I think I better flag this excellent Guardian piece up today. By Aditya Chakrabortty, it explains that tory ‘austerity’ is essentially about flogging off everything the public owns. The tories want to put everything into private hands: every school, swimming pool and post office. Chakrabortty writes ”Privatisation is the multibillion pound centrepiece of Osborne’s austerity – yet it rarely gets a mention from either politicians or press.”

[quote=”Chakraborly”]Austerity is far bigger than that: it is a project irreversibly to transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest. It’s doing the job very nicely: while the typical British worker is still earning less after inflation than he or she was before the banking crash, the number of UK-based billionaires has nearly quadrupled since 2009. Even while he slashes benefits, Osborne is deep into a programme to hand over much of what is still owned by the British public to the wealthiest.[/quote]

Thus, far from being an economic necessity, austerity is entirely ideologically driven. These people believe poor people deserve to be poor, and that rich people have a natural right to lord it over everyone else. Thus government should do nothing to level the playing field, but instead slash high-rate tax and reduce the welfare state. It’s a sickeningly selfish worldview based on greed and arrogance. In public hands, things are run for the good of all; in private hands, things are run for profit. They say, of course, competition pushes up standards, but that is bull: competition means you cut corners to minimize costs. Publicly owned assets can be centrally, democratically planned with some kind of strategy in mind, whereas in private hands the only motive is profit. The result is everything gets worse, and we all suffer while those who own the assets get richer.