up their mess - more on them later).

Forensic Science Service privatisation:

During the austerity coalition the Tories and Lib-Dems decided to take the extraordinary step of privatising police forensic science services, meaning crucial stuff like the processing of crime scene samples and DNA evidence was handed over to a bunch of profiteering private corporations.

The result was ridiculously predictable: Chaos, delays, mix-ups, and deliberately tampered evidence.

One private forensics lab in Manchester was caught manipulating forensic results, which meant 10,000 cases, including rape and murder cases, had to be reinvestigated. Nobody has gone to jail over this outrageous scandal.

Nobody charged in 91% of crimes: 

It beggars belief when the Tories do their "tough on crime" posturing to whip up their right-wing authoritarian base.

Their unprecedented police cuts since 2010 mean there are fewer police per head of population than at any time since the 1970s, with an ever growing percentage of crimes involving complex and time consuming IT investigations.

Is it any wonder that such a vast percentage of crimes go entirely unpunished these days?

How on earth is it possible to pretend to be "tough on crime" when you're letting more criminals get away with it than ever?

Dodgy facial recognition:

The Tories have been extremely keen to burn mountains of cash on unproven facial recognition technology instead of actively tackling the staggering backlog of uncharged crimes they've created.

These trials have resulted in farcical levels of inaccuracy of up to 98% of people being identified as the wrong person.

They have however built up a facial recognition database of an estimated 16-19 million people, many of whom have never been charged with a crime in their lives, despite a high court ruling that the police have no right to retain such images. 

Who cares about ensuring the police comply with the law eh?

The tagging fraud:

In 2013 two private outsourcing contractors (Serco and G4S) were caught running two of the biggest frauds against the British public finances ever recorded. The fraud involved submitting thousands of fake invoices for the monitoring the electronic tags of offenders, many of whom were made up, living abroad, or even dead!

All these companies had to do was pay back what they stole (£89 million stolen by Serco, and £109 million stolen by G4S) and nobody ever went to jail for it.

In fact, within a few years the Tories brought G4S back in to run another £25 million electronic tagging contract, so as long as you're stealing out of the public purse, the Tories are keen to ensure that crime does pay!

Privatised prisons:

Most of the Tory prison privatisation agenda went on below the radar during the Tory/Lib-Dem austerity coalition. The media only really started to notice when shocking mismanagement and extraordinary staff shortages in privatised prisons like HMP Birmingham led to massive prison riots.

Surprise, surprise, the private operators that reduced HMP Birmingham to such absolute chaos they had their contract to run it rescinded were our old friends G4S.

Legal Aid cuts:

One of the most devastating Tory/Lib-Dem "reforms" to the criminal justice system was their devastation of the Legal Aid budget, which has caused all kinds of problems by denying legal representation to those unable to afford it.

Legal Aid was originally introduced in order to level the scales ever so slightly by helping those who couldn't afford legal representation. The system was still massively stacked in favour of those who could afford to hire teams of expensive lawyers, but at least the poor had any legal representation at all.

The Tories couldn't abide this so they absolutely vandalised the Legal Aid system, leaving huge numbers of people without legal representation from family courts, through victims of crimes, to appeals tribunals against obscene "fit for work" judgements and ridiculously unjustifiable welfare sanctions.

Instead people are left to represent themselves, resulting in huge amounts of wasted court time because they don't even understand the absolute basics of legal proceedings.

It's impossible to explain the absolute horror and injustice of these Legal Aid cuts in just a few paragraphs. Here are some more links for further reading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Unlawful tribunal fees:

In 2013 the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition introduced upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees designed to price low income workers out of the justice system and prevent them from seeking compensation from bad bosses who had abused and/or exploited them.

In 2017 these fees were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court because of the unfair barrier to justice they so obviously represented. This ruling necessitated the reimbursement of everyone who had paid these "barrier to justice" fees, but nothing could be done to reimburse those who were priced out of the justice system between 2013 and 2017. They just had to swallow the fact that they'd been unlawfully denied the right to seek compensation from their bad bosses by a party that loves to style itself as "the party of law and order"!

