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The So-Called Recession
I was a little surprised at how chipper George Osborne seemed to be about chucking 8 billion in the direction of the Irish banks. I thought there was a squeeze on and we had to save every last penny.
But then Lord Young explained the situation. What we're suffering is only a "so-called recession" and most people "have never had it so good". Ah, so Cameron's inner circle aren't nearly as worried about the economy as they'd like us to think they are.
They see the recession as a blip; it's manageable- and there's cash down the back of the sofa for the things they really want to do- like helping out their enterprising friends. The crisis talk is to soften up the rest of us for a set of cruel and destructive policies- throwing public servants out of work, dismantling the welfare state, harrassing the weak- that are a matter of choice, not necessity.
But then Lord Young explained the situation. What we're suffering is only a "so-called recession" and most people "have never had it so good". Ah, so Cameron's inner circle aren't nearly as worried about the economy as they'd like us to think they are.
They see the recession as a blip; it's manageable- and there's cash down the back of the sofa for the things they really want to do- like helping out their enterprising friends. The crisis talk is to soften up the rest of us for a set of cruel and destructive policies- throwing public servants out of work, dismantling the welfare state, harrassing the weak- that are a matter of choice, not necessity.
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I would like to say that the foolish activity was confined to a small elite and to a great extent it was. But it was an elite tacitly supported by the great majority of Irish people. The constant talk about "getting on the property ladder" between 2004-2008 by friends and colleagues was really bothersome. Even I am not totally off the hook - during the height of the boom I was a systems programmer for a mortgage company. But even though the banks would have given me mortgages for breakfast, dinner and tea, neither I nor Mr Strange was interested in buying some dump worth seven times our combined annual salary, so we stayed away while most people we know bought.
There was a great sense of entitlement, arrogance and racism. Foreigners were treated like shit. There is no other word for it. I worked in a company where a factory floor supervisor (Muslim, but not sure where he was from) was phoned by the plant owner on his hospital bed after being treated for a heart attack. The man in question, a brute, dark-haired, taciturn Paddy to whom the Moonlight Sonata and Yeats would be equal strangers, recently moved to a nice house in Sion Hill where he and his son, whose face was pale, red-headed and wide-mouthed like an extensive coldsore, ran the company. I remember also my German ex complaining that nurses in his hospital made fun of him because he did not own property and they did. That was in 2005. I used to hope they would fall into negative equity fast - but now I realised that all I was wishing for was that having returned to his homeland, he would end up paying their mortgage for them just that bit sooner.
Too many people overextended themselves too much, and that comic fool Ahern, who unfortunately was given the keys to the safe, snarled at anyone who said "this is not sustainable" and told them to commit suicide. No, I'm not joking. I only wish he'd tied the rope around HIS fat neck instead. This attitude, along with the inexplicable voting in of the governing party for the nth time in 2007, made me so fed up with Ireland that I nearly considered leaving the country. Mr Strange was the deciding factor really. So I stayed and watched more and more buildings, zillions of apartments being built while everyone coveted houses, Irish people buying stuff in the Black Sea for profit, and basically all the stupid shit that always happens when you mix low interest rates, a historically oppressed people who haven't owned their own land, and the opportunity to buy it, never mind that it's the size of a postage stamp and the walls are thin and there's rising damp and the sewers aren't completed...then it went on and on until someone turned the tap off - and the whole thing crashed. And I'm sorry for it, sorry for you and all the other people who have to suffer and are not to blame.
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We've lived through an era of excessive greed- and if you guys went madder than the rest of us it was because you'd been kept hungry for so long- and that's very largely the fault of us English and Scots.
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-20 12:49 pm (UTC)(link)Jenny
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We have money to prop up (foreign) banks, but not to sustain our own public services. The government has scared us into accepting their cuts, but the willingness with which they throw money at things they approve of gives the lie to their propaganda.
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What Young said was crass and stupid. He's admitted it. I'm not sure whats best - help a country out in order to lessen the long-term damage, or just let it fail which could have a catastrophic effect on the EU market, as well as our own. Its not a question of helping out a cosy clique of enterprising friends. Its a question of stopping a country's economy disappearing into oblivion and taking a massive chunk of our and the EU economy with it.
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I'm not saying we shouldn't bail out the Irish banks- only that our willingness to do it sits oddly with the message coming out of government that we're skint and need to cut everything to the bone.
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This Government may be cutting in line with ideology. But the Labour Government overspent in accordance with theirs - a return to the bad old days of tax n' spend and overmanning. I'm not sure which is worse. The former puts people out of work. The latter creates false expectations that eventually have to be dashed.
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Oh, and I forgot that Brown and Blair created an ethos of bullying nannyism in the country. Misrule or borderline dictatoriship? Hmmm.
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It seems to me you're suggesting they betrayed ideology but didn't betray the people. *Shrugs*
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billionaires and their newspapers. I doesn't surprise me when they act on behalf of those interests. But when Labour launches a pre-emptive war or gives Bernie Ecclestone a peerage I feel like its a betrayal. Yes, it's naive of me I know.
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Lord Young has probaby lived a life of privilege and cannot detach his own experience of the recession from that of other people.
And of course, I lose my job next summer, so I will get my turn too.
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We were driving through the manchester suburbs yesterday and passed building site after building site. It didn't look like the landscape of a recession.
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Obviously it's not a good thing to be so heavily in debt, but I think this Government is accentuating the negative so it can push through an agenda of cuts for the sake of cuts.
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I'm having increasing concerns that these problems aren't being addressed. And I'm quite depressed that the poor old Lib-Dems are being pulled along with the current. I still p****d-off at Labour for getting us into this mess - it's enough to make me consider voting Scot Nat.
Oh, but they backed Donald Trump. So I guess that leaves me with the Greens.
Help!!! I'm running out of options here!!!!!
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I have a long memory. I remember what happened in the 80s. I cannot forgive, and I cannot forget. Yeah, the public sector has got really fat and bloated under Labour, but... The Tories can't provide us with a panacea to cure all ills. If the workforce must be lean, flexible and mobile forcing people to move to where the jobs are, is it any wonder that social cohesion and the fabric of communities has completely disinetgrated? A mobile work force and a stable community cannot go hand in hand...
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My political loyalties aren't fixed. I wobble about between Labour and the Lib Dems, but I have never voted Tory and never will.
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