Dirty Fucking Hippies

I like this video, it is aimed at an American audience, it oversimplifies many issues and overstates others for dramatic effect but it is essentially right. I especially enjoyed seeing the "hippy car" at 4m18s resplendant with sponsorship from the worlds largest mobile phone company for the unintended irony.

This stuff does need to be very simply spelled out though, becuase most Americans are fuckwits who will believe almost anything that "authority" tells them. I'm not being discriminatory here. I'm British and most of my countrymen are fuckwits too. It is just not discriminatory to have a go at the social norms of Homo Sapiens. People are blinded to the horror and injustice of our circumstances by the human instinct to survive and prosper that is cynically manipulated by  socioeconomic engineers at the behest of the amoral profit driven behemoths of free market capitalism.

Barclays defiling their Quaker roots

A UK uncut protester in a branch of Barclays Bank
during a day of protest on 19 February 2011.

In early 2011 the American born Group Chief Executive of Barclays bank Bob Diamond chose to make a robust defence of his bank and of the global banking elite in general in his "evidence" to a Treasury Select Committee. He controversially stated that "There was a period of remorse and apology for banks - I think that period needs to be over”. Coming in the wake of huge bailouts to the banking sector, Quantitative Easing and massive interest minimised loans from the US Federal Reserve, his remarks understandably provoked widespread anger amongst the general public given the background of savage cuts inflicted on public services like libraries, universities, adult education and disability benefits across the UK being inflicted by a Conservative party that has received over £40 million pounds in funding from the super rich banking elite since 2005.

At the time of Diamond's remarks Barclays were the third biggest bank nominally based in the United Kingdom with assets of £1.5 trillion, a globally recognised brand thanks in part to their sponsorship of the English Premier League since 2004 and the 15th biggest bank in the world judged by their market share. I am not a banking expert but I do know a little bit about the subject and have an interest in the history of banking and industry in the United Kingdom. I believe that a quick look at the history of Barclays Bank can illustrate how the UK banking industry has lost it's moral bearings and spun out of control. 
 

Barclays bank was a Quaker institution founded in 1690 by David Barclay, a man of Quaker faith who's father Robert had been a highly influential Quaker writer. The bank was run on Quaker business principles and guided by the Quaker testimony of integrity (the other three testimonies being to equality, peace & simplicity).

Over the years the bank grew in strength through the amalgamation of other Quaker banks like the Backhouse Bank of Darlington and Gurney's bank of Norwich. Through the centuries Barclays has subsumed dozens of Quaker and other non-conformist banks, credit unions and building societies.

Backhouse bank in Darlington was one of the many
Quaker & non-conformist banks
subsumed into what is now Barclays Bank

A look at the Backhouse family and their Darlington Bank which was located only a couple of minutes walk away from Darlington Quaker Meeting house gives us a fine example of how Quaker run banks helped to stimulate the industrial revolution through the provision of finance to people outside the economic elite of the era. At the time Quakers were still being persecuted for their beliefs, they were prevented from attending university, standing for Parliament, becoming judiciary or trading in corporation towns. Since Quakers were barred from playing a role in the establishment economy many influential Quaker families established their own businesses and became leading bankers and industrialists of their age.

The Backhouse family of Darlington were providers of credit to local industrialists like the town's famous railway pioneers as well as being industrialists in their own rights and noted biology experts too. The Backhouses played a clearly defined and important role in their local communities which extended far beyond their role as money lenders. A far cry from the frenzied and obscure trading activities of Barclays Capital in things like derivatives, hedge funds, short sales and futures, that are pretty much abstract intangible ideas to the majority of the British population. 

Considering the Quaker disapproval of gambling and their numerous campaigns against poverty it would be galling for the founders of these constituent banks to think the institutions that they had created would be subsumed into a megalithic institution that feeds into the huge casino that is the global investment banking sector through Barclays Capital and that the results of bad bets made by these casino banks can impoverish millions of people while the gamblers within the international banking community continue to make obscene amounts of money for themselves.

