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Dan Hind

@danhind

Apr 15

We should never get tired of repeating that politics and the media in this country since the financial crisis has been monopolised by people who think that everything is basically fine, and that those arguing for an alternative to Thatcherism are dangerous extremists.

This means that the pool of competent people to draw on to populate government and political journalism gets shallower all the time. Since 2010 our PMs have been a daft posho, an authoritarian weirdo, another daft posho, whatever Liz Truss was, and now a libertarian nitwit.

Meanwhile the media has constantly had to pretend that they didn't want this parade of incompetent freaks and the catastrophic mismanagement and venality they presided over, even though they themselves lied through their teeth to head off any and all alternatives.

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Dan Hind

@danhind

Mar 19

"As we did at the end of the 1970s, we stand at an inflection point ..." There's a bit of rote Democrat-copying going on here as usual: Reeves is referencing Thatcher as Obama referenced Reagan - working with the grain of media-induced amnesia ...
theguardian.com/business/2024/…

But it is useful to remember what Thatcherism was: a carefully planned project to revive the investing class at the expense of the working majority. It was given space by the refusal of the centre left to recognise the limits of postwar social democracy, and move beyond them.

This project to revive capitalist control of society was masterminded in the UK by the likes of John Hoskyns, who set out the plan in the seventies in a series of "stepping stones" memos, in which the need to break the power of the trade unions was repeatedly stressed.

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Dan Hind

@danhind

Nov 22, 2023

The UK Chancellor today is doing what Chancellors always do in the face of economic stagnation and declining living standards: giving state subsidies to private investors. The stated purpose of this is to encourage them to invest more and so improve productivity, wages etc. 🧵

The problem is that UK private investors aren't interested in, or good at, directing real resources towards domestic projects that will increase living standards for the majority who work.

The UK’s rich got rich through land rents and through unequal trade with the rest of the world, enforced at gunpoint by the Royal Navy. They are still helping themselves to land rents, and now operate offshore under the wing of the US Empire.

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Dan Hind

@danhind

Jun 24, 2023

The current mainstream debate on the economy mostly revolves around whether the BoE was too slow to raise interest rates, which sounds much like one 18th century doctor complaining that their rival waited too long before starting to bleed the patient.

Inflationary pressure isn't coming from the great majority of middle and low income earners. Increasing the mortgage interest payments of people who are already have less discretionary spending won't do much to dent inflation caused by supply shocks and corporate price-setting.

The pandemic has greatly increased the wealth of high earners and of those who own property and other assets. To the extent there is a monetary issue, it can be addressed through wealth taxes - a Post-Pandemic Readjustment Act should cover it.

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Dan Hind

@danhind

Apr 4, 2023

Thatcher's reckless pivot from industry to finance in the 80s was paid for by North Sea oil. We could have been the largest country in Scandinavia but those vandals turned us into a world leader in money laundering and real estate fraud, held together by vicious right wing media.

Nigel Lawson is being talked about today as if he put us on the road to prosperity. And you only have to look around to see how preposterous that is. Until we can discuss the vast scale of his failure, our politics will be victim-blaming bullshit.

Because if Britain's most consequential postwar PM and her collaborators and imitators aren't responsible for what's happening now, it must be the fault of migrants, minorities, woke do gooders, and young people, a carousel of approved hate figures.

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Dan Hind

@danhind

Dec 17, 2022

https://twitter.com/danhind/status/1601954118226137091

Further to this, we need a Community Health Building approach. Publicly funded R&D would test large scale interventions that don't conform to the Pharma's patentable molecule approach. This could be funded by the surplus from NHS Generics (an idea proposed by Corbyn).

https://twitter.com/danhind/status/1601954118226137091

These experiments, in diet and lifestyle interventions and innovations like universal basic services, as well as Virchow-type interventions in democratic self-determination as a treatment for diseases of despair, would provide an evidence base for broader policy-making.

The idea would be to integrate healthcare with a vision of social development through collective and individual empowerment, and through the effective rebuttal of misinformation and advertising's lies by implication.

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