The gluttony of the financial cabal is at the root of the UK’s economic crisis

The crisis sweeping the UK has its roots in the unrepressed gluttony of the monetarist class. The preposterously freakish and totally inadequate duo Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are the bought and paid for representatives of this cabal. However the process has deeper roots in the eruption of parasitic finance capitalism after the crash of 2008.

The quantitative wasing which was brought in after the 08 crash required trillions of pounds to be printed then given to banks. Banks were supposed to lend this to companies to get manufacturing restarted. Instead companies engaged in buying back and artificially inflating their own stock. This led to a bubble which in turn led to record profits but misery for everyone else as living standards and wages dropped exponentially.

Now rampant inflation is threatening to destroy the whole temple like Samson. The propaganda by the elites is that wages are responsible. However, as wages haves stagnated and collapsed for over a decade and a half this is twaddle. Corporate profits are driving inflation.

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Central banks around the world think that inflation can be brought under control the same was it was by Paul Volcker in the 1980s. This was to cause a recession by raising interest rates. This will further crush living standards by driving up costs and smashing worker demands.

The Tories are turning into a far-right fascist party. However the Labour Party wishes to maintain the fiction the Tories are “moderate”. All to preserve them as an instrument of class rule. Therefore Keir Starmer and his red Tories play down or even ignore the far-right elements that have taken over the Tories. This is because Starmer (like the Tories) answers to the same financial mafia.

Scotland is going to be trapped in this system for the foreseeable future. There is no mechanism for route for achieving independence that would not involve a head on clash with the Westminster criminal cabal.

The unimaginative managerial class that dominates the higher echelons of the independence movement has shown no inkling for having this fight. Instead preferring empty rhetoric and verbose proclamations.

Alan Hinnrichs

Dundee

I’M a great believer that you can tell a lot about a person not just from what they say and are enthusiastically for or against, but about what they remain silent about. On that basis, after listening to all of Keir Starmer’s speech at the Labour Party conference, it was very enlightening what he omitted to say.

It was a big fat zilch about the minimum wage; state benefits; public sector pay; cooncil hooses; homelessness; offering a better more constructive relationship with the Scottish Government; disability; mental health; racism, apart from mentioning antisemitism; Islamophobia, the Windrush scandal; the Rwanda policy; no criticism of the Tory Government’s attitude and callous treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers; LGBTQ, misogyny and how unsafe many streets are throughout the UK for women to walk alone in due to some predatory men.

Given many of these topics Keir steered clear of, I can just envisage his advisers saying to him during his speech preparation. “Remember Keir, we are trying to win back as many Brexit voters, those that hate immigrants and detest benefit scroungers, racists, selfish types and generally the anti-woke brigade as possible, so don’t say anything that might upset them!”

Keir said: “My message is this. If you’re grafting every hour to buy your own home, Labour is on your side. Labour is the party of home ownership today.”

So if you’re grafting every hour and still can’t afford to buy a home, as there was no mention of building more cooncil hooses, I guess that’s just tough then! Doesn’t sound like Labour’s on your side!

As for Scotland? There were two mentions. A brief one bragging about winning cooncils in Scotland, conveniently omitting that in many instances they “got into bed” with the Tories to shut the SNP out. I take it that is a well kept secret from Labour members in England!

Then to much applause and some cheers he said, ”We can’t work with them (the SNP). We won’t work with them. No deal under any circumstances!”

He is therefore gambling on winning an outright majority or for there to be sufficient LibDem and maybe Green MPs for a coalition government with them. He didn’t mention the LibDems once. Sounds to me like they have already agreed a deal behind closed doors.

Also, I really resent that Starmer, like Truss, displayed total contempt and lack of respect for democracy in Scotland. By dismissing the SNP he has done likewise to me and half of Scotland, yet he is quite happy to effectively suck up to the ex-UKIP/Brexit Party voters that left them when the Tories became indistinguishable from them.

As an ex-Labour voter they will never get my vote again. As someone famously said: “I would rather die in a ditch...!”

Ivor Telfer Dalgety Bay, Fife THE Scottish Government needs to get involved in the University of Dundee pension dispute.

I am a Unite member and employee of the University of Dundee currently on strike over pensions. This dispute is my first time on a picket line, and it has been an education to me. One would often assume a picket line the natural habitat of the Labour Party, and ours certainly has been.

