Woe is Us

UK financial stability guaranteed!!

I’m not done. In fact I’m not even sure I am past the early fumbling stages of beginning to make sense to myself, never mind any poor soul reading this.

In my first few posts I set myself the seemingly therapeutic task of justifying my gut feeling Yes vote to my guilt ridden socialist conscience dyed in its anti-nationalist juices. Congruence I think it’s called.

So far I’ve had a right rant about Nigel Farage a couple of times. Ed Miliband and party leader chums too. On reflection I seem to be what academics might call “deeply alienated” from Westminster party leaders and the parties they represent. Of course folks who prefer lowfalutin might just identify my feelings towards the Westminster political offerings as “pissed off”, “scunnered” or something even more earthy. Those folks would be dead right.

Why though? I’m saying that our UK politicians are hopeless, that they really make me angry and that I feel so very distant from their universe, but why? What is it I wanted them to do, or be doing? What’s wrong with my world that I needed these parental leadership figures to be setting right for poor we me (and us)?

I can feel it already, just asking myself that question. What’s wrong? Before we even get to the “What is to be done?” stuff (top marks to reference getters there by the way) there seems to be so much broken in our British society that it’s hard to know where to begin. I suppose I had a bit of a bash with the “Ed Miliband? Seriously? Ed Miliband?” type rant in a previous post, and of course there’s always Nigel as a crow-like harbinger of the spirit of the times – I refuse to use “Zeitgeist”, I just refuse. But they’re just two blokes who represent social “stuff”. They’re handy blame/rage-hounds for me, and I suspect us. So what’s the social stuff I want sorting out? Again hard to know where to start.

So let's start here: Paul Moore was on the Max Keiser show on 15^th May and whatever you feel about Max and Stacey’s Barnum-like financial reporting Mr Robson, Head of Risk at HBOS during the financial crisis had some real bombshells for anyone who’s paying attention. Watch him from 12:35 to the end, it’s worth it and I promise it’s jaw dropping.

Right you’re back. So the top layers of our biggest banks, their accountants, the regulators we expect to govern their practice and the politicians we expect to govern the whole framework and system are corrupt. Not just incompetent, but wilfully, criminally corrupt. Watch it again, watch other Keiser shows, or other financial commentary from the likes of Professor Steve Keen. Google “Brown’s Bottom” and dig a bit on why Gordie deliberately undersold Britain’s gold reserves as the bottom of the market.  Folks, it sounds mad, conspiracy laden and leftfield, but we’re really not living in anything remotely like a democracy. Kleptocracy, autocracy, fraudocracy, call it what you like, it’s not in our interests and it’s also not something that Ed, Dave, Nick or even Nige are talking about or intending to change. Austerity politics is about propping the damned thing up.  Good god that was a rant. Sorry if I’ve lost anyone on a “wow Stevie’s a conspiracy nut” type response. Let me be more sensible for a bit.

It’s easy to disappear down the rabbit hole of this stuff, losing yourself in the financial shenanigans and conspiracies, but if you and I manage to get the gist of it it’s this - our politics in the UK are about the public acceptance of corporate risks and debts while our corporations pay no tax and essentially have no risk or liabilities. We print them our money, we pay their debt, they take the profit. That’s what austerity is. The nationalisation of risk and debt with the privatisation of profit and wealth. That’s quite a trick if you can pull it off and it certainly takes some explaining once someone starts asking you about it. And that’s one of the things that makes me angry or exceptionally disillusioned with Westminster politics and politicians. Instead of there being a political “reckoning” following our banking crisis, with its' austerity based policy reaction, we’ve had an emerging consensus on increasingly right wing politics that kisses goodbye to the notion of welfare and victimises the poor for the sins of the rich. And in our media? Well we’re back to Farage and seemingly it goes like this “Get Nigel out of the closet, he’ll mug it up and say some offensive stuff to throw folk off the scent.”

That’s our politics there folks. A corrupt elite masking a huge corporate robbery of our public wealth. Sounds like madness and a conspiracy doesn’t it? Like some wild eyed lefty waving arms and flinging spit instead of sense. I know it does. I wish it didn't. Do some reading. Do some thinking. It really isn’t. £1.5 trillion pounds worth of debt UK PLC will have soon. Me and you lined to pay for it, in every sense of the phrase. Watch Professor Steve Keen, one of the few who predicted the 2008 crash. Dig around it for yourself. Even if you disagree with my own strange take on it all, find your own, you'll very quickly discover just how bad the UK economy and City of London are for 99.9% of the people living in the UK. 

So when someone says “we need to stick with the UK for financial stability” don’t punch them, but think about it a lot while maybe explaining the error in their ways.

Clearly I have more thinking to do. We all do,

Stevie