Time to admit budget hits the poor the hardest?

Channel 4's Faisal Islam's blog on economics:
Time to admit budget hits the poor the hardest?

Yeah - I left a comment. I'm posting that full comment here - because 1. there's no guarantee it'll get posted. 2. I ran out of words.
I always get annoyed when I hear people talk of the mess Blair/Brown got the economy into - because it blatantly flies in the face of the facts that New Labour were only continuing down the path set out by Thatcher and Major before them, one of privatisation, and various part-state part-privation schemes- of the ever increasing deregulation of the banks & financial sector, the encouragement of unfettered globalisation, allowing uncontrolled immigration of European workers and introducing pointless 'competition' into the public sector (hospital against hospital, school against school etc.) We're now reaping the results of all these misguided ideas - and yet the only way forward seems to be to make the poorest of our society suffer even more deprivations - so we can eventually, hopefully crawl back up onto the very same path that caused so much trouble in the first place...

We're suffering from a severe lack of real political vision and ideas in this country (actually there only seems to ever be one idea – 'what are the Americans doing? Oh – let's do that then.') But then we've now governed by a PM whose only real job was in PR (and to think how New Labour was lambasted over it's over-reliance on spin-doctors. Now we have a spin doctor for PM) a Chancellor who knows more about English literature than he does about economics and a whole Lib-Dem party that are acting like deer-in-headlights – still so incredulous at their luck that they're on the other side of the house for the first time in decades that all they can currently do is mouth apologises for the Tory cuts - having totally abandoned absolutely everything they were supposed to stand for in their election manifesto.

I could add that -apparently the only alternative to this is a couple of brothers - neither of which have had any 'real' jobs outside of politics...

This worries me a lot - because we now have an entrenched bunch of career politicians - people who will sing any tune they are told to by anyone who waves a hefty party donation their way...

This isn't what democracy is supposed to be about. Is it?

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