VIDEO: How America wrecked Britain and China’s Golden Age

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.

Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.

Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”

“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.

To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.

Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?

Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.

Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.

How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!

The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.

Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”

Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?

The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.

In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.

Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!

In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.

Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.

So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?

Nope.

Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.

Made in China 2025

Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.

In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.

We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.

Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.

Britain and the China Golden Goose

Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.

China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.

And then … and then …!

2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.

“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018

Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.

Brexit wrecks it

American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.

Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.

Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.

Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.

Clown car reverses gear

The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.

Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.

In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.

Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Britain hangs on to benefits

However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.

In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.

Superman versus Kryptonite

Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.

He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.

The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.

A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.

US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021

Eurasia land mess

A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.

The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.

With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.

In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.

Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.

Europe, your nine lives are up

The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.

Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.

France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.

NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.

It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack

About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Credit Crunch Suicide: poem about the bankers' crash by Anna Chen

Ten years of austerity since the credit crunch crisis and we're even worse off while the rich doubled their wealth since 2008

It is ten years since the bankers' crash went full blown and what have we done? Austerity, Macjobs, disabled payments cuts, a spiteful bedroom tax costing more to administer than is collected, tax cuts for the better off, women losing seven years of state pension after a lifetime of inequality, students leaving university with crippling debt the size of a mortgage, social cleansing in London through unaffordable "affordable" property prices and demolition of their communities, life expectancy slammed into reverse in the North, hate crimes on the up, the lowest interest rates for 5,000 years, quantitive easing (QE) diluting the value of our money. And the culmination of all that injustice and greed: the Grenfell Tower fire.

The Tories and their media mouthpieces tried to persuade us that Labour caused the crisis even though UK economic growth stood at two or three per cent at the time of the 2010 general election; oh for that rate today. In 2010 the Tories were elected on a raft of lies and a narrative as dissembling as the £350 billion NHS Brexit pledge emblazoned across the Leave battle-bus. Mind you, Labour allowed the Tory narrative to set like concrete, allowing incoming Chancellor George Osborne to use the crash to impose austerity, which is basically the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest.

Once in power, Prime Minister David Cameron came on like a Tony Blair mini-me and had a war with Libya in 2011, further destabilising the world. Cameron promised a bonfire of regulations to "kill off the health and safety culture for good". He also gave us the EU referendum, not because there was any widespread demand for it, but in order to quell right-wing rebellion in his own Tory ranks. Some 52% of the vote — 37% of the total electorate, a quarter of the UK population — voted to "Take back control" and promptly handed us over to global warming oil guzzlers and chlorinated chicken merchants. And his actions may very well end up bankrupting the country should the Brexit trajectory be carried through.

Here's a poem I wrote about the crash in 2008. The shock for me is that we are re-entering the same territory with a mountain of debt and market manipulation.

Credit Crunch Suicide

I could have been a banker
Sitting on a ledge
High up on a skyscraper
Coz someone clipped my hedge

I could have been in business
In the city making bids
Take a shotgun to the wife and dogs
And then I’d do the kids

But I’m just a daily worker
About to lose my home
Savings all depleted
Can’t even get a loan

The bankers got their billions
The doggy got a bone
The millions got the wankers
Whose hearts are made of stone

I can cry into me drink
I can curse the gods above
I'd like to give that banker
A bleedin' great big shove

Watch him splat upon the pavement
A human pizza pie
Coz that's where I'll be living
Until the day I die.

by Anna Chen 29 Oct 2008

General election 2015: "It pumps me up!!!" not a lot

"IT PUMPS ME UP!!!"

I KNEW David Cameron would try the Obama "anger translator" trick and screw it up. His speech today launching his small business manifesto (sic!) in London was made even more hideously embarrassing by not actually hiring in the translator. Perhaps it's an English flaw, confusing mere rich-kid petulance with the fiery passion he'd dearly love to exude but can't. And, one mo' thang, Dave, it's "you've got another THINK coming," not "another thing" (which is what I heard mumbled on Radio 4's World At One programme just now). Perhaps Dave should be given the opportunity to spend more time with his book after 7th May.

Team Cameron are making much of Dave's claim that he has plenty of other things to do with his life and that being Prime Minister doesn't mean as much to him as it does to the other party leaders in the general election. Smell the BS, taste those sour grapes and pucker up. Surely the role of PM is supposed to be the greatest honour this nation can offer short of tea and crumpets with Her Maj.

Ed is much more likeable, especially as the right's relentless Bullingdon bully-boy tactics have won him the sympathy vote with the nation's young women and given rise to the phenomenon of the Milifan. This is almost as bizarre to me as when mighty efforts were made to transform Margaret Thatcher into a sex symbol in the 1980s and overnight she was turned into Marilyn Monroe ... at least in the eyes of old colonels, Little Ingerland and Alan Clark (who perved about her ankles). I felt like the little boy who saw that not only did the King have no clothes, he was wrinkly and ponked of formaldehyde as well.

