The Business of Jobs

Let me be clear, I'm no fan of Labour. It seems that under Tony Blair it went wrong pretty quickly. The Ecclestone affair, cash for questions and, more importantly in my mind, the introduction of tuition fees. This was a watershed moment, the first step in kicking the ladder away from the lower classes. It certainly had an effect on me as I quit a university course that I was uncertain about because I didn't want to get into lots of debt. I'm not wont to try again given it would only increase that burden, no matter what the conditions are regarding paying this off. 

But it wasn't Labour that were to blame for the current bullshit - at least no more than the Tories and even the Liberal Democrats (having now shown their true colours). This is simply because the City and the banksters are the Tory party. No matter how right wing Labour have become, no matter how hard they've tried to take the centre right political ground (to curry the favour of the likes of the Mail and the Express), they've been completely wrongfooted by the Tories and Blue Milliband cannot fight them on this ground. No matter how many times I hear the Coalition blame the Labour for the 'mess they left us in', the truth is that mess was predicated by the privateers that the Tory spirit likes to champion: the world of big business. That's not to absolve Labour of any guilt - fighting the Tories at their own game meant making the same appeasals to the same banking and finance interests.

Right up to the crash David Cameron pledged to match Labour spending pound for pound. In fact Osbourne was calling for banking deregulation. If Labour were profligate, the tories intended to match them. Never mind that NHS waiting times, despite awful people like Patricia Hewitt, were decreasing while the Tories left the schools in a dire state in 1997. 

How things have changed. How the media message has been spun so effectively that people now believe the only way out is the Tory way. Part of that is their wholesale belief that the public sector is the enemy; that growth comes from business. But that's bollocks. Here's a smart man in America explaining this. Makes sense to me; no business is set up to hire people and provide work but to make money. They make less money the more people they have to pay (which of course is why workfare is so appealing to them, the government and so dangerous for everyone else, no matter how self defeating). So they are only going to hire people if the demand for their goods/services exists and that requires people have money. 

Some have said the best thing the government could have done with Quantitative Easing, even though it's not quite printing money, would be to give it directly to the people to spend. What's the likelihood of that happening? That's the sort of kickstart the economy needs.

That of course is if you want a capitalist system in the first place and buy into the myth that we have no money. Of course we have money. It's all tied up in debt, land, assets and the bank accounts of people that want to tell us to make do with less.