Last Straw

With New Labour’s neo-liberal agenda and long record of social­ising costs and privat­ising profits it comes as a sur­prise to me that Alistair Darling has turned to Keynes in the face of reces­sion. I had assumed until now that they’d use this reces­sion and the recent handout to bankers as an oppor­tun­ity to cut back on social spend­ing. Maybe we have the absence of Tony Blair to thank?

While I’ve increas­ingly been hear­ing news of archi­tects being laid off over the past few weeks, the firm I’m employed by works nearly exclus­ively in the social hous­ing sec­tor, so it’s cer­tainly good eco­nomic news for me:

The chan­cel­lor said hous­ing, energy and small busi­nesses would bene­fit in his new spend­ing plans.

And I couldn’t agree more with Darling on this statement:

This is a time when you have to sup­port the eco­nomy. You will see us switch­ing our spend­ing pri­or­it­ies to areas which make a difference.

It’s just a shame he includes in this the entrench­ment of the military-industrial com­plex and the myopic decision to upgrade Britain’s nuc­lear weapons.

… plans for two air­craft car­ri­ers and a new nuc­lear deterrent would go ahead.

I might add that a decision to upgrade Britain’s nuc­lear weapons is a dir­ect viol­a­tion of the Nuc­lear Non-Proliferation Treaty, some­thing the UK and U.S. gov­ern­ments have been falsely accus­ing Iran of over the past year or so.