Same thing happened with Tony Blair. Was I the only person on the planet who saw a bland posh-git Nigelesque twit whose only stand-out character trait was acquired when he achieved war criminal status over Iraq?

It didn't bother me that Ed was caught inelegantly chowing down on a messy bacon sandwich, not a fraction as much as that Labour "immigration controls" mug (and I don't mean Ed Balls). Re housing — which is surely part of the Labour USP — he's tinkering at the edges, bringing in a mansion tax that catches accidentally asset-rich but income-poor Londoners; bashing the Buy To Let sector, which is a nice juicy target for skint governments, instead of tackling the root cause — NOT ENOUGH HOUSES BEING BUILT FOR THE PAST DECADES. Try that one, Ed, along with increasing decent social housing stock ... and watch those pesky BTL landlords wither away as fast as their savings in the age of deflation.

While Austerity Bastard and Austerity Lite battle it out, we almost missed the super-rich doubling their wealth in the last ten years, thanks to the main parties politely pretending it didn't happen like a fart at that tea with the Queen I was talking about.

It took the Labour Party more than a year to decide that the bedroom tax was a travesty and even longer to challenge the Tory narrative about the deficit, which has now set like concrete and for which you'd now need the equivalent of a political pneumatic drill to break through the lies accreted during the past five years. This election should have been a walk-over after the cruelty, theft and vandalism of the Tory/LibDem Coalition. Ed should heed Aditya Chakrabortty's warning highlighting parallels between Labour and Greece's Pasok party.

Who voted for the Royal Mail firesale? For tuition fees trebled, for tax breaks for the rich, the poor and disabled hounded to suicide? The explosion in food bank use? The whole IDS DWP nightmare?

On the other hand, look at the overlaps of ghastliness with the last Labour government. Who can forget the Private Finance Initiative, loving up to non-doms like Lakshmi Mittal (yes, Ed is doing something now), the near-complete collapse of house-building? Who was it who brought in tuition fees in the first place? How many in the Labour camp have financial interests in privatising the NHS (hi, Alan Milburn and Cherie Blair!). How many Labour peers voted for the NHS Privatisation Bill ... and then it turns out they have financial interests? Former Home Secretary Dr John Reed a director of G4S, Jack Straw selling himself ...

Ach! They're all awful. Having personally witnessed how the far left is just another ruling class in waiting, I'll probably vote Labour just to get rid of the Tories. It pumps me up not a lot!

David Cameron's message from the cosmos: IDS to use unemployed as sandbags

VIDEO: David Cameron's cabinet contemplating a mighty wind.

David Cameron's karma runs over his dogma in biblical fashion. Rain, floods, blizzards, storms, and a mighty wind have ravaged these isles, and vast swathes of Britain have been under water for weeks. Cutbacks and cessation of dredging under all governments in recent years have only added to the misery.

Imagine being immersed in raw sewage, not being able to use the loo, and not being dry since new year.

All we need is a plague of frogs, water-borne pestilence and war and we'll have a full set.

Aprés Cameron, le deluge.

Now that the Tory heartland has been hit with Thames waters drowning the playing fields of Eton and lapping at Windsor Castle, His Smugness has had to show his thought-free visage on the scene.

Never have we felt so relieved to have been too skint to buy our idealised riverfront home with parking for boat at the end of the lawn. If it weren't for the innocent civilians losing their homes and living (it's not all bourgeoisie doing the suffering), some might class this as divine punishment for cruelty, callousness and greed on the part of those Tory voters in the Stockbroker Belt who thought they were immune from "austerity".

In his Hunter wellies and Barbour jacket, Cameron did his damnedest to ensure that immunity continues and promised his flooded bredren that money will be no object. Yet the widespread horrors of rising poverty and homelessness elicit no such generous response.

In the Tory hierarchy of need, what's highest? Evicted due to slashed benefits or flooded out? Cameron and the devil take the hindmost.

The Tories are under pressure from their even more right-wingnuts to take the money not just from Britons in poverty but to raid the aid budget for the world's poorest to keep his voters happy. Expect an intravenous treasury fix straight into DFS and Heals to replace all those soggy sofas but heaven forfend that food and medicine should be sent abroad.

He's probably hoping we'll all forget, not only the broken promises of a greener nation, but that the Tories and UKIP voted in the European Parliament against measures to protect against flooding.

The Guardian says:

The Royal Institute of British Architects estimates that 1.5% of the UK is at risk from direct flooding from the sea and about 7% of the country is likely to flood at least once a century from rivers. It says about 1.7m homes and 130,000 commercial properties are at risk from river or coastal flooding in England alone, and the effects of flooding and managing flood risk cost the country about £2.2bn a year, compared with the less than £1bn spent on flood protection and management.

