Social and Economic Policy

The FTSE 100 index of the share prices of top companies has just reached an all-time high, 16% up on October 2022. Those top companies paid out about £83 billion in dividends in 2022, and £50.3 bn in share buybacks. MoneyWeek expects "FTSE 100 ordinary dividend payments to keep setting new records in 2023". To get an idea of scale here, the journalist Philip Inman calculates that a 10.1% pay rise across the public sector would cost the government £8.5 billion (if we factor in the government recouping some of the rise through income tax and VAT on workers' spending). Supporters of capitalism...

Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory minister and ex-chancellor now disgraced for tax evasion, atypically did not go to Oxford University. He went to University College London instead. But his entry to high-level Tory politics was through the entourage of Jeffrey Archer, who did go to Oxford. A small group of Tory men (and a few women here) educated at Oxford and also often at Eton are the base of the current ruling elite in the UK: deeply undemocratic, unaccountable, elitist, corrupt, repulsive, and many of them quite stupid. Simon Kuper’s book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK...

Nadim Zahawi, chair of the Tory party, last year Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously claimed public money to warm his stables. The same entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to try to avoid paying tax on £20 million he made selling shares — at a time when many, forced onto pre-payment meters, literally cannot afford to heat their homes in the freezing cold. Zahawi should resign, and corruption and tax avoidance should be rooted out. But the much bigger issue is the spiralling wealth of the rich per se. That spiralling, and the bad situation huge swathes of the population find ourselves in —...

As the weather gets colder, higher energy bills are biting. Maybe 10,000 households across Britain are being added to the 4.3 million already on pre-payment meters. Pre-payment means that you get no electricity or gas if you run out of cash one week, while with direct debit you incur debt but will not be cut off. It is more expensive, and loads the cost onto colder months rather than spreading it over the year. Energy firms can switch households on smart meters to pre-payment remotely, without having to send out an engineer. People on pre-payment meters are dependent on vouchers to get...

The Economist magazine in its 26 November issue recalled Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism , a book from 2009 which asserted (glumly, from the author’s viewpoint) that it had become “easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. Even the crash of 2008, argued Fisher, had narrowed socialist imagination. According to the Economist ’s columnist, the Tory crises and the Tories’ current offer — stable management of... a record drop in living standards and a near-collapse of public services — have had a similar paradoxical effect. It has become, the column says, “easier to imagine...

Sue Himmelweit is a feminist economist, emeritus professor of economics at the Open University, and active with the Women’s Budget Group. She talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . Jeremy Hunt has call for a report on the increasing levels of “economic inactivity” among working-age people in the UK. I think what he’s looking for ways to tighten up the conditionality in Universal Credit in order to get more people into the labour force. Really the inquiry should be into the conditions under which people can get into the labour market. There are a lot of people waiting for NHS treatment. You...

After 12 grisly years of “austerity” — cuts to living standards and public services to further enrich employers and the rich — and decades of rising inequality, the working class in the UK faces a dramatic new assault. One that poses a stark challenge to workers, the labour movement and every individual who wants a better society. The growing surge of workers’ struggles can defeat these attacks and start to turn things around — but only if we organise to take it much further . Under the Tories’ plan, people in this country will suffer the biggest fall in living standards on record: a 4.3% cut...

Andrew Gamble, author of The Conservative Nation and other books, talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . There’s been a long civil war in the Conservative Party over Europe. It became more intense after the 2016 referendum. A majority of Conservative MPs and Cabinet Ministers voted Remain, but 57% of voters who had voted Conservative at the general election only a year before in 2015 repudiated David Cameron and voted Leave. Ever since 2016, the party has been disoriented. It has radical factions who want to do different things with Brexit, and a bigger group of MPs who haven’t known what...

In British capitalist society, vast amounts of wealth and income are held by a rich or well-off minority, much more than is needed to repair the NHS and pay workers wage and benefit increases matching inflation. In round figures, Britain’s 32.6 million workforce produces £2.2 trillion (thousand billion) of output each year, or £67,000 per person. That is inexact. A good chunk of the “output” is not actual goods and services (“use-values”, as Karl Marx called them), but a counting-as-output of fees and the like generated as surplus-value from production is whirled through financial markets and...

Stuart Jordan in “Winning the cooperation we need” ( Solidarity 652 ) makes a persuasive case that workers’ action to win democratic rational economic planning — not moral appeals to capitalist leaders — is needed to halt climate catastrophe. But one of his claims is incomplete at best. “We need to slow down, do less work and have more leisure time, resisting the bosses’ incessant drive to intensify the rate of work.” There are many important reasons to fight for a shorter working week and against intensification. Longer weeks and overworking degrade our quality of life, harming workers for...