Going back to Diamond’s speech, he said that "No bank should be a burden on the taxpayer" and insisted that  Barclays had not taken any direct support from the taxpayer. Maybe they can claim that they had no direct assistance from the British tax payer but according to the Guardian and Private Eye in 2009 Barclays took $232bn in (Term Auction Facility) TAF loans from the US Federal Reserve (The American taxpayer) with minuscule interest rates unavailable to the money markets and definitely unavailable to plebs like us. They also borrowed $212bn from a similar scheme called the Primary Dealers Credit Facility (PDCF) in 2008. All this ultra low interest borrowing from the Federal Reserve (US taxpayer) adds up to at least $680bn since the credit crunch began. The most galling thing is that they obviously used this slush fund of cheap money to lend on to other people at the usual high interest rates and creamed off the profits.

The fact that the Americans pumped hundreds of billions of dollars through Barclays with near 0% interest rates raises a number of questions such as: Could the UK have even afforded the burden of lending nearly half a trillion pounds to Barclays at negligable interest rates? How much of a controlling interest in Barclays activities did all those billions of dollars buy for the Americans? How can Diamond continue in his job when he made such transparently disingenuous remarks to a Parliamentary Select Committee? How would the Quaker founders of Barclays and other constituent banks feel about recent Barclays activities and Diamond's unfamiliarity with the Quaker testimony of integrity, the single standard of truthfulness and the belief that honest dealing with others means more than simply avoiding direct lies?

Diamond giving "evidence" to the Treasury Select Committee,
where he made disingenuous claims that Barclays
had received no government assistance in 2009.

In his speech Diamond boasted that "In 2009, "we lent £35bn more [than the previous year] and in 2010 we lent £35bn more again in the first nine months alone," but it seems that they only managed to do this by borrowing £680bn in easy money from the Fed. 

Even if we forget about the direct assistance loans they took from the Americans, the bank also benefited from the climate in which the UK government was pumping billions of pounds into the banking sector to support toppling institutions like Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, HBOS and RBS in order to prevent the destruction of London as the financial capital of the world and billions more injected into the banking sector through its Quantitative Easing program.

It is pretty difficult to judge the scale of the negative effects that Quantitative Easing has had on the global economy, however the futility of creating new money to pump into an economic system was one of the few economic ideas that seeped through to me from the idiosyncratically structured British mass education system. To me it doesn't matter whether you are creating money to directly fund government spending (monetising) or printing money in order to deliberately invest it in buying up the remnants of hundreds of billions of pounds worth of toxic bad bets that the banks can't afford to service (quantitative easing). Printing money in order to stop the banking system from collapsing distorts the whole economy and is the kind of government subsidisation that consecutive UK governments have doggedly avoided giving to once proud industries like coal, steel, shipbuilding, cars and trains, thus allowing swathes of our economy that actually used to produce things to fall into ruin leaving the UK completely dependent on foreign imports of commodities of which until relatively recently we were global leaders in production.

To me it is a disgrace that our elected leaders took the ideological decision to let British mining, manufacturing and engineering fall into ruin rather than pay subsidies to help them through difficult periods, always citing the mantra of their free-marketeer friends and paymasters that "subsidisation is bad because it distorts economic systems". Instead of supporting British industry they concentrated on turning the city of London into the banking capital of the world. As soon as the banking sector ran into difficulties they poured countless billions that British miners and manufacturers could never even have dreamed of into a banking sector dominated by the same free-marketeer parasites that would have bitterly opposed emergency subsidisation of any other part of the UK economy.

To make matters worse, in February 2011 it was revealed that  in 2009 Barclays used a whirlpool of tax-avoidance subsidiaries based in tax-efficient countries. (tax havens) to reduce their tax bill to just £113m on profits of £11.6bn, which is a rate of taxation of less than 1%. If they had paid the 28% tax rate that many businesses in the struggling British manufacturing sector cant avoid, they would have ended up making a contribution of £3.25bn to the UK economy.