These events are also a dire warning against privatisation. Can you imagine G4S handling this emergency? Yes, it could be worse.

Will Cameron succeed in stealing even more from the poor in order to throw money at his flooded voters? Will IDS use the unemployed as sandbags?

Does this spell the end for the greediest, most shortsighted "anything for a fast buck" government we've seen since WWII? And that includes Thatcher. We can only hope so.

World War III averted: Ed Miliband finally does his job

Yesterday, Ed Miliband pulled his big-boy underpants over his trousers and rose to new adequacies by actually doing what the electorate has been yelling for loud and clear all along: NO WAR WITH SYRIA. He slew the Cameron lizards in the parliamentary vote and carved out a space for the pursuit of a peaceful solution.

There is no proof that hereditary despot Basher Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, killing hundreds of men women and lots of children. It would be suicidal (and nuts) if he did this just as inspectors arrive and Obama warms up for war. I would have to see the polaroids to believe he did it, and not the opposition fundies who'd stop at nothing to repeat NATO operations in Iraq and Libya, dislodging secular tyrants only to be replaced by mayhem with no end in sight. After all, UN reports say the Syrian rebels carried out a Sarin nerve gas attack earlier this year, only revealed at the 11th hour when we were tooling up for conflict. Even weirder that Al Qaeda nemesis Israel stepped in to do the job right this time by claiming the government carried out recent poison attack.

Let's suppose it does emerge that Cameron's "likelihood" is a dead cert and Assad did indeed do it. What good is bombing? "Hulk smash!" mode is for ten-year olds, not world leaders. Turning a disastrous situation into a calamity and piling atrocity on atrocity in a geopolitical layer cake of horrors is not the way to solve anything. How would we like it if a bigger power bombed, say, Westminster? OK, fantasies about Guy Fawkes notwithstanding, the reality would be horrific. Killing civilians and traumatising the rest is a war crime that only adds to these people's misery. There has to be another way with Russia, China and the Arab League doing something useful. There are other pressures that can be brought to bear through economic, trade and cultural means.

If we were serious about chemical warfare, we'd stop selling nerve gas components such as sodium fluoride, not only an innocent toothpaste ingredient. And how about America compensating the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who are still dying decades after the US drenched their forests with Agent Orange herbicides? Or Bhopal where Dow Chemicals refuses to clear up the mess made by Union Carbide Corp — the parent company of Union Carbide India at the time of the disaster — which Dow bought with all the benefits and none of the responsibilities? The CIA helped Saddam Hussein use mustard gas and sarin on Iranians in 1988 when he was our boy. America's depleted uranium used in the Gulf and Iraq wars is still killing but nothing is being done about it. Then there are the cluster bombs and phosphorous and the nuclear ...

The hypocrisy is amazing. This time the British public has seen through the NATO agenda of cutting a swathe through the world and reshaping it into a New World Order of their liking.

Apart from the big question — who used chemical warfare against Syrian civilians? — there are two more I'd like answered:

1) Who were the 30 Labour MPs who stayed away from last night's vote?

2) Remembering the parliamentary vote that effectively privatised the NHS, plus Halliburton and J P Morgan's profits from the Iraq war, how many of the war cheerleaders have investments in arms companies?

Ed may have fudged too many issues, but today there is palpable relief that we aren't repeating Tony Blair's war crimes. Is this is how our forebears felt after the Bay of Pigs Crisis? The world did not end. For now.

EDIT: When you play "Risk", the board game, you reach a stage where several players have a ton of armies. No-one want to take on the one with the most armies so you work round it, picking off their weaker territories and allies. Robert Fisk points out that the US's real target in the region is Iran before it stabilises under the promising new president. To do that it has to exhaust the munitions of their chief supporter — Syria. (Assad seems to be winning its fight against the rebels.) Hence the rush to war.

Basher in The Onion telling it like it is.

Not about oil, then. Transnational energy corporations represented as Saudis join Israel, France and US in Syria clusterfuck.

Even the US army "in doubt" about an attack.

An interesting gender take at Open Democracy on weaponry and patriarchy.


Ministry: New World Order

Cameron brands Jimmy Carr "immoral" over tax avoidance: who else is in the frame?

So Jimmy Carr has been exposed as a greedy hypocrite for lampooning Barclays (his own bank) for tax avoidance while taking advantage of a legal scheme that allows him to pay only one per cent tax himself. Amid the photos of his lovely £8.5m Hampstead home and his shiny Bentley (in which we all have a stake now), we might have lost sight of who it is who's looting the public purse on a grand scale. Vodafone and "Sir" Philip Green spring to mind, not forgetting David Harnett, the former head of HMRC, who allowed some flagrantly unfair deals to go through.

