David Cameron: "We're all Thatcherites now"

[Diego_Sideburns]

In 2006 David Cameron said: “At the next election, a whole generation of people will be voting who were born after Mrs Thatcher left office. So when it comes to tackling the big challenges our society faces, I won’t be the prisoner of an ideological past”.

 

On 17^th April 2013, the day of Margaret Thatcher’s Ceremonial Funeral, David Cameron said: "I think in a way we’re all Thatcherites now because, I mean, I think one of the things about her legacy is some of those big arguments that she had had, you know, everyone now accepts."

 

Legacy

 

Thatcher’s legacy of free enterprise capitalism, warts and all, should carry with it an obligation to have a decent regard for the poor. Simply warehousing them in ghettos only breeds trouble. However, the essential argument of the rich appears to be that those who have 'earned' their wealth should not be asked to help those who have not. They would prefer to see people homeless, poor healthcare and low standards of education than pay more tax. They attack the members of society they see as leeching away their 'hard-earned' fortune - single mothers, refugees, children, the working class, the homeless, the unemployed and the elderly. They treat with contempt the people incapable of protecting themselves, the people with the least political representation and the weakest voice in the media - the people most in need of help. Whilst the rich are made richer, the poor are blamed for their own predicament, as though their poverty proved they do not deserve better as they obviously are not working hard enough.

 

Socialism appears to be dead and behaviour along the lines of mercy, kindness, and concern for the poor, the weak and the outcast seems to be only for those who have a social conscience.

 

Thatcherism lives on

 

Thatcher is dead but Thatcherism lives on. After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher praised Blair in an interview saying "I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved". Blair and Brown were right-wing wolves in New Labour sheep's clothing.

 

They were wrong to believe markets work best when they are unregulated. The deregulation maintained by both main parties resulted in business models that were simultaneously unethical and unsustainable, as the big bail-out using tax-payers' money proved necessary.

 

In 2011, Labour leader Ed Miliband praised some of Thatcher's key policies, stating: "Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 per cent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots. These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time".In September 2012 Miliband was reported to have praised Thatcher for creating an era of aspiration in the 1980s.

 

It was the super-rich bankers and City speculators, with their seven-figure annual returns, who created the financial meltdown, and they have continued paying themselves ludicrous sums, while everyone else is expected to pay more, work longer and receive less. John Caine, former Director of Corporate Affairs at Alliance and Leicester, said, "If Government is to blame, then it is that led by Margaret Thatcher [and her] determination to deregulate the UK financial markets".

 

Was it coincidence or a bitter irony that the Bank of England chose the 25^th anniversary of the beginning of the Miners’ Strike to cut interest rates to a record low of 0.5% and start quantitative easing?

 

The Governor of the Bank of England admitted that the roots of the 2008 financial crisis were the excesses of the banking sector, which over-extended itself. He said. "Banks made increasingly risky investments [and] to make matters worse they started making huge bets with each other on whether loans that had already been made would be repaid". He also admitted that the Bank of England should have been more vocal about its concerns regarding the banking sector. "With the benefit of hindsight, we should have shouted from the rooftops that a system had been built in which banks were too important to fail, that banks had grown too quickly and borrowed too much, and that so-called 'light-touch' regulation hadn't prevented any of this". When did the Governor admit to these shortcomings? When was it that he confessed that the Bank of England should have tried harder to persuade everyone of the need to recapitalise the banks sooner and by more? Well, it was certainly not at the time of the financial crisis. Neither was it two years later in 2010, when it was revealed that some senior staff at the Bank of England were uncomfortable with the Governor's endorsement of the Government's public spending cuts, accusing him of overstepping the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy. Nor was it when he was knighted in 2011. We had to wait four years until May 2012 to receive the benefit of his expertise, and he added that the Government should speed up its reform of Britain's financial sector, and attacked bankers for resisting new financial regulation in order to protect their large bonuses.

 

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote:

We've had our pockets picked,

the soft, white hands of bankers,

bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;

we want it back.

