Re Dispatches, “Tomorrow” should read “today”. In 40 mins, in fact.

“Who benefits [from excessive wages and bonuses within the Square Mile]? All of us”, the Telegraph’s leader roared, along with the trite “It makes sense for banks to spend vast sums in order to secure the best available talent”

Supporters of the corrupt system always talk of ‘the best people’ but they never define what they mean by best. I guess if you want the best people to run the banking industry over the cliff then I am sure you could have got the job done for far less money.

Brown was happy to take their taxes. What was the proportion of the national tax income paid by the city workers and the companies working in the financial sector ?

Brown was happy to take their taxes.

You mean they paid all their taxes?

Could I have a look at where you got that information?

Well I think greed is great.

It is not so great in sectors that are too close to government to function in a stable manner. The financial sector is one of them. But as I always say, I’ll take this busted and defective state-capitalism over any alternative currently existing, while always hoping that true liberty in finance might one day be possible. If some horrible people get rich thanks to the defects in the system, then I will be pissed off, but still thankful that we aren’t in a more authoritarian scheme where nasty people can do rather a lot more damage to people.

@Nick

“while always hoping that true liberty in finance might one day be possible”

Erm, it isn’t. Hence the utter mess we’re in. High Finance requires meticulous monitoring and regulation due to the sums of money and rewards involved. It will always be thus, no matter what some of our more delusional libertarian brethren think.

Rather a well regulated, accountable, fairly taxed capital market than the warped, amoral laissez-faire version we’ve suffered under these last thirty years. We’ve had the reality check. Time to act on it.

“Rather a well regulated, accountable, fairly taxed capital market than the warped, amoral laissez-faire version we’ve suffered under these last thirty years. We’ve had the reality check.”

A laissez-faire financial system wouldn’t have a central bank controlling interest rates and holding them too low.

@4, the salaried & bonused workers for big banks did, indeed, pay their taxes (a hell of a lot thereof, which is one of the reasons for the current public finances hole). If you’re employed in London by a company that’s listed somewhere major, then you can’t get away with dodging PAYE and NI.

The PE and hedge funds, where the difference between capital gain and income is blurrier and you don’t have disclosure obligations to shareholders, less so.

“Rather a well regulated, accountable, fairly taxed capital market than the warped, amoral laissez-faire version we’ve suffered under these last thirty years.”

It is a testament to the power of common knowledge that people imagine that what is probably the most regulated market in our entire economy has been a stand-out example of laissez-faire for the last 30 years. I suppose people’s idea of what could constitute freedom in finance have been narrowed sufficiently that what we have had looks like it to them.

Quite right. How they sneered at me in the 80s when I said Thatcherism was unsustainable and would unravel. How they fucking gloated, as they called me “Old Labour” and a relic. But I diagnosed long ago that the Blatcherite consensus is a pile of fucking shite that was on the way out sooner or later.

I laugh my head off going through the archives of right-wing blogs and reading the shite they were spouting before the second half of 2008- and the furious apologies as they try to deny that libertarianism is now discredited.

Yes- where the fuck has it all gone now? These service “industries” to replace manufacturing. The dominance of banker scum who would lead us into a brave new world where we all enrich each other by selling each other houses without doing any work or making anything. These poor sods who were duped into thinking they were getting something out of the right to buy- house prices gone out of control and their kids can neither buy (with such shite wages as proper men’s jobs barely exist any more) or get a council house.

Of course, the fucking cowardice of Brown has led to him being unable to react to real-world events as swiftly as the public, who now solidly reject the Thatcherite lie. But I tell you one thing- if I were Cameron I’d pack by bags and fuck off now, because it is not in his interests to be prime minister when the “free market” worldview is finally, irrefutably discredited and those who always demanded proper policies and called Blair and Brown cunts get their day.

We were right all along when we said nothing could replace real jobs of the kind Thatcher laid waste to.

Thatcher? She left office over 18 years ago for crying out loud, and there was no such as a “Blatcherite” consensus.

Gordon Brown has not run the economy in a Thatcherite or Majorite manner. Those on the left must face facts: it is the Labour party, acting as the Labour party, that has driven us into this mess (starting with the regulatory changes made in 1997 remember).

Fuck off- the Tories have been in power uninterruptedly since 1979, pursuing the mirage of free market fucking shite which was always a mirage and has now finally unravelled.

