The Sin Bin • Re: Man of the People
Sal Paradise wrote:
On Boris yes I do think he cares - I think Corbyn its all about a project can escalated public ownership really deliver in the 2020's - if it doesn't it doesn't matter he and McDonald will not be there and Lansman is pretty wealthy so he doesn't really care as the impact on him would have been the same as all rich people very limited. I see NMW is increasing by 6.5% not bad for someone who supposedly only cares for his rich mates.
I think the Tories believe in you taking personal ownership and only using the state as a last resort - Labour believe the state is an alternative to work - simple difference in philosophy, and I know which most in the country deem appropriate. There are people who simply cannot work through physical/mental issues and they need looking after correctly.
The Tories have said net borrowing will be below what it is now at the end of this parliament. Compared to the telephone numbers Labour were talking about they are pretty modest.
That argument would have made more sense if we were in the 1980s comparing Thatcher's Conservatives with Foot/Kinnock's Labour. The current Conservative party isn't a party of small-state empowerment policies, it's become more one of embracing a kind of economic populism to direct state funding towards strategic interests for political purposes.
Hence all the talk about redirecting state spending towards projects in the north; northern universities are now going to receive more cash. The big push to be outside EU state aid rules so that they can use taxpayers' money to prop up ailing industries that struggle to adjust to costs of Brexit.
If Conservatives and the right wing media are honest, these are policies that they would have been heavily criticising if they were coming from a Labour government, just like they would if Labour were jacking up the minimum wage by 6.5%. They would be comparing that to the incomes policies of the 1970s. Remember it was also the Conservative government who introduced an energy price cap, which was an Ed Miliband idea and the Tories warned it would lead to investment flooding out of the sector.
There are a lot of spending pledges coming out of the Tories, and economic commitments (like the NMW rise) that are going to rely on some pretty strong economic growth and/or tax rises somewhere if we are going to avoid just letting borrowing rise. Remember also that during the Tory leadership contest Boris talked a lot about tax cuts which he seems to have gone quiet on, but maybe those were pledges just made to bring that particular demographic onside which he is less wedded to honouring now.
Maybe their plan will be just to increase borrowing, like Trump has done in the US, safe in the knowledge that the media won't talk about 'burdening future generations with debt' when they have a right wing government in charge so much, and the 'tea party' style activists also go strangely quiet.
But it will mean that a lot of Conservatives will have to swallow some strange compromises to their ideology in order to ride the Boris train. I suspect Conservatives are better at compromising ideology if it means accepting power than most Labour supporters are (which may be why the Conservatives have held power for much longer over the past century). When Blair was aping some Thatcher policies he took a lot of crap from Labour supporters.
Statistics: Posted by sally cinnamon — Tue Dec 31, 2019 7:10 pm