[www.bbc.co.uk]



words but no language

Some of the reforms make sense, particularly less central planning. But they are incidental; the real jist of it is summed up by that little outmoded word, "choice". The tories haven't learned a thing, have they? You can't have your One Nation Toryism AND your Neoliberalism. The latter destroys the possibility of the former.

The NHS is one of the few remaining institutions that provide social cohesion in British society, and one of the few plus points the country has going for it when it comes to attracting overseas investment and foreign labour. Once again though, neoliberal short-sightedness will sacrifice long-term economic health for short-term cost-cutting, illusory "competitiveness" and pathetic 17th century WASP anachronisms about, "freedom" and "individual choice".

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

potemkin villages built like this exciting illusion of the 'vibrant' and 'dynamic' new system... yet the target-marks are quite obvious. the UK's biggest issue is the construction and growth of a permanent underclass. this will make it even worse... mark my words, in 10 years you will see your first real ghettos (think: camden, nj).

the simple truth is that some of you - those who makes 50k a year, preferably more, and those living in affluent areas - will get better service, but do not think your grandma up in the poor province or cousins out in the sticks will get it better. long-term this system change will suck the lifeblood out of british productivity.

you get what you deserve!



words but no language

sounds sketchy



our life now lies broken,
our hatred now left unspoken,

No, you see there won't be ghettos because in another policy they want to combat chronic unemployment by offering incentives to the jobless to move from their area somewhere else.

This will contribute to the depopulation of traditional industrial areas towards new economic centres. If these people move to a more prosperous area, the local amenities will be better and benefit everyone.

The ones who are left behind in the underclass and in rubbish areas are the ones who rely on the social net and their services are safe because frankly what they are getting now with the postcode lottery is not much to shout about.

There is a programme on Channel4 broadcast this week - a continuation of what they started last year. It was called "The Hospital" and they said that over 70% of what they get in A&E are drink-related accidents and the doctors and nurses complain about stress at work because their job can become dangerous.

oh my heavenly god... yes, jackie, i truly hope it will work out so.



words but no language

Let's put it this way, 15 years ago, the elderly and sick would have got a home help coming into the house because some of them were so crippled that they needed the basic things done at home. I don't know how it was in the rest of the UK, 15 years ago but over here many low incomes were living in terraces that had a coal fire. Someone needed to come out and light the fire for them otherwise, they would be cold. I wouldn't say that the quality of life at home for the frail was very good. Still they prefered their own accommodation over being put in a home.

What has changed with healthcare is that the home help does not come, however, the occupational therapist makes recommendations on adapting the home. If you live in bad housing, you will get something adapted to your needs. And the very frail live in sheltered accommodation meaning that they have their own flat but with a buzzer so that they can call their nurse. The other people who don't need to be in hospital but need care will have a nurse coming over to check on them. The job that the home help used to do is now done by the private sector and the frail person receives an allowance to pay for that.

As far as day centres go, what the government wants is those places to work in the community. That means, that their activities are not all based on a location but their group is encouraged to mix with other funded social groups in order to combat community exclusion.

If that government is going to continue helping the old and frail having a better quality of life despite the bad postcode, then I'm all for it. And acute hospital care needs to be maintained at high level.

the 'choice' is usually an euphemism for 'get money or get fucked'... sorry to be blunt, but that's how it generally goes.



enter: long, philanthropic essay from spank



words but no language

mattiasbrundin Wrote:
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> [www.bbc.co.uk]

'so it begins'... thanks for alerting us, two weeks later....

;)



Mean? That's not mean. No, no, no. Mean is when I made my childhood sweetheart ride her bike home after I ass-fucked her behind the tennis courts

who can stay on top on what's going on in these small and insignificant satellite states?

;)



words but no language

Jackie- there are still home helps. My aunt lived in a cottage with a coal fire until last year when she lost a leg (she's 92).

And this, "you see there won't be ghettos because in another policy they want to combat chronic unemployment by offering incentives to the jobless to move from their area somewhere else". I really hope that was sarcastic.