David Cameron certainly seems to think Carr is the worst miscreant when he labelled him "immoral", but is he the worst? Here's a graphic putting it in perspective.


Royalty sycophant Gary Barlow — who was awarded an OBE for mounting a show of staggering mediocrity for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations — may not have been one of the main players in terms of the £26m tax he avoids with Take That but he was strangely left off Cameron's Rogues Gallery of one, possibly because he is a Tory?

The Mirror reminds Cameron about some of the others who deserve a roll-call of dishonour.


While all eyes are on the showbiz star, the government sneaks in the abandonment of a promise to make their own tax affairs transparent — see what they did there? No word of closing the loopholes or clawing tax back from the richest, just a smirking pledge by Cameron to allow France's wealthy to take refuge in the UK when Hollande makes them pay a fairer rate of tax — he was elected, remember, while the Tories were not. We are recapitalising the banks, they are paying themselves bonuses out of our bail-outs, but that is not immoral. Worse, it's not illegal, either. Government's make the laws, so they could have cleared this up ages ago.

The original exposé came from the Murdoch press, so excuse me while I laugh my guts up. Carr is far from being the biggest target for our wrath. As Father Ted said holding up a tiny toy cow, "No, Dougall, this cow is small. That cow (a real one in a field) is big."

Martin Rowson on the UK riots sentencing: cartoon

Martin Rowson does it beautifully.

And John Harris sums up the hypocrisy of MPs lining up to condemn looters for stealing items such as water worth £3.50 and accepting a pair of shorts someone else had nicked (six months and five months in prison). Who could not feel distinctly ill as Labour MP Hazel Bears — who felt compelled to return £13,332 to the public purse for capital gains tax she shouldn't have had — called for harsh sentencing for looters?

Or how about this paragon of virtue?

The then shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, lately heard bemoaning an "absence of discipline in the home and in the school", agreed to pay back £7,000, spent on furniture and fittings for his house in north Kensington. They included a £331 Chinon armchair, a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of "elephant lamps" worth £134.50. Also: a £750 Loire table, a Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table that cost £238.50.

Mmm, good taste, Michael.

Even the Prime Minster David Cameron had to return £680 for home repairs he should have paid himself. Sense of entitlement? Culture of greed? How can we possibly compete with our political class?

The real damage to this country is the erosion of our democracy, its values, and its replacement by Thatcherville.

David Cameron: Common People video

This is hilarious. And how true ...

Thanks to Harry Paterson and David Harwood on Facebook.

Looters move into Downing Street: Cameron returns

So, wappnin' today?

Firstly, people accused of rioting have been rushed through the magistrates' courts which have been sitting all night to process them like sausage-meat.

How easily we're slipping into martial law with nary a by your leave.

Six months jail for electrical student Nicholas Robinson — no previous record — for stealing bottled water worth £3.50 when he was caught up in the heat of the moment. An 11-year old girl in foster care given a nine-month referral order for breaking a window. Sixteen weeks for one guy who cheeked a copper with, "I'd smash you if you took your uniform off". Not nice but I hear worse in my latex maid's outfit. Almost all of the accused kept on remand without bail. Some of the accused might have been scooped up and convicted merely because they were in the vicinity. We'll never know because ordinary standards of justice have gone to the wall as everyone's losing their heads.

These aren't the nasty hardened criminals who burnt, beat and maimed — and who will have to learn that destructive anti-social actions have consequences. These are angry children (73% of the rioters were aged between 18 and 24).

Considering the youth of Haringey have each lost an average of £75 of spending with the ending of EMA, youth clubs and outreach workers before the cuts have even begun to bite, I'd say we owe them.

No cause and effect, no understanding, just "crush, kill, destroy" bellowed by the same politicians who claimed thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands in "expenses" off the tax-payer.

And the bankers who kicked off this cycle of misery? Laughing like a drain on the economy all the way to their bonuses, I dare say.

OK, where'd I put my flaming torch and pitchfork ...? "Off with their heads ... to Wembley stadium ... we shall take them on the beaches ... stringing up's too good for them ... use the Plastic Ono bullets ... "

Um, which mob am I with, again?

Madam Miaow on Looting & the UK riots: as above, so below.

Madam Miaow's mash-up video to The Bermondsey Joyriders' "Society Is Rapidly Changing".

Peter Oborne making good sense.

David Harvey: feral capitalism hits the hight streets.

Nick Clegg — cactus killer by Harpy Marx.

Blair's support of Cameron torpedoes Labour anti-cuts fight

Just when you thought the monster was dead, he rises in the fourth reel. So the Blairites are out in force supporting Cameron's National Health Service destruction (I can't bring myself to call them "reforms", an Orwellian deformation of the English language).

