No Matter Who Won

There is to be the highest public spending since the 1970s, apparently, no matter who won the General Election. Well, for as long as I can remember, the British have been insatiably nostalgic for the popular culture of the 1970s, at least.

As for the Winter of Discontent, it happened only after the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism, it happened before half the present population was born, and ask people what privations they, or anyone known to them, personally suffered during it, rather than merely thinking that they were watching on television. An eerie silence will descend.

Recite this until you understand it. A sovereign state with its own free floating fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. It literally cannot run out of money. Both fiscal means and monetary means exist to control inflation, and to encourage certain forms of behaviour while discouraging others.

What those forms of behaviour are to be, and how much inflation is to tolerated or sometimes even encouraged, are the stuff of political choice, so that both fiscal policy and monetary policy must be subject to democratic political control. 

But taxation is not "where the Government's money comes from", that money is not "taxpayers' money" as such, there is no factual basis for the necessarily reversible cry of "no taxation without representation", and everyone understood all of this until the still quite mysterious emergence of a First Lord of the Treasury who thought that it was all to do with being a housewife, something that in any case she had arguably never really been.

Alas, most Labour MPs are still trapped in that way of thinking, and they are going to remain so. 85 per cent of Labour MPs are, and will remain, economically well to the right of the Conservative Party, as such. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.