This is once again a US neoliberal "innovation" that isn't terribly innovative and... well, doesn't work. Where are these areas where there is an abundance of jobs offering a living wage? South East England? It's already over-populated. Why do you think they put asylum seekers in Bradford, Oldham and Leeds? Because there's a surplus of housing. Why? Because people have already left those areas to look for work- there's been an economic diaspora since the 70's, and it hit warp speed in the 80's. Around 60% of Britons live near the place they were born; such policies will lead to the number falling below 50%, with a devastating effect on communities. It will not prevent ghettoisation but accelerate the process as it has done in Michigan.

Here's what really happens. People move from their homes to areas where housing is hugely expensive to take jobs that, once their rent and other basic expenses are paid for, leave them not much better off. In the long term, it leaves people far more vulnerable in downturns than they would have been if they had stayed put. In the US, there was a mass exodus from poor states / unemployment blackspots to big cities and affluent areas such as California. California now has chronic debt problems because of the strain of providing services for people. The infrastructure of the state simply can't cope, and the only answer to the endemic poverty (with the inevitable black economy that goes with it) is to lock people up; more people are in prison in California than in the UK and Germany combined. And when you have something like an earthquake or a fire (not uncommon in Cali), or, if this were London, a large-scale terrorist attack or a mass riot, the already over-burdened and underfunded authorities struggle to cope.

Right now in places like Orange County, once a playground of the rich, there are thousands of working families living in motels. Working families; two parent families working over 40 hours a week each who can't even afford to rent a flat. Not "bums", not lazy people, working families struggling to pay for cheap motels, because it's better than sleeping in a car or on the street. And of course, in this country, these people don't have healthcare- you won't get welfare if you're working.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

Saint Sebastian Wrote:
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> And this, "you see there won't be ghettos because
> in another policy they want to combat chronic
> unemployment by offering incentives to the jobless
> to move from their area somewhere else". I really
> hope that was sarcastic.
>
> This is once again a US neoliberal "innovation"
> that isn't terribly innovative and... well,
> doesn't work. Where are these areas where there is
> an abundance of jobs offering a living wage? South
> East England? It's already over-populated.


sorry if i'm being naive, but i imagined that by moving people somewhere else they meant peripheral areas, small towns and the like in order to achieve a balance and help the development of these places as well.

I thought they meant moving them OUT of the South.

@ headacheville & 2-J: people are moved out of the South because there are empty council properties in the north and the midlands. One reason is a decline in population, another is the "brain drain" to the south east and the emigration of industrial workers (shipbuilders from Sunderland moved to Rotterdam for instance). Tories are always using this "on yer bike" crap, as though people hadn't already done it- like, no brit ever moved to Australia, Germany or the middle east looking for work, the tories just thought of it last week.

The consequences of economic migration are that social structures are further weakened. Families are broken up (like we really need more of that) and people become rootless. "Communities" become temporary settlements for people who don't know each other and have no connection to the area; no familial or cultural ties. Their "friends" are just fellow tenants or people they work with- and they don't work with them for very long because of our culture of short-term contracts, temping, downsizing and "competition" (that guy in the office, he's not a mate, he's a rival trying to take that bonus away from you).

We are using technology and a global market not to bring cultures together and make life easier for people, but as an excuse to create serfdom in the name of "competitiveness" and budget-balancing.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

Jackie- there are still home helps. My aunt lived in a cottage with a coal fire until last year when she lost a leg (she's 92).

You will realise that there will be less and less people receiving services in remote areas because will be told that due to budget cuts infrastructures in rural areas will be reduced. This is what is happening where I live, less and less home help services in rural areas goes on par with less and less public transport. This means that if you want to live in the countryside, you are better off with your own car and with family around you and Mr Cameron with his "Big society" "community" talk wants the voluntary and private sector taking over. If you don't want your village school with three pupils closed, then run it yourself because there is no money for the infrastructure and they can only offer you a school that performs better.

If your aunt is stuck in a cottage in the country-side and needs the nurse or a home-help, they will of course take into account her state of health but try to convince her to get to the surgery and hire a home-help and pay her with her DLA. If she is lucky, she might get a door-to-door disabled transport.

I was briefly considering moving out of my estate to a quieter part of town, even outside Belfast but my doctor and social worker explained that I would probably not get some of the infrastructures I currently get. If I was on my own I would therefore spend a lot on taxis to and from the surgery or the day centre.

