Maybe it was ‘hair cuts?’… to keep JG happy?

Jolly defensive – you sound like a scalded spokesman.

I didn’t say it was a quote from anybody in Government. In fact, it may not be a quote – but you’d be hard pressed to argue that, for example, John G on this very forum hasn’t posited that belief very clearly, and it is one that you know comes straight from the pages of the Daily Mail.

I am fully aware of the reason cuts affect the poor – I was instead referring to the justification (‘undeserving poor’) provided by this supporting chorus.

The NHS does not benefit us all, and neither does State Education. It benefits those who can not afford to do it privately, as you well know. I would not advocate further cuts while it is necessary to provide that support. On the other hand, they are things we can be proud of, however many attempts are made to undermine them.

I admit, I wasn’t aware of what Corbyn said about cuts (apart from Trident)- can you point me at it?

I was not arguing about what the British people want or don’t want. Seems like a diversion from the debate. I have a perspective that might be out of step from the electorate (though I sense decreasingly so), but that doesn’t alter the facts under discussion one iota.

We are where we are, and we should hold it up to the light and look at it. One might equally argue that we are where we are because of whom we elected. B. Liar included. Did the fact of it all being democratic make it all so great with hindsight? Democracy is a principle to be defended to the death. The principles of those democratically elected are another matter.

CD, the last Labour government were no more Socialist than you.

Re blame.. There are those who champion further cuts because the money that is so ‘urgently’ needed to pay our debt is currently ‘wasted on scroungers’. That’s blaming the poor.

I agree it would be good to raise the debate above cynical point scoring.

Re Quantitative easing – I feel that a ‘proper old fashioned’ socialist wouldn’t agree with it on structural grounds. OK, I’ll hold up my hands and say I don’t actually know what socialist policy is, as there hasn’t been such a thing for a long time, but I can’t see it sitting right.

I imagine there is greater sensitivity on the left to the idea that when you print money and only give it to banks, all you are really doing is redistributing a finite resource upwards (the actual wealth, not the numbers on the notes). It is this ‘take’ on what it actually means to perform QE that I think would prevent a Socialist (as opposed to Blairite or even Obama-ite) government from doing this..

Interesting observation, that.

In the UK there is no socialist policy of borrowing or printing money for the financial markets, the ‘City’ crowd. That would be absolute anathema to our Left.

There is a danger of confusing the two, and certainly the right would like that to happen.

Giving handouts to Wall Street / the City of London is not the same as social care for the poor. Let’s not get sidetracked by this false association. If they are associated in the US Presidents mind I would be surprised, even if he has done both (has he)?

It was the belief that debt didn’t matter that led to recession when they were called in and suddenly it was realised that making up money doesn’t help. It’s been quickly forgotten again now by the private financial sector, and yet the UK government like to constantly bang on about how much it matters as its a national debt and somehow thus ‘public’ money (even though it was lost privately), and can only be paid for by cuts.

Yes, I accept completely there is a relationship between government spend and national debt. The size of the pot is what it is. However, the big hole in the pot was made by a financial collapse. It might have been unwise not to keep it absolutely full to the brim just in case this happened, and that was a Government mistake. But not keeping the pot full did not cause the hole.

The difference in terms of whether the debt matters is that a national debt such as ours is unlikely ever to be called in, mainly because there’s no-one we actually owe the money to except bankers and they actually make more real money out of interest on a virtual debt, seen as an asset, then they would from making it concrete and asking for it back! The system WORKS on debt (for them), it’s not necessarily a good thing but it’s very much aligned with the free-market uber-capitalist thinking that is currently fashionable. If you follow the money it goes upwards and then offshore – so what is Osborne worried about?

So yes, getting into this position was dumb – but not as dumb as blaming it on the poor.

Not your usual measured response. The Conservatives were careful not to trumpet those figures, because they correlated to a global recession and nothing that could be pinned on the opposition (lending weight to the argument that these things happen regardless). Instead they conflated this with public spending policies – and without having the first clue as to how this actually made sense (it didn’t) the media mostly nodded along.

I accept there was an actual global recession that ended a long time ago, but as we who aren’t rolling in it don’t feel much better about things and haven’t since 09 the party line is to point to a different one that’s all the Government-before-last’s fault and which – at great sacrifice and under Churchillian leadership- we are just beginning to turn around. Now, that is your actual crap.

There’s a school of thought that the economy will just do its own thing, and the colour of the political party in charge – and the machinations of its Chancellor – have very little effect. This school of thought thinks that things like levels of public spending are irrelevant – and it’s true that countries enter recessions, and booms, with the ‘public purse’ in the black as much as they do with it in the red.

At the heart of this contention is my earlier point that all ‘public’ money is recycled, not stashed or gambled* like ‘private’ money. Thus this kind of spending is only a force for stasis, not a ‘loss’ on any national balance sheet as neo-cons would have us believe.

The ‘recession’ we were supposed to have gone through and now recovered from was defined by the Conservative party initially by looking only at funds available for public spending (that allegorical ‘there’s nothing left’ note) and no other measure. This was then sold to us via the tory press to justify ideologically motivated spending cuts – and furthermore the cuts had no effect on the ‘ending’ of this ‘recession’. The bit that they have kept quiet is public finances are actually no better than they were at the beginning. As employment is slightly up they point to that instead, though no-one can explain how that’s connected to their policies (and it’s stopped going up now).

Meanwhile the ‘economy’ goes its own sweet way, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

*and no, John, that’s not ‘wealth creation’. Gambling wouldn’t work if you could just invent more money as you went along. You can pretend to, but it does go wrong when debts are called in…