Social and Economic Policy

Children's rights, crime & justice, immigration & asylum, pensions, poverty, youth, ...

To rebuild services: tax the rich!

On Monday 10 July Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt, alongside Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey, assured City plutocrats at a Mansion House dinner that he would hold a hard line against public sector wage claims. He said that was to damp inflation. In fact, conceding to the school workers, the doctors, the rail and Tube workers, and others, would cost a tiny part of the government’s budget. Even if it led to a bigger government deficit, its effect on inflation would be impossible to calculate, and small anyway. And that effect could be reduced to zero, even notionally, by covering the rises from...

Public ownership for public services

The French poet and journalist, Anatole France, commented 130 years ago: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” France’s point, of course, is that it is not necessary for the rich to steal food, and formal equality under the law impacts differently on the well-off and the badly-off. Last week, in Blackpool, a 29-year-old man, Gage Blundell, a father of two children and a heroin addict, was jailed for three months for shoplifting £100-worth of cheese and butter. Someone with a problem which should...

Public services and democratic control

In August 1869 Karl Marx argued in the First International, the big workers’ movement of that time, for schools as a public service, but not controlled from above by the government. At that time fewer than half of primary-age children attended (mostly church) schools in Britain, and many were sent to wage-work. “National education”, said Marx, “had been looked upon as governmental, but that was not necessarily the case”. He mentioned schooling in the USA, more widespread than in Britain but too patchy and localised. “Education might be national without being governmental. Government might...

Their economic crisis

The Tory government remains hardline on public sector pay. It now threatens to dismiss even the miserly recommendations of its own official Pay Review Bodies for 2023-4. The Tories say that squeezes on pay and NHS spending are necessary to slow inflation. But: • It now looks as if inflation will remain high (probably not as high as now) for longer than the Bank of England estimated when the Pay Review Bodies were pondering. Meagre pay rises will mean new real-wage cuts in 2023-4. • Profits were up in the early months of 2023, as spending power stashed during lockdowns flowed into markets. The...

How to get the Tories out

The Chartists, Britain’s first great workers’ movement from 1838 to the early 1850s, demanded parliamentary elections every year, not every five years. One of the reasons why Karl Marx identified the Paris Commune of 1871 as especially democratic is that the representatives could be “recalled” — subject to new election — at any time when sufficiently many of their electors demanded it. Lenin later, in State and Revolution , identified that right of recall as a key democratic feature of the “workers’ semi-state” exemplified by the workers’ councils (Soviets). In Britain today we have a Tory...

Can Johnson do a Trump?

Boris Johnson has flagged up an attempt do a Trump or a de Gaulle: to position himself as the outsider hit by an establishment conspiracy, the better to come back later. Johnson has resigned “for now” from Parliament to pre-empt a parliamentary committee verdict on “Partygate”, and has floated a tax-cut, harder-Brexit stance against Rishi Sunak. A possible game plan for Johnson is to get back into parliament just before a 2024 general election, or just after, then seek to replace a defeated Sunak as Tory leader. We’d have to know more about the inside of the Tory party, and possible crises in...

Tax the rich, fund services!

The Tory government has ruled on behalf of the capitalist class and the rich. Under the Tories, Britain has become more unequal. In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14mn people fell by 7.5%, while incomes for the richest fifth saw a 7.8% increase. The richest fifth of earners had an income more than 12 times the amount earned by the poorest fifth. The top 1% have incomes much higher than the rest of those in the top 10%. The differences in wealth are even starker. In 2020, the Office for National Statistics calculated that the richest 10% of households hold 43% of all wealth. The poorest 50% own...

Sanders denounces Biden-Republican deal

On Thursday 1 June the US Senate approved a budget deal negotiated between President Biden and Republican leaders in order to approve an increase in the USA’s federal debt ceiling. Bernie Sanders voted against, saying: At a time when climate change is, by far, the most existential threat facing our country and the entire world I cannot, in good conscience, vote for a bill that makes it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and destroy the planet by fast-tracking the disastrous Mountain Valley Pipeline. When the future of the world is literally at stake we must have the courage to stand...

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