You can listen to the Lowdown on Apple (see below) Spotify, Amazon and every other Podcast host
The UK has been paralysed by economic failure since the great financial crisis of 2008.
Wages are stagnant, public services are terrible, and infrastructure repair and house building are national embarrassments.
How did we get here and what should be done?
I was delighted to be joined on the Lowdown by Danny Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and the only member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee to warn in 2008 that the greatest financial crisis of our lifetime would cause a recession (yes, really, no one apart from Danny was willing to stick their neck out and make this rather obvious point).
We go through the stages of stagnation
The 2008 crash and the failure of the Bank of England to act.
David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme of the 2010s, which increased poverty and demoralised the public sector without bringing an economic revival.
Brexit, which depending on who you listen to has caused between three and five percent loss of national wealth.
Liz Truss, crashing the economy for the sake of the discredited Reaganite fantasy that unfunded tax cuts for the rich will make us all wealthier.
And now, today, we have the Bank of England panicking again and holding interest rates way too high for way too long.
Please listen to the whole thing. Danny is particularly worrying when he talks about the shortage of ideas in the Labour party.
Anyone chronicling this country’s fate must look at the disproportionate and disproportionately malign influence of upper-class Tories from the elite public schools.
First they gave us Brexit, and then they handed power to Liz Truss.
To use old-fashioned language, they betrayed their country. We are not used to thinking of Tories as traitors. The traditional charge is that they are too hard-headed and mean.
But if Tories were the hard-headed pragmatists of cliche, they would never have given us Brexit.
I have done a long piece looking at the delusions and vanities that drive the upper-class right to betrayal.
Like so much else on this site it is for paying subscribers. The good news is the cost is just £1.15 a week, and there is a free trial for the faint-hearted!
Who is the author of this passage describing?
He hated the EU very deeply, he said. For a while, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime, he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing.
“The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs.”
It’s not Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, or a columnist for a Conservative paper writing circa 2015. It’s from the final scenes of John le Carré Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where Bill Haydon tells George Smiley why he betrayed England to serve the Soviet Union.
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