alicatte said: "I have become increasingly worried about the idea that there was actually another workable way and that this method of dealing with the deficit might be an 'ideological' choice in that it is intended to return to a 'Thatcherite' agenda (i.e. wealth 'should' only be created in the 'private' sector). I am confused confused.
Guess we will just have to wait and see.
Would a government (any government) really do something like this out of choice?"
Laugs said: "One thing women might be concerned about: Simon Hughes (I think) on BBC Breakfast this morning was talking about how business would pick up the slack and be able to replace the 500,000 lost public sector jobs. He said something like 'government just needs to get out of the way and let the private sector get on with it'
What did he mean by this? To me government 'getting out of the way' sounds like a loosening of regulations on employees rights, things like maternity pay, minimum wage and so on. I don't think we should only be concerned about job losses, but the quality of the jobs we get to keep."
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This is what's worrying me. I'm half-way through Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine at the moment and a lot of what I'm hearing about these cuts sounds alarmingly familiar. Here she is, for example, on Canada in 1993:
'The phrase "debt wall" suddenly entered the vocabulary. What it meant was that, although life seemed comfortable and peaceful now, Canada was spending so far beyond its means that, very soon, powerful Wall Street firms ... would downgrade our national credit rating from its perfect Triple A status to something much lower... The only solution, we were told, was to radically cut spending on such programs as unemployment insurance and health care ... Two years after the deficit hysteria peaked, the investigative journalist Linda McQuaig definitively exposed that a sense of crisis had been carefully stoked and manipulated by a handful of think tanks funded by the largest banks and corporations in Canada ... By the time Canadians learned that the "deficit crisis" had been grossly manipulated by the corporate-funded think tanks, it hardly mattered - the budget cuts had already been made and locked in ... the crisis strategy was used again and again in this period. In September 1995, a video was leaked to the Canadian press of John Snobelen, Ontario's minister of education, telling a closed-door meeting of civil servants that before cuts to education and other unpopular reforms could be announced, a climate of panic needed to be created by leaking information that painted a more dire picture than he "would be inclined to talk about." He called it "creating a useful crisis"'
I suspect we are being given a dose of economic "shock" therapy for ideological reasons. Whether the current crisis is real or artificially manufactured, it's certainly very useful to a neoliberal/Thatcherite agenda - it's a great opportunity to dismantle government "interference" with the free market on a grand scale.