What do Britain and Greece have in common?

The mainstream media rarely draw attention to the ongoing collapse in the value of UK workers wages.

They rarely bother to explain that the real terms value of workers' wages are lower than they were 10 years ago, and that this decline is set to continue into the 2020s.

They rarely bother to explain that the percentage of people living in poverty despite being in working families has been soaring.

And they steadfastly ignore the fact that the only country in the developed world that has suffered a comparably severe collapse in the value of workers' wages is crisis-stricken Greece.

To hear Tories scaremongering that the UK could end up like Greece if the public don't re-elect the Tory party is utterly laughable. Wealthy Tory MPs and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press may be financially insulated from the dire consequences of their austerity wealth transfer con but ordinary working people certainly aren't.

Judged by the collapse in the value of our wages, the UK has already ended up like Greece in the experience of ordinary working people.

We all know that prices have been rising way faster than wages. 

We've all seen people we know struggling on exploitative zero hours contracts, and fake self-employment scams in the gig economy. 

We all know people who haven't had a proper pay raise in years. 

We all know people who have had their in-work benefits slashed by this cruel Tory government. 

We all know people who are struggling to get by on various low paid part-time jobs because there aren't enough real jobs to go around. 

We're all well aware of the scandal of NHS nurses relying on food bank parcels in order to survive.

We all know that the Tory "economic recovery" was only ever a recovery for the rich, while the rest of us have seen our share of the wealth actually eroded away.

The UK is the only country in the developed world where the economy has actually been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers' has been in decline.

"Where has all of this extra wealth gone?" you may ask. The answer is obvious. While the majority were suffering the worst collapse in the value of our wages on record, the tiny mega-rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

One of the most appalling things about this situation is that the Greek government oversaw the collapse in the value of their workers' wages because they were forced to do it by the iron fist of the Troika. The Tories chose to do it to British workers because they wanted to.

The Tories actually want to turn the UK into a low-skill, low-tech, low-pay, low-welfare economy to compete with China and India on their way up, as we meet them on our way down, and trashing the value of UK workers' wages is one of the ways they've been trying to achieve it.

Even worse than the fact that the Tories imposed this wage repression agenda just because they wanted to do it, not because they had to, is the fact that so many ordinary British workers absolutely refuse to fight back, and even allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that they actually have something to gain by voting for the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party.

Just imagine if this was France. Just imagine if the French government had overseen such a severe collapse in the value of workers' wages to match the wage collapse that British workers have endured. Just imagine the strikes, the mass protests, the riots in the streets, the relentless civil disobedience. Hell, they'd probably blockade Britain to make themselves heard!

Meanwhile in Britain the party that did this to our wages have been re-elected as the largest political party twice (despite being led into the most recent election by a robotic charisma vacuum of a woman who is seemingly hell bent on delivering a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit strop to make the global banking crisis look like a walk in the park).

Not only are British workers failing to fight back against this sustained Tory assault on the value of their wages, millions of them are still actually queuing up to vote for the party that did it to them!

 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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How the Tories used "divide and conquer" tactics to trash all of our wages

Since the Tories were enabled back into power in 2010 workers in the United Kingdom have suffered an unprecedented attack on the value of their wages.

The wage collapse

George Osborne's imposition of hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression resulted in the longest sustained fall in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

In fact the only country in the entire developed world to have suffered a post-crisis collapse in wages as bad as Britain's was crisis-stricken Greece, and they were forced into imposing austerity dogma and wage repression by the Troika, the Tories imposed the same toxic hard-right economic snake oil on Britain simply because they wanted to.

The dreadful outcome of these fanatically right-wing economic policies put UK workers in a uniquely bad position. The UK is the only developed nation in the world where the economy has been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers has been in decline, which leaves the obvious question of where all that extra wealth has been going if not to working people.

Another obvious question that arises is how on earth the Tories have managed to get away with such a prolonged ideological attack on the wages of hard-working people without triggering a furious backlash.

Propaganda

One of the obvious reasons the Tories have got away with this sustained ideological assault on ordinary working people is the fact that the complicit mainstream media barely ever covers the issue.