First David Miliband gives us the speech-that-never-was, and suddenly they're all emerging from under their stones. Tony Blair has been a major bulwark for Cameron, who quotes the filthy-rich warmonger willy-nilly, with some in his camp, notably Education Secretary Michael Gove, outing themselves as Blairite.

The Independent's Steve Richards wrote a blistering piece yesterday, headlined, "Blair's approval keeps Cameron safe". And, indeed, it does.

Blair appears to broadly support Cameron's public service reforms, and in his memoir argued in favour of George Osborne's contentious deficit-cutting strategy. ... His former health minister Lord Warner appeared on the Today programme on Tuesday to put the case for the Coalition's original NHS changes, conveying more evangelical zeal than Andrew Lansley did when he launched his partially doomed revolution. On the World Tonight on Tuesday, there was an illuminating discussion between another former adviser to Blair, Julian Le Grand, and the former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris. Harris noted that Le Grand's arguments were so close to Lansley's he was surprised Blair's adviser did not support the original plans. Meanwhile two of Blair's former ministerial allies, Alan Milburn and John Hutton, have worked or work on specific projects for Cameron. Both have been known to tell friends: "These people are Blairites." ... When [Ed] Miliband and others argue against cutting the deficit too quickly, he and George Osborne are armed with quotes from Blair's memoir supporting them.

Alan Milburn, another former Labour health minister under Blair, has supported the hated Andrew Lansley (also with his finger in the privatisation pie, being bankrolled by a major private health company) who's been charged with ripping up the NHS. What could possibly have moved the lefty who once ran the "Haze of Dope" bookshop to switch ideologies so drastically?

Entirely unrelated, Hugh Muir writes in today's Guardian Diary:

A broadside in the Telegraph from former health secretary Alan Milburn about the coalition's apparent loss of nerve over the health reforms. Nye Bevan himself would have been perplexed, said a furious Ally. "When I introduced private sector providers, some claimed it would be the end of the health service as we had known it. In fact, they strengthened it." In time, they strengthened the Milburn bank balances too. Milburn chairs the European Advisory Committee at Bridgepoint, a private equity group that makes a pretty penny out of private healthcare. Nothing wrong with that, though the Telegraph rant might have mentioned it. Helps him see the big picture.

I never liked Ed Balls due to his pandering to the immigration scapegoat, but he is fast looking like the only Labour contender to check the pillage by Blair's acolytes. Can someone please finish off the grinning monster for good?

Cameron team wears poppies in China

Yes, that's a great idea. Wear poppies on a trade visit to China in the 150th anniversary year marking the end of the Opium Wars when Britain forced cheap Bengal opium on the Chinese people at the point of a gun.

Prime Minister David Cameron may think he is remembering the dead of World Wars One and Two, but in China the vivid symbols only serve as a reminder of Western arrogance and corruption and the Chinese who died due to the actions of a ruthless invading force. That's like a German delegation visiting Coventry and wearing doodlebug bomb badges emblazoned with "Ballroom Blitz". Is this in-yer-face callousness regarding British cruelty abroad the right way to go about touting for trade? Nah! Wouldn't think so.

I'm quoted in today's Evening Standard, responding to Cameron's breathtaking cheek in lecturing the Chinese on international responsibility. China certainly needs to clean up its act in regard to free speech and rights, and is slowly loosening up, but for us — the country that helped start the illegal Iraq war, approved of rendition and torture of its subjects — to deliver the lecture is nothing short of gobsmacking hypocrisy.

Under the Tory LibDem coalition government, which we did not vote for in our democratic elections, lives are being destroyed and a trajectory set for a return to Victorian levels of poverty. I can see a time coming when we'll envy the Chinese.

As for telling another nation to adjust its economy to help us out of a hole, have America or Britain ever done this to ease the debts of foreign countries? I thought it was all market forces. In fact, this means socialism for our rulers but dog-eat-dog capitalism for everyone else. The Chinese economy is made up of thousands of small factories with tiny profit margins making our crap for us. A revaluation of the yuan will mean whole swathes of production wiped out. If the reverse were needed, would America destroy great chunks of its industry with mass unemployment and civil unrest in order to placate another country in trouble due to a crisis that wasn't of our making? They will be making snowmen in hell before this ever happens.

[EDIT 2022: This event ended up marking the start of the Golden Era in UK China relations, brought to a close by the US and Boris Johnson. As for free speech and human rights, China and the US/UK are now travelling in opposite directions. "I can see a time coming when we'll envy the Chinese," is happening. Rising life expectancy; lowering of pollution and the world's biggest investment in fighting Climate Change; 850 million raised out of absolute poverty while US tent cites and UK food banks proliferate; the creation of a huge 550 million-strong middle-class, almost twice the size of America's population; personal safety and no gun killings; Harvard research shows over 95 per cent of China's people support the government, especially after it prevented an estimated five million deaths had China gone down the US/UK route of letting Covid rip through the population.]

