There is, near where we live in Luton, a rather attractive open space known as Stopsley Common. In the middle are wide open spaces, including three cricket fields and a dozen or more football pitches, as well as areas simply left open for walking. Around the edge are hills and wooded areas crossed by well-maintained paths.
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| Luci and Toffee enjoying Stopsley Common |
Sadly, however, it’s also an area much favoured by joy-riding bikers, the kind that like to race their motorbikes or quads, without registration plates, across the grass, churning it up and endangering lives including their own – the obligation to wear helmets is one of many they ignore.
Many of these people seem to be what one might call sedentary travellers. In other words, they belong to that community of people we think of as travellers, in the sense that they wander around the country in caravans (often, it has to be said, drawn by large BMWs or Mercedes) and only stop for short periods in any one place.
However, a group seems to have set up permanent home in Stopsley. Occasionally, they alert their more peripatetic brethren of the fact that a gate has been left open, or blocks of cement designed to prevent access to certain places, are more mobile than their designers imagined, and we discover a few days later that a favourite place has been invaded once more.
I use the word “invaded” advisedly. When these travellers move into a place, they don’t simply inhabit it for a few days before moving on, which I would strongly favour tolerating. Although they use highly sophisticated caravans, they seem not to like the toilets most of them contain, or perhaps they don’t like dealing with the waste. So they tend to use the area around where they park as an open toilet, making it generally less attractive as a place to wander in.
At least that involves substances which are biodegradable. Far more unpleasant still is one of the ways they have chosen to earn a living. They contract with unscrupulous builders to collect waste from construction sites, which they then dump, at no doubt highly competitive prices, anywhere they choose – including those same places, that others value for their beauty and their amenities. Our Council is starved of cash, so it can take many weeks before these materials are cleared away.
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| No way through Dumped construction site waste blocking a path on Stopsley Common |
In 2010, David Cameron assured the British electorate that “… we have a moral obligation to stop running up bills that will have to be paid by future generations.”
He won the election that year and he and his successor, Theresa May, have had the opportunity to honour that moral obligation. The result? National debt has grown from a trillion pounds to approaching two trillion.
What has been the result of their austerity programme? Nurses are 14% worse off than they would otherwise have been. It seems that the poorest people in society are to lose on average a further £50 a week of income by 2020 or around £2500 a year. To put that in context, median income in Britain is around £25,000 a year. By definition, half the population is below that level; the forthcoming cuts will disproportionately hit such people.
Belatedly, the government has realised that its approach is failing. It has decided to start moving away from its pay cap for public servants. As usual, however, it is doing so in too mean a way – police are to have an increase of 2% instead of 1%, in other words a rise that is paltry as opposed to derisory – and as divisively as possible: most public sector workers, including nurses, will have to suffer at least another year of the 1% limit.
Austerity has caused pain, but there has been no gain on the debt front. On the contrary, things have got worse. And life has been impoverished in myriad ways.
For me, it’s the spoiling of Stopsley Common. That is a fitting tribute to seven and a half years of Conservative austerity rule. But I don’t deny it’s only the monument: the real thing is the terrible suffering being inflicted on people already poor enough.Still, at least the state of many part of Stopsley Common reminds me of the sheer ghastliness of Tory rule each time I take the dogs out there.
Reminders are what the British electorate apparently most needs.
You are not presenting the facts correctly, debt is the consequence of the deficit which has been reduced by 3/4 in the 7 years only when that turns positive is there any chance of reducing the debt. Simple maths will tell you that the debt would be staggeringly larger if the deficit had not been reduced. Borrowing more and more and more is simply a broken economy that will collapse as we have seen with others.
ReplyDeleteAh. You've got yourself stuck in the early twentieth century, pre-Keynes, and aren't aware of the paradox of thrift: by spending less a government shrinks the economy and therefore its tax take. So certainly this government has reduced the deficit, but by giving up the opportunity to increase its revenue through stimulating growth. That would have reduced the deficit far more and perhaps even put spending into surplus - and therefore paid down debt.
ReplyDeleteYou suffer from the same problem as the Tories, that they can't see that you can work on the revenue side of government as well its spending. I understand it in them, since their real agenda is to protect the earnings of their own people, even at the expense of the economy as a whole. But what axe do you have to grind?
Great stuff but I am not aware of a single example of Keynes theory ever having worked anywhere ever.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, the fact that you aren't aware is more a reflection on you than on anything else.
ReplyDeleteKeynesian economics, which most advanced countries followed since the great depression, has allowed to attenuate the worst consequences of the boom and bust cycle. Crises still happen (as we all saw spectacularly in 2008) as a result of weaknesses (and greed) in the market. But thanks to government spending, the impacts are far less.
It's often been said that the 2008 crisis was much worse, on paper, than the one in 1929. But the Great Depression had for more unpleasant ramifications on people and nations than 2008 did (terrible though that was). Why? Keynesian economics.
Here, have a read:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/27/ben-bernanke-the-2008-financial-crisis-was-worse-than-the-great-depression/#43b214187684
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9309_Keynesian_resurgence
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/05/us-economy-keynesian-economic-theory
But hey, feel free to wallow in your ignorance
Thank you for your links I am still though totaly confused as to where it has actually worked the Obama experience appears to now be dismissed as having failed if you read more recent articles written after 2008. It appears to be more your political persuasion that makes you believe and support or alternatively not be persuaded and disagree with the longer term results. I remain totally unconvinced, however thank you for your comments.
ReplyDeleteBritain, stuck with its obsession with the gold standard, suffered far worse from the 1929 depression than the US did: there they replaced President Hoover by Franklyn Roosevelt, who pursued a distinctly Keynesian economic programme which worked remarkably well. The only hiccup? In 1937, he thought he'd done enough, and started cutting spending once more - re-plunging the economy into recession.
ReplyDeleteA pretty powerful object lesson.