The facts that British workers have suffered the worst wage collapse since records began should be the narrative that underpins pretty much every newspaper article about politics or the economy, but somehow the ideologically driven Tory "war on wages" is a story that only ever pops up intermittently, with much greater prominence given to absolute drivel like Diane Abbott's bouts of innumeracy, fake stories about Jeremy Corbyn breaking a student debt promise he never made, and endless hate-mongering attacks against any public figure who dares argue for anything but the most extreme-right anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit.

Not only have the mainstream media been complicit with the Tory "war on wages" by omission, they've also desperately failed to ridicule the ridiculous Orwellian propaganda narrative from the Tories that they're the party for "hardworking people".

The Tories have orchestrated the worst collapse in workers' wages on record, repeatedly slashed in-work social security (Tax Credits, sick pay, the child welfare system, maternity & paternity pay, Employment Support Allowance ...), attacked workers' rights (like the right of low-income workers to take bad bosses to Employment Tribunals without paying £1,200 in unlawful Tory tribunal fees), and created a system where a shocking 55% of all families living in poverty are working families.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the mainstream media have allowed an anti-worker party like this to dress themselves up as friends of "hardworking people" without repeatedly calling them out on their completely backwards "black is white" propaganda.

Divide and conquer

One of the classic right-wing political tactics is to drive divisions within sectors of society in order to get them hating each other, rather than fighting back against the government that is actually to blame for most of their problems.

The division the Tories have created in order to drive down all of our wages is between public sector and private sector workers.

The right-wing press have been particularly helpful to the Tories in helping spread this social division with their continual attacks on public sector employees, especially teachers and NHS staff.

The idea is to stoke jealousy amongst private sector employees about the supposedly brilliant wages and fantastic pensions enjoyed by public sector workers in order to justify imposing real terms pay cuts on public sector workers year after year, whilst simultaneously increasing their workloads too.

The economy is interconnected

Dim-witted private sector employees buy into the crude envy politics of the right-wing press and actually end up supporting the public sector pay freeze. They support it because they're actually gullible enough believe the ridiculous narrative that public sector wage repression is about equalising conditions between the public and private sector, rather than a political means of driving down the wages of all of us.

The reason they're too stupid to understand is that they've been conditioned into thinking about the economy in super-simplistic "us and them" terms, rather than seeing the economy as a spectacularly complex mass of interconnections.

Just think about it. If nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff are hit by huge real terms pay cuts for seven consecutive years, what kind of effect would this have on the local economy? 

Would the private sector employees of a hospital's now-struggling local coffee shops and sandwich bars be better off, or worse off, as increasingly over-worked medical staff bring packed lunches instead of eating out?

Would local businesses like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, and takeaways fare better or worse as their public sector clientele are forced to cut back dramatically on luxury expenditure?

If public sector wages in your town are collapsing and people are quitting public sector jobs in droves to seek private sector employment, is this increased competition for private sector jobs going to have an upwards or downwards influence on wages in the private sector?

Anyone who can't see that an intense campaign of wage repression against one sector of society is going to have a knock-on effect on their own wages too is obviously so riddled with envy that they've abandoned even the most basic critical thinking skills in favour of outright jealousy and hate.

Tory inertia

Remember how the Tory party actually cheered themselves when they won their vote to continue repressing the wages of the firefighters, police officers and NHS staff who were the heroues of the Grenfell fire and the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester?

Those cheers were an illustration of the ideological hatred that Tories have towards public sector workers (despite being particularly well-paid public sector workers themselves!). 

To actually cheer themselves for their continued attacks on public sector pay just goes to show how much the Tory party have bought into their own vile divisive propaganda.

A significant proportion of the Tory party are now so enamoured with their own anti-public sector propaganda that there is no way that the party can change direction without triggering yet another internal party civil war on top of the battles that are already raging over Europe and Theresa May's pathetic leadership.

These people actually believe that it makes economic sense to attack workers' wages which depresses economic demand, and create a repetition of the household debt boom that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown.

They also see public sector workers like nurses, firefighters and teachers as the new "enemy within" who need to be attacked and crushed like the miners were in the 1980s.

