Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "Richard J Murphy" channel.

  1. A financially illiterate population can be fleeced at will by the finance industry. The finance industry is one of the biggest donors to MPs and political parties. MPs and political parties show no interest at all in educating people about finance. There might be a connection there. Excellent video, Richard.
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  2. I agree about the SNP. There are some genuinely progressive MPs and MSPs but also many who would be quite comfortable in Starmer's Labour or the Lib Dems. But we're not getting a real alternative until we have independence with PR for all elections. So we have to vote SNP for now in order to get rid of them when independence comes!
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  3. Where did you get that figure from? The OBR and IFS report that the top 10% of earners paid 60% of all income tax. But that's the only vaguely progressive tax we have. Most other taxes are regressive, with the burden falling on lower earners.
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  4.  @perkinscrane  The Falklands war happened because Thatcher was hopelessly unpopular and headed for certain defeat. It could easily have been resolved by negotiation but she wanted a diversion. If Thatcher's privatisations were copied so faithfully, you'll have to explain why European state owned companies like EDF have taken over so many of our public utilities. 70% of the UK's private rail providers are owned by state-owned European companies! Both Blair and Brown are neoliberals. The Labour Party is a broad church dominated by the Centre Right and is rapidly become hard right as socialists and social democrats are expelled or leave. Most of my family lived in council housing in the Wilson era, much of it built during that time so I'm a little puzzled at your claim that the Wilson administration curtailed it. Brexit was a scam to enable the aims of the extreme right so that is also a rather strange claim.
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  5.  @xtc2v  Of course not. That's the point!
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  6. Well said. I'm always amused when MPs defend their second jobs and directorships on the basis that it keeps them in touch with the real world. As if mahogany-panelled boardrooms and business lunches were a feature of most people's lives. I think 90K is reasonable - provided they are no allowed to do second jobs. It puts them on a par with many professionals and compensates them for extra hours worked compared to the rest of us and for being away from home for long periods but it does at least mean that they have to be aware of bills and expenses just like everyone else.
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  7. Well said. She hasn't got a plan because she is a doctrinaire Neoliberal. She doesn't think that governments should have a plan for the economy. That should be down to the markets - of which she considers herself to be a servant. The fact that this has been the motivation of every Chancellor since Geoffrey Howe and that it has failed for every single one of them, is beyond her very limited comprehension.
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  8. No. She learned less than nothing. Nothing would be harmless.
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  9.  @LowPlainsDrifter60  We know what it means: It's the replacement for "political correctness gone mad" which eventually became as comedic as it could get as Spitting Image gave it at least one skit on every show. There's always been a personal insult to dish out when you've no arguments. Is anyone here old enough to have been called a "trendy lefty" or a "bleeding heart liberal? No doubt, the Right Wing echo chamber will replace the equally vacuous and meaningless "woke" in due course.
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  10. 3 to 4 minute videos a few times per day suits my schedule. For me, the choice of topics are just right
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  11. It's a no brainer. Investing in HMRC staff will bring in more revenue. So why won't government do it?
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  12.  @2frogland  Then you'd have to explain why countries like France and Germany with much stronger trade unions and far more immigration didn't have that decline and explain why their economies overtook the UK's during the Thatcher years. The UK's current economic underperformance stems from the 2008 crash which was the Thatcher bubble bursting. Though, of course, Brexit has made things much, much worse.
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  13. It's not the name of the party that matters. It's the people behind it; the ones providing the seed money and profiting from the outcome. The Tories were originally the party of the landed whom they defended against the growing power of the industrial bourgeoisie who were championed by the Liberals. In the period between the 1880s and 1920s they gradually took over that mantel of being the champions of the capitalist class which subsumed the landed class through marriage and other means. In effect, they BECAME the UK's liberal party, leaving the party of Lloyd George to fester as the party of the rump middle class while Labour squeezed them the left. The Tories still retained an element of the patrician "one nation" Conservatism of Peel and Disraeli but that was effectively neutered by Thatcher and finally purged out of existence by Johnson. In so doing, he made the party utterly unelectable as its underlying corruption (always there but hidden) and incompetence has become too obvious to hide. So, enter the new party of the capitalists: Starmer's Labour. To make it acceptable to its new donors it had to be purged of everything progressive. After being weakened by Blair, the left of the party has now been completely destroyed by Starmer and it has become the same racket as the one that Stanley Baldwin snatched off the Liberals in the inter-war years. A different name over the door but, for all intents and purposes, the same enterprise with the same business plan: rob and exploit the poor on behalf of the rich. Richard Murphy is right in one way. The Conservative Party is probably dead now. But only in name. Starmer's Labour is every bit as corrupt and rotten and will carry on the tradition for a while before it's either overthrown by democracy or replaced with another placeholder.
