Poverty and inequality

£30 billion each year of extra social spending could be covered just by taxing unearned income at the same rates as wages

Labour’s current policy, as outlined by the National Policy Forum, is hobbled by refusing to tax the rich, beyond closing a few loopholes. A small wealth tax, or even making the tax rate on “unearned” income equal to that on “earned” income, could raise more than enough to fix up the NHS. The Labour leaders’ commitments to retain Tory tax policies, with only marginal tweaks, to stick to arbitrary Tory targets for cutting government debt, and to keep military spending high, mean continued ruination. Inequality of wealth has risen recently in many countries, more than inequality of income...

The year 2022, summarises the broadly Blairite but fact-rich and realistic Resolution Foundation, “was a disaster for living standards” — “but the worst is yet to come”. A lot more people are dependent on food banks. A lot of people this winter will not afford to heat their homes or cook properly. Many people are now paying cash for private medical treatments where NHS waiting lists are impossibly long, and many others can’t possibly afford that. Beyond the issue of people being unable to afford basics, broader class inequality, with its taunting wounds to worse-off people from the sight of...

On 16 July Labour Party members discovered from a TV interview

Gleaning is the ancient practice of going into a field after the harvest and picking up any fruit, cereal or root crops left behind. Its most famous representation is the painting by Jean-Francois Millet, “The Gleaners”, which he completed in 1857. What the painting represented was “updated”, as it were, by French director Agnès Varda in 2000 with her documentary The Gleaners and I . Shot in various locations in France, including the suburbs of Paris, film shows modern day gleaners doing very much what their ancestors have done for hundreds of years. They explain in their own words why they do...

Ludwig Wittgenstein was the most famous philosopher of the 20th century. In his 30s, after getting out his only finished book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , he worked for several years as a primary school teacher in a remote village in Austria. He fled teaching in 1926 because he had repeatedly beaten a student about the head, and the student collapsed. The village people were used to teachers hitting small children, but this was too much. A formal complaint failed, but Wittgenstein had quit anyway (and ten years later would return to the village to apologise). Teachers are now banned from...

How much have prices risen? 10.1% (CPI), 13.5% (RPI), 19.2% (food), between March 2022 and March 2023. The high CPI and RPI rates are due to food prices? Not entirely; Germany has 22% food inflation, 7.4% CPI; France 16% food, 5.7% CPI. Food is only 10% of the CPIH “basket”. The UK’s higher rate is mostly due to household energy prices having jumped sharply here between March and April 2022. So the official May inflation figures (for rise between April 2022 and April 2023) will be lower? Almost certainly. Also, world wholesale food price rises have been slowing for a while, and that will...

The regulator Ofgem is lifting the pause on forced installation of pre-payment energy meters (PPMs) agreed in February after an outcry over around 10,000 new PPM installations per month during high energy prices. Solidarity advocates: • pre-payment meters should be banned outright (not impossible: there are none in France ) • public ownership of the whole energy industry, to mop up the vast profits currently made (under the Tories’ energy subsidy scheme) by oil and gas companies, and to speed transition to renewables and nuclear. • every household should get a basic quota of energy free (even...

“Private property”, wrote Marx , “has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it — when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc…” Much of socialist effort, within capitalist society, involves supporting working-class struggles to “have” more within this society, to limit the gap between workers and the rich. And we see an emancipatory side even to capitalist consumerism, when it spurs workers to widen aspirations, to seek roses as well as bread. But capitalism remains a society which tilts us ever more...

What are the lessons from the Budget; the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse; and the figures showing Feb-2022-to-Feb-2023 UK inflation a tad up on Jan-2022-to-Jan-2023, after three months of slight decline in those year-on-year figures?