The UK economic “narrative” doesn’t address the failure of Western capitalism unless it is to offer yesterday’s “socialism”

Going on twitter is an absolute eye-opener onto the state of the current political and economic narrative being peddled by left and right alike. We want to scream “a plague on all your (political) houses”. But where to start? As we registered on 19th November 2017 we have only a few twitter followers. So we have to “tweet” comment to an interesting array of the self-appointed twitterocracy who whether left or right singularly miss the people’s point that the system is at best rigged and at worst broken. So with the brevity of Twitter lets pick up two or three big-ticket issues missed by the left and right and comment.

Number one on the left wing is the nieve belief that the economy dependent as it is on debt can fund an even more active and interventionist state. They all queue up to extoll the merits of their version of Marxism singularly failing to grasp that Marx’s proletariat was creating social and economic value which was brought into existence by the capitalist’s production methods and is then misappropriated by the capitalist. The state then takes this value back on behalf of the worker. So far so 19th century. Today the economy relies on debt to provide the services people expect, but the state top slices tax income and uses debt to ensure it can pay for itself. Nice work if you can get it.

Now the right. Margaret Thatcher oversaw what in the 1980’s was a radical policy of selling council homes. This was and still is seen as a way of nurturing Tory voters. However, this “revolution” was tied in with relaxing the financial sector and the slow remorseless shift of work away from Britain to China and countries that paid a “world” wage level as opposed to an “unaffordable” western one. What happened was that we in the west stopped making stuff and began consuming cheap stuff made in China. The old industrial-scale manufacturing and extractive economies in the west became a “marketing and sales” economy and this has, in turn, become a kind of economic “bandit country”. Now making money, not creating value is the “supply side” and the “demand side” is consumption paid for with debt both government and private much of it backed by house price value. Thatcher wasn’t to blame she couldn’t join the dots up, but the bankers could and still are

Finally, the context of this mess is the canvass upon which politicians try to represent the people. On the left, the solution is government jobs and more debt welfare and healthcare without a thought about final economic collapse. On the right, it is to treat the unemployable victims of the world labour market as failures and to manage the decline of their communities whilst finding ways of passing the cost of the whole sorry mess onto the people, via low wage employment, student debt, and adult social care costs paid from the estate of the deceased, oh and more debt but not as much as under Labour.

With both parties so spectacularly missing the point about the true nature of the British economy the only conclusion we can come to is OMG!!.