Blog 4 - They run the economy, regulate them...

Standard Header - In these blogs, a current political event is illuminated by reference to the basic relationships explained in ‘Us, Politics and The System.’ To give readers an idea when to look for a new post, the initial plan is to do a new one once a week, on Fridays. This is the first.

The UK Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is going to scale down regulations of the big financial operators that were brought in after they caused the crash of 2008. She’s doing it to encourage them to stimulate growth. As a policy, it’s obviously dodgy. But we need to observe, and talk to each other, about the bigger, more general point – how we rely on these people for directing much of the economy. To run the country, you could say. And we need to bring that into play when judging what governments achieve or don’t achieve. Labour let them do it because we don’t give them firm enough instructions to regulate them and direct the economy with public spending rather than private. Conservatives - which includes Reform – let them do it because they represent them – the business class.

And beyond this big point is another – what do we do about it? A lot of people and commentators are saying that Reeves de-regulating the financial section of the business class is crazy. But we need to not just talk about that but about how to get a more democratic say in these policies and not just leave them to what amounts to an elected dictatorship, Prime Ministers and other Ministers. We’ll come back to that often in future blogs because there is this a big discrepancy between all the opinions we have on politics, and our minimal powers to affect them.

Standard Footer - Comments are not being offered in this blog right now. Reader’s reflections are best spread outwards, to somebody else the reader knows, as written about in ‘How To Talk Politics With Each Other’ at https://www.uspoliticsandthesystem.org/_files/ugd/e8d212_1f348918923e4f33bac1b09b314affbb.pdf