Privatised Probation Service:

Perhaps the most devastating Tory reform to the justice system of all was their unbelievably dangerous and shambolic privatisation of the Probation Service.

Somehow the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks decided that it would be a fabulous idea to carve the probation system open for privatisation, leaving only the most serious (and costly) cases in public hands.

police, crime experts, and legal professionals all warned that handing probation services over to a bunch of corporate regional monopolies would represent a danger to the public, but the Tories and Lib-Dems did it anyway, because ideology apparently trumps evidence.

Then lo and behold, the probation system collapsed into chaos, mass resignations of experienced staff, soaring recidivism rates, virtually unsupervised offenders, unacceptable risks with public money, and clearing up the mess ended up costing a whopping £500 million.

Abolition of choice:

One of the most extraordinary assaults on the criminal justice system during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition was the move to scrap the right for criminal defendants to choose their own solicitor, instead being assigned one from a government approved list of mega-contractors including the usual suspects like Serco, G4S, and Capita as well as Eddie Stobart (yes the haulage firm).

This new policy would have driven hundreds of small and specialist legal firms out of business by preventing potential clients from choosing a local or specialist firm, because they've been automatically assigned representation by one of the corporate giants who bid for the regional monopoly in their area.

Thankfully this ludicrous nonsense was eventually scrapped, but the fact that it was even proposed is horrifying. There are enough ludicrous financial conflicts of interest with private companies running front line policing, forensic science, private prisons, the probation system, and electronic tagging, without them providing legal services to the people they'd profit from in their private jails if they were found guilty!

The prison book ban:

If we look back at the four previous justice system disasters, one man's fingerprints are all over every single one of them; the spectacularly incompetent Chris Grayling.

Another one of Grayling's brainwaves was the policy of banning books in prisons.

Anyone with the faintest appreciation of the fact that prisons need to rehabilitate as well as punish, must see that banning books is the kind of venal authoritarian nonsense of dictatorships, and that book bans are obviously an impediment to rehabilitation.

Like Grayling's shambolic effort to abolish legal aid choice, and his spectacularly failed probation system privatisation, and his unlawful tribunal fees, his ridiculous book ban was eventually scrapped too, after it was ruled unlawful.

The fact that the Tories allowed a serial incompetent like Chris Grayling anywhere near the justice system is proof of their utter contempt for "law and order".

The hiring 20,000 police deception:

Even when the Tories claim to be helping the police by hiring "another 20,000 police starting right now", it's an absurd deception.

The natural attrition rate of police retiring, changing careers, or quitting in exasperation at the under-funded chaos they're working in, means that the UK will need around an additional 20,000 police officers over the next three years just to keep the numbers where they are.

The Tories have dressed this police hiring process up as some kind of marvellous recruitment drive, but in reality they're doing little more than the bare minimum to prevent police numbers collapsing even further.

Even if nobody retired from the police for the next three years, where would all the extra police be placed given the fact the Tories have closed down over 600 police stations since 2010, and how would their operations be funded given that the current force is reduced to the absolute bare bones after nine years of ruinous Tory austerity cuts?

The problem of course is that there are an awful lot of dangerously under-informed dupes out there who still, despite all of the vandalism detailed in this article, imagine the Tories to be "the party of law and order", and willingly believe their ridiculous false promises to restore the police services they've just spent the last nine years deliberately wrecking.

Maybe reading this article would cure them of their delusion, or maybe they'd simply refuse to read it because they don't want their political preconceptions challenged in any way.

All we can do is try, and hope that they're not so far gone that they outright refuse to engage with information that clashes with their Tory tribalist worldview.

 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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HMP Birmingham: A case study in failed Tory privatisation mania

In October 2011 HMP Birmingham became the first British operating prison to be fully privatised when the Tory-led government handed operations over to the corporate outsourcing giant G4S.

By 2014 whistleblowers at the prison were reporting widespread violence and drug use, prisoners staying in bed all day, and experienced staff quitting in droves.

In 2016 the prison was rocked by a 14 hour riot involving some 500 prisoners. The Tory government then attempted to bury the report that cited staff shortages as a major factor.

