Anybody with half a brain cell knows that "austerity" was an ideological decision and not a necessity. It was a determined policy of plundering the public purse to feed the corporate tax havens. Though I have always been aware of the fact that the state feeds and supports the corporate beast with the false platitude that it helps the "economy" (the rich) and brings jobs. Although the facts were there, Somehow I never however thought of the Tory party as the party of a welfare state!!
The article in "The Canary" explains it very clearly, well worth a read just to sort the facts out in your mind.
The article in "The Canary" explains it very clearly, well worth a read just to sort the facts out in your mind.
An extract from The Canary article:
The Tories run a secret welfare state for rich people that costs taxpayers up to £180bn a year
The long conRead the full article HERE:
The idea was never to shrink the welfare state. It was always to divert government investment from the human-welfare state for the many to the corporate-welfare state for the few. Imagine it like a long con.
You create a sense of scarcity, like there just isn’t enough to go around. The coalition government did this with austerity; the Thatcher government did it with previous economic crises. Despite the 2007/8 financial crisis being caused exclusively by the private sector, and the private sector being bailed out by the government, it was reframed as a public spending crisis. And the very debt accumulated in rescuing the economy from casino banking became the excuse to rapidly cut funding for the welfare state.
Then you begin pitting different needs against each other. Young people’s services versus elderly people’s security. People who were born here versus people who arrived here. People with jobs versus people without jobs. And thanks to the primal fear that people with little have when faced with having even less, a fight ensues. While that fight is happening, you merrily divert as much spending as possible to you and your friends. The best bit? When the scarcity you just created hits and things stop working in the human-welfare state, it just makes your case seem stronger. ‘See, we told you things were bad. This service needs more private-sector involvement to boost efficiency.’
And so you go on. Every publicly-funded service is up for grabs – a means of siphoning taxpayer cash away from meeting public needs, and towards filling private pockets. In return, you’ve assured your post-parliament career in the revolving door of political and corporate life.
The enablers
Perhaps the greatest enablers of the corporate-welfare-state long con are UK newspapers and media outlets. Just three corporations dominate 83% of newspaper reach in the UK. That’s just a handful of billionaires dominating the UK press. And they cannot be trusted to play fair when it comes to policies that invest in regular people rather than providing them with government subsidies or tax cuts.
