Monday 18th April

Most people have probably never heard the term before; it isn’t even used by its exponents anymore.  This is a most dangerous Political and Economic philosophy because it goes under no name, no title, no recognized doctrine even.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  It is there in Donald Trump’s crazed rhetoric, and incidentally in the just as dangerous barking of mad-dog Ted Cruz, it is there in the repeatedly failing Austerity and tax-cutting of Osborne, for a while it was lurking in the background as New Labour admired the free-market and applied PFI into the NHS.  It is in essence the belief that the free market rewards enterprise and crushes inefficiency and is therefore the best possible economic model for progress.  And the free-er the market the better, or so they believe.  And in order to make the market free-er we must get rid of rules and barriers; you cannot expect the rich to invest unless they get continually increasing returns and the less tax they pay the more they will invest.  Surely.  And they justify this kowtowing to greed by insisting in the trickling-down of wealth; in other words the more money you take from the poor and give to the rich the more that that wealth will mysteriously drift back down to the poor.

And to a small degree they are right; to help the rich become richer a small army of fairly well-paid experts and administrators are employed.  But these are outweighed by the many who are at the mercy of the market, who are thrown out of work at the click of a mouse on another continent, whose Hospital closes because it is more ‘efficient’ to centralise and privatise services fifty miles away, whose rent continually rises because after all the landlord must make his profit.  And so it goes on. The rich get richer, the poor – well what can you do, they will always be poor.

For almost fifty years after the Second World War we had rising standards of living, my parents and me and my children had lives of comfort and opportunity undreamt of by earlier generations. Then in the Eighties ‘Neoliberalism’ started to kick in; Reagan in America and Thatcher over here became converts.  For a while nobody really noticed, but the greedy got greedier and the financial crash of 2008 should have woken us up, but we threw more borrowed money at the problem and slipped back into that dreamlike state of unknowing.  And the forces of Neoliberalsim march on and the rich get even more tax cuts and the poor get even more benefit cuts…And still it is not enough.  The poor are now poor because of a lack of enterprise, because they refuse to work hard (as the rich obviously do) and must be punished for their inability to be wealthy.  How it will all end I really do not know, human history is not, as Marx predicted, an inevitable redistribution of power from the few to the many; sometimes it is the exact opposite.