The Labour party does not currently exist as it surrendered to Thatcher, but the number of us on the left who are ready and waiting for the time grows every day as more and more people young and old see through the lying fucking shite quoted in the original post from the likes of Brown.

david brough – are you Sally in male form?
Her husband perhaps?!

the mirage of free market fucking shite which was always a mirage and has now finally unravelled

Dream on.
(Or f*** off, as you might put it.)
There have been periodic banking crises since ancient Rome.
There were recoveries from those, and we will recover from this.

the number of us on the left who are ready and waiting for the time grows every day

From what – 10 to 20?
Where is this leftist revival?
In the fortunes of the Tories, UKIP and BNP?

DB, you are a total mug. The “free market” that you hate is a mix between free market capitalism and Govt regulation. Nothing has unravelled, its is continuing and developing as it has for thousands of years. Its a basic human need to trade. 20thC socialist intervention has been a failure. Socialism has been swallowed by capitalism. The good bits have kept and the rest has been spat out. There are only 2 true socialist States remaining and their people are either starving, living on US hand outs or prostitute themselves to tourists.

DB, the Tories have NOT been in power since 1979. Even so, I’m not sure what was so great about Britain in 1978. We were a few steps up from left-wing states such as the Soviet Union, but very little else was in our favour.

What absolute “fucking shite”.

“Fans of greed”?

Not sure that there are all that many of them.

There are a certain number of poeple who accept that it’s an inescapable part of the varied motivations of human beings though.

Not the existence of it, but the management of it being the problem.

What’re the current GDP projections, in any case? 1%ish growth last year, 4%ish decline this year, 0%ish growth next, recovery in 2011?

If that’s how things turn out, then the greed fans are hardly in a terrible position: we grew richer at 3%ish a year for 15 years, had two years when we didn’t get any richer, and one where we got 4% poorer. Over an 18-year average that’s still not a bad model…

@ johnb

You forget that Thatcherism \ Reaganism managed to LOWER the long run economic growth rate.

And they made the economy more volatile in the process.

There’s no way you can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear – laissez faire is a bad bargain for everyone, and our indulgence of it since 1979 (making it the orthodoxy no less despite all the historical evidence!) makes monkeys out of us all.

@whatnext

Britain in 1978 certainly cannot compare to the Britain of today, but on almost every measurable scale the society of Britain of 1978 scores better than its 2009 rival, be that on measures of poverty, social mobility, educational attainment, employment, drug misuse, crime etc, etc.

There is not a rightwing government that hasn’t thrown a mighty spanner into the workings of the society it is supposed to represent. The US is a prime example of this.

Every developed nation on earth became so thanks to hefty taxation and long-term investment in public infrastructure. Without exception. No Libertarian is able to point to any advanced nation which has got to where it is today by indulging the greed of its people through low taxation.

This is why Libertarians are rightly lampooned.

@ BenM:

It’s also true to say that right-wing states have done much better in terms of “poverty, social mobility, educational attainment, employment, drug misuse, crime etc, etc” than left-wing states.

You all keep a) “lampooning libertarians”, and b) claiming the the Labour government is Tory/Thatcherite, but you keep ignoring the examples of the Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, etc etc.

I’m 49. When I was growing up, my dad was able to provide a good standard of living for my mum and 6 kids, and he wasn’t seen as being on a good wage at the time. Every man in the village had a job, except pensioners and cripples, and there was no need for women to go out to work at all.

Yes- I followed him down the pit and I earned a lot more than any youth does today, by comparison. I went to fucking Morocco when I was 19- can you imagine a young lad being able to do that now? Because I work in a warehouse and I haven’t got fuck all at the end of the month.

Now working-class wages are so shite that if you even have a job, you have to go cap in hand to demand your own fucking money that you’ve already paid in taxes back, having been processed by some dickhead bureaucrat of the kind that has proliferated since 1979 in an ettempt to disguise the lack of real work.

When right-wing filth talk about “the evil poor”, why the fuck is it that they became poor, when their fathers and grandparents had good jobs? Because Thatcher and her Blatcherite henchmen in parliament, whom we now know to be thieves from the public purse on a much greater scale than any benefit claimant, destroyed their livelihoods and now have the fucking nerve to vilify them for being left destitute as a result of having no work.

Who the fuck created “broken Britain” if not free market fuckwits pursuing a fake economic miracle?

And now they want us to hate immigrants, even though all our problems would still exist if there were no immigrants, until we grasp the nettle of providing proper employment.

@wahtnext

Libertarians deserve lampooning when, like you, they resort desperately to such extreme examples as Zimbabwe and the Soviet Union to make their case.

