<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/24/britain-radical-solutions-labour-1990s-strikes>
"The past few weeks of British politics have been very strange indeed. As one
of the hottest summers on record drew to a close, a wave of militant strike
action propelled union leaders on to the national stage for the first time in
decades. A new mass movement to combat the cost of living crisis attracted tens
of thousands of supporters within days. With Britain facing an imminent
recession, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng announced tax cuts for the rich in a
“fiscal event” that felt like a surreal exercise in looting the country.
It’s clear that nobody in the political mainstream is offering solutions that
are remotely up to the task of dealing with the climate crisis, the imminent
recession or the spiralling costs of energy bills and other basic essentials.
The new Conservative leadership has a policy agenda that would have seemed like
satire or science fiction in the 1980s, while Labour has become so preoccupied
with its factional war against the left that it seems not to care that Jeremy
Corbyn’s core policy programme always enjoyed broad popular support.
Both frontbenches have put forward wholly inadequate proposals that come
nowhere close to resolving Britain’s fundamental problems. Corporations,
developers, landlords, banks and their respective shareholders have been
accumulating power and wealth at the expense of every other social constituency
since the end of the 1970s. As a result, almost every institution, from the
House of Commons to the local primary school, has been hollowed-out, starved of
resources and lacks the authority to fulfil its social purpose. Younger
generations have been left with a future far more grim than the past their
parents enjoyed.
The sense of drift and perpetual crisis this has created is not a novel
phenomenon. It has been developing at least since the aftermath of the 2008
financial crisis, when politicians, opinion-makers, thinktanks and lobbyists
first began to lose their ability to secure support for the policy agenda that
had defined the preceding two decades in the UK and US. Until the financial
crisis, public complacency had been bought largely with the promise of private
luxury. The public were only ever partially content with neoliberalism, and
only content with it at all as long as cheap credit and cheap manufactured
goods from China could guarantee them a relatively luxurious lifestyle."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
