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Showing posts from October, 2010

Good news travels fast. But it doesn't always take up residence.

According to the latest news reports, Thatcherism isn’t dead. It’s propped up somewhere in a London hospital bed, while a crash team – consisting of Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Cable – is desperately trying to revive the patient. Glancing at the medical records, we can see an admission date of 1990, coinciding with what was presumed to be a fatal injury in the poll tax riots. Comatose for two decades, the zombie is about to get up and walk again. Call Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Ok, maybe I’m a little cynical, but it does seem to me that we’re on the brink of another right-wing ideological experiment and the deficit problem is just handy cover for the dismantling of the welfare state. Back at the end of the 1970s, George Bush Senior famously accused Ronald Reagan of pursuing ‘voodoo’ economics. There’s a fair bit of hooey about the current ConDem administration too. They have a near mystical belief in the ability of the private sector to generate jobs to replace those