201 people were arrested during the TUC’s protest in London on Saturday. All 201 of them were still in custody today according to the BBC.
The protest was meant to be about opposing public sector cuts but as usually the case whenever you get more than a handful of left wingers, it descended into a riot with damage to both public and private property and attacks on the police.
Sadly the left is pretty much economically illiterate which is why we have this boom and bust economic cycle where socialists get into government and bankrupt the country and then capitalists spend the next few years getting us out of trouble. I’m generalising a bit by calling Labour socialists when they’re more accurately described as social democrats (with less emphasis on the “democrat” bit) and calling the Conservatives capitalist when they’re more accurately described as social market capitalists but they still adhere to socialist and capitalist ideologies.
The simple reality is that the UK is insolvent – more money is being spent than is being paid in taxes. National debt is over a trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) and will realistically never, ever be paid off. The “cuts” that the economically illiterate left are opposing are reductions in the increase in spending, not real cuts. But the “cuts” aren’t enough, we really have to cut spending in real terms and quite savagely. This doesn’t have to result in swingeing cuts to services though, or at least not to essential services. Spending on health and education can continue as it is or even increase. Spending on roads and social care can continue as it is or even increase. What we need is to start all over again with state income and expenditure. There are so many taxes and public expenditures that it’s just a complete mess and countless billions are spent on merely administering this behemoth. We need to go back to basics and simplify and cut back the whole public sector and tax system.
The tax handbook produced by HMRC every year which details all the tax rules is now over 10,000 pages long and comes in seven volumes. Inordinate amounts of money are spent on administering the tax system and trying to find out whether people are evading tax, let alone trying to make them pay what they owe. The tax credit system is the very worst of a tax system that has been allowed to grow out of all proportion – in what alternate reality does it make sense to spend money collecting tax off people and them spend even more money giving it back to them rather than just not taxing them in the first place? The tax system needs scrapping and starting again.
Public services also need cutting back. There is too much bureaucracy in the public sector wasting money that should be spent delivering services. You need management in the public sector just as much as you do in the private sector but you need management that can do things, not just talk about them and a lot less management is needed. People are assets but they’re also liabilities – the private sector understands this better than the public sector which is why private sector organisations are a lot leaner than comparable public sector organisations. The public sector needs to be run more like a charity (a proper charity, not one of the taxpayer-funded lobby groups that call themselves charities like Common Purpose or ASH) with a constant eye on value for money and an over-riding goal of providing services to people who need them. Public sector organisations go too far one way or the other – they’re either run as profit-making companies or they spend money like it’s going out of fashion.
The left are wrong to be campaigning for no “cuts” and maintaining the status quo in the public sector. The only way to keep spending at the current rate is to put up taxes and that’s not a sustainable way to run the economy because the economy needs people to have disposable income to stimulate growth and without growth you have recession and then you enter the economic doom cycle of people having less money to spend which send the economy deeper into recession.
So, back to Saturday’s protests. What were they actually about? It was supposed to be a march and rally against “cuts” organised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) but I saw more banners and placards for completely irrelevant issues. There were gay pride flags, religious placards, anti-capitalists, anarchists, banker-haters, CND flags, environmentalists, anti-Tory slogans, Palestinian flags, anti-Trident posters, “class war” placards, anti-tax avoidance posters and those are just the ones I remember seeing. The TUC are claiming it as the biggest protest since the second world war but at the upper end of their 250-500k attendees (you can’t get much more vague than a 100% margin of error) it’s about the same as the 400k+ who descended on London to protest against the ban on fox hunting and all of those 400k were protesting against the hunting ban whereas a sizeable proportion of those in London yesterday were protesting about all sorts of things.
The TUC and the media tried to play down the violence and attacks on the police yesterday, saying it was a small group of about 125 people who weren’t there for the TUC protest. As 201 people have been arrested so far, the 125 people is obviously wrong. I will accept that the so-called anarchists (another form of socialism) weren’t there for the protest against the “cuts” but were there to cause trouble but you have to ask yourself why it is that they only ever turn up to left wing demonstrations and not, for instance, EDL marches? The answer is that they are they are the true representatives of the views of the left, the only difference between one of the far left extremists attacking police officers and breaking into banks and businesses and the middle aged teachers and council workers and street football co-ordinators is that they have the balls to go out on the rampage.