The fact that this kind of large scale tax avoidance amongst the global capitalist elites has been going on has been public knowledge for a long time and Barclays are by no means unusual in their aversion to paying tax. This public knowledge was because the intricacies of Barclays tax avoidance schemes were being freely circulated elsewhere on the internet as Barclays lawyers were making determined efforts to gag the Gaurdian from revealing some of the complex tax avoidance strategies they had been using in 2008. This latest revelation of the sheer scale of Barclays tax avoidance has come as shock even to seasoned politicians and fair tax campaigners like UK Uncut and the Robin Hood Tax Campaign.

So to recap, in his speech Diamond cited Barclays 2009 lending figures as reason that everyone should stop criticising bankers and let them get on with doing their jobs and made the disingenuous claim that the banks had received no government assistance to achieve these figures when in reality they had taken secretive loans of more that half a trillion dollars for the American Federal reserve, benefited from the British government's use of quantitative easing and the ridiculously low tax burden expected of them by their host nation. He then issued veiled threats by talking about how they needed to be allowed to pay obscene bonuses or their "best staff" would simply leave to claim their vast bonuses in less regulated economies and then pointedly reiterated Barclays' intention to remain based in London.

The fact is that the values of the small local banks with strong community ties, clear community benefits and ethical motivation have been forgotten as Barclays bank has grown into this monolithic and amoral profit driven entity that is structured to avoid billions in tax and pay out almost as much as they avoided in tax as bonuses for their super rich traders and executives, many of whom use the same tax evasion strategies as Barclays in order to avoid paying tax on their earnings while communities all over the UK are stripped of their services to pay off government debts that have been massively exacerbated by the unprecedented billions of public money used to prop up the banking system.

It is clear that Barclays have moved on from providing ethically motivated community banking to become an institution that diverts billions of pounds into the pockets of a tiny economic elite and avoids paying tax, while the communities from which it rose are impoverished by rising price inflation, wage repression and increased job insecurity as their public infrastructure is devastated by vicious cuts orchestrated by a demonstrably bankrolled Tory party.

UPDATE: In 2012 Bob Diamond resigned in disgrace after the LIBOR rigging scandal. He walked away with an £8.75 million payoff.

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Psychoquackery

From the very beginning, the so called psycho-sciences (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy) were built on a foundation of deranged nonsense. Sigmund Freud came out with a lot of pseudoscientific gibberish (all little boys are latent motherfuckers and all little girls fantasise about a good fucking from their dad). To use a phrase that is common to the psycho-brigade this looks like a classic case of projection. 

Even today Freud's ideas still have huge influence over the field, his theory that adult problems can be traced to unresolved conflicts from certain phases of childhood and adolescence is still popular, his descendants also heavily influenced the field and the vast majority of people able to name a famous psychoanalyst would probably come up with Sigmund Freud.

One of "Pavlov's children."

In the early 20th century, psyco-sciences progressed from Freud's deranged pseudoscience to barbaric experiments on animals and people. Most people have heard of Pavlov's dogs and the "conditioned reflex" but few are aware that Pavlov carried out the same experiments on children too, including surgically adding taps to their salivary glands and force feeding them.

Others like William Sargent pioneered some horrifying treatments like insulin therapy (regularly inducing comas with huge insulin overdoses), Electroconvulsive therapy (giving huge electric shocks to the patient in order to "burn out" their mental illness) brain surgery like lobotomies and all kinds of experimental drug therapies. It seems that many of the people working in the field in the early 20th century would be described as psychopaths by today’s standards because of their willingness to inflict unproven and traumatic treatments on people, often with little or no scientific justification.

By the 1950s the idea of treating "deviance" was commonplace. People such as young women who had a child out of wedlock or refused to stop seeing a boyfriend that their parents disapproved of would be institutionalised and given treatments like electroshock therapy and in many cases lobotomies. Many victims of this regime can still be found in mental institutions to this day and have suffered whole lifetimes of bogus psychotherapeutic treatments and institutionalisation just for failing some social conformity expectation in their early years.

