Voters everywhere are frustrated by their worsening economic prospects. Thanks to the rules of hyper-globalization that have been imposed universally on democracies during the past three decades, it’s almost impossible for an individual nation to pursue a different path.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, austerity was the universal rule. Policy is reduced to ineffectual, marginal tweaks that transform no one’s life prospects.
The only people who prosper from this regime are the very rich. No wonder every national leader seems like a failure. And no wonder potentially transformative leaders are not attracted to politics.
Meanwhile, a nationalist backlash everywhere leads to parliamentary fragmentation and weak coalition governments, and makes it even harder for politics to make a constructive difference. So leaders are deemed failures, because they fail.
Yes, there are complicating factors such as aging populations that strain welfare states. But if the income distribution and tax structure were anything like that of the postwar boom, there would be plenty of money both for decent wage and salary earnings as well as social benefits.
This brings me back to Keir Starmer. With Reeves as his enforcer, Starmer has embraced the fatal premise that there is simply no money to invest in an economic transformation of Britain. He and Reeves have ruled out taxing the rich, as bad for the economy, since capital might flee. Instead, they cut social benefits.
Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative,” abbreviated as TINA. She meant there was no alternative to liberating capital. It worked very well—for capital. Not so well for ordinary Brits. But more than 35 years after Thatcher left office, her legacy of TINA still functions as a straitjacket—on a Labour government no less.
Starmer’s great predecessor, Clement Attlee, Labour’s first prime minister with a majority in Parliament, inherited a Britain whose economy lay crushed by the war. But instead of embracing austerity in 1945, Attlee built the National Health Service and the modern British welfare state. Then again, the rules of the system back then constrained capital and allowed much more latitude for nations to go their own way.
Ugly hyper-nationalism is no substitute for fixing today’s predatory capitalism, but it is pervasive as displaced anger. Scapegoating others does provide some psychic gratification for the masses, while global billionaires chortle all the way to the bank. That’s where Trump fits in. His approval ratings are a relatively impressive negative 17 percent.
|
