Are you gullible enough to believe George Osborne's misleading pro-privatisation propaganda?

On Monday 13th October 2014 George Osborne announced his plan to sell off the 40% stake in Eurostar owned by the UK government.

The fact that George Osborne is planning to sell off this profitable national asset is hardly surprising, given the ideological hatred of public ownership that runs through the Tory party.

What is shocking is the absurdly misleading language George Osborne has used to defend this ideologically driven sell-off. He made the ridiculous claim that the projected £300 million pounds in proceeds from the sell-off "would make an important contribution to the task of reducing the public sector debt".
The latest available figures on the public sector debt (which is calculated by deliberately hiding the huge sums used to bail out the insolvent financial sector "off balance sheet") show that the UK is £1,432.3 billion in the red.

The £0.3 billion to be raised from this sale equates to one five thousandth of the current national debt, which is hardly what anyone could reasonably call "an important contribution".

Another misleading aspect within George Osborne's statement is his implication that the Tories are engaged in "the task of reducing the public sector debt", when the economic evidence shows that in just four years Osborne has created more debt than all the Labour governments in history combined.

The appalling failure of George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment means that the UK is still borrowing almost £100 billion per year, despite the fact that when the Tories came to power in 2010 Osborne claimed that he was going to have completely eliminated the budget deficit by now.

To pretend that the £0.3 billion proceeds from this sell off would help to reduce the national debt, when he's still increasing the debt by an extra £100 billion per year is disingenuous at best. Either he knows that he's talking utterly misleading crap when he says claims that the proceeds from this sale are "an important contribution" or he's so economically illiterate that he can't see that £300 million is a tiny drop in a £1.4 trillion ocean of debt.
Once again were left with the unavoidable conclusion that George Osborne is either an innumerate idiot who should have been let nowhere near the levers of power, or he's so brazenly dishonest and full of contempt for the public that he believes that they're so gullible, they'll fall for his desperately misleading pro-privatisation propaganda.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

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It's time to shut up about "government piggy banks" and "national credit cards"

         
After I posted an article defending the NHS to the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, someone purporting to be a left-wing NHS supporter popped by to leave a comment in which they claimed that the NHS is great, but unaffordable in it's current form "because the piggy bank is not just empty, but shattered and in pieces on the floor".

The first thing to ask is why this person felt it necessary to use such melodramatic language? The frantic desperation of the phrase "shattered and in pieces on the floor" makes it sound like something rote-learned from the pages of the right-wing tabloid press, not anything divined through academic research or considered analysis.

The UK debt to GDP ratio is currently around 80%, and the cost of servicing this debt has been artificially lowered to the cheapest rates ever through the ongoing practice of holding interest rates at the all-time-low of 0.5% (for six long years) and inventing hundreds of billions in new money through the process of Quantitative Easing.            
To put the size of the current debt into perspective, in 1947 the UK debt to GDP ratio had risen to an incredible 238%. This huge debt came about as a result of participation in two catastrophic world wars with a great depression in between them, all crammed into the preceding three decades.

If the piggy bank is currently "shattered on the floor", what state must it have been in back in the late 1940s? Perhaps "Blitzed" or "A-bombed" might be appropriate melodramatic descriptions using the vernacular of the era?
              
So, back to the NHS that we supposedly can no longer afford to maintain in its current form because of the quite frankly awful "shattered piggy bank" situation. Well did you know that the NHS was built in the late 1940s along with hundreds of thousands of decent houses per year, despite the national debt then being three times the scale it is today?
          
The really amazing thing is that this massive post-war investment in infrastructure and services had the effect of stimulating the economy to such an extent that the following two decades became known as "the golden age of capitalism". The sustained period of economic stability in the 1950s and 1960s saw increasing prosperity for all sectors of society: rich, middle-income and poor alike. In contrast, George Osborne's so-called "recovery" has only benefited the wealthiest, who are becoming richer at a faster rate than ever, as the rest of us endure the dire consequences of austerity.
       