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  14.  @kevinfoley8730  Anyone doing an economics degree these days is shepherded away from economics. They're still teaching Samuelson with his utterly discredited nonsense about the virtues of lightly regulated markets!
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  15. It's like one of those street corner cup-and-switch games. And it appears to be done with the same aim in mind - to cheat the punter!
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  16. Investment summit = potential donor summit. The politicians present will also have an eye to raising their profiles for future directorships.
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  17. "Wealth Taxation does seem like a punishment for success." No. It's merely a rebalancing of the distortion in reward created by the market place.
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  18. Banks are NOT "Savings and Loans" institutions.
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  19.  @andyinsuffolk  From one extreme to the other. Ask Chileans what they thought of such neoliberal nonsense.
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  20. You have to distinguish between two strands of the far right. On the one hand you have the comic-book Fascists who like Seig Heiling and bullying Muslim women in the street. They have had very little electoral impact in their own right but their posturing and bullying can intimidate people and prevent proper political discourse. Most importantly, they complement the other strand, the neoliberals. They are just as hostile to democracy but they are smart enough to use it and corrupt it rather than destroy it completely. They have been very good at it too. But, as Richard Murphy correctly points out, we've now entered a very dangerous phase where the violent and potentially violent strand is learning to make use of the system too. I don't think they'll have much electoral impact but if the so-called respectable right (Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems) keep triangulating to head them off, they will achieve a lot of their aims anyway.
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  21. RJM puts his finger on it once again. Corporate law in the UK is laughable and limited liability is little more than a licence to defraud the exchequer, the public, suppliers, shareholders and anyone else that gets in the way. Way past time that it was brought under control.
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  22. You think being in the top 4% of earners isn't? Really?
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  23. When the Right say that they hate "the state", they really mean that they hate democracy. There are plenty of "scholarly" articles published by organisations like the Mises Institute and the Cato Institute which argue that democracy is a barrier to "liberty". And when you come down to actual cases, neoliberal experiments like those in Chile, Iran and Argentina have depended on a brutally powerful state to ensure that those who have beneficially exercised their liberty do not have to fear the reaction to poverty and desperation of those they have exercised it against.
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  24. Labour's decision to raise employers' NI contributions is going to force a lot of small businesses to close. Who benefits from that? Big business. Who is Labour courting as donors? Yes. Big business. It doesn't take long to join the dots.
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  25. ​ @perkinscrane  The whole point of PR is that it makes government more representative. The population of the UK did not want its assets sold off at bargain basement prices, it did not want its schools taken out of democratic control, it didn't want its schools removed from democratic accountability, it didn't want its health system degraded by being made accountable to the market, it wanted to retain social housing, it wanted to retain control of its infrastructure and utilities and didn't want to give the crooks of the financial "industry" the facility to loot the real economy which they got from de-regulation. PR would mean that governments would have included elements which would have been unwilling to allow these disastrous policies to proceed. In European countries which had PR, left and moderate elements were able to avoid or at least mitigate most of the excesses of neoliberalism that have destroyed both our economy and democracy.
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  26.  @adenwellsmith6908  No. I think that enough money should be provided to staff hospitals properly instead of blaming over-worked staff.
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  27. I think that libelling or slandering someone in order to damage others' perception of them can be as hurtful and injurious as physical attack. It should be treated as a crime and prosecuted by the state. The current law means that, on the one hand, rich individuals can evade not only criticism but proper investigation for actual crimes: Think Savile, Maxwell, Archer. On the other hand, if ordinary people are lied about they are deterred from seeking redress by the deep pockets of the likes of the individuals above - as well as the rest of the press, of course. A law of criminal libel/slander would correct this imbalance.
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  28. Both Tories and Labour have been subject to entryism of the sort once advocated by the Trotskyists. The Tories have neoliberals. Labour has the Jewish Labour Movement. Neither have anything to do with the traditions of their respective parties and both have negated what they once stood for.
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  29. The trope that Scotland is a hand-out junkie is standard fayre from the right-wing media and never contradicted by the allegedly not-so-right-wing media. The remedy is simple. Let us handle our own taxation and spending. No? Why not? What are they afraid of? I think they fear Scotland might do it better and show that there are alternatives to the hash they are making of things in Westminster.
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  30. Quite right. But it's workers who produce the value which that money represents.
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  31.  @adenwellsmith6908  The opacity in the NHS comes from the Thatcher government's drive to make it work like a commercial organisation. What we need to do is get rid of the trusts and go back to good old fashioned democratic accountability.
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  32.  @markwelch3564  Spot on. You also have to take into account the money they then put back into the economy with their spending and the contribution they make by filling skill gaps. A proper and honest assessment would reveal that preventing immigration is utter madness.