The Tories are now in a hopeless bind because they're incapable of seeing beyond their own propaganda. 

They've spent seven years making excuses for socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, and they've spend seven years deliberately repressing all of our wages.

Just look at the epic struggle Jeremy Corbyn has had trying to tear the Labour Party right away from their fixation with hard-right austerity dogma and attacks on the in-work benefit system, and Labour are traditionally the workers' party (hence the name)!

If Corbyn's had such a difficult job of steering Labour away from hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression policies, just imagine how difficult it would be for a new Tory leader to convince their MPs and party members that they need to reverse austerity and stop wage repression because they've been guilty of driving the UK economy in totally the wrong direction for seven disastrous years.

As long as this Tory government continues to defy the national interest by clinging onto power, there's going to be nothing but the most superficial PR-driven changes of direction.

As long as they cling to power their wage repression policies which affect all of us will continue to increase rates of in-work poverty, cripple economic demand, and re-inflate the dangerous household debt bubble.

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Why would any ordinary working person dream of voting Tory?

The Labour Party manifesto pledges to not raise Income Tax or National Insurance for the 95% of ordinary workers.

All workers should read the relevant parts of the Labour manifesto. which are their economic strategy (which contains the 95% pledge)and also the important section on securing a fair deal at work.

Theresa May loves to pretend to be on the side of working people, but since 2010 UK workers have suffered the worst slump in the purchasing power of their wages since records began.

The only other economy in the developed world where wages have slumped as badly as the UK is crisis-stricken Greece.

The difference of course is that Greece were forced to impose ruinous austerity and severe wage repression by the Troika. The Tories imposed their destructive austerity dogma and crushed our wages out of choice, because they wanted to.

One of the most notable things about Theresa May's 2017 General Election manifesto is that she decided to delete David Cameron's 2015 pledge to not raise Income Tax or National Insurance until 2020.

Just ask yourself why they would have deleted those pledges if they had no intention of hiking taxes?

There's no other explanation is there?

We all know that Theresa May and her Chancellor Philip Hammond tried to break Cameron's National Insurance pledge by announcing their hike in NI for self-employed workers. Thankfully she was made to do one of her countless U-turns on this occasion, but the tax raising intention was absolutely clear.

The Tories are clearly mad keen to hike taxes on ordinary working people, and it's only the fact they didn't have a big majority that stopped them from getting away with their National Insurance hike in March.

In the final week of the election Theresa May's Defence minister Michael Fallon suddenly decided to pledge on tax rises for the super-rich 5%!

The choice is now absolutely clear.

You've got a party that is financed by millions of small donations from ordinary workers that is promising to not raise taxes for the 95% ...

And you've got a party that is financed by a small number of massive donations from millionaires that is promising not to raise taxes on the 5%!

If you're an ordinary working person and you vote Tory, you're so obviously voting against your own economic best interests it's ridiculous.

 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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What do Britain and Greece have in common?

The mainstream media are highly unlikely to make the collapse in the value of UK workers' wages an issue during this election campaign because that would be extremely counter-productive to their aim of ensuring a landslide victory for Theresa May.

As a result of the Tories overseeing the longest sustained decline in the real value of UK workers' wages in history between 2010 and 2014 it was revealed that the only country in the developed world that has suffered such a severe decline in the value of workers' wages is crisis-stricken Greece.

To hear Tories scaremongering that the UK could end up like Greece if the public don't re-elect the Tory party is utterly laughable. They may be well insulated from the dire consequences of their austerity wealth transfer con (MPs got a whopping great 11% pay rise) but ordinary working people certainly aren't.

Judged by the collapse in the value of our wages ordinary the UK has already ended up like Greece in the experience of ordinary working people.

We all know that prices have been rising way faster than wages. We've all seen people we know struggling on exploitative zero hours contracts. We all know people who have had their in-work benefits slashed by this cruel Tory government. We all know people who haven't had a proper pay raise in years. We all know people who are struggling to get by on various low paid part-time jobs because there aren't enough real jobs to go around. We all know there are huge numbers of people working fake "self-employed" jobs in the gig economy. We're all well aware of the scandal of NHS nurses relying on food bank parcels in order to survive.