The vast majority of people who have long since seen through the enormous propaganda surrounding the so-called Thatcherite “reforms” have no desire to emulate either of these nations. You insult them by even implying that they do.

No, rather the British people have a very European outlook, and, left to their own devices, would happily ape the social market economies of France, Germany and Sweden. Given Proportional Representation, no rightist government would ever gain power here to wreak as much damage as the last thirty years has done.

And I challenge you to point to a large country implementing the same rightwing anglo-saxon style free markets and low taxation, which is able to maintain successful social outcomes of high educational achievement, universal health coverage, low inequality, low crime etc.

I guarantee you won’t find any.

Whats next
Murdering and torturing people in Chile, in that free Market heaven
Also bank deregulation started in the eighties under you boys.
Also the real problems of the world economics lay at the door of the conservatives in the US.
Also do you really want to live in completely laisez faire society, a country where there are workhouses and millions die because economic principles cannot be crossed.
I have no time for the communists but nor do have much time for your land of economic slavery and greed.
As for Nick, and you are Nick Cohen.
Greed is good.
Win at all costs
Why ?
Hard work and honesty were the principles I was brought up with.
You were obviously dragged up in an atmosphere of Thatcherite hatred.

I can’t believe the number of words you’ve put in my mouth.

By right-wing, I mean a mixed economy, based on private ownership. Left-wing means a belief in public ownership. This is about right isn’t it?

There are no left-wing governments that have provided “successful social outcomes of high educational achievement, universal health coverage, low inequality, low crime etc”.

And, surely, if it’s okay to blame Thatcher for everything happening now, isn’t also okay to mention the Soviet Union? The latter is the more recent phenomenon.

Don’t talk such utter SHITE.

The Soviet Union was dismantled years ago, whereas Thatcherism is still the principle by which we are used, despite having been discredited in the real world. Thatcher, therefore, lives on until we finally fucking crush her hateful legacy once and for all.

“the principle by which we are governed” *

Are you saying that Thatcherism has won seven elections in a row? Not bad for a discredited doctrine.

#17 john b,

I can’t believe you think of “how well we are doing” in terms of 1-3% marginal increases or decreases of GDP.

Go and tell the 70,000 families who are having their homes repossessed.

Go and tell the millions of agency workers who will be pennyless by the time they reach pensionable age and who hop from job insecurity to job insecurity (but I bet you think they are all “freelancers”, don’t you?)

Go and tell the millions of Britons who are indebted to their necks and the record numbers of bankrupts.

It’s just so sad that there are still people who think we’ve had 18 years of “growth”- just like that- proper school of Pangloss and don-t-you- question-anything…

Well, I tell you what some certainly did experience exponential growth. The Fred Goodwins and the Rupert Murdochs, the Adam Applegarth and the Wayne Rooneys. Their economic growth has been certainly exponential. And I mean exponential. But at what price????

“And another thing”…
the so-called growth Blair and Brown were boasting throughout their “golden years” was based on a nation that counted 2/3 of all the EU private debt. Nice.

“I went to fucking Morocco when I was 19- can you imagine a young lad being able to do that now?”

Easyjet is quoting gbp61 (taxes included) for flights for a week in Morocco this November. Fleapit accommodation in Morocco costs a couple of quid a night. When I went to Malia (yes, I know), 75%+ of the people in the resort were young working class lads and girls; the cheapest holiday to Malia available at the time was about gbp200. So, err, yes, I can, far more than kids 30 years ago ever could. That’s an example of how Evil Capitalism has driven down prices and hence made nominal incomes stretch further.

“Go and tell the 70,000 families who are having their homes repossessed.”

And I suppose we should ignore the millions of families who own their homes for the first time because that’s what they wanted to do, right?

I’m not, actually, a big fan of the Thatcherite consensus. We should have redistributed more of the proceeds of the last boom; we shouldn’t have encouraged everyone to aspire to borrow money they didn’t have just so they could get away from having to deal with landlords (security of tenure and proper investment in the construction of new council housing would’ve been a bloody good start), we shouldn’t have set monetary policy in the 1980s and 1990s to favour the City over manufacturing (although the loan environment in the 2000s couldn’t have been more manufacturing-friendly without interest rates being negative…).