As for workers who have to leave their communities for jobs - this is the story of emigration, isn't it? No job in the sticks, so you go to town. No jobs in the region, so you move elsewhere. I'm not sure how mobile they are in England, but many people in Northern Ireland do not expect jobs to fall into their lap and move elsewhere if they find a job. That doesn't prevent them from visiting their families and having a sense of community.

On mainland Europe, workers are used to the transience of work. You never expect that you will get a job in a small town in the middle of nowhere or at an ailing factory, so you cast your net wider and wider. This is why many Europeans of my generation made sure that they learnt as many languages as they could so that they had more chances on the job market.

We have an NHS because voluntary and private sector healthcare did NOT take on the job of healthcare. Charity has neither the funds nor the expertise and the private sector puts profit first. Mr Cameron should read a history book.

Or, if he doesn't want to read, then the next time he's in DC, instead of going to Ben's Chilli Bowl he should take a trip to Anacostia or Baltimore and see what a society that adopts this policy looks like.

As for your community stuff Jackie, the point is that having transitory workforces is not terribly good for society. It is a source of alienation, racial strife, dislocation, family breakdown and even alcoholism. I know people of a liberal persuasion love all that, "multicultural", "global village" stuff, but nomadic serfdom is not multi-culturalism. Our transitory workers have been raised in a culture of individualism, and because of that we can ill afford anything that jeopardises the functionality of our already fragile communities. As a mainland European, you're able to cope far better than Brits, especially English and American people, because you were raised in a culture that is less individualistic.

One of the strange things that immigrants are told is that they must "integrate"... which is such a joke. Why do Indians or Koreans or the Chinese flourish in western societies? Because they don't act like whitey, that's why. They make business work for them. Businesses are family-owned and are seen as community resources with community responsibilities. In western culture, especially anglo-saxon culture, we are expected to adapt to the needs of business (see: your own post) and we expect, even accept, that businesses exist purely for profiteering and we are mere commodities (it's up to us to "sell ourselves"). In other cultures, there's more to it than that.

Here's a good example- the English-speaking peoples of the world, more than anybody else, see education purely as utilitarian- a means to a job. In almost every other culture, knowledge is a noble thing in itself. Families in most cultures want their kids to be doctors or teachers or lawyers. English-speakers couldn't care less as long as you make money. It's a fundamental difference- making money is important, but great value is attached to HOW you make money, to the usefulness of what you do. That is the very thing that has been lost in the neoliberal age.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

What are you supposed to do if your government tells you that they are slashing the budget? The only thing that we are hearing here is deficit, deficit, deficit.

They won't be dismantling the NHS but the reality of subcontracting to the private sector and roping the voluntary sector in is already there.
Community centres etc - at least round here - are a mixture of regular people who get wages and volunteers from the community and freelancers who get paid for their courses. The existence of community centres depends on funding. So what they do round here is to apply for fundings in locally, nationally and at EU level (if it's cross-border stuff) and fundraise privately. In day-centres, they get their funding in the same way, plus subcontract their activities - for example if they want to take the "clients" (recipient of services) out, a bus gets hired, the "clients" pay a subsidised price to share for petrol.

This pragmatic approach has been done for years. I do know that it's not only East Belfast who works like that, but the local churches seem to be quite involved in community stuff and sometimes it's the only thing the locals have. A few years ago, I remember being employed at the Glenmachan Church of God because they provided the premises for a creche. The kids were not necessarily members of that church nor was I. I witnessed similar schemes in London (precisely I visited a place in Balham).

There is no ideological solution to this. Governments and local goverments have been muddling along for the past years to get services and fundings. And it's likely to go on like that for a while because of ta-da! - Budget deficit, global recession, blah blah blah.

I don't understand your analyses of national cultures, Seb. And if you think that only the English want their education to be utilitarian whilst continentals are cultured then you are wrong. The typical English attitudes that you describe can be found everywhere else, and I am sure that in England there are people who learn for pleasure. I am sure that not every migrant or second-generation migrant does not own a small business and that in fact like many dual-language people are a bit of a cultural muddle. Not quite here and not quite there.

