Steven Dando

Graphic designer, film/music/art obsessive who sometimes
moans about political issues. Views my own. 🇧🇷 🇷🇸 🇬🇧

[Jon Wiltshire @JonWiltshire_]

This latest article from Thomas Pikkety, the renowned French economist and leading authority on wealth inequality, should be essential reading here in the UK.

His argument is simple.

France has never been wealthier. Yet education funding per student has fallen by 20% since 2017, public services are struggling, and inequality is deeply embedded in the system.

Sound familiar?

The problem isn't that our countries have run out of wealth. It's how that wealth is distributed, who controls it, and the political choices made to protect it.

For decades, we've been told that austerity, declining public services and falling living standards are unavoidable consequences of economic crises, yet those same decades have seen extraordinary concentrations of private wealth.

Socialise the costs. Privatise the gains.

This is the reality we all need to wake up to.

These aren't inevitable economic outcomes. They're the consequences of political choices, made over time, that have prioritised the accumulation of private wealth over the needs of society.

And as public anger grows, we're seeing a deeply concerning response: The rise of the far right, directing that anger towards immigrants, disabled people, those claiming welfare and other vulnerable groups, rather than towards the economic structures responsible for the inequalities people are rightly furious about.

As @NaomiAKlein describes fascism, "it's capitalism's most ferocious threat response. A way of directing public anger downwards at the vulnerable, rather than upwards at the system."

Fascism doesn't challenge the status quo. It protects it by giving people someone else to blame.

The fundamental question isn't whether our societies can afford something better. It's why, when we've never been wealthier, we're repeatedly told we must accept less.

We need to fundamentally rethink an economy built around extraction, exploitation and wealth concentration, and start building one that delivers equitable, sustainable prosperity for everyone.

And with the UK Budget next week, this should be a serious warning to @UKLabour.

If the Budget fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality, and instead offers another round of "difficult decisions" that protect concentrated wealth while asking ordinary people to shoulder the burden, then @andyburnham really hasn't understood what's happening across Europe.

What's unfolding in France isn't an isolated protest. It's a warning of what happens when people stop accepting that a society growing ever wealthier somehow can't afford to give them a better life.

This isn't something politicians can keep kicking down the road.

The warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether those in power are prepared to confront the causes, or continue defending the very system that's driving the anger.

@ZackPolanski @jeremycorbyn @KemiBadenoch @Nigel_Farage

[Nick Young @nickofnz]

It's become painfully clear that structuring our whole society around maximising profit instead of the wellbeing of people and planet was a REALLY terrible idea.

[Nik Boyle @NikBoyle]

This absolutely wins hands down

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

The irony of Laura Kuenssberg presenting cheap flights, mobile phones and online shopping as some kind of fair exchange for forty years of neoliberalism, privatisation and globalisation is hard to miss.

Britain didn’t go wrong because we lacked mobile phones and online shopping. We went wrong because we sold the country off.

I’ll call out Burnham as quickly as any other politician when he deserves it. But on this, he’s right: Britain took a wrecking ball to itself in the 1980s. Power was centralised, industry hollowed out, public assets sold off and whole communities were left carrying the bill for decades.

He could have added that the same economic model marched straight through the Blair years and every government that followed. That would have been the full truth.

Instead Kuenssberg reaches for the establishment’s oldest response to decline: shut up and eat your gruel, you don’t know how lucky you are.

“But we got cheap flights, mobile phones, home working and online shopping.”

That is a spectacularly thin defence of forty years of economic vandalism. A cheaper holiday and next-day delivery are no compensation for selling off council housing, privatising the utilities, closing industry and handing essential infrastructure to shareholders.

And those mobile phones rather prove the point. Britain consumes them, but doesn't make them.

The model became brutally simple: shift manufacturing to Asia and India where production is cheaper, import the finished goods, and let retailers squeeze the maximum margin from the difference. We kept the shopping. We exported the factories, the apprenticeships, the skilled jobs and much of the productive wealth that went with them.

The bitter irony is that British science helped lay the foundations of the communications revolution, yet Britain surrendered much of the productive capacity that could have turned innovation into skilled employment, exports and national wealth. We became very good at buying what other countries make.

Cheap flights weren’t invented by Thatcherism either. Freddie Laker was flying passengers cheaply across the Atlantic in the 1970s. And online shopping may be convenient, but convenience does not replace the wages, shops and local economies lost when high streets are hollowed out.

A mobile phone is a consumer product. A council house is security. Cheap flights are convenient. Publicly owned energy is economic power. Online shopping saves an afternoon. Ownership decides who receives the wealth for generations.

Those things are not remotely equivalent.

Meanwhile, we sold off the family silver, squandered the great windfall of North Sea oil and gas, and built an economy of soaring rents, grotesque inequality and household bills that would once have caused a political revolt.

Selling off the country’s assets and running essential services for private profit was never a recipe for making the majority richer.

Britain remains one of the richest countries on Earth. So if that wealth isn’t showing up in secure homes, decent wages, affordable energy, functioning public services and a better life for the working class, where exactly is it going?

Someone is taking the cream. Everyone else gets the gruel, the bill, and then a lecture about living within their means.

We know the disease because we live with the symptoms every day.

The question Burnham now has to answer is the only one that matters: where is the cure? Where is the vision to rebuild public ownership, council housing, secure work and an economy that serves the country rather than strips it for parts?

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@Telegraph If you still reading the Telegraph, probably not

[Colin the Dachshund @DachshundColin]

Lord, give me a sign.

The sign:

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@LoveInner Great choices. The Ludwig recording is sublime. Have you heard the live Janet Baker version with Kubelik. That's my personal favourite.

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@RobBfromDerby They might be Titans

[Colin the Dachshund @DachshundColin]

"Of course the sharks are real, and we should just learn to enjoy swimming with them."

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@SimonForrest11 Should we not include the channel Islands? Might even up a bit.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Remember to keep using plastic straws.

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@LoveInner Looking forward to seeing your top 50👍

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@IMcginness93242 "Say hello to the new boss. Same as the old boss. " No wonder he didn't rustle any feathers amongst the plp.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Remember to keep using biodegradable straws.

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@ToryFibs

[Steven Dando @StevenDando]

@BernardThoma_ Queen Jane Approximately has always been one of favourites. Hopefully not too obvious or pretentious

[Roy Andrew @AndrewRoy70]

#gmb this morning . Four incredibly wealthy women casually chatting away at how best to cut benefits for people who have next to nothing.
What a country eh

[Cold War Steve @coldwarsteve]

My first in a series of World Cup collages in today’s @guardian 👇👇
https://t.co/dSGwut8lqG