David Cameron tells Pakistan to fight terrorists we created as he strikes nuclear deal

Getty Images
Prime Minister David Cameron flaunts his ignorance of history. Again. He's only been in the job for a matter of weeks and already is proving himself as gaffe-prone as BP's Tony Harwood.

He's said he would take on China in a nuclear bust-up, stated that Britain played second fiddle to the US in 1940, and now he tells Pakistan it isn't doing enough to combat terrorism:

"To be fair to the Pakistan government, they have made progress in chasing down militants and terrorists in Pakistan that threaten their own country and threaten others. But we need them to do more and we should work with them to do more because as I said yesterday, it's not acceptable to have those within Pakistan who are supporting terrorist groups that can do so much damage to their own country and to British people whether in Afghanistan or back home in Britain."

In India to sell military hardware, Cameron has insulted poor beleaguered Pakistan by tellling them to get their finger out. Considering it was the CIA who trained up Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces in the early 1980s during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and then left the region with the problem once the USSR was defeated, it's a stunning bit of hypocrisy for us to be blaming them.

What started as Taliban resistance to the US has now gone national as the Pashtun people have been radicalised by indiscriminate killings. By October 2009, the US had killed 14 Al Qaeda but 700 civilians. That is not a ratio designed to win hearts and minds.

It's us who have brought the Afghanistan war to Pakistan.

As ex-cricketer and former Indian MP Imran Khan said last year:

" ... it’s just a blatant lie. How can they say that Pakistan has to be stabilized and then Afghanistan will become [stable]. Surely, stability in Afghanistan will stabilize Pakistan. In fact, a CIA ex-station chief of Kabul, Graham Fuller, actually wrote in the International Herald Tribune that unless and until NATO leaves Afghanistan, Pakistan is going to descend into radicalization and chaos which is absolutely right, because we had no Taliban in Pakistan."

While Cameron drones on, Imran Khan has filed a petition in the Supreme Court to declare the use of drones in his home land illegal.

In his petition, Khan asked the court to declare as illegal and unconstitutional all acts that take away the fundamental rights of citizens, the provision of facilities and logistics to any foreign country, any alliance for mass destruction due to drone attacks inside Pakistani territory. Such acts should also be declared a violation of the United Nations charter, the universal declaration on human rights, international laws and international humanitarian laws. Khan said the respondents should be directed to lodge complaints against the killings of innocent Pakistanis, destruction of their properties and displacement from their homes at appropriate international forums. He also asked the court to direct the respondents to take all preventive measures against the drone attacks to protect the life, liberty, dignity, property and other fundamental rights of citizens.

Back in India, Cameron has just done a nuclear deal worth billions with his hosts. I wonder how his arms shares portfolio is doing.

David Cameron tells Pakistan to fight terrorists we created as he strikes nuclear deal

Getty Images
Prime Minister David Cameron flaunts his ignorance of history. Again. He's only been in the job for a matter of weeks and already is proving himself as gaffe-prone as BP's Tony Harwood.

He's said he would take on China in a nuclear bust-up, stated that Britain played second fiddle to the US in 1940, and now he tells Pakistan it isn't doing enough to combat terrorism:

"To be fair to the Pakistan government, they have made progress in chasing down militants and terrorists in Pakistan that threaten their own country and threaten others. But we need them to do more and we should work with them to do more because as I said yesterday, it's not acceptable to have those within Pakistan who are supporting terrorist groups that can do so much damage to their own country and to British people whether in Afghanistan or back home in Britain."

In India to sell military hardware, Cameron has insulted poor beleaguered Pakistan by tellling them to get their finger out. Considering it was the CIA who trained up Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces in the early 1980s during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and then left the region with the problem once the USSR was defeated, it's a stunning bit of hypocrisy for us to be blaming them.

What started as Taliban resistance to the US has now gone national as the Pashtun people have been radicalised by indiscriminate killings. By October 2009, the US had killed 14 Al Qaeda but 700 civilians. That is not a ratio designed to win hearts and minds.

It's us who have brought the Afghanistan war to Pakistan.

As ex-cricketer and former Indian MP Imran Khan said last year:

" ... it’s just a blatant lie. How can they say that Pakistan has to be stabilized and then Afghanistan will become [stable]. Surely, stability in Afghanistan will stabilize Pakistan. In fact, a CIA ex-station chief of Kabul, Graham Fuller, actually wrote in the International Herald Tribune that unless and until NATO leaves Afghanistan, Pakistan is going to descend into radicalization and chaos which is absolutely right, because we had no Taliban in Pakistan."