We have had tremendous support from Labour MSPs Michael Marra, who has written letters to university management and raised our issue in Holyrood recently, and Mercedes Villalba, who visits us on the picket and is vocal in her support of our cause on social media.

We have, however, also enjoyed cross-party support at all levels of politics. Stewart Hosie for SNP has also visited and spoken at our picket line. Maggie Chapman MSP for Scottish Greens has been supporting us since day one, visiting the picket line often and constantly fighting for Dundee University’s lowest paid workers’ pensions.

I think her letter to Dundee University management was spot-on when she said their failure to acknowledge the Unite union officers, “…makes a mockery of the University’s strategy that makes claims to be ‘of Dundee and for Dundee’.”

We have truly enjoyed massive cross-party support. It has not been enough, however. I feel since Dundee University management are unwilling to discuss this issue with the unions, they are at odds with the SNP’s fair work vision. It is, therefore, essential the Scottish Government gets officially involved and insists that the University of Dundee management re-starts talks with the Union so we can get back to work.

Andrew Maclean

Dundee

THERE have been, rightly, many comments made about the Chancellor’s budget and what it means for the public, in financial terms, with commentators and critics airing their views. But none about what it shows about the direction in which the Truss Cabinet is moving.

Ministers claim that abolishing the 45% rate for high earners allows for growth and investment, as the savings “trickle down” through the economy, while ending the cap on banker’s bonuses, they believe, will stimulate the financial sector by recruiting the best, and make London a leading finance hub.

It is risible to think that those who brought about the financial crisis of 2008, then fired staff to reduce costs, and gave themselves bonuses for their “balancing the books”, should be encouraged to repeat their “success”.

What is true is that these policies will attract, not the best, but the greediest, and the only trickle will be into their offshore accounts. At the same time the Chancellor and his acolytes have not said one word about trying to improve any industry other that the financial sector, as if that were the only one that mattered to people outside of London and the south-east.

But more worryingly, several ministers have made comments that indicate that the current cabinet is intent on a reform of society on a grand scale.

The Secretary to the Treasury, Chris Philp, said on Times Radio last week, that those who opposed the budget were showing “the politics of envy”. This from the author of Work For The Dole (Taxpayers Alliance, September 2013), advocating “mandatory community work in return for benefits”, shows the desire of the current incumbents at Westminster to turn the clock back to the poor relief system of two centuries ago. would have been unthinkable Therese Coffey, the Minister of Health, has refused to publish the white paper on health inequality, promised by Boris Johnson and now overdue. Leaks suggest that the document is highly critical of government policy and seeks wide reform. Is this to be the norm: if it is bad news, don’t publish it, what the public doesn’t know cannot harm the government.

Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, the former Attorney General, wants to bin the European Commission of Human Rights, in order to “free” the UK from “outside interference” in legal matters. That a senior legal officer should propose ignoring a commission set up to protect the rights of the public in the modern world, yet that is what is being put forward as government policy. One can only suppose that the intention is to allow the deportation of asylum seekers, and to restrict the rights of citizens of this country.

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Even today, Friday September 30, after a week of ministers and Truss supporters telling the media that all is going to be well, and reminding us that the government helped during the pandemic and intervened in the fuel crisis (not to mention “delivering Brexit”), and people should just be patient and trust Truss to put the world to rights, we get yet another leak that the PM and Chancellor want to reduce benefits by tying them to earnings rather that to inflation. This is to reduce government expenditure – presumably to compensate for the cost of tax cuts for the rich.

During her election presentation to the Conservative Party, she made a comment about the French President in an appeal to the xenophobic wing of the party, and clearly this is still her audience. Such narrow, self-interested and politically motivated policies have not been seen since the 1930s, and even then, not in the UK.

The writing is on the wall, if only the public would take the time to read what it says.

T J Dowds

Cumbernauld

MAY I suggest that the Chancellor knew exactly what he was doing. Crash the pound, buy at the bottom, wait for a recovery and smile. Standard “shorting”, well understood by the money boys.

Yet in the outside world plumes of methane are being released from the pipeline damage in the Baltic. At the same time bubbles of the gas are appearing from the melting tundra in Canada. As methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in accelerating global warming, when will Tory politicians show the intelligence to concentrate on our number one threat rather than lining the pockets of the already wealthy?

Iain R Thomson

Strathglass