Thankfully the "profession" has left some of the worst treatments like insulin induced comas and lobotomies in the past, however the concept of medicalisation of "deviance" and "non-conformity" is still fundamental to the profession. As you can see from the video there is an ever growing cloud of so called psychiatric disorders, the most famous being ADHD for which hundreds of thousands of children are treated with a stimulant called Ritalin (which has pharmacological effects similar to a mix of amphetamines and cocaine). Imagine the public outrage if I were to set up a website aimed at selling amphetamines to children in order to help them stay awake and concentrate on their school work, however the psycho-brigade can get away with it by deflecting criticism with their expertise and qualifications and pointing to the evidence base they have built up to support their methodology of drugging children with powerful stimulants.

The experimental data does show that the kids become less disruptive when they take these powerful stimulants but the methodology of medicalising symptoms like hyperactivity, impulsive behaviour and inattentiveness with extremely powerful drugs at such early ages must lead to medical dependence in the same way that mass institutionalisations of the mid 20th century led to a huge number of completely institutionalised patients.

The creation of medical dependence is clearly beneficial to the big pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs like Ritalin and to the professional prescribers, who with the right techniques can create lifelong patients out of children with "disorders" like not being able to "sit still and concentrate on boring stuff" which until recent times was considered fairly normal childhood behaviour and treated with corporal punishment in schools. The profession is not only punishing and stigmatising people that display non conformist behaviour they are making a profitable industry out of their medicalised treatments.

The rise of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has given traditional psychotherapists a lot to worry about. In layman's terms CBT is a methodology that focuses on helping patients to develop the mental skills to overcome their own behavioural problems and has been shown to work in the treatment of anxiety, depression, phobias, insomnia and a range of other "mental disorders". One of the main benefits of CBT is that it can reduce patient reliance on expensive long term drug therapy.

It is no surprise at all that leading establishment psychiatrists such as Andrew Samuels like to use their influence to characterise CBT as "a coup, a power play by a community that has suddenly found itself on the brink of corralling an enormous amount of money". It is frankly disgraceful to see a spokesman for, and proponent of, the traditional and expensive methodology of medicalisation and institutionalisation trying to smear the cheaper and more humanist approach as a bunch of money grabbing usurpers.

I don't see CBT as a magic bullet, but it is much closer to the holistic and humanist approach to mental illness that I favour. To me it is obvious that helping people to work out how to overcome their own problems where possible is a vastly superior approach to trawling their childhood for traumatic experiences and helping them to pin the blame for their situation on things that simply can't be undone, prescribing lifelong regimes of expensive and powerful drugs like stimulants and sedatives and herding patients into institutional care. It is time for the so called experts to get rid of the view of mental health conditions as deviances that can be categorised and medicated and start to see and treat their patients as people.

More info - CCHR

A message to the people of Britian from your superior & benevolent Tory overlords:

Using libraries is stealing from the publishing industry.
Cycling to work is stealing from privatised transport companies.
Using the NHS is stealing from private health care organisations.
Celebrating Mayday is stealing from the tourist industry.
Using herbal and complimentary medicine is stealing from pharmaceutical companies.
Growing your own food is stealing from supermarkets.
Walking and jogging to stay fit is stealing from private gyms.
Smoking weed to chill out is stealing from the breweries and tobacco companies.
Supporting public ownership of woodland is stealing from property developers.
Watching the BBC is stealing from Rupert Murdoch.


Thank you for your attention.

The Great Neoliberal Lie

Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebells
is credited with the creation of the
"big lie" strategy.

The Great Neoliberal Lie is one of the most egregious modern day examples of the "big lie" propaganda technique in action. The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels defined the big lie technique as "when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it" and that "if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it".

The Great Neoliberal Lie comes up repeatedly in any kind of political discourse about the causes and consequences of the 2008 global economic meltdown. Orthodox neoliberals such as small-state conservatives, corporatists and free-marketeers use the Great Neoliberal Lie to defend their favoured policies of cutting state spending on infrastructure, healthcare, education and welfare in the name of "austerity". The lie goes along the lines of:

The state has spent too much on infrastructure, healthcare, education and welfare and has borrowed excessively to pay for it, creating the budget deficit and increasing the national debt. The only way to to reduce the deficit is to cut government spending.

