Give up the act Nick Cohen: You are a right winger advocating a return the Thatcherism and cuts.
If we read a flood of articles we see that massive amounts have been given to "restart lending". But this money that our government has freely given to rescue the richest amongst us could have gone into public services.
The austerity programme of the Tories following on (in a worst case scenario in a year or so) is the direct result of this gift of tax revenue to the rich. We know this. Cohen says that the governmet wastes money and there goes the deictic reference to the conventional wisdom the right have put so much money and column inches and air time into building up: that the public sector is inefficient and that, by implication, it should be sold off to the rich to run efficiently for profit.
Why should I have to argue against this ridiculous notion: the case for the public sector? Why should anyone have to argue the case for the obvious? It's obvious, for example, that rail travel and the power companies and water companies should never have been privatised. It's obvious that the BBC fills a need. It's obvious that private contractors represent a double tax on citizens as they operate for profit and are dedicated to extorting profits. It's obvious that the government abdicates direct accountability.
Basically, all the services that are offered through the government represent a redistribution of the income of the richer people in this society to the poorer people. Rich people go to private schools and use private hospitals and invest their money where the return is highest. They are the least concerned with the welfare of the people of Britain of any of the people who live in Britain. They are not concerned when public services are cut unless it's cuts to the police service dedicated to stopping people upsetting the status quo or stealing their stuff.
The "natural" order of things that Thatcher wanted to return us to. The upstairs downstairs Britain of the time before the war is where we are headed if we vote Cameron and Tory and if we listen to journalists like Nick Cohen.
Get rid of all the hogwash ideology disguised as economics and what you have is the representatives of rich people - the Tories - acting in the interests of richer people and arguing for slimming down the state, by reducing the burden on the rich tax payer. All the accusations of sleeze that we read against the Labour governement are there to inspire a visceral, unthinking response in the electorate and what the electorate will be manipulated into is reelecting a Thatcherite government ready to make cuts galore.
That Nick Cohen should join in the attack on the public sector is no surprise to me. He as gone the way of Hitchens and all the former Left that were never socialists except as a pose. They were posed as critical journalists, but they knew that that very pose, while winking and reassuring the establishment, would stand them in good stead when it came to make the very strategic betrayals of socialist ideals when the time came. Now as far as I and many others are concerned, Cohen has already demonstrated that he has no credentials on the left. So why does he continue to present himself as a leftist while he advocates the most reactionary positions imaginable.
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