Normally I wouldnt respond to this on a match day, I have a little rule where i only do football topics on match days, but as it is kind of linked and i still cant do any work, cos my server is out of action thought id stick my penneth worth in.
It's not just a problem with the UK, it is the whole economic system which is fundamentally broken and only survives because regulations are specifically designed to maintain the broken system. The core of the problem as I see it is the hegemony of systems and entities over people. Austerity was designed to protect the economic system, the financial system and the banks in the hope that eventually those protection would filter throuh the the population.
There are some major problems with privatisation of utilities and other elements of national infrastructure in that the economic models for profitability mean that everything has to be looked at in three year cycles or shorter. So infrastructure is neglected in favour of making a few extra bucks today. The only way to make profit in these sectors is to abandon the future, or to price it so that it is only just affordable and that is where we are at. Infrastructure is deteriorating and energy prices for example are rising exponentially and almost every energy company is saddled with a debt that sooner or later will bankrupt them, unless state aid is available.
Patriotism is a simple way to create anger and to get particularly nasty individuals into positions of power. Farage, that patriot of patriots is currently pushing international investment companies at his supporters, and has been a strong advocate of american style and american owned health care providers. he has lobbied for many years for US access to the NHS and the UK health market.
The chinese invest in foreign infrastructure because they have a 50 / 100 / 200 year plan for global economic dominance. They are the ultimate purveyors of systems over people.
The centre left or the hard left cannot answer these problems because it needs an entirely different model. Like the ESL issue, where it might be the re-set that is needed, the economy and social systems needs to be re-set. The hard left cant fix it because they are still obsessed with an early twentieth century marxist inspired socialism, which - does - not - work: the centre left can't fix it because they just have a slight variation on neo-liberalism with a slightly more regulated corporate hegemony. The right and centre right can go on because they are only interested in serving a few.
Theres an economist I follow, who says some interesting things, and has a view which encompasses a thousand years of historic economic analysis, and addresses for example, interest rates over that period of time as a comparative. My issue with it is that the economic models over almost all of that period were design and managed to benefit 2 or 3% of the population. People were a resource. For a very small period of time post WW2 and a shorter period after WW1, there was economic thinking designed to benefit the majority. This was abandoned in the early eighties, and now we are back to the point where the economic system treat people as resourcesto be exploited and latterly a product to be sold.
The only fix is to address the economy for everyone and put people above systems and entities, and that includes governmental entities.
Hi Costero.
Firstly, apologies for not coming back to you sooner with my detailed comments. Life has got in the way a bit and I haven’t had much time to gather my thoughts. Your posts are indeed a compelling read and demand a rigorous examination. Not that message boards are set up for this type of thing. Ordinarily, immediacy is the name of the game. Then again, why not go for a more involved discussion?
So, where to start. Well, with your over-arching theme seems a reasonable place; the notion that we are run by systems and entities for their own sake and not for the benefit of people. You begin by saying that
“the whole [world?] economic system…is fundamentally broken and only survives because regulations are specifically designed to maintain the broken system.” I’ll demur slightly – but only as a brief aside – by noting that regulations were too weak to prevent the 2008 banking crisis, for example, and that regulations in UK social policy dramatically failed to prevent the rampant spread of Covid in UK care homes. However, you move on quickly to establish your key theme, that the core of the problem is the hegemony of systems and entities over people. To illustrate this you consider the post-banking crisis policy of economic austerity suggesting that it was
“designed to protect the economic system, the financial system and the banks in the hope that eventually those protections would filter through [to] the population.”
Here I agree with your reasoning but not what you see as being the ‘stated’ intention of austerity. Because, it was never intended that the financial system & banks be protected for the benefit of people, It was always and only for
the benefit of profit. Whilst the profit motive remains the great organiser, the raison d'être of economic activity, it will remain unsaid in the public lobbies of the powerful. The French journalist Vivianne Forrester described profit in her book,
The Economic Horror, as being the entity for which all economic activity is organised, planned prevented or induced.
“[this] then seems inevitable, so fused with the very fabric of life that the two cannot be told apart……it is disseminated and active everywhere, but never referred to except in the modest guise of the ‘creation of wealth’ that is supposed to bring immediate benefit to the entire human race and to contain treasures of jobs.”
But these illusory benefits of austerity never have, as you put it, “filtered through the population.” By applying the finesse-lacking, monetary tool of low (almost non-existent) interest rates, the focus of profit has shifted to the accumulation of land assets, nearly all of which have been harvested by the top 1% of the world’s richest. That is where growth now goes. Not into our pockets but into the bricks & mortar of the world’s wealthiest oligarchs. From there it creates nothing but more and more wealth for the owners as the value of these limited assets rockets.
You then narrow your focus to the more practical problems created for our society by persisting with the profit model in the context of national infrastructure. You say that:
“There are some major problems with privatisation of utilities and other elements of national infrastructure in that the economic models for profitability mean that everything has to be looked at in three year cycles or shorter. So infrastructure is neglected in favour of making a few extra bucks today. The only way to make profit in these sectors is to abandon the future, or to price it so that it is only just affordable and that is where we are at. Infrastructure is deteriorating and energy prices for example are rising exponentially and almost every energy company is saddled with a debt that sooner or later will bankrupt them, unless state aid is available.” Here our views align but I would take a step further and say that just as Capitalism uses advertising to benefit brands, the State should use advertising to reinforce the message that public ownership is precisely for the benefit of the public. We have huge public communication vehicles available via TV, print media and the internet. Those should be organised to facilitate a continual dialogue with the public as to how our nationalised entities are operated, what their aims & objectives should be and how well they are perceived to be performing. Publicly owned and run utilities’ infrastructures, IT infrastructures and railways should not be faceless monoliths interfacing solely with the public at the point of delivery. There should be interactive hubs where views can be shared and Directors/Management held to account. This is the 21st Century, not the 1950s.
Your sideways shift to a critique of patriotism is an interesting one. Had this discussion taken place even as late as ten years ago, I would have brushed this off as a peripheral sideshow (in advanced western states only, of course). Not now though. It has been used as a weapon to galvanise Brexit and continues to be used as a reductive way of convincing people to accept and legitimise one-dimensional, populist politicians of the far-right. In China, the State-Communist leadership go beyond even this crude populism by subordinating all citizens to the tyranny of the State. In this example I totally agree with your theme of the hegemony of the system – less so in respect of western-style liberal democasies.
However, for me the key issue in the rise of far-right populism is the public’s sense of disenfranchisement; That authorities: European, national & local Government do things to people and that people have no say in this and the authorities cannot be brought to account. Such was the principal anxiety behind Brexit. The likes of Boris Johnson, Gove and Farrage built the EU up as a controlling leviathan over which we had no control. Whatever the truth of this it is easy to see why people should believe it. They might as well have voted for British Antarctic Base MPs as MEPs. It was almost impossible to see how one’s MEP could influence EU trade, economic, defence or social policies.
How we should be run politically in order to redress this feeling of disenfranchisement and to explore how I believe this may illustrate that a hegemony of systems and entities is not inevitable I will leave to another time. I think this thread is long enough as it is.