A good article by Pilger, but he is certainly wrong about one thing: Britain is utterly bankrupt. The comparison with 1945 is facile: Britain then still had a substantial industrial base and had a powerful position internationally allied with the USA. Now both have eroded almost completely. Britain is bankrupt at every level, personal, local, corporate and national, a dire situation which it makes worse through its aggressive stand off against the rest of the world. Standing defiantly alone will get us nowhere. Thirty years of Thatcherism have wrecked the place and it will take thirty years to rebuild it, a task that can only be accomplished in collaboration with Europe, China and other  creditors. This involves a major strategic shift away from imperialism which in the form of the pound/dollar reserve currency racket has been the  basis of our prosperity in the last 20 years.  The cuts will precipitate the collapse of Britain’s parasitic “consumer economy”; not making the cuts will start a run on the pound and  hyperinflationary burn out. Pilger and the left are deluding themselves about the depth of the crisis so they can go on as ever making mindless, mock-heroic exhortations. Trying to link national reconstruction with multipolarity I have outlined a programme for the end of empire.

John Pilger

ICH

3rd November, 2010

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

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