In 2017 the Chief inspector of prisons found a violent, dirty, lawless, drug-riddled hovel rated as the worst prison h'd ever inspected.

In 2018 the Ministry of Justice demonstrate the shocking scale of this ideologically driven prison privatisation folly with the emergency state take-over of operations.

Amazingly the privatisation-fixated Tories knew exactly how bad HMP Birmingham was for several year, yet they just sat back and watched it deteriorate rather than admit their ideologically driven prison privatisation agenda was failing.

Even in the days before the emergency take-over they were still delaying because they were busy negotiating "commercially sensitive" contract terms with G4S!

Imagine how badly the contract must have been drafted if the private sector operators can turn a functioning prison into a violent drug-riddled horror show that even the guards are terrified to work in, and still think they've got a leg to stand on to quibble over contract terms when the the government steps in to take over the mess they've created.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Tory government have announced that they plan to hand the prison straight back to G4S after six months!

So G4S take over a functional prison, turn it into an absolute hellpit for the inmates and staff alike, hand it over to the government to clean up at public expense, and then waltz back in six months later to wreck it all over again!

Instead of negotiating over contract terms and then promising to hand the prison back to the failing outsourcing company after just six months, the government should be immediately banning G4S from bidding for any more Ministry of Justice work, calling a moratorium on all justice system privatisations, and announcing a wide-ranging public inquiry into how the prison privatisation agenda went so wrong so quickly.

To anyone with any sense the whole idea of handing prisons over to private companies is absolutely perverse. Only the most fanatical of hard-right neoliberal pro-privatisation freaks could try to argue that the primary function of prisons should be for private companies to generate private profits at the public expense, rather than keeping the public safe from dangerous criminals and rehabilitating lawbreakers so that they can reenter society with the skills and attitude necessary in order to avoid recidivism.

But this is where were at now. The cult of neoliberalism is so embedded within the Westminster political establishment that the majority of MPs and political journalists never criticise the ideologically driven privatisation of prisons, the forensic science service, electronic tagging of prisoners, the probation service, court translation services, or even front line policing. 

Meanwhile the minority of MPs who espouse renationalisation and a preference for not-for-profit public services are continually derided as the dangerous radicals and extremists!

The polling evidence is absolutely clear that the majority of British people are strongly opposed to privatisation mania, but the Westminster political establishment remain stubbornly impervious to the public view that ideologically driven privatisatise everything agenda absolutely stinks.

And that's the problem with the cult of neoliberalism - you can point to as many privatisation failures as you like (HMP Birmingham, collapsed and fraud riddled academy chains, Carillion, the rail privatisation farce, the G4S Olympic security failure, the G4S electronic tagging fraud, the forensic science privatisation calamity, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the absurdly inefficient Work Programme, the rip-off water companies, Royal Mail being flogged off at way below its true market value, flogging off the NHS blood supply, and dozens upon dozens of other examples) and you can point to the polling data that says the public hate it, but the neoliberal cultists will simply shrug their shoulders, ignore the evidence, and adopt their arrogant and elitist "we are the enlightened few, and the public are wrong again" stance.

 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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The corporate outsourcing parasites that are already cashing in on Brexit

A bunch of parasitical outsourcing corporations are already becoming major beneficiaries of this Tory administered Brexit shambles because they are having their rip-off contracts extended because civil servants are too busy dealing with Brexit to conduct competitive tenders for the work, so they're just allowing the contracts to roll over indefinitely.

The National Audit Office have found that 54% of the government outsourcing contracts up for renewal in 2016-17 have been automatically extended rather than put out to tender.

The problem isn't just that civil servants are being diverted into sorting out the Tories' Brexit shambles, government departments had already had their staff cut to the bone by Tory austerity with a 26% decline in the number of civil servants since the global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2007-08. So now we have the scenario that already overstretched government departments are having their staff poached to deal with Brexit, meaning these departments don't have the slightest chance of ensuring that taxpayers get anything like value for money on the £billions in corporate outsourcing contracts they're lumbered with.

