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The Sea Cat wrote: Very good points and I agree mainly, but I do think that a deliberate agenda re. the state and social engineering is happening, the scope of which is unprecedented and the effects of which will be catastrophic. I still believe that enough people protesting can/may influence the progress of this deliberate attack on all but the extremely wealthy. Yes, people vote with their wallets, and the same old money/power game is involved, but the sheer scale of what is at stake here is a huge gamble for this Cabal. A vast number of people may very well not accept the destruction of the NHS, the rise in homelessness/crime/social inequalty/economic recession, and, the kick in the bollox wallet that is coming, either.
I hear you. I think the saving grace of England if not the rest of the UK (I don't know so can't say) is that your common or garden greedhead doesn't do well with a guilty conscience. They are happy to get the best of what's out there but there is an underlying nagging sense of fairness that, in the end, pulls society back the other way.
In the end the effectivenss of these cuts and this government in political terms boils down to one issue - how much suffering among the poor will the middle classes tolerate in order to hold what they have?
Thatcher was helped by the fact that she oversaw the creation of a new class of property-owmning lower middle class and working class Tories. What turned them against the Tories ultimately was the fact they were still using government schools and health care. These new Tories were smart enough to know that their taxes should be providing better services rather than worse. It took eight to ten years for that process to play itself out.
This time there will be no new cadre of future blue rinsers to hold the fort come the elections. Also there are a lot more people from lower down the economic pyramid signed up to (largely pointless) private health plans and who are breaking the bank to send their kids to one of the 2400 private schools. This shift in education is partly down to post 9/11 NIMBY bigotry and partly down to the fact that there are low-mid income families who have some disposable income but are unable to move up the property ladder or see the risks there as being too great. So it goes on schooling and health instead. Out of London you are talking about two working parents scrapping maybe as much as £700 a month together between them and probably digging into savings to make it happen. If tax squeezes see these families starting to have to pull little Janet and John out of their private schools and send them to the local comp there will be hell to pay for Tories at the ballot box. Other than a guilty conscience the other thing the class-bound English hate most is loss of perceived status.
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