While Cameron drones on, Imran Khan has filed a petition in the Supreme Court to declare the use of drones in his home land illegal.

In his petition, Khan asked the court to declare as illegal and unconstitutional all acts that take away the fundamental rights of citizens, the provision of facilities and logistics to any foreign country, any alliance for mass destruction due to drone attacks inside Pakistani territory. Such acts should also be declared a violation of the United Nations charter, the universal declaration on human rights, international laws and international humanitarian laws. Khan said the respondents should be directed to lodge complaints against the killings of innocent Pakistanis, destruction of their properties and displacement from their homes at appropriate international forums. He also asked the court to direct the respondents to take all preventive measures against the drone attacks to protect the life, liberty, dignity, property and other fundamental rights of citizens.

Back in India, Cameron has just done a nuclear deal worth billions with his hosts. I wonder how his arms shares portfolio is doing.

How The Other 3% Think, Lesson 1: Dealing With Racism

A small but telling tale from Sarah Sands' vomit-inducing obsequy 'David Cameron: Born and bred to rule' in the Evening Standard.

In a style reminiscent of Private Eye's Sylvie Krin and without a hint of irony, Sands cites this as an example of how our Dave stands up to racists.

In James Hanning and Francis Elliott's biography of Cameron, the authors quote an Eton contemporary who was being bullied because he was Jewish. The bullied boy, now a City figure, said: “Cameron was very mature. He didn't get angry with them ( the bullies) or punish them, because then they would have taken it out on me. Dave said, 'It's beneath you both to behave like this'. He was giving half the blame to me, you see, which I now understand was quite brilliant.”

Great! Not only blame the victim but get the victim to praise you for it (and, years later, find a hagiographer to serve as second).

Next stop: Victorian levels of poverty. When they say "Back To Basics", that means very basic indeed. Workhouses: a fine institution much maligned by liberals ... that's small-l liberals, of course. Cap-L Liberals are now on-side.

Note to Alan Rusbridger and The Guardian: Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaahhhh (stop, I'm having a heart attack.) Ha ha ha ha hahhhh ...

How The Other 3% Think, Lesson 1: Dealing With Racism

A small but telling tale from Sarah Sands' vomit-inducing obsequy 'David Cameron: Born and bred to rule' in the Evening Standard.

In a style reminiscent of Private Eye's Sylvie Krin and without a hint of irony, Sands cites this as an example of how our Dave stands up to racists.

In James Hanning and Francis Elliott's biography of Cameron, the authors quote an Eton contemporary who was being bullied because he was Jewish. The bullied boy, now a City figure, said: “Cameron was very mature. He didn't get angry with them ( the bullies) or punish them, because then they would have taken it out on me. Dave said, 'It's beneath you both to behave like this'. He was giving half the blame to me, you see, which I now understand was quite brilliant.”

Great! Not only blame the victim but get the victim to praise you for it (and, years later, find a hagiographer to serve as second).

Next stop: Victorian levels of poverty. When they say "Back To Basics", that means very basic indeed. Workhouses: a fine institution much maligned by liberals ... that's small-l liberals, of course. Cap-L Liberals are now on-side.

Note to Alan Rusbridger and The Guardian: Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaahhhh (stop, I'm having a heart attack.) Ha ha ha ha hahhhh ...

Cameron's wet dream of nuking China

Completely from left field ( uh, right field...) and out of the blue skies in David Cameron's air-brushed head, Oceania is now at war with Eastasia.

I've walked fresh from my shortlist triumph at last night's Orwell Prize event and into life as the Conservatives would have it — a posh boy's fantasy about plucky little Britain taking on Big Bad China. What is this? "C'mon, guys, if you think you're hard enough"? Tony Blair, you only took on Iraq. Cameron's going for the Big One: he wants to square up to China. Is he prawn crackers? We'd end up as sesame toast.

In last night's snoreathon debate between the pink tie, the blue tie and the yellow tie, the blue tie stated:

I think the most important duty of any Government, anyone who wants to be Prime Minister of this country, is to protect and defend our United Kingdom. And are we really happy to say that we’d give up our independent nuclear deterrent when we don’t know what is going to happen with Iran, we can’t be certain of the future in China, we don’t know exactly what our world will look like? I say we should always have the ultimate protection of our independent nuclear deterrent.

Is Cameron seriously equating China with "rogue state" Iran? May I ask you in your saner moments, David (assuming you have any): with all the money they're pouring into saving our sorry skint skins, why would China want to nuke its own investment? Who has the bigger arms industry, and who has damn near started World War Three?

How many Tories have arms investments in their bulging share portfolios?

Any Chinese who vote for the Tories are turkeys voting for Christmas. Or ducks voting for the spring festival. With hoi sin sauce if not relish.

