A very interesting POV from Another Angry Voice. To anyone other than a brainwashed working-class Tory, or a very rich person reading it, it has the ring of truth...

”In 2008 the Westminster political establishment class decided to keep the bloated monster of speculative capitalism alive with vast bailouts at the public expense.

The fact that capitalism required such an extraordinary dose of 'socialism for the rich' should have been the wake up call we needed that capitalism doesn't work.

Instead of demanding something better, the British public decided to elect the Tories, who decided to load the cost of this 'socialism for the rich' onto the poor and ordinary through a decade of ruinous austerity fanaticism, whilst lavishing the bankers who caused the crisis with one tax break and handout after another.

We didn't just return to business as usual, we sped up the process of increasing inequality, transferring wealth upwards, and handing ever larger slices of the public sphere over to private capitalist profiteers.

The whole thing was bound to come crashing down again at some point, because it's literally insane to keep on transferring ever larger proportions of the economy's wealth and resources to the greediest people in society, to use for their own advantage.

This kind of hard-right neoliberal economic extremism leaves us weak, and unprepared, with public services in chaos, spare capacity slashed to the absolute minimum, and millions living on the absolute brink of survival before the crisis even comes along.

The virus was just the straw that broke the camel's back, after years of mistreatment and neglect.

When this chaos is over we'll need to ask ourselves whether we want to continue down the same path again (austerity extremism, devastating public service cuts, wage repression, soaring inequality, privatisation mania ...) or change direction so we're actually economically healthy and much better prepared the next time a major crisis comes along.

And you damned well know which of these directions will be favoured by the Tories, the corporate elites who fund them, and the mainstream media hack pack who propagandise for them, don't you?

This means that those of us who want something better will have an almighty fight on our hands to stop them from opportunistically using the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to poison us with yet another deadly dose of their toxic neoliberal economic quack medicine.”