The National Audit Office also revealed that an astounding 31% of government spending now goes on procurement from external providers. This means that the government are now spending an astounding £242 billion on outsourced goods and services (which is more than double the cost of running the entire NHS), but now the Tory government are not bothering to even pretend to be getting value for taxpayers' money by conducting competitive tenders for this work. They're just letting companies keep their lucrative contracts no matter whether anyone else could do the work cheaper.

The beneficiaries of these contract extensions include Serco and G4S who robbed £180 million between them on outsourced electronic tagging contracts by fraudulently claiming to have tagged prisoners who were dead, still in prison, or entirely made up.

Another beneficiary will be Capita who has had its contract to run PIP disability assessments renewed for two years until 2019.

Tom Gash from the Institute of Government said that "it's a damning sign that the government is letting Brexit distract from the core job of ensuring taxpayers’ money is being well spent ... Extensions should be the exception not the rule, as they represent a missed opportunity for finding better ways of designing services, reducing costs and increasing competition". [source]

It was always beyond obvious that a Brexit administered by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party was going to end up handsomely benefiting their corporate mates at the expense of the taxpayer, but few could have imagined that parasitical outsourcing corporations would end up cashing in quite so quickly from the Tory Brexit chaos.

 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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David Cameron's speaking gig with Bain Capital

Back in 2013 David Cameron's Tory party oversaw the sale of our NHS blood plasma supply unit to a vampire capitalist group called Bain Capital (which was founded by the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney).

Fast-forward three years and Bain Capital have already handed David Cameron a lucrative speaking gig at one of their events just weeks after he quit politics after his Brexit gamble went so spectacularly wrong. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax rules covering financial rewards to former politicians it's not clear how much Cameron is going to be paid for his speaking gig, but given that that the former foreign secretary William Hague is expecting to make some £4 million per year on the speaking circuit at £50,000 - £100,000 per appearance, Cameron's speaking fees are unlikely to be less than six figures.

It's no wonder Cameron was so keen to abandon politics when there are such rich pickings to be had from the companies his government handed favours to during his time as Prime Minister.

Some other potential speaking gigs for David Cameron include:

Wonga: The revolving door between David Cameron's government and this appalling legal loan shark company has been well documented. Cameron's sack-at-will legislation (drawn up by the Wonga investor Adrian Beecroft) must have been a real boon to the company as desperate sacked workers turned to them for their rip-off 5,000%+ APR loans. Surely Beecroft and his boys at Wonga could return the favour by handing Cameron a few lucrative public speaking gigs?

Circle Health: This private operator of various NHS facilities across England was one of the major beneficiaries of Cameron's 2012 NHS privatisation by stealth bill. Circle (owned by numerous major Tory party donors) was responsible for the absolute debacle at Hinchingbrook hospital, yet they're still running other NHS facilities across the country. The least they could do for Cameron is stuff him a few hundred grand for all of the NHS services they've snapped up under his watch.

Landsdowne Partners: This hedge fund made a £36 million profit when Cameron's government sold off the Royal Mail at way below its true market value. Given their enormous profits surely they can shove a bit Cameron's way?

G4S and Serco: In 2013 these global outsourcing were caught defrauding the taxpayer out of £180 million by submitting false invoices for the electronic tagging of non-existent prisoners. Cameron's government promised to punish them by temporarily banning both companies from bidding for contracts, but secretly handed them £350 million worth of contracts when they were supposedly banned. Even worse than that, the Tories carried on paying these companies for electronic tagging services way into 2015, two years after they were caught defrauding the taxpayer. Surely these companies can find a few hundred grand apiece to stuff into Cameron's back pocket?

Caudrilla: The fortunes of Cuadrilla and other fracking companies received a massive boost when Cameron's government decided to halve the rate of corporation tax for fracking companies. The fracking boom and bust in the US is proof that fracking is only financially viable if energy prices remain high, so the champagne corks must have been popping at Cuadrilla headquarters when Cameron and Osborne signed the UK taxpayer up to an absolutely ludicrous deal with the French and Chinese states to pay them double the market rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C for an astonishing 35 year period. No doubt Cuadrilla and other fracking companies will feel a moral obligation to repay Cameron for the vast tax cut he handed them and his decision to ensure their financial viability by signing the UK taxpayer up to pay massively inflated energy prices for generations to come?

