MELTDOWN BRITAIN: DEBTS ALL FOLKS...

It’s the elephant in the room as we lurch towards another election - IMF-style austerity cuts in the UK. In order to bail the banks out of their self-induced crisis, the UK government directly spent £50bn from tax revenue income in 2008, not to mention the hundreds of billions of pounds of support committed since to prop up the whole sorry system. 

Not that any of these selfless acts of charity stopped bank bosses handing out giant bonuses to themselves last year of course - a whacking £6bn in total - with the wholly taxpayer-owned RBS handing out £1bn in ‘reward’ bonuses.

This huge increase in government spending has led to the ballooning of the national debt to £900 billion. The majority of the increase went to staving off financial Armageddon. This means that 10% of all taxation will go just to financing the national debt.

International credit agencies like Standard & Poors are warning that the UK’s triple-A credit rating is under review (i.e. the perceived likelihood of the UK being able to repay its debts). If they do downgrade the credit rating it’s likely to trigger a capital flight from the UK the likes of which haven’t been seen since ‘76 when Denis Healey called in the IMF.

After the election, whichever bunch of clowns in suits have been elected, we’re gonna find out who really runs the country. As the Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese are finding out - the shadowy forces of international capitalism can impose ruthless solutions on economies - always with the result that public services are slashed and money is channelled upwards.

All three main parties are promising big restructuring after the election - meaning big cuts in public services. The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, whose widely accepted number-crunching usually forms the basis of government policy and opposition attack alike, this week said that all three of the main parties’ manifestos had failed to account for any more than a tiny fraction of the actual level of cuts needed.

And of course those cuts aren’t going to fall on the necks of those whose profiteering caused the crisis in the first place (or those still making a mint). Nope, it’s front-line services and welfare that are gonna get the axe. Will this be the trigger to get the hitherto apathetic British public out onto the streets? …here’s hoping.

To paraphrase the ancient anarchist saying- “It doesn’t matter who you vote for...a bunch of bankers are gonna get in.”