The first fault in the theory is that the economic crisis and subsequent rises in government debts were not caused by excessive government borrowing, they were caused by reckless lending in the financial sector.

To take the UK as an example, between 1997 and 2008 the UK national debt actually fell from 41.92% of GDP to 36.25%. During the same period British banks lent ever increasing amounts to less credit worthy customers in the form of 3.5x and 4.5x mortgages, banks' investments in household debt rose from around 60% of GDP to above 90%, and their leverage ratios increased as ever growing numbers of people chose to take out loans in order to invest in the property market rather than invest in savings or private pensions.

Several of the worst affected British banks even chose to invest £billions in buying up sub-prime mortgage-backed debt securities such as Collateralised Debt Obligations (they were AAA rated but anyone diligent enough to actually check what they're buying would have seen that CDOs were worthless neoliberal economic diarrhea). Much of this reckless lending was facilitated by successive government deregulations of the financial sector and seemingly deliberate government policies aimed at fuelling house price inflation.

Anyone attempting to maintain that the economic crisis and the huge rises in government debts were caused by excessive government borrowing as opposed to reckless lending in the financial sector and unsustainable property price inflation, is either lacking sufficient economic knowledge to understand the causes of the crisis or is deliberately attempting to obfuscate the actual causes of the crisis by switching cause and effect.

The next problem with the Great Neoliberal Lie can be found through closer examination of what actually constitutes government debt.

UK national debt as % of GDP since 1900.
In recent years large sections of the debt have been misleadingly removed
from official debt calculations, PFI debt lagacies in yellow & bankers' bailouts in purple.

To take the UK as an example again, as of July 2011 the proportion of government debt spent on infrastructure, healthcare, welfare, education, pensions, the military, policing, the justice system, prisons, local services, roads, government subsidies, EU contributions, science funding and research, international aid and even a few ill advised foreign invasions and occupations amounted to £876 billion (58% of GDP) which is actually well below the 20th Century average, not bad considering the tremendous economic impact of the credit crunch.

The headline figure of £876 billion (58% of GDP) is actually extremely misleading because the government chooses to exclude huge chunks of debt from the calculations. These artificial exclusions are designed to mislead, but what they actually do is make it very easy to compare the "legitimate costs" of running the state with the cost of following neoliberal economic policies.

The first of these artificial exclusions is the amount of government spending diverted through neoliberal economic alchemy schemes called PFI. Gordon Brown began the policy of hiding this proportion of government expenditure "off balance sheet" in order to prevent government borrowing passing his arbitrary 40% of GDP "golden rule". Despite pre-election Tory promises these hidden liabilities have not been brought back on balance, meaning that an estimated £240 billion (15.9% of GDP) in uneconomical, inefficient and inflexible PFI debt legacies remain hidden.

The next, and by far the biggest of the misleading exclusions is the cost of "interventions" to save the UK financial sector from collapsing into the black holes of debt they had created for themselves. UK Government borrowing to fund bailouts and the nationalisation of failed banks amounts to an incredible £1,376 billion (91% of GDP). This astonishing level of borrowing doesn't even take into account the severe economic damage inflicted by the Bank of England policy of printing money (quantitative easing) and holding interest rates artificially low, neither does it take into account the $trillions in secretive low interest loans made to British banks by the US Federal Reserve.

These figures show that "legitimate" state borrowing to fund all manner of useful infrastructure and services is absolutely dwarfed by borrowing to artificially prop up the dysfunctional UK financial sector and to facilitate neoliberal economic alchemy schemes. The neoliberal experiment in deregulated banking has been an abject failure and the UK government should be looking to impose "austerity" on the financial sector and on wasteful and inefficient PFI scams long before it turns its attention to minimising the legitimate costs of statehood.

The next problem with the Great Neoliberal Lie is the short-termism of large scale across the board cuts in state investment, which in many cases will create transparent false economies.

There are so many potential examples here I'm going to limit myself to brief discussion of just two general areas of state investment, policing and education.

