Bankers say that democracy must 'fade' if neoliberalism is to survive.

 

In Britain we have one of the lowest state retirement pensions in Europe. Although the state retirement pension is well below the national minimum wage, we're told that the 'triple-lock' which uprates the state pension, is unaffordable and unsustainable. Starmer's Labour government seem to be able to find money for just about everybody else in the world but cannot find it for Britain's elderly population or for  people with disabilities. Labour says they're not the party for people on state benefits but the party for people in work.

Not very long ago, the Labour government pledged £11 billion in aid to help developing countries cope with climate change. Starmer also pledged to give £3 billion a year to the Ukraine until 2030. And yet, the Chancellor Rachel 'Freeze' Reeves, says Britain has got no money. If Britain increases its defence spending as Keir Starmer has promised to do, then the money is likely to come from cutting people's welfare benefits and pensions rather than taxing the rich. The richest 1000 people in the UK own as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent.

Since the 1980s, beginning with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan, the UK and USA have led the world in pursuing pro-rich policies and have been the countries that have seen the most marked increase in income inequality. Economics is really a political argument rather than a science because it involves making value judgements about who gets what. Whenever one talks about the distribution of wealth, politics is never very far behind and it is difficult for anyone escape contemporary class prejudices and interests.

When the corn laws were in introduce in Britain in 1815, which protected the interests of wealthy English landowners while often driving up the price of bread for the labouring classes, the aristocracy and gentry were espousing the doctrine of laissez-faire, which held that the state should not interfere in the workings of the free market. The British government adhered to the principle of laissez-faire while millions of people were starving to death in Ireland in the mid-1840s. Ireland had been part of the Union since 1801. It was free competition for the English working-class, starvation for the Irish, and protectionism for wealthy landowners who basically governed the country.

It might strike some people as rather odd, but in what is called 'Supply-side Economics', there's a belief that if you want to incentivise the rich and make them work harder, you make them richer by cutting their taxes, whereas, if you want to make the poor work harder, you make them poorer by cutting subsidies to the poor like housing and the minimum wage. Poverty is seen as a spur that leads to self-improvement and industry.

In 2012, Tidjane Thiam, the CEO of Prudential, told the Davos Forum that trade unions were the "enemy of young people" and that the minimum wage was "a machine to destroy jobs." The multi-millionaire financier said that workers' rights and decent wages, stood in the way of capitalism's revival and had to go. In 2013, economists at J.P. Morgan, declared that for neoliberalism (a doctrine of uncontrolled markets), to survive, democracy must fade. The pioneers of neoliberalism came to a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot exist with an organised working-class. Atomisation and the destruction of Labour's bargaining power, has been the essence of the entire project.

Extreme inequality has to be sustained politically through an "apparatus of justification." People either believe that some people have reached their exalted position in life through talent or merit or they believe that inequality is good for everyone, sane, reasonable, and even necessary. If this cannot be maintained, then states have to act, or revolutions happen. This is what brought about the French Revolution and united England's aristocratic landowners and manufacturers in common panic that made the upper classes tremble. The Napoleonic wars were a war against Jacobinism.

 I've often wondered if the working people of Britain wouldn't have been better off if Napoleon and the French had taken over in Britain and destroyed the old class regime in the country. Oligarchs like Pitt and Sidmouth, made the inequalities of life the basis of the British state and regarded working people as a subject inferior social class.