Bankrupt Legacies
When Mrs Thatcher was playing Oliver Hardy to Ronald Reagan’s Stan Laurel, everyone thought their time had come.
We were all going to live in lands flowing with milk and honey and riches and comfort would befall us all the days of our lives, even if we were going to have to behave like ravening wolves to achieve it.
To nobody’s great surprise, it did not quite work according to plan. Things just went on pretty much as normal, with the rich getting richer and the poor picking up the bill.
We all woke up to find we had been conned.
Then along came Tony Blair selling the same old claptrap and everyone got fooled again.
As that heavyweight of political thought, George Bush, would say:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
No, it doesn’t make any sense, but you can see what his poor little brain is aiming at.
We all know that these bankrupt ideas have made a very few people repugnantly rich and the world in general a poorer place. As Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian shows, people are now wise to all this nonsense.
The problem is, how soon will it be before the politicians catch up?
Tony Blair’s legacy is that he was a pantomime Mrs Thatcher in drag who managed to take the farce on tour for one long, last show before all the costumes and props unravelled and collapsed on the rickety stage and everyone saw the horror of the real ugliness of the players beneath the peeling and running greasepaint masks.
Not much to show for ten years in power.
What will Gordon Brown’s legacy be for the couple of years he will have at the big top of the political circus?
New Britain: Nation Of Shopkeepers And Bankrupt Billionaires
Hurrah! The people of New Britain are now bankers every one!
We all own a bank and can write cheques for whatever amount we want because it is our money and we own it!
Well, not quite.
Wonderful Gordon “Prudence” Brown and his puppet Darling of the Treasury have actually saddled almost every man, woman and child of this nation with a debt of £1000.
Yes, it sounds like Monopoly money and, of course, that is the way the bankers and politicians look at at when it gets to the level of squillions of squid. After all, they are hardly going to have to find that kind of money in the real world.
That job they leave, as always, to the ordinary taxpayer.
So, Northern Rock has now been nationalised. The choice of last resort.
The only saving grace is that we will not have the indignity of having high streets full of Virgin Banks, selling Virgin Mobiles and Virgin Atlantic flights and Virgin Cola and Virgin Condoms. We have been saved from the bilious spiv dream of Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses.
So, does it feel as if you now have access to untold riches?
Or does it seem that your incompetent government has made yet another total and absolute mess of things and sold you a pup?
We had all better hope that there are no more runs on the banks as the recession starts to bite, otherwise we may all end up paying for their collapse for the rest of our lives.
Gordon Brown: your money unsafe in this man’s clunking iron fist.
Shock Revelation: Free Markets Are Not Heaven On Earth
Remember one of Mrs Thatcher’s catchphrases: “You cannot buck the markets”?
Yes, but you can certainly get bucked by them. Quite.
When Mrs Thatcher ended up in Downing Street, some observant commenter noted ‘You are the first woman prime minister’ to which she replied something like: “And the first prime minister with a science degree”.
We were all stunned. Suddenly, we had the cleverest person on earth running the country and for the next thirty years (a whole generation) we all lived under Thatcher’s Law or spiv rule.
Any system, from picking your own nose to the entire world, could be turned into a market, where some moneygrubber would be able to filch from others to get rich and those with less sharp elbows would be trampled underfoot by the mighty onslaught of the free market in all its terrible grandeur.
Because this was sold to everyone by such a clever person, who sufficiently terrorised all around her that their brains melted and they were unable to raise even the weakest line of defence, we have all had to suffer the nonsense of this delusion.
Thatcher sold the idiotic and childish dream that everyone could get richer and the poor lapped it up because, quite naturally, they wanted some of the wonderful things that the rich had always had. The fact that the poor would be taxed to make the rich even richer beyond the dreams of avarice was never declared. Everyone suddenly forgot their infant school sums, which said that if Tommy eats 99 per cent of the pie, Timmy is going to go very hungry indeed.
Ordinary people also forgot Michael Moore’s First Law of Economics, which is this: “You are never going to be a millionaire”. He also said: “These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control”.
Still, it’s only a game with money, after all. It is hardly life and death.
Oh, woops! Apparently it is.
It now seems that the free market which was imposed upon the NHS by Thatcher and gleefully endorsed and developed by the man with the big brain, Gordon Brown, may actually kill you after all.
The theory was that patients would be converted into chattels with a price tag to be traded by competing hospitals. The hospitals which accumulated the highest aggregate value of price tags would be rewarded financially: paid for by the taxpayer, of course.
Whether this would actually lead to an erosion of patient care and the chances of being cured by a hospital rather than having it kill you was never part of the equation.
This is the result, according to AOL News:
Competition between NHS hospitals may lower the quality of patient care, researchers have warned.
When hospitals are forced to compete with each other death rates from heart attacks actually rose, they found.
The decline in standards means patients are worse off even though waiting lists and waiting times have fallen, according to a paper published in the Economic Journal.
Professor Carol Propper at the University of Bristol examined the “internal market” in the NHS created by the Conservative government in 1991. Labour has introduced similar market-based reforms intended to improve health service performance.
She found deaths from heart attacks actually went up in hospitals covered by the reforms. Heart attack death rates are used as an indicator of overall hospital performance.
So, you already knew that successive governments are picking the money from your pocket to give to their rich friends; you knew that this government is selling you down the river to their corporate masters; now you know that they are glibly killing you for profit.
Thatcher’s Britain, New Labour’s New Britain: all the same thing.
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