Ed Miliband has much the same view as the American paleocons, and this sort of thing was called Toryism when Toryism, properly so called, was still permitted in national political debate.
Take out bailouts or the permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts, take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what is there left? They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse or road sweeper. Everyone is.
And with public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met, accountability and responsibilities defined by classical, historic, mainstream Christianity as the basis of the British State and as the guiding inspiration of all three of this State’s authentic, indigenous, popular political traditions.
Privatisation, globalisation, deregulation and demutualisation have turned out, in the most spectacular fashion, to have been anything but fiscally responsible. The same is true of a generation of scorn for full employment, leading to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s and the institutionalisation of that mass indolence down to the present day.
The transfer of huge sums of public money to ostensibly private, but entirely risk-free, companies in order to run schools, hospitals, railways, rubbish collections, and so many other things: is that fiscally responsible? Bailing out the City at all, never mind so that it can carry on paying the same salaries and bonuses as before: is that fiscally responsible? Even leaving aside more rarefied academic pursuits, is it fiscally responsible to allow primary education, or healthcare, or public transport, or social housing to fall apart? Is that good for business? Are wars of aggression fiscally responsible? Are military-industrial complexes?
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Apart from Peter Oborne's appreciation of Ed Miliband's speech, your consolidation of this post, the bank shares one and the BAE one into a comment on Janet Daley's is the best thing on Telegraph Blogs today. Much better than Daley's own effort, she is a classic neocon who knows nothing about real conservatism. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteAs if you needed to worry.
ReplyDeleteDespite 30 years of exactly the wrong sort of government action in relation to the economy, manufacturing is still more than twice the size of financial services.
But Janet Daley, like most of Fleet Street, would never meet the people who engaged in it, and would not like them if she did. So she wants manufacturing to be destroyed. It is the same as her attitude to council housing.