Will I join in with this thread, or won’t I? It seems that some are already getting pretty hot under the collar so anything I have to say will probably only stoke the fires. Considering that the world debt at £114 trillion is more than the entire GDP of all nations added together, It is very likely that we are about to tip into another deep recession. Debt is given life by printed money and assumed, often inflated, ideas of the worth of shares. It is just one of the unacceptable practices of capitalism that most takeovers are funded by debt repaid by hiving off assets making only a few chancers rich whilst loading the company taken over with impossible repayments and often collapse. As an example, I would cite the dire position of elderly care providers in the UK where financiers have taken over the care homes with borrowed money, sold off the properties to line their pockets leaving the care provider to push up prices to pay off the debt that has been loaded onto their backs. Is this an acceptable face of capitalism? I think not.
However, I see no merit in printing money in an attempt to fill the insatiable black hole of nationalisation. I can see why anyone born since Thatcher might consider the idea attractive, but memories must be short in our generation to discount the awful shortcomings of nationalised industries in the 6th and 7th decades of the last century when waste and strikes under Labour government that led to the era of Thatcherism. BMC/British Leyland, their tea break strikes and rubbish cars, British Road Services that to keep drivers employed were not allowed to pick up return loads, British Coal that struggled on pumping cash into and an old-fashioned industry dying on its feet, British Rail with late, filthy old trains and constant strikes over rest days. I could go on and on and on, but you will be getting bored by now. We have two generations now that never heard of the “English disease” that pervaded the mid-20th century and fail to see the dangers of its return.
To consider that we can fund nationalised industries on assets taken from the rich are short sighted because most of those assets are already mostly funded by debt, but to continue funding private debt by simply adding to the pile of printed money and inflated share values is equally myopic. When I left school, I could look forward to a job for life like my dad and grandad before me (hopefully not punctuated by two world wars like theirs), but in fact I have had to come to terms with change and have now lost count of the number of companies who have employed me over the years. This does not faze the modern workforce who expect job and career changes at regular intervals as a normal state of a working life and are mentally equipped for it. My point? Times change and social and political outlooks must change with them. Unfortunately, this is not the case with both left and right remaining glued do outdated ideologies.
Both sides must change. Surely both political and social attitudes towards the status quo must be challenged, but based on a clear knowledge of the past, not rose-tinted vision of class jealousy that is currently holding us back. Takeovers by spurious financial instruments must be stopped and overcome with real value by encouraging genuine entrepreneurs and inventors whilst social attitudes must be steered away from a free ride. Our political organisations and attitudes also need to be reorganised, along with the disestablishment of reliance on an unelected upper house and commitment to a parliamentary democracy that fails to support the will of the majority, not just on Brexit, but in so many other ways.
There, I said I was doubtful over whether I should join this thread and by saying that I both believe and disbelieve you all at the same time, I guess I have done my best , at length, to insult everyone at the same time, (a rare feat, I am sure you will agree), I could meander on, but I will stop and get prepared for my cruise in the Med.