The first, (and probably the simplest) example can be seen in the UK coalition government proposal to sack up to 40,000 police officers in the name of "austerity". This policy alone could be seen as potentially economically damaging but aligned with policies of cutting social services, slashing benefits and eliminating charity funding, all against a backdrop of increasing unemployment and rising poverty levels, it looks like a recipe for massively increased crime rates. Increased crime rates as poverty and lack of alternatives drive people to crime and a gelded police force become overwhelmed would lead to spiraling insurance costs.

More examples of false economies can be seen the coalition government's education policies. The decision to inflict huge budget cuts on university funding and scientific research look like an extreme economic disincentive for high-tech industries considering whether to base themselves in the UK.

Borrowing £4.5 billion per year to pay out £9,000 loans to 487,000 students will only add to the public debt problem in the short term and continue the squeeze on disposable income in the long term as graduates have loan repayments deducted from their salaries. It has been estimated that huge numbers of graduates will end up paying this "aspiration tax" for their entire working lives, as unless they have wealthy parents to pay the fees for them any graduate earning under £42,000 a year will not even be able to cover the (inflation +3%) interest rates on the loans.

Lumbering students that decide to study at English universities with such massive debts has already been criticised as an economic disincentive to higher education and a tax on aspiration, but it could also lead to a significant "brain drain" as the potential industrial pioneers and business leaders of the future should be smart enough decide to study for equivalent qualifications elsewhere in Europe, where they would be entitled to free university education, or via the payment of nominal registration fees.

Lastly, and in my opinion most importantly, the biggest criticism of the Great Neoliberal Liars is the way they completely disregard numerous historical precedents in making the fundamental assumption that cutting state spending is the only way to reduce government deficits.

There are several notable examples of states using targeted taxation, intelligent regulation and increased government spending in order to boost the economy out of recession, allowing them to address government debts in the long term. Thus showing that paying down government debts in the short term is not the only way to reduce state deficits and that stimulating the economy in order to pay down debts once prosperity returns is a successfully tried and tested methodology and a viable alternative.

Probably the most famous example of "tax and spend" is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States which resolved the post Wall Street Crash depression through policies such as; reform of the financial sector (closing the banks down entirely until they agreed to proper regualtion), wealth taxes, the initiation of huge state funded infrastructure projects, a massive reduction in unemployment, large scale house building and the repeal of prohibition. These measures pulled the United States out of recession while maintaining a carefully balanced budget (until America joined the Second World War).

William Beveridge, the architect of the Post War Consensus
which led to vast social improvements as well as achieving a
six fold reduction in the UK national debt.

The second World War increased the US national debt from around 40% of GDP in 1940 to over 100% by the mid 1940s, however the cost of the war was felt even more seriously in the United Kingdom as the British economy was still suffering the legacy of public debts built up during the First World War as they entered the Second World War. By the time it was over the British national debt stood at 237% of GDP. In the immediate aftermath of war the Labour party were elected and began implementation of the Post War Consensus as envisaged by William Beveridge. The fundamental policies included the establishment of universal healthcare which was to be "free at the point of delivery", the strengthening of the welfare state, massive housebuilding schemes and the nationalisation of key industries to create a "mixed economy".

The Post War Consensus lasted until the late 1970s and saw the national debt fall from 237% of GDP down to 43.7%. During the period 1946-1979 the wealth gap closed significantly, unemployment fell to very low levels, the living conditions of the poorest improved dramatically, ordinary working people had more disposable income than in any other period in history and the economy boomed despite the gradual loss of the British Empire. It was such a success that many elements of the Post War Consensus were imitated by democratic governments across the western world.

After a decade of economic neoliberalism resulted in a huge economic
crisis in Argentina, former President Néstor Kirchner led a powerful
economic recovery via targeted taxation and state investment policies.

