Greed is good, or at least that’s what the bankers and CEOs of the biggest companies think. What is surprising is not their avaricious self-interest and total indifference to everyone else, but the blatancy with which they flaunt it. As their leader so movingly put it, they’re all in it together – the CEOs of Ocado and Kingfisher, those Labour sell-outs Lord (Digby) Jones and Lord Myners (both worth a bob or two in the City), and inevitably Boris Johnson.
The only omission was Blair, but no doubt it would have been too much of an embarrassment even for him now that he’s reputed to be worth £40 million. The cacophony of financial selfies that Balls’ modest proposal has elicited is extremely revealing. It shows what a tin ear they have to the tightening squeeze being imposed on 90% of the population, where 60% of voters sampled in a poll approved of Labour’s move, even including Conservatives. Continue reading
Apart from assuring us that the government’s main objective was economic stability – the stability of the graveyard it seems in this government’s case – the only other significant things in the Queen’s Speech were what it didn’t contain, not anything it did contain. Nothing about housebuilding, an infrastructure bank, reviving manufacturing, boosting capital investment, QE to bolster youth employment rather than the banks, or anything that really needs doing. And nothing about 1% versus the 99%. The inequality in wealth in Britain today is on a staggering scale, and it’s not even mentioned. So let’s start with the facts, grace of the Sunday Times Rich List rather than Treasury data – even the evidence of the distribution of wealth has been privatised. 
No doubt Osborne will never dare use his infamous phrase again “We’re all in it together”. If it was ever true, it was only till the rich wanted out, and as we now see in the run-up to this budget, that was almost immediately as soon as it had the slightest adverse impact on themselves. 
To give a tax break to people on more than £150,000 a year when the rest of the population, and above all the bottom half, are on the rack for a decade of austerity takes some doing. It shows more acidly than anything else could the sheer psychopathic mania of the ruling Tory elite for relentlessly squeezing the mass of the people in order to consolidate the power and wealth of a miniscule set of the ultra-rich. 