The only party with a fully costed manifesto backed by hundreds of economists last election was Labour.
The Tories, who were claiming we had to tighten our belts, shockingly immediately pulled £1Bn out of nowhere to pay off the DUP MPs to give the Tories power. They tell us we can't spend a couple hundred million more on our NHS to save lives and get people back contributing into our economy quicker, but they can pull it out their asses whenever they might lose power?
The idea that a countries economics is as simple as book balancing is a complete myth, no modern economist argues austerity is a way out of economic hardship, all modern examples from other countries shows you need initial investment in services before people can start to contribute to the economy. Dead, homeless, or incarcerated people can't contribute to the economy, we can't solve crime, poverty or sickness while cutting away all the police, social services and NHS staff.
All the things costing our country the most right now including crime rates and skyrocketing NHS costs can be directly linked to the consequences of austerity, of course these things still cost us money before but the complications of these issues are far beyond what they were 10 years ago.
I'm fortunate enough to have close links to a country that follows exactly the opposite line of thinking to the UK over the last decade, a country that embraces democratic socialism with open arms. This is a country that had the strongest growth in the EU through the financial crisis, and has the strongest and fastest growing technology and industrial sectors in the EU, and they're set to have the fastest growing full economy of any EU nation this year. I don't need to guess at which system works better, I've lived in both.
Worth noting, over this time period in which Malta has had an amazing economic transformation, they also were taking in more refugees than any other EU nation by a significant margin, often more than 100 times more than other EU nations around the start of the Arab spring, a nation with a population roughly the size of Leicester. Did it destroy their amazing state funded healthcare system? Or the robust welfare system? Did these refugees milk the public services? No, they continued with the jobs they would have if their country wasn't bombed to sh*t, and contributed to the local economy.
This British fetish for right wing economics is borne entirely out of the idea that everyone just wants to do each other over and will screw each other for whatever they can get. Many British people probably would and do. But most humans are not like this, the idea that selfishness & greed are inevitabilities of human nature is true, but the idea that they're widespread problems with most of the nation and that we should build our economy around it (IE the basis for libertarian capitalism) is something that I think says more about the minds of the proponents of these systems than the minds of most people.
