ZanuPFNulabour had to go,but they may well have been the best option at our last election. Scary, but this is my economic guess. The Japs have been through the kind of economic mess we have now, and the best guess there is they made things worse for themselves by cutting public deficits and that kind of jive too soon. Cameroon (for it is his intent to reduce us to similar penury) and his cronies are relying on a private sector many economists believe stopped working a couple of decades back, if it ever did as the myth has it. Thatcher delivered us into the toilet and then war and class war of industrial decline in favour of bank smurfing. This may be his plan.
Whatever the truth, it looks as though CoDem now only appeals to a few anti-redtape diehards and that core of many of us hoping for action on immigration, overpaid, ineffective managers and for the spin to stop. US unemployment ias twice the prediction and the media haven’t worked out how to report ours yet. Cops cheer the removal of this or that ZPFL lunacy, but will soon be cheering themselves by strike braziers, if they have the guts. Anyone able to report a plan to change anywhere, rather than the standard budget preparations for cuts? ConDem look like very old history to me. The economics is well right of Adam Smith and I doubt he’d approve.
Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, argued that society taught man to be good. This tuition started from man’s capacity for “sympathy”: his ability to feel what another man feels. It continued with his capacity for sympathy squared: his ability to sense what other men feel about him, putting himself in the shoes of other men putting themselves in his shoes (Rawls bored on this 50 years ago). The moral education was complete when a person chose the perfect shoes in which to put himself: those of an “impartial Spectator”, who “considers our conduct with the same indifference with which we regard that of other people”.
Smith’s greatest work, “The Wealth of Nations”, was a “very violent attack” on Britain’s commercial policies, which misdirected the nation’s energies, weakened its colonies and plunged it into deep rivalries with its neighbours, all in the mistaken belief that a nation’s wealth lay in the gold and silver it hoarded. We still have trouble thinking of the economy as a system of interacting parts, to be judged by the necessities and conveniences it produces, not the bullion it amasses (today GDP tables). Back then, merchants, artisans and manufacturers added nothing to labour and capital they diverted from the land. For Smith, who had lived in a Glasgow transformed by trade and industry, this was implausible. The wealth of nations lay not in land, but in labour, deployed to its best advantage and divided as finely as demand would allow.
Simples! Where’s this lot’s plan on this – or are they looking for a meerkat to ask? A few factories would help.
Allcoppedout's Blog 
New Labour the best option in the last election?
You are joking? This is a wind up, isn’t it?
Their policies were Orwellian and they ran up a huge debt on unnecessary and intrusive IT projects. They undermined the police force. They undermined civil liberties.
They undermined EVERY public service ethos, and they undermined parental authority. You are having a laugh!
There was hope that the Liberal/Conservative coalition would be sensible and do the right thing by the people of this country, on ALL the important issues. The LibDems do not appear to be doing that in fact, having done U turns on some vitally important matters, like on Trident and unsustainable and polluting nuclear energy plants.
There appears to be a malign influence at work in politics, and elsewhere, that is doing the opposite of what is actually best for the people of this country.
There does not appear to be much difference between the ConDems and New Labour. Except on the rolling back of the Orwellian surveillance state and its intrusive databases, which is a sensible action to take. But on other serious issues, so far they are still on the wrong tracks.
I didn’t mean it as a wind-up – they were utterly vile (so were the last Tories) by the end. Yet the current stuff is all old hat, wasn’t declared in the election and so on. On the economics, ZPFNulabour would probably have been the best choice – my point being how sad that is if true – and the Japanese experience suggests it is.
I suspect our Orwellian times concern something much wider than the State.
“There appears to be a malign influence at work in politics, and elsewhere, that is doing the opposite of what is actually best for the people of this country.”
Agree with the ‘and elsewhere’. Often, the government proposes, and the institutions do the opposite of disposing.
Check out Teresa May’s demand they abolish the Policing Pledge, and how that is still being carried on under new names…
Gadget is just right on that particular promising dross Julia. ‘I pledge to do the job I’m paid for’- FFS! I noticed a few decades ago when I started teaching management, that I could never actually find the brilliant successes the textbooks contained. The classic was called ‘In Search of Excellence’ – even on the authors’ own criteria only 2 of their 67 companies were excellent by the time the book was published, and none of them got into the ‘good firm to work for list’.
Then I found myself managed by a “great leader” spouting from the book some 20 years later and even now working with ‘colleagues’ who teach it. More priests know the Bible is vapid and ahistorical than business school types know their foundations are bullshit.
I must start a lecture with ‘today and for most of the next 14 weeks I will teach from an up-to-date book published in 1981 that has been thoroughly trashed by critical research and that you will come to believe is the word of god’ – damn I should have been an RE teacher!
Yes! 😉