LETTER: Public paying for price of crash

With far too little regard for the growing gap between rich and poor taking us back to the worst of the Victorian era, the Conservative leadership has concentrated on stroking the comfortable for electoral benefit whilst trampling on the disadvantaged. Under cover of coalition government it has achieved one of its primary political objectives by insinuating the private profit motive across the public sector. The NHS is wide open to the profit seekers.

The received view from the Conservative leadership is that the economy is improving, signalling benefit to all. Leaving aside the essential question whether any recovery is built on ‘rock or sand’, there is no accord about who gains. ‘Trickle-down’ economics is proffered as a sound way to proceed. Pope Francis emphatically squashes that view. Quoted in ‘Just Money’, a paper from the Theos think tank, he says, “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in greater inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralised working of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting”. Little translation is necessary to see that working in current practice.

What is currently being lost in much of the political exchanges is the place of the market, with scant regard for the belief that ‘Market fundamentalism, sometimes called neoliberalism, drove the world economy to the edge of the precipice in the crash of 2008’.

Yet, as ‘Just Money’ goes on to suggest, neoliberalism remains the favoured option, notwithstanding opposition from individuals like Pope Francis and distaste for its excesses expressed by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England.

Much of our political system remains attached to it - in the case of the right wing of the Conservative Party and UKIP almost by umbilical cord. The problems it presented have not been resolved. The price arising from the crash was colossal and the public is still paying for it. The next crash, it is said, will demand a price that will be unaffordable.

ERIK SHOPLAND

Denne Road, Horsham