Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The New, Newer Right

David Cameron has had a major amount of exposure on our own national TV news of late, along with politics in England. Cameron is from the new, newer right who talk soft to the working man and woman in the street about how much better they will be with massive cuts in public budgets, while both splashing money at failed banks and protecting them from any responsibility and minor increases in taxation.

On europe and the eurozone, Cameron is unfortunetly on the correct side of right! It is high time the left in the UK also showed this degree of scepticism. Nationalism is what drove the 1983 election in favour of Thatcher: we want our money and we want our Falklands! To paraphrase Gordon Browns declaration on the Euro, Britain, and Norway are not convergent to the big Four economies in the Eurozone. We have oil and are linked into that global trading loop and "barrel barter currency", while the UK has oil, massive renewables, a major global financial centre (be it based ever more funny-money over for stocks in companies which do anything) and a housing stock bubble which is teetering at the edge of collapse. Why let the Eurozone drag the housing market into a "correction" when the government's own policies of feeding the international rich will cut the whole castle-of-cards at the base and bring it all down. If they are unlucky.

I often wonder if this recession was engineered by the world's capitalists to try and nail the solid left of the social welfare and public spending programmes into what has happened: cutting off their leverage and forcing them to balance the books based on lower tax-income forecasts. However it is the Greek's and Irish super-middle classes whose greed, corruption and short sightedness : the v ery opposite of prudence; which demonstrates the stupidity of the men in blue and grey suits in banks and beaurocracies. Like many eras, and we are in a new dangerous era, it is symptomatic of what came immediately before and will throw up some radical curees.

Conspiracy theorists love this type of suggestion though. David Ike is probably rubbing his hands and writing a new book about this recession being a construction of international capital. If the whole thing were not so tied to orginisations acting either irresponsibly or individuals acting criminally then a conspiracy could be plausable.

Why be in the euro anyway then? As said I do not support scandinavian countries or the UK being in the Euro now : they will probably end up more or less in the dollar otherwise, but the economies stand too much to gain from high currency valuation in terms of buying power and public spending. However for Spain, Italy and the smaller nations, the Euro zone both simplifies business and protects the supply chain against fluctuations which can errode bottom line over night. Also it gives a united front for a Europe in growth against other major currencies, maintaining buying power.

Scandinavia and the UK benefit from the fluctuations and the stability at the core ironically enough. On one side raw materials get cheaper, on the other exports


Let's face it we buy stuff and okay add value to larger "things" or more technical "things" or military protected "things". Service industries and Keynsian public spending keep it all afloat and feed the property market with well paid policemen, doctors, lawyers, administrators and politicians. You can't sell a burger  to a night duty nurse or a night at the opera to a  well paid publocrat in Shanghai when they live in Brussels.



Therefore are the new, newer right a danger. They don't like this money circulating around the hoi polloi. They want more of this money to be "freed up". Small government. Liberalisation nouveaux. Flow up and trickle down. Plenty of talk of freedom, but like in the USA will you be "free" to work 12 hour days and yet not have economic access to medical care?

I see the real danger in the errosion of social mobility. Obama had identified this and health care for all as two major factors holding back growth and well being in the USA. Shame cry the right. If  you work hard then your kids maybe get to go to uni. Well Uni may well be clogged up with the type of lame rich kids we meet on eurotour: they know they will get by on arrogance, and the economic power of their parents. Essentially they clog up the system and then drift off into property management and capital, leaving the enterprises their parent built to their own fortunes or worse, crippeling them in arguements about how to exit their capital share holding.

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