William Patterson founded the bank of England in the reign of king William III (him of Orange). A central Bank enables certain financial mechanisms, economists generally agree that having one is a mighty good thang..

Nige, the son of a stock trader, educated at a private school, and himself previously a broker in financial markets, poses as a man of the people. His rhetoric appears people-centric, he appeals to ordinary folks because they come to believe that he has their best interests at heart. This is ever the tactic of the populist, but nothing about his position, or him, in my humble opinion, could be further from the truth.

Nige is an ultra-capitalist neo-liberal with a far right agenda he would like to bring to Britain. Neo-Liberalism is the politics of unrestrained financial meddling, one of the goals being the removal of all previously enacted restraints in law that prevent those actors in the financial system, them like Nige, from being able to treat public/state funds as their own private set of chips to be used on the casino table of global and national finance. In the pursuit of Nige’s goal he will speak and act as if every law he disagrees with, that protects people from his ilk, represents a barrier to human freedom, your freedom. This is a populist tactic, his suggestion being that it is government that makes law, so it is government that is restraining human freedoms, and with this rhetoric he can attempt to capture the hearts and minds of those that know little, and don’t like to think too much.

I’ll give you an example… The Glass-Steagall Act prevented bankers from using people’s deposited money to pursue risky strategies; that looks like a protection yes? It was. Clinton repealed it, this is thought by some to have allowed for the invention of complex risk management strategies that then led to the global financial crisis of the late 00s. Banks had new access to a large amount of funds and were able to make bigger profits with them, while not passing the dividends of those profits on to the persons who’s investment it was in the first place, the depositors. Banks make vast amounts of money simply by borrowing at one rate (you deposit in some form, you are lending the bank your money), and lending (your money) at a higher rate, and in some of this dealing the depositor (you) is protected from the lender (the bank) in law. Nige is one of those guys that wants to reform all of those existing relationships between people and financial institutions, to achieve this he must convince the people that the institutions are being restrained by those mean lefties in government with their outdated and unhelpful legislation. Remember to Nige, someone like Teresa May was too left leaning! And he maybe will win, he might be able to get the populous marching, pitchforks in hand towards Downing street, to call for the handcuffs to be taken off those decent and moral money farmers that want to create prosperity for all. They are our friends after all, if you believe the adverts…

Americans often lap this postulate up, and that’s likely why they’ve elected a right wing populist twice, maybe believing that lack of law allows them to protect themselves better (a liberal mentality), yet when something bad happens they seem to wonder where their government was to do something about it? Dirty water, road surfaces like ploughed fields, rusting bridges, low quality housing, industrial pollution, smog, low nutrient foodstuffs, a predatory litigious legal system, a healthcare system that excludes the poor, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world which is itself heavily skewed toward locking up ethnic minorities from poor backgrounds, etc… The US suffers very badly from the sort of Liberalism that can be described as negative only in it’s application; the freedom from rather than the freedom to, a freedom that enables no actions that you can’t afford whilst restricting barely any actions against you that those that wish to enact can afford. Liberals see the sort of socialist safety nets of the welfare state and free education or healthcare as oppressive toward freedom. and often argue against them; Winston Churchill went on a UK tour to argue against the formation of the NHS, he was a liberal.

Bottom line, Nige wants the turkeys to vote for Xmas.

The acts of parliament that restrain bankers are there to mitigate risk, the acts that restrain trade are there to protect producers, the acts that ensure safety and rights are there to prevent exploitation, the acts that come from Europe are there to protect the interests of Europe as a whole. The laws that prevent trade with some countries are partially morally founded and for the purpose of changing their behaviour. I believe Nige would do away with these laws, favouring then what makes money for those he would probably consider the right people, and likely being a right winger he truly believes in the nonsense that what benefits the producer, the merchant, the investor, is what trickles down to benefitting the consumer and the worker also. This, I trust most of you already know, is a fallacy and only works in a classroom economics lesson. In reality neo-liberalism as a political system causes rampant inequality, we know this because it is not a new idea, as the financial class has grown in political power and financial might, the inequality of Britain has grown right along side it. Not a coincidence, Thatcher’s Britain may have been richer than Wilson’s, but it was measurably less equal!

Mine is not an argument completely against capitalism, that would be stupid, and it’s not an argument against progress. Capitalism, according to Marx, has brought forth the most wondrous things from little beginnings. Mine is an argument for sensible restraints to exploitative wealth, the sort of wealth that impoverishes many to serve few, the sort that wants to be free enough to really go for the monopoly game win where everyone has to go bankrupt by just trying to survive, everyone but the winner that is. I’d like to see a world and a nation where nobody starved so that somebody could have more expensive cigars than they could ever smoke, or where rich people appreciated art rather than creating it’s false and inflated value by storing their tax allowances on a wall. A world where people like Nige and his political thugs were treated with the scrutiny, and sometimes contempt, they merit…

Paul S Wilson