Governments are not powerless and the markets are not almighty
The annual Budget charade saw the usual suspects – wealthy elites – agree that the poor should suffer most in the desperate efforts by capitalists (who value property above work) to save their wretched and cruel economy from implosion.
In 2022 the toy-town economics of Trumpton Mayor a.k.a. Liz Truss dealt the biggest blow to Britons, already reeling from fuel hikes caused by Putin's Ukraine invasion. Months after his European war started, Truss slashed taxes and spending in a fabulously bonkers scheme to magically inject growth into Britain's economy. Bankers instantly detected a reckless fraud at the wheel and threw out the spikes to stop her - IE they hiked mortgage rates, throwing millions into debt and poverty.
Now politicians and bankers nod together in their unholy pact to pauperise the masses, chanting: "the welfare bill needs to come down", instead of rising year on year.
But why?
Wasn't Labour elected in 1945 to deliver a welfare state? After decades of trades union struggle for workers' rights, the Beveridge plan promised free health care and education, family, unemployment and housing benefits, sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, university grants...
Governments whittled away those hard-won rights to balance the books, feart to make the wealthy pay their fair share. To paraphrase Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, the media still "manufactures consent" for the seemingly endless cruelty, while mega-rich make mega-profits and donate £32m apiece to an arguably racist party.
Because he failed to cut much this week, pundits assume Healey plans war on benefits next year. Benefits that we all paid for in National Insurance, VAT and other taxes on selling homes, or inheritance. What right does he have to take away our benefits? If large families are trapped on welfare benefits because they can't afford to accept paltry wages, who can blame them?
Sheffield university's Emeritus Professor Richard Murphy is an economist who reckons the Healey budget offers on balance almost nothing. If Holyrood matches the feeble £100 energy rebate, it will be wiped out by a £276 average rise next year.
Murphy says Healey could have saved £20bn by restructuring the bail-out debt created by the 2008 Global Financial Mess and the 2020 Global Pandemic Mess. Capitalist governments firstly allowed unregulated banks to gamble with toxic debts, and then ministers cut healthcare budgets by cutting pandemic preparedness. (Last week the tragic impact of the Covid virus on care homes was revealed, naming the guilty: former PM Boris Johnson, Health Secretary Nick Hancock and perhaps worst of all, his Tory predecessor Jeremy Hunt. It was on his watch, with the approval of Teresa May, that NHS pandemic response budgets were slashed to save money.)
Murphy argues we need something like Serbia's student movement which has just swept away the old politics of power. "We need to replace 2-party politics with something new that puts people at the centre. This is the moment," he says. "The capitalist mantra, that government is powerless and only markets matter has failed."