New British PM Liz Truss is giving us a useful foretaste of what a change of government here next year would deliver: tax cuts, welfare reductions, law and order crackdowns, and further handouts to banks. On Friday, the new British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is expected to unveil a major “’fiscal event” rather than a mini-budget. This linguistic sleight of hand will enable the package to escape the scrutiny of the independent Office of Budget Responsibility.

Irresponsibly, the tax cuts are expected to reduce the state’s revenues by between 30- 50 billion British pounds, or roughly $NZ60-95 billion. So much for being able to meet the current and future needs of Britain’s National Health Service. Truss has also foreshadowed that she aims to cancel her predecessor’s plan to raise corporation taxes, and that backdown has been estimated to be worth some 6.3 billion pounds (over two years) to the banking system alone.

Stamp duty on property transactions is also expected to be scrapped by the Truss government - because as we know, it's always desirable to further reduce public finances in order to deliver a financial windfall to people who already own property. Christopher Luxon has much the same goal in mind via his planned handout to landlords – by scrapping the bright line test and restoring interest deductibility on property investments. This at a time when New Zealand is facing a health system in crisis, and a massively costly bill to rebuild essential public infrastructure.

If the Truss/Luxon agenda sounds like ”trickle down economics” is back in vogue, you’re dead right. Like David Seymour, Truss is a believer in the faith-based fantasy that if you give rich people more money via a disproportionate share of tax changes, this will grow the economy, and the additional wealth will gradually trickle down to the people clinging on for dear life, further down the income ladder.

“Trickle down” economics didn’t work here in the 1980s under the Lange government, or during the last decade under John Key. It didn’t work in the US under Ronald Reagan, or in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. What it did do was increase income inequality, and reduce social mobility.

In effect, “trickle down” economics was the boomer generation’s own ram-raid on public assets, and on the range and the quality of public services. It treated the poor - who had no market value - as disposable. Not surprisingly, subsequent generations of the poor have turned against a society in which they see no future beyond mere subsistence.

If this sounds like bleeding heart liberalism for the kids currently committing ram-raids, then so be it. IMO it is bizarre to treat ram-raids as if they are being committed by aliens from another planet. Ram-raids are a consequence, not a cause of our social disorder. We locked those kids out and now we want to lock them up? Great. That is just an expensive path to nowhere. In its market wisdom, New Zealand chose some time ago to pursue fanatical economic policies that have destroyed jobs, incomes, and wasted the social health and talents of entire communities. Left without hope, those communities are now prey to the ravages of drugs and crime. What a surprise.

It is a bit like the situation with climate change. Obviously, we can’t afford to persist with business as usual while merely offering a few token carbon offsets on the side. Similarly though… We won’t be able to reduce poverty and crime unless we’re willing to change the policies that keep generating them. Yet apparently, all that the likes of Liz Truss, and her local Luxon/Seymour equivalents have to offer is more of the same responses: lock ‘em out, and if they kick back, lock ‘em up.

True… On a regular basis, this Labour government manages to dismay even its most loyal supporters. Yet the centre-right is not a credible option. They’re a nostalgia act. Their policies won’t restore the peace and prosperity of bygone years. Instead, they promise to deliver prosperity and security only to the people who can afford to buy their way into the gated communities that are the logical end point of the centre-right’s policy vision.

Long ago, Franklin Roosevelt identified the essential difference between the two approaches during his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in 1936: “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity, than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” Exactly.

Footnote: National’s vaunted “social investment” policy is not much of a solution, either. It mainly offers a way of privatising welfare delivery and will introduce a sharp profit incentive into how we provide for social need. Crucially, the social investment approach stigmatises the victims by treating poverty not as something created by inequality - and fostered by the workings of privilege - but as solely the outcome of bad individual choices. Such people will be identified by Big Data, and then pursued by a punitive state that has learned to dress its harassments in the Orwellian language of “wraparound social services.”

Weyes Blood Returns

Natalie Mering, who performs as Weyes Blood, was raised in a Pentecostal family and she chose the name as a tribute to the Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood. She has a big, languorous voice that often hasn’t quite found the ideal songs to match, but she’s getting there. As the title suggests, her new single “It's Not Just Me, Its Everybody” treats her personal dislocation in the context of a wider sense of malaise :

Sitting at this party
Wondering if anyone knows me
Really sees who I am
Oh, it's been so long since I felt really known

Fragile in the morning….

Living in the wake of overwhelming changes
We've all become strangers…

Interestingly, her quietly intense delivery feels of a piece with an apparent acceptance that this condition may be permanent:

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