Republished at Labour Left List

James Denselow on Cameron's grandiose China ilusion

Cameron's wet dream of nuking China

Completely from left field ( uh, right field...) and out of the blue skies in David Cameron's air-brushed head, Oceania is now at war with Eastasia.

I've walked fresh from my shortlist triumph at last night's Orwell Prize event and into life as the Conservatives would have it — a posh boy's fantasy about plucky little Britain taking on Big Bad China. What is this? "C'mon, guys, if you think you're hard enough"? Tony Blair, you only took on Iraq. Cameron's going for the Big One: he wants to square up to China. Is he prawn crackers? We'd end up as sesame toast.

In last night's snoreathon debate between the pink tie, the blue tie and the yellow tie, the blue tie stated:

I think the most important duty of any Government, anyone who wants to be Prime Minister of this country, is to protect and defend our United Kingdom. And are we really happy to say that we’d give up our independent nuclear deterrent when we don’t know what is going to happen with Iran, we can’t be certain of the future in China, we don’t know exactly what our world will look like? I say we should always have the ultimate protection of our independent nuclear deterrent.

Is Cameron seriously equating China with "rogue state" Iran? May I ask you in your saner moments, David (assuming you have any): with all the money they're pouring into saving our sorry skint skins, why would China want to nuke its own investment? Who has the bigger arms industry, and who has damn near started World War Three?

How many Tories have arms investments in their bulging share portfolios?

Any Chinese who vote for the Tories are turkeys voting for Christmas. Or ducks voting for the spring festival. With hoi sin sauce if not relish.

Republished at Labour Left List

James Denselow on Cameron's grandiose China ilusion

Tory Ashcroft British tax avoidance "legal"

What more to add to Johann Hari's piece on the Tory donor, billionaire "Lord" Michael Ashcroft and his refusal to pay British taxes?

David Cameron and William Hague have covered up for him despite his "clear and unequivocal assurance" he would become a "permanent" resident in Britain ten years ago. Because of their obfuscation he has succeeded in avoiding paying £127 million in taxes. How many patients would that care for under the ailing NHS? How many children would that educate? How many immigrants — actually a net gain for the country — would that look after?

Of Cameron, Hari writes:

Made to pick between the national interests of the British people and the sectional interests of the super-rich, he choose the over-class – and we should assume he would do the same in Downing Street.

But of the bigger underlying tax scandal, he points out:

... under both Labour and Conservative governments, this revolting behaviour is perfectly legal. The bottom 99 per cent of us pay our taxes on time and in full – while the richest have been allowed to get away with this insult. Ashcroft is not alone. The invaluable Tax Justice Network has calculated that rich individuals "avoid" £13bn a year and rich corporations £12bn. (Indeed, a third of Britain's top 700 companies haven't paid any tax at all.) That's enough to double the education budget – or to pay off Britain's entire deficit in seven years without a single dent in public spending. ... Tax exiles want all the benefits of an advanced society, without paying for it to keep going. There's a technical definition for this in the natural sciences: a parasite. ... We are constantly being told by a chorus of conservatives that the financial crisis caused by their market fundamentalism can only be solved by slashing back spending. But this is unnecessary if only the overclass start to pay their taxes.

A hung Parliament in 2010? Yes, they should be.

Tory Ashcroft British tax avoidance "legal"

What more to add to Johann Hari's piece on the Tory donor, billionaire "Lord" Michael Ashcroft and his refusal to pay British taxes?

David Cameron and William Hague have covered up for him despite his "clear and unequivocal assurance" he would become a "permanent" resident in Britain ten years ago. Because of their obfuscation he has succeeded in avoiding paying £127 million in taxes. How many patients would that care for under the ailing NHS? How many children would that educate? How many immigrants — actually a net gain for the country — would that look after?

Of Cameron, Hari writes:

Made to pick between the national interests of the British people and the sectional interests of the super-rich, he choose the over-class – and we should assume he would do the same in Downing Street.

But of the bigger underlying tax scandal, he points out:

... under both Labour and Conservative governments, this revolting behaviour is perfectly legal. The bottom 99 per cent of us pay our taxes on time and in full – while the richest have been allowed to get away with this insult. Ashcroft is not alone. The invaluable Tax Justice Network has calculated that rich individuals "avoid" £13bn a year and rich corporations £12bn. (Indeed, a third of Britain's top 700 companies haven't paid any tax at all.) That's enough to double the education budget – or to pay off Britain's entire deficit in seven years without a single dent in public spending. ... Tax exiles want all the benefits of an advanced society, without paying for it to keep going. There's a technical definition for this in the natural sciences: a parasite. ... We are constantly being told by a chorus of conservatives that the financial crisis caused by their market fundamentalism can only be solved by slashing back spending. But this is unnecessary if only the overclass start to pay their taxes.

A hung Parliament in 2010? Yes, they should be.