Virgin Group: Richard Branson's Virgin Group have been major beneficiaries of numerous Tory privatisation schemes. From heavily subsidised rail contracts to huge slices of NHS infrastructure Branson's business did extremely well at raking in taxpayers' cash during David Cameron's time in office. The least "beardie" could do is repay Cameron with a few six figure public speaking gigs?

Times have moved on since former Prime Ministers quietly stepped out of the limelight having achieved the pinnacle of public life. These days becoming Prime Minister or an important government minister is just a stepping stone in the process of becoming filthy rich.

After serving as Prime Minister John Major cashed in by hooking up with corporations like the Carlyle Group arms company, but Tony Blair really blazed the trail for David Cameron with his corporate consultancies with the likes of JP Morgan, his lucrative speaking gigs and his work as adviser to all kinds of brutal dictatorial regimes.

After shafting the British public with his failed Brexit gamble Cameron literally couldn't wait to get stuck into what was clearly always the endgame; making himself filthy rich gorging on corporate speaking fees and lucrative consultancy positions.

 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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10 Economic fairy stories that people need to stop believing in

One of the big problems in the UK is the fact that the vast majority of the 93% of kids who go to state school end up with no economics education. This means that an awful lot of people are susceptible to the kind of ridiculous economic fairy stories that are pushed by right-wing politicians and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.

In this article I'm going to quickly run through ten of them. I've already written articles critiquing several of these myths individually. Where this is the case I've linked to the full article underneath the section header.

1. Government finances are like a household budget
[Main Article]

This is one of the most pervasive right-wing economic myths. The Tories love it because it allows them to hoodwink economically uneducated people into supporting their economic policies by making them think they understand economic issues that are actually very much more complex.

If your family home has a printing press that can produce money out of nothing (like the Bank of England) then the government finances-household budget analogy is slightly less misleading, but it also means you're a bunch of money forging criminals, so hardly representative of the typical UK family.

Anyone who tells you that government finances are like a household budget is either economically illiterate, or they're someone who knows perfectly well that they're talking economic gibberish but they're deliberately lying to you because they're assuming you to be economically illiterate.

2. The private sector is more efficient than public ownership
[Main article]

There are so many examples of this being completely wrong it's impossible to list them all. Think of the G4S security fiasco at the 2012 Olympics when public sector workers like the army and police had to step in at the last moment to rectify a massive private sector blunder. The private company had months to prepare a security plan and failed, the public sector stepped in at the very last moment and succeeded.

Then you've got the publicly operated East Coast Mainline rail franchise that was outperforming all the private franchises so dramatically that the Tories quickly bundled it back into private ownership to avoid the embarrassment.

If private ownership really is so much more efficient than public ownership, ask yourself why the military wasn't one of the first things to be privatised. Ask yourself why countries at war tend to bring private industries under public management.

3. House price inflation is good for the economy and creates growth

I'm sure you'll have seen plenty of news items focusing on house prices. When house prices fall the media report it as if it's some kind of terrible tragedy, and when house prices rise they often paint it as evidence that the economy is recovering. This is completely wrong-headed.

There's no major problem if house prices increase more or less in line with average earnings, but that's clearly not been the case for decades. The more house price inflation outpaces earnings, the bigger the percentage of people's incomes end up going on mortgage repayments rather than being spent on genuinely productive economic activities like setting up businesses, investment and consumption.

The higher the rate of house price inflation, the more skewed towards house price speculation the economy becomes. 

Things have got so bad in the UK that four times as much money is created by the private banks to channel into house price speculation than is lent to businesses outside of the financial sector that actually produce things and provide services. The more house prices inflate, the more incentive there is for the banks to pour even more money into the housing bubble rather than into the sectors of the real economy that actually generate real economic activity.

4. Austerity is necessary and not just an ideologically driven choice
[Main article]

"Let's cut our way to growth" is an absolutely ridiculous policy from a macroeconomic perspective. The majority of economists recognise that severe spending cuts are harmful to the economy, and more and more people are waking up to the fact that austerity is a con job that uses debt-fearmongering as a cover for policies designed to ensure a huge transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the tiny super-rich minority.