 

During the height of the global crisis, the Queen famously asked: "Why did nobody notice it?". In December 2012, while on a tour of the Bank of England, she was given a thorough explanation of the 2008 downturn by a member of the Bank's Financial Services Committee.

 

During the discussion, the Queen made her thoughts on the crisis clear, saying that the City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, "didn't have any teeth" and that there was complacency in the City. She said to the workers: "People got a bit lax ... perhaps it is difficult to foresee (a financial crisis)."

 

David Cameron spoke out "And to the lawless minority, the criminals who’ve taken what they can get, I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done." Unfortunately he was referring to looters in the riots of 2011, rather than the miscreant bankers.

 

Thankfully, by July 2012, the Serious Fraud Office announced a decision to investigate Libor rate-fixing by bank staff, after Barclays was fined by the Financial Services Authority. The investigation could ultimately lead to criminal prosecutions and bankers facing charges in court.

 

The Conservative era of endless deregulation and civil service cuts has resumed, with Lib/Dem support, and the unethical, risk-driven use of our cash will continue. David Cameron has the cheek to call on everyone to take responsibility for their own community and pull together to get the nation out of the economic and social doldrums. In September 2011 there were 6,012 (4.2%) fewer Police officers than a year ago. Police forces made 2,100 of the most experienced officers take early retirement, some of whom were then asked to rejoin on a voluntary basis. We're told we're all in it together......oh yeah, in it together with the twenty millionaires in the Coalition Cabinet and seven in the Shadow Cabinet! In the 2012 Budget 14,000 people who earn more than £1m a year, got a tax cut of about £40,000 a year, and those on £5m a year would benefit to the tune of £250,000. In contrast, families on incomes of £20,000 were about £250 a year worse off, and some of the people at the poor end of the ladder would lose £4,000 a year in benefits.

 

 

Thatcher weakened workers’ rights to the extent that they had little control over their working conditions. Her battle with the unions resulted in many workers giving up on trades union membership and they have paid the price for having no one to fight for them ever since, as the genuine concerns of ordinary workers about their future are treated with disdain. Her success at cracking down on union restrictive practices and freeing the country’s entrepreneurial spirit means Britons are working more hours per week than they did in the 1980s. The poorest fifth, those in the lowest 20 per cent of the income range, are working one hour longer. By comparison, the lowest income group in Finland is working seven hours less, in the Netherlands six hours less, and in Germany four hours less. On average across the OECD, the low-income worker is at work for three hours less.

 

The Labour Government introduced the National Minimum Wage - the amount that employers must pay by law - but stopped short of handing over more rights to workers. By October 2012, the National Minimum Wage was set at £6.19 an hour for those aged 21 and over. However, research carried out for accountants KPMG revealed that 4.8 million workers (one in five workers in the UK and up to 90% of waiters and bar staff) were paid less than the higher voluntary Living Wage of £8.30 an hour in London and £7.20 in the rest of the UK, required for a basic standard of living. At a time when those on the lowest pay were suffering the most, employers were refusing to alleviate in-work poverty by paying a Living Wage, which would make a huge difference to the individuals and their families.

By comparison, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and freelance journalist, has described his freelance earnings as “chicken feed”. They are reported to be £363,000 a year, almost £7,000 per week.

 

Firms in the private sector have succeeded in shutting down what were once first-class pension schemes for their workers. This has resulted in higher rewards for shareholders and bonuses for the bosses, while the National Association of Pension Funds reported in 2012 that millions of private sector workers faced a "bleak old age" because they fell through the cracks of pension provision. Instead of improving their plight, the Government’s attitude is that a similar plight should be extended to public sector workers, who should accept an equally insecure future in retirement.

 

In the 2010-11 tax year, the maximum annual allowance on pension contributions was £255,000. So, if wealthy enough, you could get in excess of £100,000 a year in tax relief (40p for each pound). In the 2011-12 tax year, tax relief was available on up to £50,000 of pension contributions. With the 50p tax rate, this still made £25,000 of tax relief available for those who could afford to make more than twice the median income in pension contributions each year.