The Tory "recovery" has benefited the wealthiest minority enormously, whilst ordinary wage earners have seen their incomes fall in real terms month after month after month in an unprecedented period of sustained wage repression. Those of us reliant upon savings or pension funds rather than earnings have also lost out terribly as our investments have been eroded away by inflation. Meanwhile the speculative classes have benefited by borrowing to fund their speculative investments at the very same ultra-low interest rates that are destroying the value of the labour, savings and pensions of the rest of us*.
 
The one thing that right-wing apologists for austerity really don't want you to think about is the fact that by the time Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 and set about her ideological destruction of the post-war settlement with her mantra of "modernisation" and "opportunity", the national debt was down to just 43% of GDP.  This means that decades of state investment, improved infrastructure, access to social housing and well funded universal services coincided with an almost 200% reduction in the national debt!

In contrast, after just four years of George Osborne's slash and burn economic lunacy, the national debt has risen so dramatically that he's already created more national debt (as a percentage of GDP) than all of the Labour governments in history combined! 

Only the economically uneducated could think about something as complex as the national economy in terms of "shattered piggy banks" and imagine the opposite of the truth to be the case. History has shown time and again that you can't simply cut your way out of a crisis, this is because you need to spend money to make money.**

Conclusion
             When people from the left lower themselves to using the economically illiterate tabloidesque language of "government piggy banks" and "national credit cards" to explain our views on the economy, we play right into the hands of the wealthy minority who understand how the economy actually works, and have spent the last three decades rigging the whole system in their own favour.

These beneficiaries of the crony capitalist system know that "the left" will never be able to effectively oppose the right-wing orthodoxy (austerity, privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts for the rich) if the public have got heads so full of economically illiterate nonsense that they don't have a chance of properly understanding how the system actually works.

So next time you hear someone purporting to be left-wing harping on about "overusing the national credit card" or complaining that the "government piggy bank is broken". You've got to stop them - because as long as people continue to think in such simplistic and misleading economic terms, they can be easily led by the nose by those who have a vested interest in the public not actually understanding the basics of what's going on.

If we allow ourselves to remain so economically uneducated that we believe in such simplistic nonsense, we can easily be convinced that good is bad, that black is white and that we can't afford to keep the NHS despite the fact that the tiny super-rich minority are busy making themselves richer at a faster rate than ever.

If you want to learn more about economics, you could use my guide to learning about economics as a starting point.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

Footnotes

* This is hardly controversial stuff. Even the IMF have finally admitted that ultra-low interest rates have benefited the speculative class, who have borrowed at low interest in order to inflate vast and unstable speculative bubbles like the London housing market. 

**of course you have to spend money wisely, to make money - but that's a whole other story.

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What is the point of the Labour Party?

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with anything Peter Hitchens says, so I was taken aback when I stumbled across an old article of his in the Daily Mail calling for the renationalisation of British Rail, in which he described rail privatisation as "a huge con that left us with delays, antique trains and a vast bill", admitted that he'd stopped believing in free-trade and asked "What on earth is the point of the Labour Party if it cannot even oppose the mad disaster of railway privatisation?"  

Once I got over the shock of agreeing with something this right-wing blowhard had said (by telling myself that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day), I got to thinking about the answer to the question: What is the point of the Labour Party?

I know what the point of the Labour Party used to be before Blair and Brown took over in 1994 and replaced the principle ideologies of the party with a Rupert Murdoch approved version of neoliberalism-lite (Thatcherite economic policy with a sprinkling of pseudo-socialist window dressing). The point of the Old Labour party was to maintain a social democratic system in which the public are provided with a social safety net and enough opportunities in life to stop them from rising up and overthrowing the establishment.