5. Everyone maximising their self-interest promotes wellbeing

This is one of the central ideas that underpins the right-wing economic models that have become accepted as the economic orthodoxy since the 1980s, and it's utterly ridiculous.

The concept that humans are rationally self-interested beings who will always act in their own self-interest is utterly ridiculous. Rational self interest is an impossible concept because in situations with multiple choices (like supermarket shopping) the number of different combinations of choices mean that a rational analysis would take thousands of years to complete, so people just use heuristics to make their decisions. 

A look at the concept of information asymmetry demonstrates how wrong-headed the idea of humans as perfectly rational economic agents is, because without a perfect supply of information, perfect rationality is clearly impossible to achieve.

Another glaring problem is that the concept of people as purely rational self-interested economic agents is the way it conflicts so dramatically with what we know about reality. If we were all perfectly selfish economic automota, then stuff like charity, empathy, voluntary activities and philanthropy simply wouldn't exist.

The problem goes further than the fact that humans don't and can't act as purely self-interested individuals. The idea that if only we were all just entirely selfish, then general wellbeing would be promoted is staggeringly backwards. If only everyone would stop giving to charity or volunteering in their community then the world would be a better place? Who actually believes this drivel?

6. It is a good idea to get China to finance our infrastructure projects
[Main article]

Even before it was revealed that one of the Chinese stakeholders in the bid to construct the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant is accused of espionage in the US, George Osborne's own father-in-law described the deal concocted by Cameron and Osborne as "one of the worst deals ever" for energy consumers and the UK taxpayer.

I'm not going to go into any more detail on this because it really boggles my mind that there's anyone out there who thinks that the UK is better off bribing the Chinese into building our infrastructure for us than building it for ourselves.

7. Impoverishing people on benefits makes them find jobs

The idea that the benefits system is too generous and that people will just go out and find jobs if the welfare system is slashed is one of the most pervasive right-wing economic myths.

The first problem is that many people on benefits are simply incapable of work. Cutting the benefits paid to the severely disabled and terminally ill doesn't make them more likely to find work, it just makes their already difficult situation much worse.

Another problem is that an awful lot of benefits go to the working poor. Stuff like working tax credits and in-work benefits accounts for a much bigger slice of the welfare system than unemployment benefit. Additionally an ever increasing slice of the vast housing benefit budget goes to the working-poor, whose employers pay such pitifully low wages that their employees can't even afford to cover their housing costs. 

Slashing Working Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, Statutory Sick Pay, maternity and paternity pay and other in-work benefits, whilst harking on about "making work pay" is obscene political propaganda from the Tories, but lots of people actually buy into it because they're unwilling to differentiate between the benefits paid to the unemployed, and benefits paid to the working poor.

Another major problem is that the concept of equilibrium unemployment is central to right-wing economic orthodoxy. They actually believe that there is an ideal rate of unemployment and design their economic policies to ensure that there's always a pool of unemployed workers. The idea of deliberately maintaining a standing army of unemployed people to drive down the wages and working conditions of those with jobs is bad enough, but it's utterly appalling to then say that we have to slash the pitiful subsistence incomes they live on in order to force them into work, when the policy is actually to keep them out of work to keep wages as low as possible.

One last problem is that the government's own evidence shows that impoverishing people in order to make them look for work is totally ineffective. In fact it actually creates more barriers to employment (inability to pay transport costs, printing CVs, cleaning clothes ...).

8. Driving down wages is good for the economy

UK workers have suffered a 10.4% decrease in their average real terms incomes since 2007 which is a decline only matched in severity by Greece in the rest of the developed world. The Tories have actually tried to make out that repressing wages is good for the economy as they tried to justify their 1% cap on wage increases for public sector workers (whilst accepting an 11% pay raise for themselves of course).

Slashing wages is bad for the economy because lower wages means lower aggregate demand in the economy. The only way that demand can be kept up when wages are falling is if people avoid cutting back by incurring private debt. Anyone who thinks that cutting wages and stimulating an even bigger private debt bubble than the one that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown is a good idea really hasn't been thinking very hard about economic issues at all.

