Eat the Rich

In The Independent I came across this real piece of work, written by one Jon Moulton. Apparently we’re in a bit of a bind with the economy as of late (this was very surprising news for me) and our Jon’s getting a bit miffed that the politicians aren’t doing much about it.

‘In the past week our politicians have put on their most serious faces and addressed the economy. They have got into a wrangle about National Insurance contributions. Labour wants to increase them; the Tories don't. A lot of heat has been generated, much ink spilt. What it suits none of them to tell you, though, is that such talk is tinkering at the margins. The debt that Britain faces is monstrous, and neither Tories nor Labour will admit it. They prefer to quibble about the small change than admit that they are taking part in, in effect, a conspiracy on the British people. To make it worse, much of the media is allowing them to get away with it, presumably because they think – as the politicians seem to believe – that the public doesn't want to hear the bad news. In short, we are complicit in a con.’

So, here we go, another ‘captain of industry’ calling for ‘belt tightening’ in terms of public spending. In other news, the sky is blue and Eric Pickles is a Big Mac away from a massive heart attack. Nothing out of the ordinary here. But what particular brand of poison is Mr. Moulton trying to sell us today?

After taking us on a whimsical journey back to the 1970s (where not even the dead were buried don’t you know), Moulton makes some comparisons of how good we had it back then compared to now:

‘Actually, quite a few other things were better in the mid-1970s: unemployment was half of today's level. The 1975 decline in the economy was only one-seventh of what happened to us last year. And the UK had much less of the largely unmentioned other debt – mostly, the pensions promises that will have to be paid by future generations, which now represents perhaps 125 per cent of GDP but was near 20 per cent in the 1976 time frame. Not a reassuring background.’

Keep that unemployment tidbit in your mind.

We’re in such a terrible predicament, Mr. Moulton, whatever can we do about it?

‘’Increasing taxes is not going to get there. We need to get £50bn plus in each year to stop the debt from rising in five years' time. Look at the bickering about National Insurance rises – try 10 per cent on VAT as a political idea to make a good dent in the budgetary hole. It's inconceivable that our current politicians would have the stomach to do this. In any case, the tax load would probably become counterproductive with businesses and people moving overseas to less taxing environments.’

Gee, that’s awfully convenient, would it be ineffective because the tax burden would probably come down hardest on Mr. Moulton and his mates? Perish the thought...

‘Civil servants do not really generate growth, so a smaller private sector has to support a larger public sector.’

Oh boy. Bear in mind Mr. Moulton is the head of Better Capital and used to be on the executive board of Alchemy, both of which are ‘private equity groups’ (I,e, asset-strippers). If I were in that position, I certainly wouldn’t talk about civil servants not ‘generating growth.’

In fact, Moulton, as with most people featured on this blog, has some interesting baggage going into this debate. Back in 2000, Alchemy showed an interest in purchasing Rover, the car company in order to rescue it from tanking. Was Moulton interested saving jobs there?

"if we get it right, we can make a great deal of money" out of the Rover deal.

Need more be said?

‘Now that really leaves the only route to stability, which is to cut the public proportion of our economy, which means reducing spending, increasing the ability of the economy to grow and reducing the number of civil servants, and probably their pay and pensions. And the numbers are large: we need to take out several hundred thousand public sector jobs. We need to reduce the vast liability for public pensions that clouds our future. The politics – and human costs – of this are not palatable. Tough choices have to be made as to what we can afford’

Not content with being obscenely wealthy, Moulton wants to tell us little people we’re due for a royal screwing. If the situation in the 1970s was better because of the smaller amount of people unemployed compared to the present day, what the hell does he think it’s going to be like if we throw ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people into unemployment? Even if civil servants do not ‘generate growth,’ they still draw a salary that is then put back into the economy. How are we to relieve the burden on the State by putting more people on unemployment benefit? Out of all the article, I think this is the section I object to most. It’s what I’ve objected to publicly on this blog all along. Wealthy, unaccountable businessmen who don’t have recourse to the welfare state telling us that ‘tough choices’ have to be made,usually in the form of job cuts. Certainly, it’s ‘not palatable’, but its what’s best for us, for the country in fact! Best be good little children and go along with what our betters tell us. Do we get any say in it? Do we fuck.

I know what Moulton’s proposing will not be a voice in the wilderness. I know there’ll be a glut of MPs who are more than willing to give Moulton and people like him a fair hearing. Meanwhile, civil servants and, let’s face it, other public sector workers later on down the line will have to take the shaft once again. But then where there will moves to try and solve this through the usual channels, with, perhaps, a lobby of parliament, it’ll be fobbed off with the same old excuses. The voices of the many do not carry the same weight as the voices of the rich few. As the old song goes, One Law for Them, and another law for us.

We did not choose to get into these levels of debt, it was the wealthiest in society that was responsible for our present precarious position. Should they not be the ones to suffer for it? Their economics have led us into this disaster - why do they still continue to exist at the top of society?