I have often said that we need to be more like the French (how that sticks in my throat) and learn to protest better when we don’t get our own way but these people go too far. The like of the EDL and the Countryside Alliance protested for change in policy, these “anarchists” are protesting against society. I don’t want a communitarian society like these left wing nutjobs. I want a society where things get made that I can buy, where stuff happens and I don’t have to worry about it and where I can come home and look at all the shiny things I’ve got and think “yes, it was worth going out to work for all this”. If I wanted to live in a society where everyone ignored the law and things only worked when people could be bothered I’d move to France or Spain or Greece.
There is a certain amount of irony in these protests. The unions paid for first class train tickets for their class war warriors and the cost of cleaning up and making good the damage caused by rampaging anti-“cuts” terrorists will take even more money away from the services they supposedly want to protect. And the money companies like Top Shop, Santander and Fortnum & Mason’s spend cleaning up and repairing their buildings after they were attacked by people demanding they stop legally avoiding paying some of their taxes can be set off against their tax liabilities. Well done lefties, way to score an own goal.
I am sick to death of the workshy, hypocritical left demanding more and more of my money to fund their addiction to the state and the state’s addiction to my money. I want less tax, less government and more cuts.
do you you think the troublemakers were allowed to run riot, to distract ‘good publicity’ from the main march?
do you you think the troublemakers were allowed to run riot, to allow the police to be able to point out the inconsistent and incompatible aspects of their job?
I would make those found guilty of causing the trouble to pay for it, so what if it takes them all their life to do so.
Hi Wonko
I’m not sure that I can agree with much of your post today.
1) A quarter of a million people are slightly more than a handful
2)You blame the boom and bust on economically illiterate socialists. Ignoring the 80’s which were caused by the ultra-right Thatherites, this round was caused in the USA, by banks and mortgage lenders. It soon spread to our banks, showing us just how stupid investing in bad debt and gambling with investments really is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_financial_crisis
3) The UK is the 6th richest country in the world. We are not bankrupt as we have assets in excess of our debt
4) You say public services need cutting back – why? If I run up a debt I expect to pay it back, I don’t expect anyone else to bail me out. The banks run up debts and they have assets. They are businesses not public services so why do we have to pay off their debts? As Revinkevin said “I would make those found guilty of causing the trouble to pay for it, so what if it takes them all their life to do so”.
5) Public services cannot be run like businesses because there are no profits to be made from service users. Private companies have to bid for taxpayer’s money. Once the contracts are allocated there are no alternatives for the public to choose between so therefore free market economics cannot apply.
6) You said “the economy needs people to have disposable income to stimulate growth and without growth you have recession”. I agree, therefore cuts in jobs increases the problem two fold, by turning taxpayers into people reliant on benefits.
7) Everyone there was protesting against the cuts. By holding different banners they were just showing how many organisations were against the cuts.
8) Using your most extreme figures, there were 201 violent anarchists amongst 250,000 protesters. Put another way, statistically insignificant compared to the proportion of EDL members arrested at the protest you mentioned last November. We all know that violence is pointless, and yes I agree that those guilty should pay for the damage, however long it takes, but they were a tiny group.
9) You said that the 400,000 Countryside Alliance marchers were in support of foxhunting. This is incorrect. The Countryside Alliance march was billed as being in support of the countryside in general and the foxhunting angle was played down until the last minute. There were far more different groups involved in that march than in Saturdays one. I know this because my brother was one of the organisers involved with the countryside alliance in Kent.
10) It’s interesting that you call the marchers work shy. Every single person that I know who went on the march is currently working. Most of them are unsure that they will have a job this time next year, but all of them are currently employed. Why should they have to lose their jobs when those responsible were bailed out and then rewarded?
I am sick to death of the workshy, hypocritical right demanding more and more of my money to fund their addiction to capitalism and the capitalist’s addiction to my money. I want fair tax, fair government and less cuts.
Axel, I think they were allowed to go on the rampage because the police were criticised for cracking heads at the student protest and because they were outnumbered.