 Main Article:  Argentine Recovery Economics

The most recent example of "tax and spend" leading to dramatic economic recovery and national debt reduction can be found in Argentina. Throughout the 1990s Argentina were considered IMF poster boys because of the enthusiastic manner in which they implemented hardline neoliberal economic reforms such as deregulation of the financial sector, privatisation of almost everything, lack of fiscal autonomy, low taxes and low government spending. Between 1999 and 2002 the Argentine economy imploded spectacularly with four consecutive years of economic contraction and hyperinflation eventually resulting in the biggest national default in economic history.

Between 2002 and 2010 Argentina instituted a number of "tax and spend policies" aimed at reducing capital flight, improving national infrastructure, stimulating housebuilding and reducing unemployment. In this period the Argentine economy grew at an average of 9% per annum and Argentine national debts have been significantly reduced, despite strenuous efforts to bring down their unorthodox recovery from the IMF, international markets and numerous vulture funds. The IMF's intransigence led former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner to complain that the IMF has transformed itself "from being a lender for development to a creditor demanding privileges".

Conclusions

The "austerity lovers" that repeat the Great Neoliberal Lie have created a revisionist history in which they switch cause and effect. The deficit is not the cause of the economic crisis, in fact the deficit is only growing so rapidly because the real economy is shrinking in the wake of the financial sector crisis the neoliberals triggered with their deregulation mania. The hidden debt figures show that the state has borrowed far more in order to hand it out to the banks than it has borrowed to spend on infrastructure and services, meaning that any sensible course of action would involve imposing strict regulation and austerity measures on the financial services industries in order to recover the bailouts and prevent them from being gambled away on the unregulated derivatives markets, paid out in excessive pay and bonuses or squirreled away into tax havens.

The austerity loving revisionist would have us believe that the cause of the economic recession is that the government has spent too much on employing policemen, funding scientific research, providing universal healthcare and maintaining a social safety net to protect those that lose their jobs or become too old or ill to work, even though this interpretation is completely undermined by their own evidence.

The tried and tested methodologies for resolving debt crises are targeted taxation, intelligent legislation and increased government investment in order to boost the economy. Once the economy is thriving the deficit can be addressed. Current neoliberal policies of cutting taxes for the rich, further corporate deregulation and the slashing of state investment are just a continuation of the militant neoliberal economic policies that created the economic crisis in the first place.

The concept of targeting deficit reduction through the slashing of state investment as a principle and over-ruling priority, is an unfounded ideological stance based on the faulty assumption that cuts are the only option. Our politicians feel free to implement ideologically driven and assumption riddled policies based on falsified national debt statistics. Cuts that looks set to intensify the effects of the global economic meltdown rather than alleviate them. This is an absolute outrage.

The only way such brutal cuts in areas such as education and policing can be justified is through a denial that these services provide economic benefits of their own. It seems like common sense that a low crime state with an highly educated populace would be better equipped to recover from an economic downturn than a high crime state with a poorly educated populace, where the most intelligent students are actually incentivised to leave the country altogether by a localised aspiration tax.

Apart from repeating the Great Neoliberal Lie another tactic of the unthinking right-wing reactionary is to use the pejorative term "deficit denier" to describe anyone that opposes their favoured "slash and burn" economic policies. In proposing tried and tested economic solutions as an alternative to ideologically driven and unproven neoliberal small-statism, the opposition are not denying the deficit. In fact they are pointing out that austerity is far from the only option, and that prioritising deficit reduction above wider economic recovery may intensify the economic crisis and harm the economy in both the short term and the long term, making it much more difficult to reduce government debts.

Unless political leaders are prepared to accept that targeted taxation, regulation of the financial services sector and state investment are proven strategies for economic recovery and a long term reduction in government debts, they should be considered as dangerous ideologues pursuing an experimental and unproven economic strategy.

By borrowing over a trillion pounds in order to sink it into the dysfunctional financial sector instead of using it to fund direct investment in infrastructure projects, provide high quality education and services as well as providing low interest direct support to struggling industries, UK politicians were tearing up the economic recovery textbook in order to continue their slavish adherence to a dysfunctional neoliberal system. In deciding to slash government spending rather than concentrate on stimulating economic recovery the Tories are risking the future economic prosperity of the UK in order to give "more of the same" hardline neoliberalism yet another chance.



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