Yesterday the Conservative chancellor of Great Britain gave his Autumn Budget (yes, in winter). As the image here shows, Autumn is the leafy, golden one, with people picking apples, bottom right. Winter is the snowy, ice-hockey one, top right. chancellor osbourne (he doesn’t get capital letters) might need such nursery learning resources so that in the future, if he has one, he can deliver his budgets on time. As most of the country trudged through austerity, even the weather turned austere, with blizzards and ice confirming the prophecies of the picture above.

Usually it would be a travesty to subject anyone to a discussion of george osbourne, but at the moment every budget in a major economy is important. France’s budget, with the election of Hollande, was important because it hesitated over austerity. Germany’s budgets are important because they tell you what the lives of most Southern Europeans will be like for the foreseeable future. Americas budget… blah blah blah. China’s five year plans… blah blah blah.

The British budget, piling into this, isn’t important because suddenly our rulers have decided to step back from the neoliberal edge; when even credit ratings agency Fitch is telling them “don’t jump!” they are intent on diving off in a Thatcherite somersault; no, the British budget is important because it is nothing but a continuation, and even extension, of the same austerity plans drawn up in the immediate aftermath of 2008. It is important because it shows the continued hegemony of neoliberal governmentality and class consolidation. It is a confirmation of German policy, without the global political power (but with the economic depression-contagion effect).

The usual reaction to the British parliament within Britain is that it resembles the Victorian children’s puppet show, Punch and Judy. A more apt description is chimps in a cage throwing their faeces at one another. Actually, this does an injustice to chimps, which are rightly known as “great apes”. None of the apes in parliament yesterday looked particularly great; and chimps throw faeces out of boredom and frustration at captivity. Parliament is captive to neoliberalism, but they don’t seem to be bored by it, even if the masses increasingly are. The politicians sling shit because they have nothing else to hand.

This is all said in full awareness of the psychic synonymity Freud established between faeces and money. Unfortunately, despite lots of grunting, groaning, and quantitative easing, there still isn’t much money around (or there is, but somehow the money the State printed ended up as bank bonuses and dividends; it’s now comfortably in accounts in Barbados, Panama and Luxembourg). Consequently some turds had to be polished not just slung – our illustrious rulers had to pretend they were doing well, even though neoliberals set their stall by economic growth and such a thing hasn’t been known now for four years. None is on the horizon in the UK either, or in the Eurozone, whilst America’s 4% growth is only 1% above recession level, whilst China’s growth drops quarter on quarter.

Neoliberalism is a particular mode of accumulation, a certain balance between industrial capital, finance capital, mercantile capital and good old primitive accumulation. This mode of accumulation is still (quite obviously) in a crisis (the only people who disagree seem to variations on the Dickens character Bounderby). Neoliberalism has never been very good at making new value, relying on State capitalist China to do so, or financialisation/fictive capital, or else expropriating anything it can, from the entire ost-bloc to national health services, from Cochambamba’s water system, to California’s energy grid. This isn’t working at the moment – there isn’t enough value around to back up all those “toxic assets” that popped up four years ago, and which continue to pop up. “Austerity” simply names the continuation of this strategy (trying to create value by asset stripping and selling off national services), whilst the only reason growth figures don’t look even worse in the UK is because financial services have been growing (because someone hurled money at them). The only other area of economic growth in the UK is the so-called “green economy”, wind farms, insulation etc. osbourne mentioned nothing of this, instead tying his boat to fracking. Making all this look alright is a serious turd-polishing act for osbourne.

Neoliberalism is also a consolidation of class power, partly through the redistribution and consolidation of wealth. This is also a difficult turd to polish. However hard he tried, chancellor osbourne couldn’t make his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations look particularly shiny given the week-old tax avoidance scandals rocking Britain, and the constant, Schumpetarian reports of record profits we keep getting from around the world.

One of the few useful things the Labour party opposition pointed out was that even osbourne could not help but smirk when he said “we’re all in this together”. I finished off that sentence in a previous post.

Much of osbourne’s message, about tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity, Britain being “open for business”, going cold over tax collecting, not increasing funding for greening the economy, was code for: “fellow millionaires, you are safe and secure”; – but then they knew this already.

As Foucault said, neoliberalism is also a “veradiction”, a speaking of the truth – not a truth which reflects reality (we’re in post-modernity here, not a book by Popper; nobody would be so stupid as to have a reflection theory of truth any more, even C/conservatives). No, this truth speaking is the speaking of socially effective truths, the making of truths which intervene in the world. True to form, Osbourne’s speech was a masterclass of neoliberal ideology. Take most of neoliberalism’s jargon, throw it into a pot with some statistics, then deliver it as if your doing the world a massive favour, and you will have just recreated the last 30 years political spectacle (yesterday’s budget included). “Hard working families”; “best practice”; “sustainability”; “competition”; “the needs of business” etc. etc. There was a lot of it, a steaming pile of it. A new nugget was “improving Britain’s competitiveness in the global race”. This is a neoliberal-Darwinian twist on old colonial capital’s “White Man’s Burden” and its notion of race. osbourne seems to think he’s still at the London Paralympics, where, as it never gets tiring to reiterate, he was booed. This is, however, only one of the excellent responses to anything he says; another one is removing osbourne (and other neoliberals) from any kind of position of power.