9. Government spending crowds out the private sector

The idea that government investment crowds out the private sector is difficult enough to justify in economic good times, but in a economic situation where the private banks are unwilling to lend to businesses because they see much greater returns gambling on the house price bubble or playing the global derivatives casino it's utterly senseless.

Just look at the decline in house building since the 1970s (see image). The Thatcher government basically put an end to government house building, and if crowding out theory is correct, the private sector should have taken up the government share in the market which would have kept the number of new builds per year more or less the same.

In fact if you combine crowding out with the myth of private sector efficiency there should actually have been a huge house building boom since the 1980s, but what has actually happened is an extraordinary slump with new builds falling to the lowest level since the 1920s under David Cameron's government.

The private sector didn't build more houses at all, they simply sat back and enjoyed a huge unearned bonanza as the supply of new houses dwindled and ever increasing demand resulted in skyrocketing prices and corporate profits.

Crowding out theory clearly didn't even work in the pre-crisis period, but in the post-crisis economy it's absolute gibberish to claim state investment crowds out the private sector when the private banks are refusing to lend to genuinely productive sectors of the economy.

10. Government money creation always creates inflation

This myth is easily accepted by the masses because "wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread" in Wiemar Germany has been part of the history curriculum for millions of UK school kids. It's easy to perpetuate the myth that money creation creates hyperinflation when you can hark back to stuff like that, but it's basically just economic fearmongering because it relies on a complete misunderstanding of where money actually comes from (it's actually created out of nothing by the private banks) and a failure to consider the different ways in which the money could be spent.

It is true that money creation can lead to inflation, but it clearly depends where the newly created money is directed. The private banks create money out of nothing every time they make a loan and this led to a huge house price bubble. After the 2007-08 economic collapse the monetary system was not reformed and we're now seeing the development of another, even bigger house price bubble.

When the Bank of England created £375 billion in quantitative easing cash to prop up the insolvent financial sector it did not create a large spike in general inflation. The purpose of this vast cash injection was to stave off deflation in financial sector assets that are mainly held by the wealthy. As a result of it the values of the assets held by the rich were significantly inflated, while the values of pension funds and savings were deflated.

The type of inflation caused by money creation clearly depends on where the targeted money is directed into the economy.

If the government created money to just hand it out to the public that would likely cause price inflation in goods and services, but imagine if the government created £50 billion to invest in ensuring that every business and household in the UK gets free access to high-speed broadband. This spending would obviously have a significant economic effect but whether it causes inflation or deflation would depend on which area of the economy you were to look at. Such a scheme would create a large number of relatively high-skilled jobs meaning an earnings boost. It would create increased demand for materials which would have various economic repercussions, and it would also clearly cause a collapse in the value of companies providing home broadband services.

Anyone trying to claim that money creation to invest in infrastructure and services would always create hyperinflation is clearly trying to con you, probably because they prefer money creation schemes that inflate the assets of the rich, rather than money creation schemes that benefit all of society.

Conclusion

After the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown the "too big to fail" banks still utterly dominate the UK market; bankers salaries and bonuses are way higher than before the crisis; ordinary British workers have suffered a collapse in the value of their wages as bad as in Greece; private banks still have a monopoly on money creation and are still using the money that they create to inflate speculative housing bubbles; and the Tory government has simply repackaged the hard-right economic dogma that caused the financial sector crisis as their Austerity snake oil elixir to supposedly cure the crisis.

This utterly unacceptable response to the financial sector meltdown has come about because far too many people accept the facile and completely inaccurate economic fairy stories propagated by the Tory party and their chums in the mainstream media. 

If the British public do not learn to stop believing in economic fairy stories like these, there's little hope of any kind of change in direction away from the kind of hard-right economic dogma that created the conditions where the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown became inevitable, which means another meltdown at some point in the future and yet another effort to rebrand the exact causes of the meltdown as the solution to the meltdown.

 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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NOTE: This article was inspired by a comment from a guy called Simon Cohen in the comments section on the Guardian website who came up with a list of 10 economic myths that need busting. I kept several of the myths he suggested, but changed others.

