Some of us believe that capitalism has shown us what’s possible with advances in technology, but can’t take us all the way to world without poverty, hunger and war. As a species we are capable of this you know.

We know we can’t get there tomorrow, but the Labour Party was formed on getting us there in the end. The last three governments will go down in history for moving us in the other direction.

This was a crisis built on (amongst other things) private debt. The Tories make a swift link of ‘logic’ between the private debt that caused this and the public debt that got us (and other countries) out of it, but it is a bit of smoke and mirrors really: it draws the eye away from the private debt and games that were played in financial services. Okay, so tax-payers money was used to get us away from the brink of an even deeper crisis. I suspect that was inevitable, but how that money was spent and how it should be paid for now is a whole other question.

There was an opportunity to restructure things (for example have genuine nationalisations rather than salvage jobs – nationalisations with the tax payer having controlling interests that could be built on certain principles such as eschewing bad debts, weighing up the human costs of any actions over short-term profiteering, not gambling with other people’s money… that kind of thing). We missed it. We now are told that public debt is the big problem. The scale of the public debt is not in the same ballpark as the private debt before the crisis, but the public debt is something we should be terrified of while all parties seem hell-bent on policies that can return us to the unsustainable levels of private debt that existed before the crisis. Indeed all the parties seem to want MORE private debt. People will have to take out bigger student loans; less money and support will be available through government schemes; people can expect less when they retire and expect to retire later… The cumulative effect is for people to rely more and more on the very financial bodies, banks and private arrangements that brought us to the brink of disaster.

Increasingly it looks like we bailed out the banks and we bailed out global capitalism for the sake of it, not to prevent the human cost of it. We’ve cushioned the super-rich and working people are asked to pick up the bill. This is not acceptable.

As for people getting rich off tax: it is a huge sector of the economy and we export it so people can get rich off other countries’ tax-payers too: the ‘free market’ in government services is a global scandal which one day will make MP’s expenses seem very small beer indeed.

So we massively raise our sovereign debt by bailing out the banks, and this puts us in debt to…private banks. Despicable. It’s hard to escape the idea that a small number of people are getting very very rich by frankly stealing from tax payers all around the world.

I think the reason why all parties are saying cuts cuts cuts, is simple, they have no idea at all of any other way, and that’s how we got into this mess in the first place.

Sadly because of the lack of ideas, I think we are heading for massive cuts or massive savings depends on who you believe.