For example, if you take Mr Clegg's background, you could easily put him with second generation migrants because he has a Dutch parent, a Russian grandparent. What makes him and people in his income bracket different from other multicultural people is that his financial situation is more stable. He and probably many others are well assimilated into the fabric of British society because their lives are stable. However, stable does not mean sedentary. If there is a better job somewhere else many of these people will go there and bring their qualifications, personality and ideas to another community. Depending on how much they get involved or good they are at making friends in their new community they fit there.

Most communities are not uni-racial long established tribes - they are a group of disparate people living together in the same geographical area. Some communities even more so than others.

it is just very simple, jackie. the market do not care for financially weak people with high care-needs. it is just how a profit-striving market gravitates...



words but no language

mattiasbrundin Wrote:
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> it is just very simple, jackie. the market do not
> care for financially weak people with high
> care-needs. it is just how a profit-striving
> market gravitates...

... which is why we need strong government. "Big government" is a good thing. The world we live in is not 1984, it's American Psycho.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

Posted by: mattiasbrundin
Date: July 26, 2010 11:10PM
it is just very simple, jackie. the market do not care for financially weak people with high care-needs. it is just how a profit-striving market gravitates...

It would be too easy to tag this government with this notion. Hand on heart, I do not believe that any democratic politician will let down the weakest elements of society. The most vulnerable people are undoubtedly the ones that have no future - such as the very old or the very sick. Societies know perfectly well that they can't muddle around and be muddled about. Someone who commutes to the hospital for their dialisis will not have that NHS service cut. And decent housing for the elderly is probably also safe from cuts. I'm 100% sure that doctors want to treat their patients even the impoverished ones. No UK government wants Dickensian streets. And although the voluntary sector can help the community, they don't have the expertise and the resources to replace some vital parts of the NHS.

Perhaps some freelance quack might want to flog hokus-pokus under the cover of "helping people", like many of these alternative "healing" services, but anyone with common sense will see that this is just claptrap. So that can't replace the conventional science and medicine.

As for outsourcing NHS services, we are mostly talking catering, supplies, cleaning, administration, IT, accounting to subcontractors and refering complex patients to a few private hospitals who agree to take them.

What people in the UK and banks should perhaps remember is that accumulating personal debt is not equivalent of making money. Before the credit crunch, there were warnings that the UK population were living above their means, and the banks lending to them.

The controversial thing that I am going to say about the UK (and the US) is that I find it totally nonsensical for people to buy houses and speculate on the value of bricks and mortar.

Any government in times of recession is going to have to implement "austerity politics" - in France, under a Socialist government that meant for instance the freezing of prices and salaries to combat stagflation (economic stagnation plus inflation).

------
If the "market" didn't care for the poor, Matti, how come that there are so many entrepreneurs who waffle about philanthropy. Even harsh capitalists have a code of ethics because they know exactly that if the society goes to pieces, they will eventually go down too.

Plus the market knows that the poor can be purchasers of goods too. Entire fortunes have been made by firms selling at the cheap end of the market.

jackie, please do not buy into that bullshit. the market sees you as a consumer, defined by buying power, and nothing else... the market will sell the cheapest possible service to the poor, the shittiest food, the cheapest slumlord housing, etc. a dollar invested in a segment of weak buying power is less worth than a dollar invested in a richer segment. what you of humble incomes and/or welfare will get from a market-adjusted 'choice' model of competition is less and less.

i hate to be a cocaine socialist (all rights reserved: sainty) but it is fucking true. the market is not a human and understanding hand looking for the best for each individual. it is a cold, brutal force that will degrade, dehumanize and simplify human existence as long as there is profit in it.



words but no language

In my situation, I have to gamble and try to trust society because I am in the middle of it. I can see that I don't live in an ideal location, not even in an ideal accommodation but at least it's an accommodation that is manageable as far as my mobility is concerned (no stairs, appropriate sanitation, easy access to chutes), I and the other souls living in here are safe from rent-sharks. We also accept that whenever there is a disturbance around the property, a new sign will come up. Last year it was "no loud noises at any time", the year before they installed CCTV camera and this year it's "No dumping" (because of the bonfires). Tennants also accept the pink coloured walls and blue doors. They planted some greenery outside to make the place look more pleasant. It could be better, but at least none is going to depend on a slumlord unless they really fuck it up and get banned from the housing executive.

