Thursday 3 March 2016

the party's over

You know well that the neocon economic era did not start with Thatcher, but with her predecessor Callaghan in 1976. His government swung to bankers' cuts and bankers' rule. In the face of bankers' games with the pound it failed to sustain financial independence even for Britain. Tony Crosland said of underwriting council budgets "The party's over." In the present, how much harder was it supposed to be to sustain financial independence for Scotland, and without it even having its own currency at all? The oil price plummeting.

Now for the SNP the party's over. The end of the council tax freeze won't bite jn time for the election, because it's put off for a year, so you are supposed to think it's never coming. But as you have seen across the front pages today, all except the National of course, the SNP budget has set a bomb of hammering rises beyond inflation, 3%, next year, to hit you like a released spring.

This instead of using Scotland's national tax power redistributively as Labour is standing for, and in a narrower single issue way the Lib Dems are too. SNP position is an embarrassment in contrast to them. So that SNP policy is austerity, and Labour's policy is redistribute and spend on need.

Scotland's much-claimed progressive voters have had a crappy history of taking several elections to make culture shifts when the progressive ground moves away from where their voting habits are. They stayed with Labour throughout the New Labour period then moved away from Labour on grounds of the memory of New Labour but aftet it was actually over. That was absurd. It's time to catch up. There is nothing progressive in voting SNP this time.

No comments:

Post a Comment