Daor to Erewhon

 

I have to report zero progress on the wrench, disc-cutter, self-manufactured, front; due to several other things needing attention today. However, some post-budget analysis in today's i caught Jane's attention, which she duly flagged to me, when we got back home this afternoon: this regarding the only true positive(?) to come from the budget, at least for a small but significant portion of society. The private pension lifetime tax limit removal. This would appear to be a Grand Canyon-sized loophole for the current generation of the wealthy to avoid their inheritors having to pay death duties on whatever wealth they leave by tying it up instead in their pension pots.

Nice one, Jeremy: who prompted that line of thinking whilst you were being advised to raise taxation on the rest of us, directly or indirectly? As I said the other day, higher taxation is an inevitable concomitant of needing to provide public services and a civilized health and welfare system; but this has to be applied across the board equitably: favours to your potential party donors should simply not be a legal option, but that seems to be the sole motivation behind this thin and partisan budget. Oh, and if anyone thought that the scraps of not raising duty on draught beer in pubs - the hoi polloi concession - would be of benefit to either customers or the pub trade, think again. All that's happening is that the brewers and pub-co's are pushing up their wholesale prices anyway, one would guess to offset all the other cost increases that the budget didn't deal with.

The problem, still, is monetarism: nearly half a century on from the brave new world of macroeconomic, liberalist, bullshit 'thinking'. The naive and partisan notion that simply controlling the flow of money is a recipe for a functioning economy and by extension a working society has been shown to be utterly, tragically, false. Also, we have synthesized a notional centrist politics from the old and established Left/Right dichotomy, imagining, disingenuously, that the only road that avoids political extremes is straight, or almost straight down the middle. Might seem obvious, might seem sensible; but the issue here is of history and society: humanity itself. The abstractions of neoliberal economic thought are simply that: abstractions.

Fine for a doctoral thesis, closeted in the dry, hermetic atmosphere of academia, but woefully inadequate to even describe the complexities of human life, out here in the real world, let alone govern competently, humanely and equitably the rich fabric of our society. The problem we have lies in the kind of people we see fit to accept as our political leaders; those we entrust with our lives and futures. We cannot continue to trust investment bankers, accountants and financiers to govern impartially, it's simply not in their nature or extra-political remit. By the same token, we equally need change in opposition: a re-run of the Blair years is simply not good enough. Fresh, radical - particularly economic - thinking is required to stem the obvious rot in our society, and to restore some semblance of sanity and humanity to the modus operandi of our governance. Otherwise, we really are on a road to nowhere...