austerity
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UK: still winter, no sign of spring
The UK government’s Spring statement on spending was as expected – really awful. First, Chancellor Rachel Reeves had to accept that the 2025 real GDP growth estimate will be half the rate previously forecast, halved to 1% from 2% by the government’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). In addition, Reeves had to… Continue reading
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Lumpen Politics of Starmer
In a Labour Party Election Broadcast on April 16th, 2024, Sir Keir Starmer highlighted how his working-class background influences his approach to politics. In a BBC interview on May 27th, 2024, Sir Starmer reinforced his working-class roots and promised to serve the interests of the working people in Britain. He even described himself as a… Continue reading
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Yellow Vest Win: Proving that Western Liberal Democracy is the same old autocracy
If we say that the Yellow Vests are not socialist revolutionaries even latently, then what are they protesting about? To put it the most simply: they are protesting the end of European Social Democracy, with the limited protections it provided. Continue reading
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IMF and debt: a new consensus?
There is much talk among ‘progressive’ economists that the IMF and the World Bank have turned over a new leaf. Gone are the days of supporting fiscal austerity, demanding that national governments get public debt levels down and insisting on conditions for countries borrowing IMF-WB funds that their governments privatise their state assets, deregulate markets… Continue reading
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UK budget: coming out of COVID
The UK economy was the hardest hit of the top G7 economies in the year of the COVID. Real GDP fell 9.9%, which the multi-millionaire and richest man in the British parliament, Conservative Chancellor, Rishi Sunak admitted was the worst contraction in national income in 300 years! Continue reading
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Ecuador: reversing the pandemic slump?
The leftist candidate Andrés Arauz took the lead in the first round of the presidential elections in Ecuador. Arauz won 31.5 per cent of the vote, putting him about 11 percentage points clear of his nearest rivals. It was unclear who Arauz would face in the run-off. Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez and Guillermo Lasso, a… Continue reading
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Mega-rich recoup COVID-19 losses in 9 months but for everyone else…
The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals a new Oxfam report today. ‘The Inequality Virus’ is being published on the opening day of the World… Continue reading
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Three tragedies born in the womb of neo-liberalism
At first sight, the Pandemic, Grenfell and Brexit, don’t seem to be connected, but they are. They represent the uncivilised outcomes of an unrestrained capitalism obsessed by cutting costs, the state and regulations. The result is that the short-term enrichment of the tiny minority are now being swamped by the longer-term losses that the rest… Continue reading
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John Pilger: ‘I spoke to impoverished families in 1975 and little has changed since then’
John Pilger interviewed Irene Brunsden in Hackney, east London about only being able to feed her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes in 1975. Now he sees nervous women queueing at foodbanks with their children as it’s revealed 600,000 more kids are in poverty now than in 2012. Continue reading
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Exiting the false “jobs versus environment” dilemma
Amidst the renewed rise of obscene inequalities, a wave of protests is sweeping through Italy, from south to north. On the one hand, the pandemic has engendered an upsurge in workplace disputes to defend health and in mobilizations to protect the income of workers affected by COVID-19-related restrictions. On the other hand, however, we have… Continue reading
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Rishi Sunak’s planned cut to benefits is much bigger than Osborne’s in 2015
Back in 2015, 3.3 million working families were on track to lose an average of over £1,000 a year from the following April. As Figure 1 shows, today, the income of roughly twice as many families is at risk, with 6 million households (containing 12 million adults and 6 million children) set to have their… Continue reading
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CoronaShock and Socialism
CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient. (PDF) Continue reading
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Blight and Revelation: Coronavirus, Austerity and the UK
Epidemiologist Michael Marmot begins his August 10 piece in The Guardian on a sombre note. It is drawn from The Plague by Albert Camus. “The pestilence is at once blight and revelation; it brings the hidden truth of a corrupt world to the surface.” Professor Marmot uses the UK’s inglorious record on combating COVID-19 as… Continue reading
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Macron wounded, but still eyeing austerity
The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose previous experience consisted mostly of being mayor of a town with… Continue reading
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Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid
BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a… Continue reading
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A zoom discussion with Michael Roberts on the prospects for the world economy post-lockdown
This is a very topical discussion and one with which the Bank of England has engaged in. It projects a 14% fall in GDP this year (the most in 300 years) followed by a 15% jump next year. This means a net rise in GDP of 1% over two years. This bounce back could have… Continue reading
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Government is using daily coronavirus death toll as a ‘propaganda tool’, claims expert
Professor Allyson Pollock, the director of Newcastle University’s centre for excellence in regulatory science, said coronavirus has “shone a spotlight on the widening inequalities” in Britain and called for the government to revisit its public sector policies. Continue reading
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When the Invisible Hand Gives You the Finger
Since the days of Adam Smith, capitalists have been arguing that unfettered markets are the best way to organize the economy. Smith famously said that the rich are “led by an invisible hand” to, “without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.” Continue reading
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Ghosts of Capitalism vs. Walls of Solidarity
In these difficult times for humanity, confronted with the danger of constant predatory action by the greed and boundless ambition of the hegemonic powers in the name of the free market, free enterprise, wild neo-liberalism, the destruction of nature ravaged to extremes never before seen by decadent capitalism, only solidarity and responsibility illuminate our habitat. Continue reading
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Brexit, Covid-19 and the Debt Deluge – The perfect storm about to engulf us all
Remembering this impending event and recalling it from memory to your friends is as easy as A, B, C, D. Broadly speaking it is about four interlinked events that have already happened but their combined effects will engulf the country within a year. Austerity, Brexit, CoVid and Debt will lead to a ruinous recession or… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 