PROSPECTS FOR SPECULATION LOOKING UP

09/10/2009

According to the Audit Commission, roughly half of all local authority budgets are spent of staff salaries; in addition sixty percent of councils have lost money through investments in money markets. This is surely a fairly clear explanatory background to the Tories announced freeze on public sector pay rises, which they claim will save equivalent of 100,000 jobs and £3.2bn per year. If these figures do stack up, then saving hundreds of thousands of jobs is surely a worthy policy, although how will this tally with the five yearly, itinerant election promise of public efficiency increases? Aren't these public pen pushers and red-tape mongers wasting resources which would be better disposed of by the private sector?... The £3.2bn figure must also raise an eyebrow; Labour conjured their £175bn bailout, supported by the Tories, out of thin air (or out of China's underwriting). It must be paid back, unless London has images of a return to feudal money relations.

175÷3.2=54.7

Brown, Cameron et al, and for that matter Chinese premier Wen Jiaboa will -radical advances in medicine notwithstanding -be long dead and buried in the sixty years a £3.2bn per year saving would take to pay back the UK's gambling debt. By comparison, a 73p per square meter, one-off ground tax would raise £175bn with little sweat for most of the population, even if they understandably object to Brown's transfer of wealth into banker's pockets.

But on top of the slightly meagre figure above, there is a £4bn planned cutting in public expenditure generally, and more cash to be gained by raising the pension age. The NHS is, after all, making the people live longer, so let them eat cake. Oops, that should be "let them work longer". All this talk about the Conservatives is taking its toll...

Daniel Dorling, a geographer from Sheffield, has noted an interesting thing about this whole crunchy recession: the North/South divide is growing, as public policy favours London. This was evidenced best when the regional development budgets were raided (the places which need development are...), in order to provide £1bn of first time buyer help (yet the city in which first time buyers need help is...). Northerners, who are proportionally the fat, smoking, drunk, pregnant teen portion of the nation, seem destined to fall even further into their mire as the South watches its back.

Technically Labour is supposed to have an eye on the North; it is after all its traditional place of backing. But since Tony Blair consolidated Thatcherism using what was supposed to be Britain's socialist party, the grimness of the North has always been, if not fact, a shadowy potential. Dorling has pointed out that for a long time London was shrinking, then thirty years ago it began to grow: just as Thatcher's neo-liberal era was spawned through the destruction of industrial Britain and the concomitant favouring of finance in The City.

However, there is to be no return to the supposed Northern/worker/Left versus Southern/financier-aristocrat/Right politics of yesteryear. When the worker's tabloid, The Sun, first trounced the TUC for its safe footwear policy, then switched its affiliation from Labour to Tory in the upcoming election, the politics of the working class took an interesting turn. At least it is interesting if it is forgotten Rupert Murdoch owns the paper, in which case it looks depressing (if you have sympathies for working class politics). On top of that, the BNP is always waiting at the door, ready to blame the nation's ills on its recent and not so recent arrivals. That the Tories have taken what is perceived as a centrist stance, and Labour is looking shoddy, must give Nick Griffin a simmilarly strong sense of destiny to that which Murdoch feels. After all, Griffin now controls Britain's Right wing party, and they are only gaining in profile.

Right wing politics, agitated working classes and economic cataclysm should not deceive one into seeing too many echoes of the 1930s, however. When the gold standard was dropped, and the world's currencies went into unprecedented oscillations which precipitated the Great Depression, foundations for what would later become called neo-liberalism were laid. But, as  The Indepedent triumphantly reports, its own story on the fall of the dollar seems to have created a rush for gold to once again become the universal currency. Quite what a return to the gold standard means is yet to be decided; as if he needed any more bad news, it does probably make Gordon Brown feel a little silly for selling half Britain's gold reserves though.

John Gullick