Paul Johnson (2023) Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?

Politics in about power. Economics is about money. As Bill Clinton said in 1992/93: ‘It’s about the economy, stupid!’ Politics and money are indivisible. The cover has a picture of a top hat with a rabbit in it. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Get it?

Our knowledge of our world is limited. Economics offers the illusion that we’re in control and smarter than we are. As Douglas Adams puts it: ‘The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90  million miles away, and think this is to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.’

Money is the way we measure the world and our place in it. But money, like speed, is relative. We think in terms of rich and poor. The poor stay mainly in lane. In the same old categories of the working class. But when we talk about the rich we need to add adjectives and create neologisms. Super-rich. Millionaires. Billionaires. The 1% of 1%. Trillionaires.

Labour leader Keir Stammer locked into the idea that there was a £22 billion black hole left by the Tory Part for his party to deal with. Small change if we look at one day.

  Wealth increases from 5 November to 6 November 2024

1. Elon Musk $290bn (+10.1%)

2. Jeff Bezos $228.3bn (+3.2%)

3. Mark Zuckerberg $202.5bn (0%)

4. Larry Ellison $193.5bn (+5.4%)

5. Bernard Arnault $173.2bn (-1.6%)

6. Bill Gates $159.5bn (+1.2%)

What is this wealth, this monetary gain anchored to? In Marxist terms it’s anchored to the means of production. Exploitation of the working class. For Marx and Engels this is a process in which economic relationships play out. Culture is dependent on the economic structure. At its most crass, this is shown by the richest man in the world handing out $1 million a day in swing states in the US to vote—with a nod and a wink, the Elon Musk was backing the moron’s moron Trump—and that his victory would lead to bigger and wider economic gains. Jeff Bezos of Amazon wealth but also owner of the Washington Post was able to block his newspaper and his staff from endorsing Kamala Harris.

 Privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts paid for by shrinking the state, curbs on the power of trade unions, the dismantling of capital controls. They’re all in Paul Johnston’s score card below. He awards the incoming Labour Government a B- for its budget.

The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The Tory Party in time-honoured fashion took money from the poor and gave it to the rich, with the message it would filter down, and when it didn’t, they blamed immigrants. Their economic experiment proved disastrous for the working class. This can be measured both by relative health, education and age at death.

Generally, it can also be measured by what in economics is termed ‘externalities’, not on the balance sheet, such as pollution.

Nobody pays for it and it seems normalised as The Great Stink of 1858 in London. An outbreak of cholera added to the death toll.

The Great Stink of Global Warming is highlighted in Johnston’s book. He writes in apocalyptic terms. If we go back to an earlier age, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, on another, lesser catastrophe—if such a thing exists—nails it for what short-term greed, asset-stripping and creating waste-lands with pollution does not only for mankind, but all other species.

 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed but at its end lies disaster. The other fork in the road—the one “less travelled” by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.’

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