We all know that the Tory economic recovery was only ever a recovery for the rich, while the rest of us have seen our share of the wealth actually eroded away.

The UK is the only country in the developed world where the economy has actually been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers' has been in decline.

"Where has all of this extra wealth gone?" you may ask. The answer is obvious. While the majority were suffering the worst collapse in the value of our wages on record, the tiny super rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

One of the most appalling things is that the Greek government oversaw the trashing of the value of their workers' wages because they were forced to do it by the iron fist of the Troika. The Tories chose to do it to us because they wanted to.

The Tories actually want to turn the UK into a low-skill, low-tech, low-pay, low-welfare economy to compete with China and India on their way up as we meet them on our way down, and trashing the value of our wages is one of the ways they've been trying to achieve it.

Even worse than the fact that the Tories imposed this wage repression agenda just because they wanted to do it, not because they had to, is the fact that so many ordinary British workers absolutely refuse to fight back, and even allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that they actually have something to gain by voting for the billionaire bankrolled Tory party.

Just imagine if this was France. Just imagine if the French government had overseen a severe collapse in the value of workers' wages to match the wage collapse that British workers have endured. Just imagine the strikes, the mass protests, the riots in the streets, the relentless civil disobedience. Hell, they'd probably blockade Britain to make themselves heard!

Meanwhile in Britain the party that did this to our wages are actually leading in the polls (despite being led by a robotic charisma vacuum of a woman who is seemingly hell bent on delivering a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit strop to make the global banking crisis look like a walk in the park).

Not only are we failing to protest against this attack on the value of our wages, we're actually queuing up to vote for the party that did it to us!

 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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When are British workers going to start blaming the Tories?

In 1896 Peter Kropotkin wrote that "the worker feels vaguely that our present technical power could give abundance to all, but he also perceives how the capitalistic system and the State hinder the conquest of this well-being in every way". Given the huge technological advances in the last 120 years his idea of abundance for all stands truer than ever, especially in an advanced and wealthy society like the UK.

The reality is starkly different. Workers in the United Kingdom have suffered the joint biggest collapse in the value of their wages of any country in the developed world. Since 2008 only workers in crisis stricken Greece have seen such huge declines in their real terms incomes.

Things have got so bad that a record high of 3.8 million workers are living in poverty, plus another 2.6 million children in working households who are living in poverty. In Tory Britain having a job is no safeguard from poverty, and having parents who work is no safeguard from poverty for children.

While the burden of Tory austerity has been loaded onto vulnerable people and ordinary working families, the bankers who actually caused the global financial sector meltdown continue to get vast bonuses and the tiny super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth. 

It should be crystal clear to every worker that Tory economic policy is actively pushing things backwards. Technological abundance should mean that fewer and fewer workers should be living in poverty, but under Tory rule the huge advances of the 20th Century are being rapidly snatched back from the majority of people and redistributed to the super-rich minority (the people who completely bankroll the Tory party).

The really sad thing is that the modern British worker doesn't even seem to understand the basic fact that the Tory party exists in order to promote the interests of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of British workers actually went out and voted for for the Tories in 2015, then millions more voted for Brexit in 2016 thinking that their rebellion would somehow make their circumstances better by giving the political establishment a kicking.

Now the reality is becoming clear. Brexit has handed even more power to the Tory party, who simply switched their leader and then continued exactly the same policy of extracting wealth from the majority of people in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

Brexit has simply given fanatically right-wing Tories like Michael Gove the green light to ask British businesses to draw up lists of the employment and consumer protection rules they would like to see scrapped so they can make more profits for themselves at the expense of their workers and their customers.

Brexit was a snake oil revolution that looks set to lead to a Tory bonfire of employment rights and even more rapid declines in standards of living for British workers than they achieved between 2010 and 2015.

If Brexit is going to come with a huge price tag, then it's absolutely guaranteed that a Tory government will extract that cost of it from ordinary people in order to protect the the interests of the super-rich*. 