In my view the achievements of the post-war Labour Party were the great political legacy of the 20th Century. The NHS, full employment, decent housing, and a more equitable share of the wealth for the bottom 90% of society. The truly incredible thing is that as all of this was being built and maintained, the national debt fell from 238% of GDP in 1947 to just 43% of GDP in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher tore up the post-war consensus in favour of ideologically driven right-wing neoliberalism, since when the national debt has skyrocketed back up again (especially if you include the deliberately hidden costs of PFI debt legacies and the bankers' bailouts).The privatisation of British Rail has been the most visible failure all of the crony capitalist privatisations enforced by the 1979-97 Tory government. As a result of this ludicrous ideologically driven sell-off, Network Rail (the bit that runs the actual railway lines) has amassed a staggering £34 billion worth of public debt; the UK rail engineering and manufacturing sectors have been annihilated; ticket prices have risen above inflation year, after year, after year; overcrowding has got ridiculous and extremely dangerous on many commuter lines; and the private rail operators and rolling stock companies have got rich on £billions worth of taxpayer funded subsidies.

The subsidies handed out to private rail companies amount to far more than the entire cost of British Rail before it was carved up for privatisation, and where we were once global leaders in advanced rail technology, we now buy our tilting trains from Italy!

After Labour came to power in 1997 they had 13 years to do something about the incredible shambles the Tories had created out of our rail network, but they did nothing. In fact they were busy with their own madcap privatisation scams to rival the incompetence of Tory rail privatisation fiasco.

PFI was introduced by the Tory party in the early 1990s, but Gordon Brown oversaw a huge expansion in these ridiculous one-sided contracts, that have been described by the Treasury Select Committee as "an extremely inefficient method of funding [public infrastructure] projects". The debt legacies from these absurd economic alchemy schemes have already driven numerous NHS Trusts into severe financial difficulties, and will remain an enormous burden on future generations of taxpayers.

Hundreds of billions in outstanding PFI debt legacies may be the most expensive privatisation burden left by New Labour, but the most ludicrous of all must be the Mapeley Steps deal to privatise the Inland Revenue property portfolio. Anyone suffering under the delusion that New Labour was a socialist government, should think long and hard about how on earth privatising our tax collection offices into the hands of a company basing themselves in Bermuda for the purposes of avoiding tax, is in any way compatible with socialism (an economic system based on social ownership).

Labour's track record in office is proof that the party ceased to be any kind of socialist party when it was usurped by Blair and Brown in 1994. Of course there are still good people within the Labour party (John McDonnell, Dennis Skinner, Michael Meacher, Ian Mearns, Stella Creasy, Austin Mitchell, Jeremy Corbyn, Grahame Morris ...), and a significant percentage of Labour supporters still identify as socialists. However it is absolutely clear that Labour will never go back to promoting social democracy, as long as adherents of the right-wing economic orthodoxy like Ed Balls retain key positions within the party.

The current Labour party energy policy is a perfect illustration that the party is intent on remaining a neoliberal party, but disguising the fact with a dollop of pseudo-socialist tinkering. The vast majority of the UK public want to see the energy companies renationalised, but all "Red Ed" is prepared to offer is the continuation of private ownership of our vital energy infrastructure, just with a short-term energy price freeze as a bribe to the electorate.

Another indicator that Labour offer no real alternative to the Tories is the ludicrous pledge to stick to George Osborne's spending plans, despite the fact that George Osborne's economic plans have been a collossal failure so far. In 2010 he pledged to completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2014-15, but we're on track to borrow an extra £100 billion this year. In fact George Osborne has borrowed more in four years than New Labour did in thirteen. If George Osborne's economic plans have been such an appalling failure so far, why on earth are Labour pledging to stick to them if they win power in 2015?

Another indicator of the fact that the Labour party are more concerned with grabbing political power by whatever means is the way they focus their attacks on the Green Party and the SNP, rather than focusing their efforts on overthrowing the Tory led coalition. The fact that Caroline Lucas' Brighton Pavillion constituency is one of their top target seats for the 2015 General Election tells us everything we need to know. Labour are more concerned with rubbing out parties that promote the social democratic policies they discarded in the 1990s, than they are with actually fighting the Tories.