The US is turning against the Prison Industrial Complex, but it's thriving in Britain

On Thursday 18th of August 2016 the US Department of Justice made a hugely significant announcement that they are planning to end the use of private prisons after a report found that private prisons are less safe and provide inferior correctional services than government run facilities.

The huge growth in the US prison population, the widespread use of private prisons in the US and the use of prisoners as cheap labour is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex. This describes the situation where private companies that profit from running prisons and exploiting prisoners as cheap labour lobby for ever harsher laws in order to boost the prisoner population and their own profit margins.

Civil rights campaigners and hip-hop artists have been complaining about the Prison Industrial Complex for years, noting how non-white people are far more likely to be imprisoned for non-violent offences like drug possession.

When it comes to private prisons the conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious. Government operated prison services have an interest in reducing prisoner numbers through correctional services like education, apprenticeships, anger management courses etc because a lower prison population means either lower taxes, or tax revenues that can be spent on other valuable services like education or infrastructure. Private prisons have an interest in keeping prisoner populations as high as possible in order to boost their profitability, meaning that any efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chances of re-offending are utterly counter-productive.

The obvious scope for corruption was highlighted by the appalling 2008 "kids for cash" scandal where two Pennsylvania judges were caught taking bribes from the owner of a private youth detention company in return for sentencing kids for utterly trivial offences like mocking a teacher on MySpace and trespassing in a vacant building!

Another scandal broke in 2016 when an undercover reporter from Mother Jones wrote a damning expose on the private prison business. This was followed soon after by the damning inspector General's report into the private prison business.

The US Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned against private prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex for decades. Here's his response to the announcement that private prisons are to be phased out.

"It is an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth. Due in large part to private prisons, incarceration has been a source of major profits to private corporations. Study after study after study has shown private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.   

We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible. Our focus should be on keeping people out of jail and making sure they stay out when they are released.  This means funding jobs and education not more jails and incarceration."

The the announcement that the US Department of Justice is planning to let all of their private prison contracts expire over the next five years resulted in an immediate slump in the stock values of private prison companies like GEO.

Even though the evidence against the private prison industry has been compelling, the announcement of the phase-out of private prisons in the US is still surprising because of the predictable freefall in private prison stocks. It's clear that taking away their opportunity to get rich on the back of the US taxpayer, and by exploiting prisoners as free labour is going to make a lot of rich and powerful people very angry indeed.

It's also surprising because the obvious insanity of private for-profit prisons in the US has long been seen as one of the factors that makes the radically right-wing US version of capitalism so much worse than the more social democratic versions of capitalism.

The irony for British people is that we'll no longer be able to high-horse about American capitalism being so much more rabid than our own version because our governments have imitated the US system by introducing a load of private prisons and detention centres in the UK, and they've also been allowing private companies to undercut the legitimate employment market by taking advantage of the UK prison population as a cheap source of labour.

Instead of getting angry about their lost opportunity to profiteer out of the US justice system, these companies could consider shifting their attention to the ongoing Tory marketisation of the UK justice system.

The Tories are creating huge profiteering opportunities by carving up and privatising all elements of the UK justice system. They're not just intent on building more and more privately operated prisons and detention centres and allowing private companies to use prisoners as cheap labour, they've also been busy trying to privatise front line police services (Theresa May is a big advocate of police privatisation), court facilities and services, electronic tagging (subject to a massive £180 million tagging fraud by G4S and Serco), and probation services. They've also been trying to reform legal aid in order to drive smaller specialist practices out of business and hand a bigger market share to multinational behemoths like Serco, G4S and Capita.

The conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious when the privatised police unit that makes the arrest, the forensic science unit, the legal aid lawyer, the courtroom facilities and services, and the private prison are all operated by the same small cabal of corporations, then upon release the probation officer and the electronic tagging company are run by the same corporations too.

If a rare display of evidence based policy making drives the private prison profiteers out of the US justice system, they can be assured that the Tories will welcome them with open arms to help them with their project to turn the UK justice system into a conflict of interest riddled free-for-all for corporate profiteers.

 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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