Paul Mason, soon to have his steel toecapped suede booties under a Channel 4 desk, seems to have cast off the shackles of BBC groupthink and ventured out into the world of thinking for himself…..well, tentatively:
The economic recovery may be patchy, but the left is wrong to ignore it
It’s not the same across the country, but there are signs of growth. The challenge for Labour is how to make the most of the new reality
Still hedging his bets, and acting as unpaid, I hope, adviser to the Labour Party, but he ventures that austerity may have worked…so much so that it may be possible to reduce it to some extent.
Of course he rounds it all off with a brickbat…
The real problem may not be the weakness or fragility of recovery, but the fact that large parts of the population are locked out of it.
……but I guess old habits are hard to change.
The left have to ignore it as they spent months/years saying it wouldn’t happen unless Osborne changed blah blah blah. They’re hypocrites and nay-sayers and the BBC was their cheerleader. Now we have other silliness where out of one corner of their mouth they say we need to spend on large infrastructure projects and out of the other corner say HS2 now shouldn’t go ahead as it costs too much.
Mason seems to have hit the ground running with the (even more) open political advocacy. Has the BBC even taken his nameplate off the office door yet?
Whose policies have kept large parts of the population in a situation where they’re “locked out” of the recovery, Paul? Answers on a red flag…..
There is a much deeper problem with the way the BBC has managed the ‘austerity’ issue.
In truth, the UK has not really undergone austerity in the last 3 years. Sure the coalition has talked the game about the deep cuts it has made, but in nominal terms government spending has increased, and even in real terms whatever cut backs there have been were minor.
This kills two birds with one stone for the left liberals:
On the one hand, if we as a nation are conditioned to believe that an era where government spending goes up can be labelled austerity, we can kiss goodbye to ever decreasing the size of government budgets; this obviously plays into the leftist goal of ever increasing state.
Second, it was a useful heads i win / tails you lose situation. If the coalition’s policies had left us today in a worse economic climate than they inherited, labour would have carte blanche to increase government spending. However, even though the reductions in planned government spending increases (I simply can’t bring myself to call this process ‘austerity’) were modest, and appear to have done less harm than good, labour and the BBC will still paint this as ‘the recovery could have been so much better if we didn’t have [the non-existent] austerity’. This is basically the message that Mason is positioning by claiming that the recovery passed various groups by – his obvious follow up will be that government should target spending on those groups to ‘help them out’
The BBC, and leftists like Mason, will never accept the reality – the more that government moves out of the way of private enterprise, by doing less, regulating less, transferring wealth less etc, the healthier the economy will become. Instead, through the ‘austerity’ messaging, they have reframed the debate on government spending such that it is always seen as ‘good’, with the only question being do you accept the tory version, who want to do ‘less good’ in order to give the ‘leftover’ wealth to their chums in industry, or the labour version where they do ‘more good’ by giving the wealth to the much more deserving teachers, doctors, nurses, unemployed, disabled, etc.
uk worklessness at a low
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862993
can’t wait for eddie mair to get his teeth into chukka me bunga on this one
many ways to twist this…and they will.
He will certainly feel at home on Channel 4 news where they all dress to the left