Kev, me too.
Stan, you can’t please all the people all the time mate. 🙂 I’ll answer your points one by one:
1. I saw something on Twitter earlier where someone had calculated the number of people who could have been in the march based on crowd density and walking speed – all very scientific – and came out at 144k. Doesn’t matter though, I was referring generally to the propensity of left wingers to turn to violence when more than a handful of them get together.
2. This round was caused by the EU actually. The collapse of Northern Rock was caused by the EU Monetary Abuse Directive (MAD) which required the Bank of England to announce to the world that it had offered them a credit line. We wouldn’t have escaped the recession entirely if it wasn’t for the EU but it would have been delayed if Northern Rock hadn’t collapsed and if the British government was allowed to do what it wanted without having to report its every move to the EU and ask permission before it could do anything.
The recession in the 80’s was caused by the Tories having to take action to control inflation which was allowed to go through the roof by Callaghan’s economic incompetence and the general strikes called by the same unions that are now trying to call general strikes in the middle of a global recession. The industrial sector was damaged but inflation dropped from 22% to 4% and the economy recovered. Once again it was an example of the Tories having to sort out the mess left by a Labour government.
As for bad debts not being profitable, can I direct your attention to these stocks? Cattles shares are currently suspended because they got themselves too heavily into very bad debt (I used to work for one of their companies, they would have folded without a recession) but look at the others. Provident is up, IPF is flat, Paragon is flat, MCB is foreign, Fast Funds is up, H&T is up – those are the high risk lenders. Manchester Building Society and West Brom Building Society are both down – they’re the comparable “sensible” lenders. There brass in muck as the old saying goes.
3. The UK doesn’t have any assets, only potential future income. Currently far more money is being borrowed and spent than is being paid in taxes and more than is projected to be spent in taxes. The UK is insolvent.
4. We have to keep the banks afloat because the financial sector is probably the biggest sector in the economy after the public sector, which is the largest. If any more banks had collapsed the whole lot would have gone, we’d have been in depression and millions of people would have lost everything. It annoys me having to bail out the Scottish banks but the alternative is worse. The banks will never get back on their feet and start paying back those huge loans they owe us if they’re subjected to punitive taxes and asset stripping.
5. I don’t think the public sector should be run like a business, I said it should be run more like a charity.
6. Cutting the public sector will mean job losses but it will also mean lower taxes which means more economic growth and more private sector jobs. You have to speculate to accumulate, no pain no gain, etc. Just like in the 80s, there will be some pain but it’s necessary to clean up the mess the reds left behind.
7. Some people from the CEP went – they were union members and got free first class travel (“nothing but the best for our members”) but they were there to leaflet for the CEP.
8. 201 is a big number, no matter how many were there. Everyone says they weren’t there for the march, they were there to cause trouble. 201 people going to London with the sole intention of causing mayhem, causing criminal damage and attacking the police is a big number.
9. I don’t know enough about the Countryside Alliance protests to argue with you but there were 750k at the anti-war demo in 2003. That’s the biggest protest since the civil war!
10. I didn’t call all the marchers workshy, I was talking about workshy lefties that want more of my money to keep paying for things the state can’t afford which will in turn mean that I can’t afford the things I want.
i work in the public sector and i think it should be run like a private business, its not what we do that is bad or wasteful, it is how we do it and that is the problem
according to the way i read it, there were 250,000 protestors doing their thing and 201 rioters doing their & being arrested elsewhere
apparently, ‘banks main assets are other peoples debts, so while a debt is being serviced it is a good thing but when the debt goes bad, it is very bad and what makes things really bad is the banks have 20-30 times nore debt assets than they have cash money, so if 5% of a banks debts go bad, it is insolvent, unlike us humans who are only fucked if 100% of our debt goes bad’
Also the debts are ‘funny’ lots of multipile bets on more or less the same event outcomes but chopped up and repackaged, sort of like comparing your wallet to a sheep and your investment portfolio to a kebab, so if one small debt goes bad, it has an effect on lots of other debts, whose status is unknown too because everything is minced up and remoulded.