When you live in a place like that, you start to become philosophical. I don't mind being asked to volunteer here and there, and they know that if I am not well, I can't do the voluntary job. I've tried ways to find myself activities that give me some kind of job satisfaction and others that nourish my mind.

I don't expect economic miracles from any kind of political persuasion. What I expect from this government and from my local government is that they use their common sense and keep informed about what's going on in society and in the world. It's in nobody's interest - apart from dictators, totalitarians and fascists - to harm the population. A bit of neglect, of laissez-faire - nobody minds because nobody needs a constant nanny, if the population starts to feel forsaken, let down and dejected, then don't worry they will let the establishment know.

What we need as citizens is to keep informed about the policies and the people implementing them but not dismiss a politician because they do not have the same background and set of value as us. And at the same time, not take anything in life for granted.



This is an interesting remark:
As Osborne said: "We export more to Ireland than we do to Brazil, India, China and Russia put together."
Funny, isn't it? India, once the jewel in the British empire's crown, receives about 1% of our exports.... The US economy is relatively depressed, as are the UK and the eurozone. Where are all these extra exports destined to go? Mars, Venus, Jupiter?

Laissez faire has ended the consensus (whether by accident or design) that we have to look after the poor and needy. And in a global market, Laissez faire impacts upon every single country on earth, whether they accept it or not; it would have done even if it had only been put into practice in Chile, but it hasn't. It's called The Washington Consensus- it was until very recently the philosophy of both parties in the US, and it's the philosophy of the IMF and the World Bank.

Here's a ten-point guide to the central beliefs of free market capitalism, with special emphasis on welfare:

1. An economy works like a piece of machinery. It is wholly rational and functional.
2. The market is self-regulating. To tamper with it is to mess with the smooth running of the machine, to throw a spanner in the works.
3. Welfare systems are examples of this tampering. They hamper the smooth running of the machine and do more harm than good by fostering laziness and dependency.
4. Welfare systems concentrate power within governments; when people rely on governments for basic needs (instead of relying upon themselves) governments can control people. This state of affairs is tailor-made for totalitarians to exploit.
5. Welfare, if it must be provided, should therefore be no more than the absolute bare minimum; to provide more is to demotivate people and make them reluctant to take low-paid jobs. Welfare should never provide more or even the same as the lowest paid job on the market, because taking those jobs is the first step to self-advancement, the bottom rung on the ladder.
6. There should never be a minimum wage as it is a job-killer that stops businesses from being competitive. When businesses are competitive, they make profits and wages will improve as businesses grow.
7. The basis of freedom is individualism and private property; or, owning land / your own home, and being self-reliant.
8. When people think of themselves as individuals and abandon the notion of "society", governments are only necessary for basic things like road-building and the military.
9. The market responds to human needs better than governments, because governments are monopolies. Competition increases the choices available to individuals and stops monopolization, because when big companies fail to provide certain things, smaller "niche" companies take their business away.
10. The Free Market has evolved naturally over the ages. Regulated markets are not the natural way of things.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

sorry to say, but that shit reads like a Gordon Gekko version of Sun Tzu's Art of War.

This sort of stuff is what makes political idealogy; and taking sides on ancient idealogy over current opportunity; as fundamental, devisive, and downright fucking looney tunes batshit crazy and out-of-touch in the modern world as religion is.



Mean? That's not mean. No, no, no. Mean is when I made my childhood sweetheart ride her bike home after I ass-fucked her behind the tennis courts

Yo Blair! Wrote:
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> sorry to say, but that shit reads like a Gordon
> Gekko version of Sun Tzu's Art of War.
>
> This sort of stuff is what makes political
> idealogy; and taking sides on ancient idealogy
> over current opportunity; as fundamental,
> devisive, and downright fucking looney tunes
> batshit crazy and out-of-touch in the modern world
> as religion is.

This has been the dominant ideology of the last thirty years. You're right to call it a religion- that's exactly what it is, a secular religion. Of course, politicians don't express it in that way (that would be pretty bad politics) but that's the fundamentals of the Hayek / Freidman economics that they're signed up to. Politicians turn it into slogans that we've all heard: "there's no such thing as society, only individuals" (Thatcher) or "government is not the solution to the problem, government IS the problem" (Reagan).

