As usual, the various candidates are talking about how we need to “reduce the deficit”. What they’re not saying is how, exactly, they intend to achieve this. The most obvious way to reduce the deficit is to make all of us pay for it through taxation. But who is to blame for the deficit? Is it you? Is it me? No, it’s the government that got us into this mess. Why should we pick up the bill for the banks?
Meanwhile they all want us to spend more and there’s a reason why they want us to do this: to fill their coffers with money that has been provided by VAT. But if people don’t have money to spend, how can they take money that isn’t there? Even if more people went out and bought loads of useless things, it wouldn’t make much difference; there is no heavy manufacturing in this country and most of our cheap consumer goods come from China. Thanks to Thatcher, there is no manufacturing base left in Britain. All we have are service industries and they do not provide the same kind of income. Then there’s the banks who, thanks to rampant deregulation, get to call the shots. Gordon Brown actually admitted that he had ‘got it wrong’ regarding the banks when he acquiesced to their demands for deregulation. Now we have Tories like Boris Johnson telling us if the banks are taxed or regulated, then they will leave London for elsewhere. I say, let them go. They helped to cause this mess and they were bailed out at our expense. Why should they be allowed to dictate terms?
I noticed that the Lib Dems have made a suggestion that they may tax the banks. …but they propose deep cuts to public spending, claiming that “at least we’re honest about it”. The Scottish Socialist Party is against cuts and is probably the only party to come out strongly against them but then they are a socialist party unlike the rest of the field.
Guy Debord's Cat 