The death toll and risk of nuclear weapons attack on Tehran has been making me forget all the other sources of disaster, the economic crisis is going to hit the UK hard as this commentator notes.
"We've already seen how that's transformed the software industry, the music industry, how social networking changed politics in America. I'm hopeful that the economics of file swapping and peer-to-peer networking and these type of things gather speed, which would be an evolution of what we call capitalism and could be instrumental in replacing it"
"The UK has got much more debt going into the problem and their real estate crisis is actually a lot worse. The fact that the dollar is a world reserve currency gives the US some cushion - not much, but some. The UK doesn't have that. They did back in the 1900s when the British sterling pound was the world reserve currency. There was some benefit to it, but that era has now passed."
So, what hope is there for us?
"The first thing the UK people have to do is sober up! They are drunk on instant gratification, cheap booze, cheap mortgages and they are still inebriated. A lot of them are going to wake up destitute on the street with really no hope but the first step is to recognise that what they called a lifestyle was not a lifestyle unless you consider to be drunk 24 hours a day on cheap credit a lifestyle.
More economic analysis from Britain's best daily newspaper here.
1 comment:
Absolutely correct. This economic crisis in the UK is systemic. We have witnessed the end of the Thatcher model with the economy being powered by retail and financial services. The question is where will the jobs come from in the future?
The Independent today has an interesting article that unemployment will probably reach 10% by 2010 and will take some time to come down, if it does, after that.
This is why Green Left is organising a discussion on unemployment and poverty in Manchester on Sunday 25th July, the day after the Convention of the Left, which many of us will be attending. It is absolutely vital that Greens and the Left address the twin problems of unemployment and poverty, especially in view of the government's appalling plans for an overhaul of the welfare system, using methods such as lie detectors on some of the most vulnerable people in society, including disabled people.
The essential question is, where will future employment come from in the UK economy? As Paul Marsden, the BBC Economics Editor said recently: "We are all now living in 99p Britain."
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