The badly hidden agenda of the Tories is to sell off state sector institutions to the highest bidders, to slash the public sector's share of Britain's GDP and privatise everything that moves.
Today the headlines read that the Tories will put tax reduction at the centre of their policy making and start cutting public spending immediately. Of course this is quite natural for a party that represents the well-off.
The well-off have private health insurance, the well off send their children to public schools, the well-off don't need state pensions and unemployment benefits, instead they have share portfolios which often include lucrative investments in the banking and financial sector, in the armaments industry and in US controlled companies like BP. The rich feed off the profits accruing from financial speculation. How many sharks out there benefited from the privatisation of BT, the Railroads, the water companies, the utilities. Cameron's friends have come back for more. They want it all. They want the health sector and education too.
The state sector is there for to benefit of the majority of the population not the upper middle and middle classes. The Bullingdon Toffs are annoyed that the higher proportion of tax that they pay, "wrongfully" gets used for things that don't directly benefit them except to placate the hoi poloi. The Bullingdons see taxation as a form of parasitical wealth redistribution back through the public sector to the less well-off. They much prefer Victorian notions of charity to the benighted. Bring in the NGOs to do the work of government.
The Conservatives say they will:
- immediately start making serious cutbacks in public finance.
- reduce taxation for the rich (the inheritance tax).
- cancel the projected increase in National Insurance.
- help business and small business with tax cuts
- reduce the amount of regulation and quality control.
And at the same time the "caring and compassionate" Conservatives claim they will also be able to:
- protect the NHS.
- avoid a double recession.
- get the economy restarted on a "sound footing".
These claims seem contradictory, impossible to achieve and they are difficult to take seriously, but we should take them very seriously indeed.
There is a way that the Conservatives will be able to do what they want to do. They will be able to do reduce public debt and restart the economy if they alter the whole balance and nature of the British economy and turn us into a kind of US hybrid economy.
The Conservatives will be able to achieve their objectives if they destroy the social democratic state apparatus in Britain and sell it off to private interests. The public sector forms 25% of our economy. Now that's a large piece of pie for Dave and his spivvy private sector mates to get their mitts onto. Dave Cameron, estate agent extraordinaire in waiting.
Cameron will borrow Blair's worn out sheep's clothing, but he is a wolf, just like Blair was.
He will guarantee that there will be service provision and that it will be affordable and say that it doesn't matter who provides it. Business will take over every sector of public life with the exception, perhaps, of the army and police. The Tories will take all this subcontracting and privatisation to the radical limit.
And for a while, while the private sector feeds off the public sector like the carrion eaters they are, (apologies to all real hyenas and vultures for the comparison) and for a while the economy will be seen to be active with money changing hands and profits flowing into the City.
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