Labour fear the growth of a viable left-wing alternative party just as much as the Tories fear UKIP.The Labour leadership seem to think that attacking genuine left-wing parties and offering the electorate nothing more than "not quite as bad as the Tories" will be enough convince the public to vote them back into power in 2015. Even though they've experienced an opinion poll boost on the rare occasions they have offered anything even remotely radical, they're still intent on pushing a Thatcherism-lite agenda in the vain hope that the Tabloid press will take it easy on them. They haven't reailed that the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail will attack Labour whatever they offer, and that by attempting to suck up to the right-wing press, they're simply driving more and more left-wing people away from the Labour Party in exasperation.

So in answer to the question of what the Labour Party is for?The Labour Party has become nothing more than an empty power structure, so far divorced from its founding principles that it exists only to seek and maintain political power. The party leadership isn't driven by any objective other than the pursuit of power for its own sake. The Labour party strategists imagine that the only path to achieve this political power is through eschewing any kind of radical, progressive or left-wing policies, in favour of promoting a Thatcherism-lite agenda designed to appease the right-wing press, and by conning the public into voting for them with a few lame bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing. 

 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 biggest threat to UK sovereignty is the TTIP corporate power grab

UKIP have made a heck of a lot of political capital out of harping on about British sovereignty. So much so that they have the Tory party running scared, looking to ramp up their own anti-immigration anti-Europe rhetoric in order to stop the exodus of voters, political figures and major party donors from their party to UKIP.

Given their professed concerns about British sovereignty it's extremely strange that the UKIP leadership have remained almost completely silent about the secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations underway in the EU, which are designed to carve open European markets (including the UK) for the benefit of gigantic US conglomerates, to bypass the UK courts and to undermine British democracy.

Investor State Dispute Settlements

The most concerning aspect of this so called "trade deal" is the inclusion of Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). These new rules would allow corporations to completely bypass the UK legal system and sue the UK government in secretive tribunals.

I don't think it's a radical view to say that if corporations want to do business in the UK, they should abide by the same legal system as the public. They shouldn't just be able to run off to a secretive transnational tribunal to sue our government every time the government does something that the corporations don't like.

Here are a few brief examples of how corporations could use ISDS proceedings to bypass the British legal system and undermine our democracy.

• NHS: If the NHS is made subject to ISDS tribunals, it would become impossible for any government to reverse the ongoing Tory privatisation of NHS services without compensating private health companies for their projected profits. 84% of the UK public want to see the NHS run as a not-for-profit public service, yet TTIP would prevent any UK government from doing what the public wants, without these secretive transnational tribunals fining our country countless £billions for trying to do what the electorate want them to.

• Renationalisation: 66% of the UK public want to see the rail network renationalised and 68% want the energy companies renationalised too. The ISDS components of TTIP would make it impossible for the UK government to ever deliver the renationalisations the electorate wants, without paying vast fines amounting to the projected future profits of the private profiteers. The $50 million case brought by Bechetel against Bolivia after the water system was renationalised is perhaps the most famous example of a corporation using the ISDS components of existing free-trade agreements in order to sue a government for renationalising infrastructure.

• Energy policy: The inability to renationalise vital energy infrastructure without triggering transnational tribunals and vast fines is not the only way government energy policy would be impacted. A Swedish company has used the ISDS components of another free-trade agreement to sue Germany for their decision to transition away from nuclear technology. The ISDS components of TTIP could provide more avenues for energy comanies to sue national governments. If a future UK government set a new target to transition away from reliance upon imported coal, they could be sued. If they set a new target to transition away from oil, they could be sued. Under TTIP control of national energy policy would essentially be completely abandoned to the private sector. 

• UK Standards: ISDS tribunals could be used to prevent the UK government from bringing in new standards. If the UK government introduced new safety standards on any kind of product, the product manufacturers could launch ISDS proceedings in order to sue the UK government for their lost profits.