 

The amount of tax relief on pensions, paid by the Government, has more than doubled in the last decade, from £17.6bn in 2001-02 to £39bn in 2011-12 or 2.8% of GDP, and 60 per cent of the benefit went to higher rate tax payers. Whereas Public Service pensions cost 1.9% of GDP in contrast and will fall to 1.4%.

 

The targeting of public sector pensions by the Government is part of its flawed economic agenda of austerity. It is determined to make the woefully inadequate private sector pension provision 'fair' by lowering public sector pensions in a race to the bottom, while at the same time using taxpayers money to subsidise through tax relief the pension pots of the rich. How can anyone make out a case for fairness in working people having to pay more pension contributions, work for lower pay and work longer before retirement, when their taxes are helping to give massive tax relief to the rich?

 

We are told repeatedly that "there is no alternative”. In 2011, after a year of everyone being exhorted to pull together and share the burden, the wealth of the 1,000 richest individuals in this country, as measured by Murdoch’s Sunday Times, was £395.8bn, equivalent to more than a third of the national debt. The number of billionaires rose from 53 to 73, while 9 people saw their fortune rise by 1 billion between May 2010 and May 2011. Thatcher’s legacy means that there is no likelihood of a substantial wealth tax being introduced. In fact, in the 2012 Budget, the reduction of the 50p tax rate to 45p handed those among the billionaires and millionaires, whose activities are not classed as ‘morally repugnant’ because they do not avoid paying tax, the nice big windfall referred to above. Instead the expropriation of the rights and earnings of people, who actually need what money they possess, will continue. This helped the super-rich to get even richer in 2012, with the wealthiest 1,000 people in the UK bucking the double-dip recession and record unemployment, as their combined wealth rose to £414.26 billion. The figure represented a 4.7% rise on last year and surpassed the previous high of £412.85 billion in 2008, set months before the financial crash from which the rest of Britain has yet to fully recover.

 

Below is a graph showing how our multimillionaire rulers are taking more than their fair share of the national income.

 

The Government admits that tax avoidance amounted to about £42 billion in 2009, but independent analysts estimate the amount of lost tax now to be £120 billion. The injustice of this is much more acute when public services are being cut. The super-rich are either paying pithy amounts in tax or escaping tax altogether, as companies are registered in off-shore tax havens. Too many of them are paying less tax than hard-pressed families. The poorest 10% pay a much greater proportion of their income to the Government in tax than the wealthiest 10% (46% compared to 34%). More than a quarter of people who earn more than £10 million a year are paying less tax than workers earning £42,000. 6% of these super-rich pay less than 10% tax, 3% pay only between 10% and 20% and 8% pay only between 20% and 30%. Why is the Government reluctant to make the super-rich pay a fair contribution as all other people do? Taxation should not be a game of strategy where you win by paying the least. Paying tax is a moral obligation - it is unacceptable to engage in complex financial arrangements in order to wriggle out of paying your fair share. If we are all in this together, they must cough up their fair share of taxes.

 

In the absence of a General Election to enable people to express their judgement on the Coalition Government’s policies through the ballot box, the cross-section of UK society in the form of the crowd at the London 2012 Paralympics, where niceness and good nature abounded, made their views known by booing the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Home Secretary when they attended on medal-presentation duties.

 

Whether or not people are Thatcherites, the 2015 General Election will give them the opportunity to vote for more of the same or change in whatever form the opposition declares in manifestos. More people need to vote to minimise the risk of another coalition, where only the minority get what they voted for.

 

What's the point of voting, they're all the same? Think of those who fought for democracy and the right to vote, and people who are living under tyrannical dictatorships or are under curfews and cannot exercise their right to opinion. Your right to vote is your right to expression and opinion. Do not take your right for granted. Try to appreciate the power of voting by exercising it! The local election in your area in May is the next opportunity.

[Frankly Mr Shankly]

Edited April 19, 2013 by Stevie_J