WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HOPE?

Ask why the people are so fed up, the twitter anti-politicians and the whole political class so hysterical and so many people prepared to buy UKIP snake oil? The answer is that they see Britain failing, an incompetent political class which feeds them lies and their living standards falling with no end to the fall in sight.

What do they want? They want hope. And they want it not at the end of a German autobahn, but now. Yet both parties offer only versions of the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has brought everything down to this mess in the first place. Their choice is between Tweedledim and Tweedle-slightly-less-dumb – each offering a diet of austerity and a greater or slightly smaller obsession with eliminating the deficit. Exactly the formula for a hung parliament and a weak grad-grinding Government 
after it.

If Labour continues down that road, after all the hard work of the policy review, it fails in its duty to its people who've been hardest hit and in its duty to a nation that needs an alternative to promises of prolonged misery. Britain deserves better than a hydra-headed deficit defeater pursuing policies which won't ever work.

To put the fiscal deficit at the centre of policy is to accept the neo-liberal economics which gave us the deficit in the first place. Deficits don't matter if the economy grows and only more borrowing and spending can get it to grow again so that more people in work pay more taxes and need less public spending.

We've created the mess by allowing the banks to create 97% of all credit and then charge us interest on it? They've shoved the money into mortgage lending to drive house prices to unsustainable levels and credit card spending to put us all in debt, but very little into investment and the productive industry which can pay the nation's way in the world. Labour's answer must be to create public credit and use it to finance social housing, public investment, infrastructure work and an industrial policy to reboot manufacturing and exports. If the private financial sector won't do it the state should and must.

Business will moan but it's failing the nation. Bankers will cry "inflation", but it's unnaturally low and we need a degree of it to lift us off the rocks. The orthodox will say it can't be done, but they'll soon be doing it in the EU and they are already in Japan. The media will protest, but they do that at everything Labour suggests. The people will see it as hope. Folk may not understand Keynes but they do want an alternative. Put the people’s credit into the people’s pockets.

Cowards may flinch while traitors and New Labour sneer. But there's nothing else to hold us back.