Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "The UK’s Self-Inflicted Economic DECLINE" video.
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@CommonPurpose1 That was your experience, which can't be generalised. And to be honest, I'm probably older than you, and I was old enough to see Thatcher in, and see what happened to my town. Deindustrialisation started after the great inflation during the 1970s. Britain had become the Sick Man of Europe. The economic growth of the 1980s was built on bankrupting the state, and wasting gains from north sea oil. Our elites thought Asian competition would undercut British industry, so they let it die. From energy to the car industry, it all was starved of investment, as the banks were making more money from stock market speculation, selling off publics services, and selling mortgages. By selling off social housing, central government destroyed local government's ability to alleviate the effects of the job losses.
British firms were sold off, and the jobs weren't replaced. Unless you were educated and literate, you didn't have much chance in the new knowledge economy.
When the Labour Party came in, the British economy had just got over the hit of crashing out of the ERM, when interest rates went up to 15%. Some people lost their homes, but GDP went up for 16 years after that. The State still had some capacity, and so they tried to use neoliberalism tools to repair the damage to public services. Children weren't going hungry, or suffering from diseases of deprivation then. There were no food banks, and the economy grew enough to finish paying off the debt of World War II owed to the Americans. But Thatcher's revolution meant there was no money to build new hospitals, and so they borrowed on usurous terms to invest in public services. That was welcomed by the financial sector which had replaced industrial production as the largest sector in the British economy. Their mistake was not to understand how unsustainable the financial revolution started by Thatcher was.
Neoliberal economics crashed and burned in 2008, and we've been subsidising the banks ever since. Whatever British manufacturing was left after the early 1980s, gradually eroded.
The loss of a mixed economy which could provide jobs for people of all abilities, is the biggest legacy of the transition to an economy dominated by finance and technology. And a 2 term Labour government and a misled public couldn't change that.
The market-driven ideology led revolution thought markets could solve everything, but it ignored the fact that the humans in them suffer from things like greed and selfishness, and weakened the only real safeguard against it. The state. Britain isn't alone in this folly. Most governments, are reaping the rewards of being owned by the wealthy, and run by the wealthy, for the wealthy. That's why most of them are technically bankrupt, including the UK. We're literally back to where we were in 1945 in terms of the National Debt. That's all down to the greatest wealth transfer in history, and it's not finished yet. In a generation or two, only the kith and kin of the asset wealthy will own homes, and the state will just be an empty shell for corporations kleptocrats, and family landlords to control the population. Unless people listen to voices like Gary Stevenson and wake up to the facts. And not just look to their own circumstances to understand the world they live in. Simply, if you rely on a job for a living, you are vulnerable. And what they do to the least valuable people in society, they will do to you.
Thatcherism made us all frogs in a pot on the stove over low heat over the last 4 decades, and the water is getting warm as the asset wealthy try to gaslight us that everything is ok. It's not. And it won't be for those who follow us unless we get our priorities straight.
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