Something woke me up from relaxed to fuming. It started when the headline ‘Austerity to blame for 130,000 ‘preventable’ UK deaths‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind-130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report) was given.
And it is all from the IPPR think-tank. This was nice because this gives us a target to look at. The first thing to realise is that Austerity is a tool to get out of debt, from the 90’s onward, the UK amassed a debt that is now approaching £2,000 billion, the debt is now getting to multiple trillions and a democracy that is at the mercy of banks and corporations is not a democracy at all, it is not even a monarchy, it becomes a feudal stage. Like the US, the UK let slip their tax laws and was a bitch of the EU when tax laws were pushed that gave freedom to really large companies to end up paying a mere 1% or less (the FAANG group being a very nice example).
So whilst the penny is out there, remember that the British people as a voter should have voted down excessive spending, but that was never done and now two decades of austerity will follow. The British children get to pay for what their parents spend, or used. In addition, the IPPR joke gets to be a little larger with ‘Two decades of public health improvements have stalled‘, Lets go back 8-10 years when we learned that the Labour government launched an IT improvement that never worked. It comes down that the NHS ended up spending £11.2 billion on a computer system that never worked. It is a collection of stupid people, short sighted demands and lack of comprehension that pushed for a system that never came. So where will the NHS get these funds to fund health improvements? Well they spend it on a computer system that never worked. I wonder if that is in the think tank research (me thinks it is not).
So when we are confronted with “An estimated two in five (44%) of health visitors reported caseloads in excess of 400 children, well above the recommended level of 250 per visitor needed to deliver a safe service.” The report recommends another 5,100 training places for health visitors. In a statement, the Local Government Association said the government urgently needed to reverse the £700m reduction in public health funding since 2015 and plug a £3.6bn gap in funding for adult social care by 2025“, a finding that is most likely correct and on the money is on the money for funds that the UK does not have. As the UK government is in the red to the degree of two thousand billion pounds, it needs to cut costs or increase corporate taxation to a degree that is acceptable, until the debts go down we would all have to make do with what is left until there is more. So when I see: ‘The IPPR calls‘, in addition to ‘radical new prevention strategy‘, I say, let’s call a spade a spade and not give it the illustrious stage of calling it a money scoop, because there is no money. In addition, the stage of ‘radical new prevention strategy‘ tends to refer to untested actions that have not been proven to be successful and we have had more than enough of those.
So when I start looking at the IPPR I find a few interesting parts. First, their HQ address is: 14 Buckingham Street, WC2N 6DF, not the address of the charity, the address of their headquarters. Now apart from it being right in front of the Victoria Embankment gardens, a place where real estate that is so expensive, I get to wonder how a charity has any money left. Its Director Tom Kibasi also draws flak from others; one Editor in Chief was able to give us all: “Tom Kibasi is at one or other of the leftish think tanks and therefore, by definition, doesn’t know his economic arse from his elbow. This coming into stark relief when he starts to talk about the effects of Brexit. For he’s claiming that the European Union will, through general nefarity, manage to steal away all Britain’s industry. Without realising that they’ve simply not got the ability to do so“, as I myself have admitted to have no economy degree at all (more than once), I feel slightly too short on economic qualifications to counter one side or the other, but the article (at https://continentaltelegraph.com/brexit/its-a-pity-tom-kibasi-doesnt-know-anything-about-the-economics-of-brexit/) shows a few sides to consider. Yet I feel that the editor giving us: “Getting the basics of the balance of payments wrong is embarrassing for anyone purporting to tell us about economics. We can’t have a balance of payments crisis. It’s simply not possible” a larger consideration to address and what I saw and he might have seen is the danger behind the quote: “the UK is heavily reliant on foreign investment – the “kindness of strangers” – which would likely collapse“, this is only half a truth, what is set through “giving sufficient time for firms like Airbus, Nissan or AstraZeneca to relocate production” is a larger danger. You see these companies have been hiding the ‘discounted taxation or we leave’ card over our head for the longest of times. The car industry left Australia because there were cheaper deals to be found elsewhere, in that time Australia basically legalised slave labour, what a rush!
Yes, these people can relocate, yet to players like AstraZeneca we can impose a no trade deal, we give their competitors (like India) the option to giving generic medication. Let us push to pharmacy button who claims ‘It is all the same sir, it is just cheaper‘, and see how that goes. As I see it, when Astra Zeneca has to report a lost consumer base of 68 million, the game changes for them by a lot, will it not?
The issue with IPPR is larger, it is seen in their own funding, those who fund over £50,000 (at https://www.ippr.org/about/how-we-are-funded). Do you not think that they have their own agenda? Stephen Peel, a former senior partner at the global private equity firm TPG CapitaLand private equity investor? Some might call him a philanthropist, but you have to spend money to make money is merely one example. The IPPR is not evil, they are political presenters, they are politically left inclined, optionally far left and they want to stage the labour needs to end austerity, but that government spend so much we are all still paying the bills. But I will make a counter offer to Tom Kibasi:
Any action regarding ending austerity requires a balanced budget to be presented on time, any government that does not achieve that is liable for prosecution and prison sentence for no less than 3 years and all their assets are to be auctioned to recover losses. In addition, that party is not eligible to sit in office until the agreement ends (after the completion of the election of 2097), it is time to deal the banks the chains that they are putting around the necks of governments and people.
I agree that my solution is Draconian, but people like Tom Kibasi aren’t leaving us any options are they?
Do they have a case? Well, yes they do to some degree, there is truth in the matter, there is no denying that, merely the stage where the ‘presenter’ has a case of the denials when it comes to fact that the children (parliament) used mommy’s credit card (HRH Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor) to an unacceptable degree is a fact the UK faces, there is a cost of doing business and a consequence to excessive overspending, the mere issue that most players refuse to look into that direction is additional cause for concern. The fact that they still refuse to look there is a danger as they will do this again and after an £11.2 billion spending spree on an IT system that never worked is too large a danger to allow for. The fact that the IPPR found it not to be important to look at these budget cuts (which regarding their paper) might be relevant, but in light of their conclusion the so called: “if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts” was seemingly not done. The actual need for austerity in all this was utterly ignored, how does that make for a functional think tank? Should the board not be observed from all angles? And if that was not the goal for whoever requested that study? What this study conceived by Director Tom Kibasi? He just woke up and said: ‘Let us look at this issue‘, or did he get a call from someone who told him to look into that matter, as exposure would be profitable for those who need these results in the open? The stage that this part of the Think Tank occupies is (at present) utterly in the dark raises other questions too, do they not?
When someone uses a charity to expose the need to spend money, someone is making money in the process; the human condition has shown that to be a truth for the longest of times.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 