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.
Now, I don’t normally go in for conspiracy theories that involve the Americans as perpetrators because they generally don’t have the intelligence for deceit but this story is – if you’ll excuse the pun – a bit fishy.
Still in 2006, 
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Their 6 year terrorist campaign included sending fake letter bombs, sending letters to neighbours of one man telling them he was a paedophile, criminal damage, grafitti and threats against the families of their victims.
