The UK government’s economic policies under new PM Liz Truss have caused a stir among, not only leftists, but also among mainstream economists. The new government says the solution to the stagnation and failure of British capitalist production is to cut taxation on the rich and on big business. The extra income flowing to them will then be available to boost investment and spending that can deliver economic growth.
On Monday 26 September, the IRR was delighted to host a panel event at this year’s The World Transformed festival in Liverpool. ‘IRR50: New circuits of anti-racism’ explored the last half-century of British anti-racism, and how that can inform the struggles of today. Whilst Liz Fekete highlighted how the growth of copwatch and anti-raids groups echoed the monitoring groups of the 1980s, Sophia Siddiqui stressed the importance of connecting anti-racism to feminism and how all of our struggles are interconnected. We were also joined by Surviving Society’s Chantelle Lewis who explained how podcasting continued a tradition of accessible knowledge production outside the academy, and Azfar Shafi, whose co-authored book Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism makes urgent calls to learn from our history in order to forge a new path towards stronger, coherent and relevant anti-racist praxis.
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It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match. The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia, the Biden administration and their media lackeys
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michael roberts
“If there was no intervention today, gilt yields could have gone up to 7-8 per cent from 4.5 per cent this morning and in that situation around 90 per cent of UK pension funds would have run out of collateral… They would have been wiped out.” So says a UK bond trader yesterday.
A liquidity crisis erupted in British bond markets after the announcement by the new right-wing Conservative government that it would spend up to £60bn to maintain and energy price cap for householders for up to two years, subsidise business energy costs AND also cut corporate and income taxes. The total hit from this largesse (mainly to the rich) to the UK public debt level over the next few years has been estimated at over £400bn or nearly 20% of GDP. With UK public debt already at 100% of GDP, that sounded the death knell for the UK bond prices. Yields (interest rate) surged.
The New Dark Age 