Friday 1 September 2017

Loadasmoney, Indeed

None of this is controversial to anyone other than saloon bar economists and the tabloid hacks who pander to them despite knowing that they are illiterate.

Instead, warmly welcome the billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland, and call for Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions to receive the same per capita. Anything less would make a mockery of the very names of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and of the Democratic Unionist Party.

The DUP has never disputed the existence of the so-called Magic Money Tree. At least in practice, that existence is now fully acknowledged by the Conservative Party as well. Let the abundant fruits of that Tree be harvested throughout the United Kingdom.

Quite apart from the sheer gall of a government with the economic record of this one, the term "Magic Money Tree" deliberately has the same initials as "Modern Monetary Theory", on which see here (PDF).

Those who have turned the former into a catchphrase are terrified that most people, including most politicians across the spectrum, might realise that money itself exists by State action in the first instance, that the State does not need to tax or borrow anything before spending it (no economist disputes that, as phrased), that it is actually impossible for a sovereign state to run out of its own free-floating fiat currency, that there is no resemblance of any kind between the budget of such a state and the budget of a household, and that the tools are readily at hand to counteract any inflationary effect of the obvious political applications of these realisations.

The people who do not want these things to be acted upon, or even to be generally known, have political objections to the intended consequences, and they have social and cultural reasons for those objections. That is fine. That is a debate to be had. Our reasons for wanting those consequences are also political, and the roots of those reasons are also social and cultural.

But that is what ours are, and that is what theirs are. Screaming about "the Magic Money Tree", and presenting their own politically preferable economic arrangements as if they were the Laws of Physics, is an approach that deserves derision, and wholesale exclusion from adult company.

To turn to Jared O'Mara himself, he is the MP for Sheffield Hallam. If the Conservatives cannot win there, where they always used to win until Nick Clegg came along, then they are doomed to become a peculiarity of the Home Counties, never again to govern alone.

O'Mara is usually cited as Momentum's first MP. The Labour Party, as such, had no interest in getting him into Parliament, and no aspiration to take Sheffield Hallam, which is one of the richest constituencies in the country and which had never previously returned a Labour candidate. But the Left within and beyond the Labour Party piled in independently, and the rest is history.

Yes, the Conservatives won an overall majority without that seat in 2015. But this is not 2015. When Labour, the Labour Left, a Labour Left candidate without any official party backing in practice, can win Sheffield Hallam, then the Conservatives are simply screwed in the North, where they have to win seats in order to govern alone. The changes are now very rapid indeed.

3 comments:

  1. Vitally important stuff. It is an absolute scandal that you are not in Parliament.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anything to add?

    ReplyDelete