Even if Brexit causes the already appalling declines in workers' wages to accelerate, it seems likely that the Tories will maintain their grip on power. They only needed 24% of the electorate to vote for them in 2015 in order to achieve a majority government.

As a result of George Osborne's austerity con British workers suffered the longest sustained fall in the real value of their wages in history during the last parliament, yet the Tories not only won, but actually increased their grip on power.

Now it's become clear that British workers are getting the absolute worst deal in the developed world alongside Greek workers, but if things continue to follow the same pattern the Tories will win the next General Election with a landslide victory!

The only way to break this pattern is for sufficient British workers to wake up to the fact that the cause of their problems isn't immigrants, or unemployed people, or the EU, or whichever scapegoats the mainstream press are pushing ... The cause of their problems is the Tory economic policy of extracting wealth from the majority in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

 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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* = In fact one of the first (and only) Brexit policies the Tories have announced is their determination to continue the vast handouts showered on the wealthy landowner class by the EU.

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 Tory anti-worker tribunal fees are a barrier to justice

In 2013 the Tory party launched a savage crackdown on workers' rights to legal redress when they are abused by bad bosses through the introduction of upfront fees for workers who want to take their bosses to employment tribunals.

This Tory anti-worker legislation means that if your boss sacks you for your age, your gender, your sexual preferences, your trade union activities, your skin colour, your religious views, your pregnancy or even your refusal to suck his dick, then you have to pay £1,200 in upfront fees in order to seek justice. The assumption being that your boss is the innocent victim, and you're the malicious troublemaker guilty of trying to scam money out of your blameless employer.

If your boss steals money out of your wages then you're also assumed to be the guilty party and forced to stump up a fee of £390 to take them to a tribunal for unlawful deduction of wages. This £390 fee applies even if the amount your employer stole from your wages was less than £390!

By introducing such fees the Tories clearly made life a lot easier for unscrupulous bosses who unfairly sack their workers and/or pillage their wages, and a lot harder for employees with abusive or thieving bosses.

Back in 2013 countless people and legal rights organisations warned that sticking a price tag on justice would create a barrier to justice, especially for low-income workers. Others stated that this barrier to justice consequence wasn't just an unintended consequence, but actually the intention of the legislation.

Since the Tory tribunal fees were introduced the number of employment tribunals has fallen by 70%. How stupid would a person have to be to believe that this fall in cases has come about because unscrupulous employers have suddenly and dramatically cleaned up their acts, rather than exploited workers having been priced out of the justice system?

Since the fees were introduced the number of sex discrimination cases has fallen by 68%, the number of equal pay cases has fallen by 58%, the number of pregnancy discrimination cases has fallen by 54% and the number part-time workers cases has fallen by 80%.

It's absolutely clear that huge numbers of the people affected by this Tory anti-worker legislation are low-income, part-time and female workers who have been priced out of seeking legal redress for the unlawful behaviour of their unscrupulous bosses.

Aside from their malicious attacks on workers' rights, the Tories have also engaged on an unprecedented campaign to drive down workers' wages. The Tories have overseen the longest sustained decline in average wages since records began, they've repeatedly attacked the benefits paid to low-income workers, and since the 2007-08 global financial sector meltdown British wages have fallen 10.4% in real terms, which is the biggest slump in wages anywhere in the developed world apart from Greece.

Perhaps the most sickening thing of all about this savage Tory assault on workers' rights and wages is the way that they keep trying to con gullible people into thinking that they're actually on the side of working people with guff like their "Making Work Pay" propaganda campaign and Theresa May's nauseatingly dishonest inaugural speech where she pretended to give a damn about people like the working poor, disabled people and ethnic minorities.

If the Tories were more honest and admitted that they hate workers' rights with a burning ideological passion and will always side with the bosses, then at least we could respect their honesty. However the Tories are well aware that the truth (that they will always serve the interests of the multi-millionaire donors who bankroll their party) is politically toxic, so they lie, and they lie and they lie.

Unfortunately there are a hell of a lot of gullible working people out there who rote learn the Tory lies and actually believe that the Tories are on the side of ordinary workers rather than the kind of unscrupulous bosses who bankroll their party.

 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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