Not that it's a left-right thing anymore, because the problem with this shit is that you can't roll it back- when you privatize say, BP, the company maximizes profits because it no longer has to be as socially responsible as it was under government control. Then the virtual economy does it's work and the speculators drive the company's value way beyond it's real-world value. And because government doesn't own the country's oil reserves (or leccy, or rail etc) it's only revenue stream is taxation. Therefore, it can't afford to buy back BP, and whoever is in charge (labour, tory... even the BNP or the fucking Communist Party) can only buy shares and hope the stock market casino works for them... then you get a recession, or a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and our pension funds are fucked.

The New Righties are not Nazis (at least, most of them aren't), they're more like Old-School dogmatic Marxists. The Maoists and the Soviets didn't start off wanting to murder people or cause misery, they wanted to liberate people. But whenever you have a, "faith" (especially one that thinks it's universal, one-size-fits-all) you ignore reality, you think the chaos you're causing is temporary. The New Right has a doctrine of what it calls, "Shock Therapy", which is like Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward- gradual reform won't do, you have to do everything at once. This causes mass poverty (see: Russia in the 90's) but it's okay, it's tough love. Get through it, and there'll be milk and honey. Of course it's bollocks, and the IMF has fucked up dozens of countries with this horseshit.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

Laissez-faire is much older than Milton Friedman's school of Chicago monetarism that led to the neo-cons such as Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet etc. I have read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, so I know about their mentality.

The credit crunch has sort of put a damper on their operations because economist realised how bad debt has climbed. People who could ill-afford to borrow so that they can buy all the goodies advertised, those ones got cheap loans by banks. Banks themselves got loans as well and when the financial market realised that the economic growth was mostly a bubble, then the bubble burst because some wanted to see the colour of the money.

The banks who go all capitalist on us were themselves bailed out by governments so it's in their interest not to insist on neo-con policies because otherwise governments would let them fall like hot potatoes. It is precisely because the governments intervene to nationalise and bail out banks and building societies that I strongly feel that any government left, right or centre has been intervening in the economy. Check it out, almost every government in the EU has done a few of these interventions, and in the US, Obama's government is also getting more and more involved in the economy.

None of these measures are enough at the moment to halt the economic recession and there will a certain amount of stagflation in the next two years or so.

I would say that the situation of middle incomes is going to get tougher, especially those who pay a mortgage, because the job security is not there and mostly because VAT is set to rise. If inflation is not under control, then your money is going to buy less and if you are repaying a loan, then effectively you are going to pay more.

The solution is either that the UK could print money to make up the deficit, but they can't do that because the pound is aligned to the Euro and the dollar and the trust in UK currency would take a nosedive. The other solution is the UK not bothering with getting in line with other economies in the EU, but since I am sure that Mr David Cameron remembers what happened when his boss Norman Lamont was in charge under John Major's government.

Sure there are a lot of people running around with expensive gadgets, but do they really own those, or are they in fact paying those with their credit cards. The overspenders should be careful that they don't go bankrupt. This can happen to an individual, and this can happen to a firm or a bank and this can happen to a country.

Perhaps, Mr Cameron's secret plan for economic recovery is to give us all an allotment and let us grow our own organic food and have a wind turbine and use bicycles... Joking aside, I think that his chancellor Mr Osborne is panicking a bit with his budget. Of course, they need to reduce the deficit, but I don't think that any government in Europe really demands draconian measures. Therefore most services and the welfare state are safe.

Also what you seem to forget is that with EU integration, it is very difficult to adopt a strict neo-con policy. Neo-cons don't like the way the E.U. works because the respective governments seem to negotiate endlessly, and second, there is a notion as "acquis communautaires" which means that what has been achieved in matter of legislation is not open to negotiation. Furthermore, goverment may have an input with retirement age, school curriculum etc but if it makes work conditions worse - compromising wages, health and safety, cutting corners - then it's a sign of incompetence. That's why no-one touches the minimum wage, or paid holidays. Austerity measures can go as far as freezing salaries for public servants, making some people work part-time instead of full-time, making someone work up to 16 hours a week and some job/schemes apprenticeship. When they talk about decreasing welfare, it means more like taking some people off welfare and put them into job schemes and keeping a health check on the others. The Labour government already introduced such measures when they changed some income support into Job Seeker Allowance and sought to eliminate fraudulent claims.

