Polly Toynbee claims that the Tories are destroying New Labour's achievements with regards the youth of Britain. With the
claim in the Guardian,Economically we face a neoliberal experiment threatening an era of low growth, no lessons learned from the 30s.
The only question is whether voters believe David Cameron's new year's message: "We're tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal. This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country's problems, not by ideology. When we talk of building a bigger, stronger society, we mean it." Or will they believe Ed Miliband's view that the "irresponsible pace and scale" of the cuts is a "political choice by those in power, not necessity"?
Actually, we have faced the neoliberal experiment at an accelerated pace since 1997 when New Labour came to power and based "growth" on unsustainable debt fuelled consumerism. The coalition is using the highly predictable crash of 2008 to impose a yet more extreme doctrinaire version of the same dogmas.
New Labour and those such as Toynbee are simply reacting to a government whose fanaticism follows on from New Labour but having inherited a mess. Instead of reining in the banking system and making reforms of that and profligate borrowing, the idea is to return to the 1990s through shock therapy.
Nothing has been done to remedy the underlying weakness of Britain: the decimation of the industrial manufacturing base, the guff about a "Creative Economy", the over reliance on services and being a pure consumer economy that does nothing particularly useful other than service global economic activity.
There are whole swathes of Britain where no new job creation is going to be forthcoming. Toynbee, at least, did criticise the colossal speed and scale of immigration encouraged and permitted by New Labour. But she did not see it as an inherent part of the short termist nature of that regime.
Inflating and bigging up consumerism through cheap money provided from China whilst bigging up migration to keep labour costs low in those jobs servicing the British consumer economy from within was what "New " Labour stood for. This was the meaning of a "global economy" in Britain.
It was easier to import labour from other countries and maintain some welfare for those in the UK who did not want to take the jobs that no Briton supposedly wanted to do at that price than reform the education system. To create one where vocational subjects and training predominated.
Instead, New Labour was intent on simply getting more students to "university" in third rate ex-polytechnics than training people to do valuable things such as plumbing and all those jobs now done by Polish migrants because of the delusion that doing media studies or other mickey mouse degrees was better.
The bubblegum economy has gone snap in Britain harder than elsewhere because of the structural weaknesses and deficiencies of Britain's economy as well as the absurdly huge expenditure on the armed forces and trident. All that panders to the notion of Britain spreading its values across the globe whilst it cannot even remedy its own deficiencies within.
Actually, we have faced the neoliberal experiment at an accelerated pace since 1997 when New Labour came to power and based "growth" on unsustainable debt fuelled consumerism. The coalition is using the highly predictable crash of 2008 to impose a yet more extreme doctrinaire version of the same dogmas.
New Labour and those such as Toynbee are simply reacting to a government whose fanaticism follows on from New Labour but having inherited a mess. Instead of reining in the banking system and making reforms of that and profligate borrowing, the idea is to return to the 1990s through shock therapy.
Nothing has been done to remedy the underlying weakness of Britain: the decimation of the industrial manufacturing base, the guff about a "Creative Economy", the over reliance on services and being a pure consumer economy that does nothing particularly useful other than service global economic activity.
There are whole swathes of Britain where no new job creation is going to be forthcoming. Toynbee, at least, did criticise the colossal speed and scale of immigration encouraged and permitted by New Labour. But she did not see it as an inherent part of the short termist nature of that regime.
Inflating and bigging up consumerism through cheap money provided from China whilst bigging up migration to keep labour costs low in those jobs servicing the British consumer economy from within was what "New " Labour stood for. This was the meaning of a "global economy" in Britain.
It was easier to import labour from other countries and maintain some welfare for those in the UK who did not want to take the jobs that no Briton supposedly wanted to do at that price than reform the education system. To create one where vocational subjects and training predominated.
Instead, New Labour was intent on simply getting more students to "university" in third rate ex-polytechnics than training people to do valuable things such as plumbing and all those jobs now done by Polish migrants because of the delusion that doing media studies or other mickey mouse degrees was better.
The bubblegum economy has gone snap in Britain harder than elsewhere because of the structural weaknesses and deficiencies of Britain's economy as well as the absurdly huge expenditure on the armed forces and trident. All that panders to the notion of Britain spreading its values across the globe whilst it cannot even remedy its own deficiencies within.