I keep thinking on this. We have just been through 13 years of historic low costs of state borrowing. As in it has literally never been cheaper for the state to borrow to invest in this country. That period is now **over**, highly unlikely we’ll ever see anything like it again in our lifetimes, and what do we have to show for it? Instead of productive investment we’ve cut everything to the point of collapse. We are going to look back on this period in anger and frustration at the wasted opportunities for decades to come I reckon.
The financial crash broke Britain.
The UK simply hasn’t recovered from that.
Subsequent government decisions taken – austerity to Brexit to Trussonomics – have compounded the problems.
Clegg, Cameron and Osborne – the worst political trio since Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. They even managed to kill more British civilians. Their names and time in office should be a mark of shame for anyone who supported them.
Call it what you want but as far as I’m concerned it’s just Tory fiscal incompetence.
Austerity has been a huge success….for some. The rich have gotten richer. The Tories have syphoned money out of the public purse and passed it to their mates.
[deleted]
I think we’re on our way to a significant reduction in quality of life. Not just a bit of food inflation and delays with ambulances, but historic structural changes to the nation.
Countries generally run a deficit during wars. The UK has ran one since 2001, and we’ve racked up colossal debt, and the interest rates are rising.
​
Debt and deficit is now our second or third biggest expense, after the NHS. It dwarfs most of our national expenses.
We’d need to cancel the UK’s entire education system just to stop getting into more debt each year.
And if you look at what it would take to get rid of the deficit and pay down our debt over a few decades, we’d need to cancel the NHS altogether.
​
When the state pension was introduced in the UK, it started one year below the average age of death. People were expected to basically work until they were terminally ill and bedbound. Now we expect decades of leisure, paid by the state.
And if you look at the age demographics of the UK, we have a huge wave of boomers that will be drawing state pensions, benefits, and leaning heavily on the NHS.
​
And austerity and lack of government funding is a vicious cycle – it puts people out of work and into ill-health, where they end up costing the state more. It makes us reliant on other nations instead of building for ourselves. The last decade made us uniquely weak and vulnerable for the energy crisis and supply chain inflation.
​
It’s all very profoundly unaffordable, on a scale we’ve never seen before.
​
It’s not just a matter of squeezing a few quid out of nurses, or cancelling a few fighter jets or delaying a few schools. All of that is pocket change.
I think the next few decades are going to see some very dramatic changes – off the top of my head, I could see the NHS being scaled down to A&E only, or the cessation of pensions for those not yet retired, or significant continued inflation until the national debt is trivial.
​
We see similar things in Turkey, Argentina and Lebanon. I genuinly think there’s a good chance the UK will go the same way.
The real problem is we reward failure in this country. None of the failures in Whitehall or Westminster ever face a trial and they are even placed in more senior positions and the House of Lords. Or they get all kinds of medals.
Austerity, and it’s friend zero-state, are as harming a concept as communism in many ways.
The blue solution is simple: kill the poor & disabled and stoke an imaginary culture war on 0.5% of the pop : /
>!/s incase its not bloody obvious!<
How the Tories decade of wealth extraction from the middle and lower class broke the country for everyone except them.
Look at the US and how Obama invested in the US after the 2008 crisis. While not perfect, he managed to get the US out of recession quicker than we did and the US has manage to grow since the crisis. You compare that to the UK, where we still have not seen living standards return to pre-2008 levels, the media and government have also managed to turn people against those on benefits. Austerity has not just made services worse, it has made people worse. Good luck getting people to admit that though.
12 comments
I keep thinking on this. We have just been through 13 years of historic low costs of state borrowing. As in it has literally never been cheaper for the state to borrow to invest in this country. That period is now **over**, highly unlikely we’ll ever see anything like it again in our lifetimes, and what do we have to show for it? Instead of productive investment we’ve cut everything to the point of collapse. We are going to look back on this period in anger and frustration at the wasted opportunities for decades to come I reckon.
The financial crash broke Britain.
The UK simply hasn’t recovered from that.
Subsequent government decisions taken – austerity to Brexit to Trussonomics – have compounded the problems.
Clegg, Cameron and Osborne – the worst political trio since Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. They even managed to kill more British civilians. Their names and time in office should be a mark of shame for anyone who supported them.
Call it what you want but as far as I’m concerned it’s just Tory fiscal incompetence.
Austerity has been a huge success….for some. The rich have gotten richer. The Tories have syphoned money out of the public purse and passed it to their mates.
[deleted]
I think we’re on our way to a significant reduction in quality of life. Not just a bit of food inflation and delays with ambulances, but historic structural changes to the nation.
Countries generally run a deficit during wars. The UK has ran one since 2001, and we’ve racked up colossal debt, and the interest rates are rising.
​
Debt and deficit is now our second or third biggest expense, after the NHS. It dwarfs most of our national expenses.
We’d need to cancel the UK’s entire education system just to stop getting into more debt each year.
And if you look at what it would take to get rid of the deficit and pay down our debt over a few decades, we’d need to cancel the NHS altogether.
​
When the state pension was introduced in the UK, it started one year below the average age of death. People were expected to basically work until they were terminally ill and bedbound. Now we expect decades of leisure, paid by the state.
And if you look at the age demographics of the UK, we have a huge wave of boomers that will be drawing state pensions, benefits, and leaning heavily on the NHS.
​
And austerity and lack of government funding is a vicious cycle – it puts people out of work and into ill-health, where they end up costing the state more. It makes us reliant on other nations instead of building for ourselves. The last decade made us uniquely weak and vulnerable for the energy crisis and supply chain inflation.
​
It’s all very profoundly unaffordable, on a scale we’ve never seen before.
​
It’s not just a matter of squeezing a few quid out of nurses, or cancelling a few fighter jets or delaying a few schools. All of that is pocket change.
I think the next few decades are going to see some very dramatic changes – off the top of my head, I could see the NHS being scaled down to A&E only, or the cessation of pensions for those not yet retired, or significant continued inflation until the national debt is trivial.
​
We see similar things in Turkey, Argentina and Lebanon. I genuinly think there’s a good chance the UK will go the same way.
The real problem is we reward failure in this country. None of the failures in Whitehall or Westminster ever face a trial and they are even placed in more senior positions and the House of Lords. Or they get all kinds of medals.
Austerity, and it’s friend zero-state, are as harming a concept as communism in many ways.
The blue solution is simple: kill the poor & disabled and stoke an imaginary culture war on 0.5% of the pop : /
>!/s incase its not bloody obvious!<
How the Tories decade of wealth extraction from the middle and lower class broke the country for everyone except them.
Look at the US and how Obama invested in the US after the 2008 crisis. While not perfect, he managed to get the US out of recession quicker than we did and the US has manage to grow since the crisis. You compare that to the UK, where we still have not seen living standards return to pre-2008 levels, the media and government have also managed to turn people against those on benefits. Austerity has not just made services worse, it has made people worse. Good luck getting people to admit that though.