‘‘Believe it or not, that’s the rationale behind the Osborne policy. Does it work? It has been tried three times in the last century in the UK. It was tried in 1921 when the Geddes committee of leading businessmen proposed a similar massive cut in public expenditure (the ‘Geddes axe’) and it led to 8 years of anaemic growth and the General Strike in 1926. It was tried again in 1931 by the May committee of leading businessmen and it led to a mutiny in the armed forces and the hunger marches of the 1930s. Then to a lesser degree it was tried a third time by Geoffrey Howe in his deflationary Budget in 1981 and growth gradually took off. But even monetarist economists acknowledge that that had much less to do with Osborne-style ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ (i.e. contract public spending and the economy expands) than with big cuts in interest rates, loosened restrictions on bank lending and and a revival of the international economy, all of which coincided but none of which is available today.’’
http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/
A Future That Works
NO2aTory/Liberal coalition - Vote with your feet for an alternative to a neo-liberal economy and neo-conservative state Yes2aLeftFront and a Red/Green Left Alliance
As Michael Meacher says it’s been tried before in 1921 which culminated with the general strike in 1926, again in 1931 which made the depression worse and more recently in 1981 which created the deepest recession since the great depression. So here we go again with the Tories making the working classes suffer for the failure of capitalism, where do we go from hear what should a broad left alternative strategy be, what should Ed Miliband and Ed Balls be saying to the people of Britain in response to David Cameron and George Osborne? Forget the Blair/Brown government that wasn’t a Labour government it was a neo-liberal/neo-conservative government what would/should a true-labour rather than new-labour party be proposing as its alternative social and economic strategy for Britain. Michael Meacher is right that Labour should be going for the jugular, to do that they need to abandon the Thatcherite/Blairite ideology and adopt a programme fit for the social and economic problems of the 21st century rather than the ‘‘solutions’’ of the late 20th century.
ReplyDeletehttp://leftalternatives.myfineforum.org/sutra6086.php#6086