Nobody plans on saying, "oh aye, some parts of the population are no use to the economy so we are going to starve them off.". Such a Malthusian solution would be unacceptable these days because of "acquis communautaires" and it would breach human rights.

Free Market capitalism goes back to the 1850's when it was applied in Britain. Inspired by Adam Smith (and greed, frankly) it required the Enclosures Act, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Poor Law, among other things, and only lasted a generation before victorian liberals, and then the Labour movement, killed it off. The Education Act buried it, the Beveridge Report and the New Deal ensured it stayed buried until the 70's. I know the history, Jackie.

The Shock Doctrine is a political tract, a good one that I agree with in many ways, but it is also seriously flawed and partisan. I've also read Hayek, Freidman and Fukuyama. Klein's summary of neo-con thought is decent, but the "disaster capitalism" she extrapolates from it is not entirely honest- read Trotsky's account of the Russian Revolution, or any book on the Cuban Revolution, or ask any schoolboy about Hitler's rise to power... disaster is always the mother of radical change. Klein sees neo-con policy as deliberately fascistic when it is not. It's just another utopian western fantasy, like fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Klein cannot admit this because she is a classical western liberal who believes in the universality of certain western ideas, just like the neo-cons. Radical Marxists, Freidman and Klein are all drawing from the same Enlightenment well.

As for the EU, you may have noticed the "austerity measures"? The fact is, in a global economy, it doesn't matter whether you elect neo-cons or don't. Every political system and every species of capitalism impacts on every other. Osborne's thing about how we export to Ireland not Russia or Brazil is quite spectacularly dumb. We trade with Ireland, Ireland trades with rest of the EU, the EU trades with Russia, Russia trades with the Far East, the Far East trades with the US, the US trades with Brazil. The Global market is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The Asian Tiger is maimed, the US takes a hit, the EU takes a hit.

Besides which, import-export trade is not the big game in town. The stock exchange does not trade in goods, it trades in shares and it speculates. All of which is as instant and as ungovernable as the internet. Someone in Tokyo can click on a mouse, and a thousand people in Belfast lose their jobs. Yes, the EU has some protections, the UK has some protections. But they are PARTIAL protections. Think about it- the global recession was caused by a bursting housing bubble in the US! Why are EU countries forced to adopt austerity measures because of a housing bubble in the US? Because the global economy is as I described.

Basically, there is a catch 22: you accept austerity measures, and your elected government loses the few protections it currently has to offer and your people sink further into endemic poverty. In short, you accept neo-con governance by the back door. Or you resist, accept the loss of foreign investment and look for an alternative. Neither option will lead to a sunny future in the short or middle-term, but until lawless cowboy capitalism, cheap labour in the developing world and the boom-and-bust cycle is controlled, there is nothing that can be done except to fight a holding operation against the destruction of our values and our economic security systems.

Actually, the world IS Malthusian Jackie. Most of the planet does not respect human rights, we're destroying the earth with pollution and the pursuit of profit, and the big mistake you're making is to think that can't happen because people are generally nice and hey, we have morals and we wouldn't do such a thing. Now, putting the Hitlers, Stalins and Pol Pots to one side, let me tell you why it's happening. Human Beings are thoughtless and short-termist. They want oil today, profits today. Nobody thinks about consequences. It doesn't matter in the slightest that people don't want something to happen if it happens anyway. Neo-cons didn't want a permanent underclass but- ta-dah!- a permanent underclass. They're not evil, they just got it wrong and can't accept that. The single most destructive force on earth is not greed or selfishness but hubris.

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Einkaufen Macht Frei

On a practical basis, if it comes to the crunch and they let us starve, then we won't go down without fighting. Every individual needs to be aware of their worth and fight for their right to exist. It is possible to live on the breadline TO A CERTAIN EXTENT but a line is drawn when the vulnerable suffer. I don't care about any economic excuse, if some frail old creature gets hypothermia because of fuel poverty or bad housing, then the rest of us must show solidarity and fight because we have a social conscience.

I would like not to succumb to cynicism and believe that our rulers and fellow citizens have a social conscience too or at least some shreds of it.