Social Justice And Fiscal Responsibility

In 2008, Britain had lower public borrowing than when Labour had come to power in 1997. But then came the global banking crisis. Have you got that? The global banking crisis. Are the economic woes of Greece, or Italy, or America also the fault of Gordon Brown?

Even George Osborne has had to admit that Brown was right, and is therefore pumping money into the economy, doing what the banks were supposed to do, but they decided to keep the money for themselves instead. If Brown was right, then Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were right. George Osborne has effectively said this. But the supposedly Labour authors of In The Black will not. No wonder that they will not join the Conservative Party.

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?

Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.