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‘Labour is fair game’: Led By Donkeys says it will hold government to account
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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UK Politics
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If I remember rightly, their budget wasn't implemented for long enough to directly cause problems - it was the financial sector's reaction to the announcement that caused the damage. It was a bad budget and definitely should have been rejected. But it should have been rejected democratically by citizens not by finance and their media friends. The reason I'm being pedantic about this is because it shows how beholden we are to the financial sector. If Truss and Kwarteng had instead come out with a good budget which would improve the lives of 99% of citizens but at the expense of the rent-seeking hoarders of capital I think the same thing would have happened. It's like "the markets" have a gun held to the governments head at all times. That's the reason why I think Labour have been banging on about economic growth rather than economic justice; the power of concentrated wealth has become too big and dangerous to risk taking anything away from, so more must be created.
That is very very easy to say, especially when they didn't. Other budgets were not unfunded messes which sought to grease their mates' pockets (so much). They thought they could fuck about and do what they wanted.
Of course, it's hypothetical. My point isn't about their specific budget (which I agree was an insane budget), it's about how the financial industry is able to manipulate the entire economy when it doesn't like a budget. We are nominally a democracy and they shouldn't have that kind of power. Truss, Kwarteng and the crash are the small story. The big story is that politicians don't have the courage to present a budget of any kind that challenges the vested interests of the financial industry. I want to see a budget that creates a fairer/more competitive market and an increase in standards of living for everyone by rolling back the massive accumulation of assets by the financial industry. But I won't see that budget because the financial industry would stand to lose by it. The economy would "crash" because we have essentially let them become the economy. Truss and Kwarteng's fiscal policy might have been worse than the crash they provoked from the financial industry - we'll never know. Personally, I'm glad they are gone because I thought it was a stupid budget. But I don't want future good policy to get killed at birth in the exactly the same way. The current Labour government are smart enough to know this, which is why they are pursuing growth instead of fairness. But it's ultimately a waste of time because the proceeds of any growth will end up in the financial industry where it will get used to further entrench their position at the expense of everyone else.
TLDR: We need a budget which is radical enough to address our problems, which will crash economy as it stands and allow it to be replaced with a better one, which is based on fairness and real assets instead of finance.