• Public health: The Tobacco company Philip Morris has already used ISDS regulations in other free-trade agreements to sue countries (including Uruguay and Australia) for attempting to introduce plain cigarette packaging. TTIP would allow multinational corporations to undermine all kinds of legislation designed to promote public health.

• Environmental issues: Corporations have been using the ISDS components of existing free-trade agreements in order to sue governments and attempt to undermine environmental legislation all over the world (Canada, Peru, El Salvador, Australia, Ecuador). If any future UK government were to introduce new environmental legislation to protect our natural environment, or reduce pollution in our cities, the ISDS components of TTIP could make them liable to pay compensation to the companies they prevent from damaging the environment.

• Tax: Another important area in which ISDS proceedings could be used to undermine national sovereignty is the tax system. If any future UK government were to introduce new taxes (pollution tax, financial transaction taxes, Pigouvian taxes, wealth taxes) they would be opening themselves up to be sued by all manner of corporations.

Mode 4 cross-border trade (immigration)

The EU has a policy of including Mode 4 concessions in all of it's trade negotiations. This allows companies to transfer workers across borders. To simplify somewhat - Mode 4 cross-border trade is similar to outsourcing, but instead of moving the factory to a low-wage economy, workers are moved from the low-wage economy to the factory. Anyone with a job should be worried at the prospect of multinational companies driving down the aggregate value of labour in the UK by shipping in workers from low-wage economies.

This article gives a much more comprehensive description of what Mode 4 cross border trade is all about.

One would have thought, given their near constant use of anti-immigration rhetoric, the proposal to allow businesses to import foreign labour into the UK would have UKIP up in arms. Given that they now have 24 MEPs in Europe, surely one of them must have realised by now that ratification of TTIP could remove their power to "close the borders" should they ever actually get into power?
 

The Opposition

The silence from the UKIP leadership on the subject of this undeniable attack on UK sovereignty is telling. If they're not prepared to speak out forcefully against TTIP (especially the inclusion of ISDS tribunals and mode 4 cross-border trade) suggests that they don't really care that much about our sovereignty at all. It suggests that they're so wedded to Thatcherite ideology that they can't even see the importance of maintaining the sovereignty of our legal system, and the decisions of our democratically elected governments. They don't seem to mind about attacks on our sovereignty, as long as the beneficiaries are corporations.

The void left by UKIP's hypocritical silence on the issue has been filled by two other players on the political scene.

The campaign group 38 Degrees has coordinated activists and organised public information campaigns to educate people about what the mainstream media seems so desperately reluctant to talk about in critical terms.

The largest political party to take a strong stance against TTIP is the Green Party, who recognise this "trade deal" for what it is: A massive corporate power grab, and a grave threat to our national sovereignty. The three Green MEPs are part of the Green-European Free Alliance, which is the largest EU parliamentary group to strongly oppose TTIP.
   

What can we do about it?

Take direct action: The campaign group 38 Degrees has been coordinating public protests against TTIP. If you feel strongly about protecting British sovereignty it is not difficult to sign up. You don't have to be any kind of "radical" or "leftie" to participate. I'm absolutely sure that if you've never really got into politics before, or if you're a right-wing libertarian (who should surely be appalled at this kind of crony capitalism) you'd be gladly welcomed into your local campaign against TTIP. The more people on the streets speaking out against it and providing public education, the better.

Write to your politicians: We live in a democracy where the politicians would prefer that we keep our noses out of it, and limit ourselves to drawing a cross on a piece of paper every few years. One of the only semblances of participatory democracy in UK politics is the fact that we can write to our political representatives and expect a reply from them. If you're not an experienced letter writer, feel free to copy and paste excerpts from my work (I don't care about copyright). Your local MP has a statutory obligation to reply to you if you include your full name and postal address in your letter. It is also worth contacting your local MEPs too, since TTIP is being negotiated within the European Union. Contact your local representatives here.

