Supine Labour lets Tories daub lipstick on this pig

[LeftishBrit]

...The Labour party has surely had the worst crash imaginable. It hasn’t voiced a penetrating analysis of the things that have gone wrong in our economy, let alone come up with convincing strategies to put them right. Instead of ideas, there is a vacuum; in place of an alternative, we have a dispirited consensus.


...To sum up: Britons are poorer and less productive than they were before Lehman Brothers fell over, and the country still can’t pay its way in the world. All hail the strongman of Europe! This is what George Osborne hails a “major milestone”, or his friends in the press describe as “total vindication”. Utter rubbish, of course, but what emboldens them to daub so much lipstick on this pig is the lack of a cogent counter-argument.

...Britain’s model of capitalism was clearly not working long before 2008. Once you strip out inflation, the typical worker saw no wage rise for most of the past decade. So who prospered during the boomiest boom in economic history? Those at the top, often running or owning businesses well-sheltered from competition (think: water, rail, energy) and shaking them down for bonuses and dividends.

Such rampant market inequality won’t be solved by competition. As for Piketty-esque taxes, they’re little more than slamming the stable door long after the horse has bolted to the Caymans. The answer might lie in a new book Miliband should take on his hols. Called The End of The Experiment, it proposes a system of social licensing in which major businesses earn the right to trade – through dispensing their obligations to the rest of us by sourcing locally, training staff and paying workers fairly. I’ll bet it would be the most refreshing thing the Labour leader’s read in ages.


(By Aditya Chakraborty; much more at link)


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/28/supine-labour-lets-tories-daub-lipstick-pig-austerity