True Blue Never Fails

At last the Tories have come out of their policy closet and given some detail on what they actually plan to do after the next election. And we see that they are the same old party. Their response to a recession is to cut public spending and pick on the vulnerable. Cuts in the health budget and tax breaks for business: business as usual for the true blues.

The slogan for the first day of 'business' was peculiarly misplaced: getting Britain working. It is hard to see how forcing the sick and disabled from one form of social security benefit to another is going to create the millions of jobs that our economy is short of, according to the conventional economic paradigm, based as it is on wage slavery. Any attempt to resort to the traditional pasttime of threatening the marginal with starvation is more likely to get Britain robbing.

Why is it that those on the right are so desperate to force others into unpleasant, poorly paid jobs, that generate little of value and a great deal of carbon dioxide emissions? Could it be that they detest their own jobs and feel others should suffer alike? Light greens are much more likely to offer to share some of their work through reducing work hours, or their income through a citizens' income scheme. Darker greens would argue for freeing access to resources - especially land - so that people can provide for their own needs outside the market system.

And what of the Tories' promise to be the 'new green'? This fake and shallow veneer has rapidly peeled away. 'The environment' will barely feature at this week's conference as the planet's fair-weather friends revert to type and blow on the dog-whistle of oppressive Victorian policies that works so well within their electoral niche.

As Colin Hines argued back in the spring, within the conventional paradigm the obvious answer to the two-sided crisis of environment and economy is to send the quantitative easing money in the direction of real green jobs, with real green consequences: retrofitting Britains' tragically leaky housing stock would be a good place to start.

It's hard to know whether the reason this will not happen is that Boy George can't work out the economics - or whether he just can't resist his in-built propensity to beat up on the working people of this country. Or perhaps I should say the people who would be working if the money that might have enabled this had not all been spent on those who live from rents rather than wages. Tweet