The huge pile of debts does not reflect a huge increase in productivity or business, it reflects the kebab money being earned, re spent as real, re invested as real, the profits being earned over and so on multipile times over, so most of the money would appear to be imaginary
I’m reading this in a book and I’ve still not got my head fully round it yet, so the above description maybe slightly off
Hi Wonko
“Stan, you can’t please all the people all the time mate.”
I know, that’s what I keep telling the missus – she just says that once would be nice……
First off, I can’t really get my head around the police letting those guys smash stuff up – It’s my understanding that wilful damage and violence are crimes…. Anyway I digress
1) The attendance figures were worked out by the TUC and the police using the Jacobs method. First estimates were 250,000 but after applying the different criteria and calculations it was revised to between 400,000 and 500,000. The police didn’t give there own estimate this time around as they only give their own figure if they disagree with the organizers.
I’m not really sure how important that is, I’m happy just to say that there were lots of people.
2) Northern Rock was only a small part of what was happening. One of the problems with globalisation is that if one country falls, the rest start to go too. As the US economy was the biggest and most important, once it went, everyone else had to follow.
As the wiki page I linked to said “Northern Rock’s Problems proved to be an early indication of the troubles that would soon befall other banks and financial institutions.”
Also I think it’s safe to say that seeing as all oil has to be bought in dollars, and that every country needs oil, if the dollar crashes everyone is buggered
Boom and bust was the direct result of strict monetarism
Here’s a quote from economicshelp.org
“The belief of Monetarism was that to control inflation you needed to control the money supply. To control the money supply, it was necessary to reduce any government deficit. Therefore, extreme deflationary policies were implemented. Firstly taxes were raised and government spending cut. Interest rates were also increased, as the government sought to reduce inflation. These deflationary fiscal and monetary policies did have the effect of reducing inflation; however it was at a cost of falling Aggregate Demand and lower economic growth. In the middle of 1980 the economy had been plunged into full-scale recession, but the government still pursued its deflationary policies. As unemployment reached the unprecedented level of 3 million, there was widespread criticism of the government. During 1981, in a famous letter to the Times, 365 economists signed a letter calling on the government to alter its economic policy and put an end to the recession”
What you’ve also got to remember is that the economy in the 80’s was running on the cash taken made from privatisation, council house sales and Oil (10% of Tax revenues were coming from oil). Once this started to run out it was only a matter of time before the bust came.
Yes, bad debt can be very profitable in the short term, but it’s still what caused this recession.
3) We’ve got tonnes of assets, including the post office and all the other public bodies, those banks we’ve got shares in, gold, art treasures, buildings and institutions at home and abroad, all the stuff that is public property but we have to pretend belongs to the royal family, the money we pay in tax – the list is endless. It’s how these things can be used which is the problem. We did have a whole bunch more but they got privatised.
4) No, we don’t have to keep banks afloat – this is from the wall street journal
http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2009/12/04/what-if-the-banks-hadnt-been-bailed-out/
5) I would hate to see anything important run like a charity. I was involved with a charity a few years back and what happened to us was a real eye-opener. If you want to know what happened I’ll send you the details in a private message – it involves an old “friend” of yours…..
6) I’ll just agree to disagree with you on that one : )
7) If that’s true then I’ll agree that first class rail travel was pretty shoddy there.
8) For the record, only 11 protesters were charged with violent offences. 138 were charged with trespass after a non-violent sit down protest.
Still, one violent offence is too many
9) Fair enough
10) I’m not sure that being work shy is a “lefty” thing,. As far as I can tell not wanting to get up every morning to go to work is a something most of us have got in common : )
I say make Axel chancellor – his sheep/kebab theory hits the nail on the head
Stan: look what has happened the last TWICE we have had a Jock Chancellor!!!!!!
‘I can’t really get my head around the police letting those guys smash stuff up’ by underplaying and rounding down the ‘risk factors’, any outliers for the demo were deemed to be harmless, so few resources were assigned to them.
With all the coverage that the Fortnum & Masons crew got, the police can go to their political masters and say, ‘we only have so many resources, it will get a lot worse, if they are cut further’
they were not ‘allowed’ to do what they did but i think the situational events that allowed it to happen were encouraged