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  33. You can "gin" up the economy just before elections in all sorts of ways. You can make a lot of tax cuts, increase pensions, create unproductive jobs to get unemployment figures down, change the way unemployment figures are calculated and reported etc etc. Politicians don't do them because they know full well that the electorate will see through them. Same goes for interest rates.
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  34.  @OB17358  He's a Trump supporter. He thinks that Communists and Fascists are the same thing and you're in serious danger of causing a brain haemorrhage with the word "oligarchic". That's 4 syllables and he probably needs a lie-down after using 3.
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  35.  @OB17358  I suspect that they've burned every dictionary they could find.
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  36.  @tlangdon12  I'm not suggesting for a minute that either Labour or the Conservatives would adopt such measures. They're the people who would oppose it!
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  37.  @refsOnReality  As if to prove my point....
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  38.  @billB101  Genuinely good people are always dangerous to those in positions of power. They can't be bought and they can't be intimidated.
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  39. They're getting more and more like the private sector....
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  40. Agree. Competence but also commitment. They should be legally obliged to give up all other employment and business interests and to actually work for their constituents - submitting evidence that they have done so (attendance in the house or a timesheet for constituency work) before they get paid.
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  41. The government should let it go bust then buy all the infrastructure and equipment from the receiver. Let the financiers sing for their money . They knew full well that they were financing fraud. That aside, the points you make here, both domestic and international, have to be addressed - and urgently.
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  42. It's the perfect vehicle for people who believe in Neoliberal dogma. They believe that wealth is created not by labour (their prime delusion is that they "debunked " the labour theory of value) but by "transactions". As private equity companies literally do nothing but transactions, then logically, they must create nothing but wealth. Unfortunately, the institution which once represented the political interests of labour has completely bought into this drivel and is hell-bent on putting it into practice. Brexit has severely damaged the UK as an entity but the ideology that inspired it, Neoliberalism, has nowhere near finished.
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  43.  @zetectic7968  You're absolutely right. I've worked in the IR twice. First of all in the 1970s when I left school. To be trained as an ordinary public facing Tax Officer took 12 months and you had to sit an exam at the end of it. I returned in 2003 to the same grade where training was done in weeks with no exam. It has been trimmed much further since then. The pay-off for the government is that they can announce a lower headcount. But as the average tax-take for each one of those heads is many times the salary it's paid, it makes no sense whatsoever. If little Miss Accounts-At-The-Kitchen-Table is serious about fiscal responsibility, she'll announce a massive increase in HMRC recruitment, along with a serious enhancement of their training. Dinnae hud yer breath!
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  44. Economic illiteracy. New investment doesn't come from savings. It comes from new money created by the Bank of England.
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  45.  @alanrumble7238  Agreed. It is also an insult to England itself. It should have its own government.
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  46.  @AlanRumble-sl8dn  Well, yes. But that's the point. Westminster is seen as England's parliament and therefore legislates for the whole of the UK based on the interests of England. That's why England should have its own parliament. It could be devolved within England as it decides but it should not be making decisions that bind the other nations of the so-called "union". UK wide decisions should be made by a body in which all the nations have equal representation.
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  47. Absolutely spot on! The efficiency of the old Inland Revenue should never have really been a concern. Every Inland Revenue employee from Tax Officer and Collector to District Inspector employed produced many times their salary in tax collected. Computerisation should have been used to boost their effectiveness and make their jobs less tedious. Instead, it was used to close down facilities and reduce an already very efficient and productive payroll in order to create an utterly cosmetic and fake efficiency. As Richard says, the real winners from this were the crooks and tax dodgers who have been able to exploit the weaknesses of an over-centralised, unwieldy and locally insensitive bureaucracy. The losers, of course, are the taxpayers and the HMRC employees who have been reduced to being underpaid and overworked and unable to employ their considerable skills and talents to do a more effective job.
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  48. This is the best and most important video so far. We're at a fork in the road. In one direction, there's reduced inequality. This would be a two-way street: All to benefit from the wealth we create with our labour but also less alienation as we would all be better able to contribute. The alternative is to keep increasing poverty at one end of the scale while allowing the likes of Musk and Bezos to trouser an increasing proportion of the "wealth" created. The ultimate conclusion of this choice would be to deplete the planet's resources until it can no longer sustain us.
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  49.  @nicholaspostlethwaite9554  No. It's those living from extractive capitalism who are over-remunerated. Workers, the people who actually create the wealth, are farcically underpaid.
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  50. The reason for that is that less and less of that cash is going to the NHS. It's being skimmed off by the private sector buddies of the Tories and New Labour. We just need to stop privatising.
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