How Neoliberalism Led to the Cost of Living Crisis – Years of austerity and attacks on trade unions have resulted in poverty pay that leaves British workers exposed to soaring prices – to fix the cost of living crisis, we need worker power and higher wages.

11 comments

  1. The destruction of the welfare state is the eventual destruction of the middle-class standard of living. We are just on a journey to that point.

    The problem has always been that most better-off people believe they are doing it all by themselves. They never understand how important public services/welfare state are to their quality of life also. Not until it’s gone.

  3. Neoliberalism: the thing most can’t describe, but they aren’t going to let that stop them blaming all their problems on it.

  4. I don’t think it really matters about the costs of things too much, the core of people’s money is going to housing!
    Housing is what we need to tackle before anything else.

  6. We don’t need higher wages, we need a lower cost of living. The government should be ensuring that, rather than standing aside and announcing how much it is rising by. Instead they’re actually aiding it.

    I knew the Tories could be a cruel bunch of cunts but I never actually believed things could get this bad.

  8. For the last forty years, the West has operated on a globalised economic model of outsourced industry, which in turn has meant **low wages** and **asset inflation**. This is why, unlike in the past, the poor (apart from those at the very bottom) can afford phones and new clothes.

    But it has in turn resulted in a winners and losers lottery, whereby if you have assets you can just about keep up, and if you don’t you slip further in to a life of instability and precariousness. And as assets continue to inflate, more and more people become a loser.

    **A top shouldn’t cost only a tenner. And a house shouldn’t cost as much as half a million.**

    We’ve essentially sacrificed the stability and community support networks that come with steady housing and resilient public services and replaced that with cheap, perishable goods that ultimately only serve to further alienate and distract.

    **And people are miserable and angry for it.**

    The only solution is to completely remodel our economic system.

  9. We haven’t really done neoliberalism.

    Neoliberalism would be lower taxes on working people. It would be education subsidies. It would be much less planning bullshit to create housing a crisis. It would not include bailouts for everything from banks to train operators.

    We’ve done the bits of neoliberalism that are good for boomers (low taxes on capital). And the bits of every other ideology that are good for boomers (communist level pension, feudal land use controls, anarchist immigration and education laws)…

    I’m not saying neoliberalism works or doesn’t. Just that no one had actually tried it. The same with communism: we have a very over-generous benefit system for the over 65s. It failed. So should we decry welfare?

  10. The headline doesn’t mention the elephant in the room: mass immigration. Not everything can be blamed on austerity. I heard many complaints before 2010 about wages, housing and weakened workers’ rights.

  11. yeah higher wages!!

    erm how does a company cover that then, oh yeah increasing prices of their goods!

    the issue is we all feel entitled to everything

    need a new car? yeah get a 20k+ car on finance

    TVs broke while watching £100+ a month sky? buy a new one because who wants to get it repaired instead

    going to the shop? let’s drive

    hungry? get uber to bring you that third takeaway of the week

    There are little struggling, I’ve seen them when I worked in the bank but the majority just need a wake up call, we’ve had it that good for so long.

    look at the people in the Ukrainian, even before the war look at some of their houses, just the essentials and that goes for a lot of people on this planet.

    yeah our energy has gone up stupid amounts but you adjust, inflation going up, start cooking bulk food like they did when your nan was cooking tatty ash, rag puddings etc

    and worker power? the unions made their own bed, when I was a rep with unite they actually thought they was bigger than the government and that should never happen

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