Sign the European petition: In September 2014 the European Union blocked the launch of a Citizens' Initiative against TTIP. Apparently they are extremely frightened that if they allow the people of Europe to have a say, they'll say something inconvenient like "we don't want TTIP". The organisers of the Citizens' Initiative decided to go ahead and self-organise the petition against TTIP anyway. The self-organised Citizens' Initiative against TTIP could be the most important petition you sign this year.

Spread awareness: You don't have to join 38 Degrees campaigners on the streets to spread awareness. Many elderly people, people with disabilities, people who work long hours and people with young children often find public protest difficult or intimidating. You can spread awareness by sharing this article or any of my other TTIP related articles and pictures. You can share this concise document from the Green - European Free Alliance, or if you suspect your friends or family might be hungry for more detail, you could share this booklet. If people don't know about TTIP, they can't oppose it.

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

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Twitter politics from various perspectives

Despite the fact that I've made my social media home on Facebook, it's impossible not to recognise that Twitter is a brilliant platform for political discourse.

These days the majority of politicians have Twitter accounts, and a large proportion of politically engaged people are more likely to check the news by scrolling through their Twitter feed, than they are to obtain all of their news from a single online source.

The days of people having their political news drip-fed to them by a particular daily newspaper are gradually coming to an end, and Twitter is one of the best "new media" platforms because it allows people to aggregate political news from all kinds of sources into a concise news feed, from which the most interesting stories can be picked out and followed up.

In my view the biggest danger with Twitter is the way in which many people will follow only the Twitter accounts that they agree with, and neglect accounts that present them with information,analysis or opinion that upsets them or threatens their worldview. In effect, Twitter allows people to create their own bespoke closed ideology echo chamber. I'm not trying to be judgmental here, in fact I know perfectly well that I tend to follow people I agree with a lot more than people I don't.

On my own Twitter account I tend to follow Green party activists, rebellious "Old Labour" politicians, left-wing political commentators, heterodox economists, protest websites and comedians. I could never follow an obnoxious right-wing hatemonger like Katie Hopkins because she makes my blood boil with her sanctimonious and judgmental bile. Neither could I follow a dishonest-to-the-core Tory politican like Grant Shapps. This means that the right-wing accounts I do follow are generally more moderate right-wingers like Zac Goldsmith or the recent Tory-UKIP defector Mark Reckless.

The fact that my own Twitter news feed is a mirror that reflects back to me the kind of opinions I generally agree with (or at least ones that I don't find horribly offensive) got me wondering how Twitter must appear to people of different political persuasions.

In order to satisfy my own curiosity (and to make a hopefully interesting experiment for you to observe too), I decided to create five separate Twitter lists in order to estimate* what self-selected Twitter feeds might look like to people of various different political persuasions.

Simply click the five images below to see the different ways in which Twitter might appear to the supporters of the five different political persuasions. 

PLEASE SIGN IN TO TWITTER FIRST, OTHERWISE THE LINKS WON'T WORK

  

UPDATE: I have had feedback from numerous people telling me that the above buttons don't work on their Apple products. Here are the basic links.

• A Tory perspective

• A Labour perspective

• A Lib-Dem perspective

• A UKIP perspective

• A Green Perspective

Note: If enough people find this a useful resource and follow the various lists, I'll consider investing a bit more time in creating lists for other political persuasions too, such as a nationalist list (SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein), a radical-left list (Left Unity, Socialists, communists ...) and an extreme-right list (BNP, EDL, Britain First ...)

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

* This isn't intended to be a scientific experiment so these feeds are only rough estimates. I've included political representatives, self declared supporters and activists by their parties, which is quite uncontroversial. I've also included a few media outlets which align with the parties, for example I've put the Independent in the Labour and Green lists, and the Daily Express in the Tory and UKIP lists. I've also included think tanks, websites and political commentators roughly aligned by their political position.

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