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    Austere Olde England

    By Donal on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 10:38pm | Politics

    I've been reading about the coming austerity measures in the UK and Germany. Guess who loses?

    Spending review axe falls on the poor

    George Osborne drove his axe deep into the heart of the British state today, with a range of sweeping cuts to welfare, higher education, social housing, policing and local government that he claims will draw the country back from the brink of bankruptcy.

    Outlining his long-awaited comprehensive spending review, which will cut £81bn from government spending, Osborne vowed to restore "sanity to our public finances and stability to our economy". Perhaps the most striking of the new cuts announced was a package of £7bn in extra welfare cuts on top of the £11bn already made in the last budget. This will include the withdrawal of £50 a week from the million people claiming incapacity benefit for more than a year.

    Osborne told MPs: "Today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink, when we confront the bills from a decade of debt. It is a hard road, but it leads to a better future." His gamble rests on the assumption that the private sector and exports will fill the gap caused by the loss of nearly 500,000 public sector jobs that will result from the cuts, mostly through natural wastage.

    In a rapid-fire speech to the Commons, Osborne slashed £350m from the legal aid budget, reduced the police budget by 20% over four years, and hacked two-thirds off the £9bn communities department budget, including more than halving the support for social housing over four years. The pension age will rise to 66 from 2018.

    Comments range from blaming Labour to blaming Socialism to disbelief that Liberal Dem Clegg hasn't resigned in protest. No one seems to have mentioned the loss of North Sea oil revenues that propped up the UK for decades.

    Could it happen in the US? Why not?

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    Damn straight it could happen here.  It's already happening, only slower. 


    by LisB on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 10:56pm

    I'm not sure why anyone would think Clegg would resign.  According to this http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/john-gray/progressive-like-the-1980s Clegg is a natural ally of the conservatives in the dismantling of the social welfare state.


    by brewmn on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 11:14pm

    Evil shits.

    PM David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson were all Bullingdon Club members. The most noxious right wing group imaginable, and this, under Thatcher. Violent, sexist, criminal, wealthy.

    Check out the life story of Gottfried von Bismarck, Darius Guppy, and a few of their select members.

    THESE are the sort of people running Britain today. It's not "austerity." These are deeply twisted people.

    http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/the-bullingdon-club/

    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/10/25/inside-the-bullingdo...

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1167172/The-high-society-psycho-...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Gottfried_von_Bismarck

     


    by quinn esq on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:16am

    German chancellor’s austerity measures recall the Weimar Republic  10 June 2010

    http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j10.shtml

    “Many feel that the cuts targeting the unemployed, the ending of the child allowance for those on welfare, the abolition of the heating subsidy for those on housing benefits, and the cancellation of pension insurance contributions for the long-term unemployed are profoundly antisocial, unjust and cowardly. Meanwhile, the banks, speculators and those responsible for the crisis remain unscathed and dictate the cuts in social spending…….It means that the ruling elite have decided to place the entire burden of the financial and economic crisis on the backs of ordinary people. This cannot be done without a major confrontation and is, in the end, incompatible with the maintenance of democratic structures…………….These events are reminiscent of the final years of the Weimar Republic. Then, as now, the ruling class exploited the world economic crisis in order to enrich itself beyond measure……The Merkel government is opening up a new stage of class struggle with its cowardly attack on the most vulnerable members of society. The policy of social mediation, which the German bourgeoisie adopted following the tragedy of Weimar and the catastrophic outcome of Nazism, is irrevocably over………The working class cannot avoid a confrontation. It must prepare for great class battles…….The government’s €80 billion cuts programme represents an attack on democracy and a step towards authoritarian forms of rule…………It is of a piece with the austerity policies being announced by governments across Europe—Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Hungary, Romania, etc.—all of which are doing the bidding of the international financial mafia.

    The biggest attacks on the welfare state took place under that government. Its Agenda 2010 welfare and labour “reforms” established a huge low-wage sector. Many who had worked for decades and paid into the unemployment insurance scheme were rapidly moved onto welfare and driven into abject poverty.

    The budget deficit, which is cited as grounds for the cuts, did not fall from the sky. It is, in the first place, the result of the repeated lowering of corporate taxes and the top tax rates

    Workers need a new party that tackles the problem at its root.

    The International Committee of the Fourth International and its German section, the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality Party), are fighting for an international socialist programme that focuses on the expropriation of the banks and big corporations.

    Only on this basis is it possible to break the dictatorship of finance capital and establish a workers government that proceeds from the needs of the population, not the profit interests of big business.” 

    Sound familiar?

    Workers need a new party ?

    Will the Democrats sell us out too?


    by Resistance on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:46am

    On the other side of the spectrum, in Baden-Wurtemberg, longtime CDU voters have joined tens of thousands of Germans who plan to vote Green because of the Stuttgart21 mega-ten-year building plan of the train station. The cross section of protestors (daily) is wildly diverse in age and normal politics. Even many conservative Germans are joining with young anti-establishment people in street protests. The demonstrations draw thousands from around Germany. The protest is moving also to Berlin and other cities. Of the many grievances, the main complaint is the spending of billions of Euros while cutting social spending.

    At the same time, the growing anti-immigration, anti-Muslim movement is quite strong.


    by euro girl (not verified) on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 7:02am

    Of interest, however, was one of the opening promises of his speech: he promised not to cut the national health care system. On that, he was more left than our democrats;


    by euro girl (not verified) on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 6:54am

    He pretty much had his hands tied. 

    Under Thatcher et al the tories had taken the well functioning NHS with which I was familiar from working in Britain and converted it into the disgrace that is still used by the Right here as an supposed example of how "socialized medicine " doesn't work  - with two year waiting lists, overworked staff and unsafe wards. 

    Guess what , people noticed. And noticed when Blair/Brown whatever their other deficiencies returned it to being the kind of service I'd hoped for in Obamacare.

    Consequently Cameron would have been unelectable if he hadn't very explicitly promised during the campaign that the NHS would be protected..  Osborne ( who  showed himself as dangerously  clueless during the financial crisis) was no doubt forbidden from contradicting his master.

      

     

     

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 8:56am

    What we are seeing in many parts of the developed world is nothing other than brazen class warfare, and an attack on society by the very wealthy.  This is no honest disagreement over "competing economic philosophies".  In very severe and trying economic times, the wealthy will band together to protect what they have.  All over the world, the privileged few are proving that they would prefer a decade of severe unemployment and enforced low-growth austerity to any social solutions that aim to  redistribute wealth and promote social investment so that we can all move forward and dig out together.


    by Dan Kervick on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 7:28am

    "In very severe and trying economic times, the wealthy will band together to protect what they have."

    I expect them to do that, and, in a healthy democracy, that would be fine.  The problem, at least in America, is that they are able to enlist so many middle-and-working class people to assist them.

    See, for example, Party, Tea.

     

     


    by brewmn on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 10:23am

    Of course it can't happen in the US. Obama would never defend Medicare and cut the military budget the way Cameron reveres the NHS and slashed the armed forces' funding.

    oh, maybe that's not what y'all meant...


    by Obey on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 10:23am

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