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Tuesday 6 July 2010

Budd feared Tories use unemployment as class weapon‏

Sir Alan Budd, who resigned as head of the new Office for Budget Responsibility today, warned against early spending cuts and accused Thatcher of waging class war, writes George Eaton on the New Statesman blog http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/07/class-war-budd-thatcher-cuts
Eaton writes that earlier this year, as the clamour for spending cuts grew, Budd warned: "If you go too quickly, then there is a risk that the recovery will be snuffed out and we will go back into a recession -- I mean what the Americans say: "Remember 1937."

And in a 1992 interview, he is reported to have said, "The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. Now, my worry is . . . that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions . . . who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.

"They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes -- if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.

"Now again, I would not say I believe that story, but when I really worry about all this I worry whether that indeed was really what was going on."

Read Eaton's full piece at http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/07/class-war-budd-thatcher-cuts