But suggesting the actual, real, increases in disposable income along the line over the last 20 years aren’t actual and real is counterproductive nonsense. I’ve just furnished a (mine, not my servants/tenant) flat out of Ikea and Argos; the whole job cost under gbp500, apart from the stupidly big telly I bought as an indulgence, and really doesn’t look too shoddy. If I’d bought a decent 20″ LCD telly, the whole job would have cost under gbp600. That’s *a whole house furnished decently* on 5% of the annual minimum wage. In 1980, that would have been unimaginable.

I am agreeing with John B on this point. The economic system we have currently is far from fair. It allows charlatans like Fred Goodwin to skim cream off a system thanks to having a privileged position in the structure. But the rate this system grows makes things available to ordinary people that are simply unimaginable a decade or two ago. And we aren’t even going that quickly in the UK. Parts of China and India are seeing even more radical growth in material prosperity. It is not something to be taken for granted.

john b,
nothing is black and white.
I accept some of what you say. Yes, we have more stuff. We have Ryaniar and Easyjet. We have broadband and playstation. We have Argos and Ikea. But how does that fit in with the argument that “greed is good”?

For my (our?) parents’ generation it’d have been unimaginable to pay mortgages for the duration of a lifetime. Houses became progressively smaller, more plasticky and way more expensive (and on this yes, Thatcher is directly responsible along with Mr Heseltine).

The thing with boom and bust. You can walk around saying that 2, 3 or 4 years of recession are actually alright compared to 18 years of growth. But it’s like someone saying in 1947, “oh we’ve only had five years of war in the last twenty, I suppose that’s great!”. Two, three or four years of a vicious recession create enormous scars on a massive number of people.

70,000 families thrown into hostels or having to beg friends in one year alone is appalling. And the fact that a million other families may “own” their homes is scant consolation to them. In fact if I were you I wouldn;t even approach the subject with any of the “repossessed”…!

Boris Johnson is still of the opinion that at least sub-prime mortgages allowed tens of thousands to own their homes. For what…Two years? Three years? Until they were kicked out? What sort of absurd argument is that???

Record number of bankruptcies? Are you saying that at least that allowed everyone to play Sarah Jessica Parker for a week, splashing it out on their credit card? Hello? Anyone there?

And, have you noticed how -hush hush- very very few ever raise the topic of the millions of agency/casual/temping workers that have populated the UK in the last 15-20 years? The race towards casualisation, even for local government workers, has been relentless.

That is a ticking bomb. These are, literally, masses who have barely paid a penny in pension contribution. In many cases for their entire working career. But up until last year no-one noticed coz Mastercard would top up their wages. What’s gonna happen Dr John B Pangloss?

“I’m 49. When I was growing up, my dad was able to provide a good standard of living for my mum and 6 kids, and he wasn’t seen as being on a good wage at the time. Every man in the village had a job, except pensioners and cripples, and there was no need for women to go out to work at all.

Yes- I followed him down the pit and I earned a lot more than any youth does today, by comparison.”

Well, if you followed him down the pit then he would have been a miner then?

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1984/may/02/miners-wages

Earning more than double the average manufacturing wage? More than double the average manufacturing wage is not “seen as being on a good wage”?

Pull the other one matey.

“The thing with boom and bust. You can walk around saying that 2, 3 or 4 years of recession are actually alright compared to 18 years of growth. But it’s like someone saying in 1947, “oh we’ve only had five years of war in the last twenty, I suppose that’s great!”. Two, three or four years of a vicious recession create enormous scars on a massive number of people.”

Well the problem isn’t the amount of wealth being generated (it goes down but not as much as it goes up). It is the fact that the wealth has been invested vastly in the wrong places. In this case, houses mainly. So rather than whinging about greed, it might be more worthwhile to find out what defects in this still amazing productive system generate poor investment decisions. Obviously, part of it is just people being human and you will never get rid of peaks and troughs entirely, but part of it might be the government dicking around with the pricing mechanism in order to generate short-term booms. Remember, they are the ones in control of the money supply.

And remember: unlike people in war, wealth can be replaced.

David Brough, you are absolutely on the money with every word you have written here. To suggest that Blairism was not a continuation of Thatcherite policies is ludicrous. What did Thatcher do? Deregulate the city and introduce the private sector into every aspect of the state. What did Blair do…same thing…PPP rip offs all over the place… and generations will suffer for it ! Not to mention the unregulated lending that has caused the latest problems… that’s right…UNregulated lending. Anyway, what we think and write here counts for nothing until we get organised and militant! As for my authorities for the above, I prefer Noam Chomsky to the undergraduate business study level of comment your detractors here can come up with. Good for you DB mate!