In the space of a week the LibDems' prospects were apparently transformed, following the first television debate between the main party leaders. Nick Clegg gazed with doe eyes into a camera, and suddenly his chances had undergone a metamorphosis! A YouGov poll put them on 33%, one point ahead of the Tories and four ahead of Labour. The polls indicate how volatile this election has become, but this is partly because there is little difference between the programmes of the main parties. 75% of people polled by Populus said that there needs to be a change from Labour but only 34% said it is time to change to the Tories. It is this space that the LibDems are exploiting, with the mantra that they represent 'change'. They haven't been in government since Ramsay MacDonald's national government in 1931. However even for people who hope they might be a change, a major hurdle for the LibDems is to convince them that they could actually win and therefore are worth voting for. "We're different," Clegg has said time and time again. But at their last party conference Clegg and LibDem shadow chancellor Vince Cable called for savage cuts in public spending and argued that the public deficit should be repaid over five years rather than eight as Labour had proposed.
While Gordon Brown and David Cameron say that some parts of the public sector should be protected from the worst cuts, such as the NHS, Cable has said that there should be no ringfencing. Of course he is simply being a degree more open on this; there is no real political difference. Vince Cable has been hailed by right wing papers like the Daily Mail as the best candidate for prime minister and by the Guardian as "one of our classiest politicians". A former chief economist of oil multinational Shell, following the 2008 banking crisis he gained a reputation for his economic analysis but he himself endorsed the policy of 'light regulation' of financial services in 1999, which contributed to the crash. Clegg and Cable were two of the architects of the LibDems' 'orange' revolution, ending the party's image as the 'beer and sandals' brigade and implementing a right-wing, neoliberal programme. Clegg has been in Cable's shadow since becoming leader but the television debate has now enabled him to shine on the national media stage. But his policies differed only slightly from the Tories and New Labour. The LibDems would pay off the public deficit by cutting 'waste' and bureaucracy in the NHS, in education and in the army (the latter to pay for better equipment in Afghanistan).
They would cut tax credits and the child trust fund and cap pay rises at £400 for all public-sector workers for two years. In other words the same 'efficiency' savings (cuts) and other cuts. However Clegg has been able to mark a small difference by saying his party would scrap Trident and ID cards. One glance at the LibDems' record in local government shows that they are no different to the other two parties when in power. In opposition they pose as tireless campaigners, photographed outside local hospitals and standing next to potholes. They pledge to defend services, but time and time again when they take control of a local council or share power they carry out cuts and privatisation. For instance in Leeds City Council, the LibDem-Tory coalition is slashing council workers' jobs and pay. Will Clegg's popularity last? The Tories cite the example of Ross Perot, the maverick Dallas billionaire who ran as an independent in the 1992 US presidential election. He led the polls after the first television debate but subsequently declined to 19% by the time of the vote. Even if the LibDems maintain their current level of support, its geographical spread would result in a hung parliament and Clegg would be faced with his main dilemma.
If he forms a government with Labour then the party that pledged to be different is seen to keep the same party in power and he alienates the right wing of his party. If he goes into coalition with the Tories then he blows out of the water the idea that you can vote LibDem to keep the Tories out and he alienates the left wing of his party, which is likely to lead to a split with those who see the party as having a radical tradition. As a result, Clegg isn't committing himself to either scenario at the moment. The LibDems are for the time being moving onto the centre stage for the first time since the days of Lloyd George, mainly at the expense of the Tories. However, the policies of a future government which contains the LibDems will be 'big' business as usual.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
More than one price to pay
Today seemed like one of those days in which you read the news tapes and wish that you hadn't got up at all. That sort of day seems, unfortunately, to be coming round more and more often. Home repossessions reached a 14-year high of 46,000 during the year. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of these will be family homes, that's probably over 100,000 people of all ages who have been thrown out of their homes and have moved into other accommodation - if they can get it. Having defaulted on one mortgage, it's more than likely that they won't be able to get another one for some years, so the chances are that their choices will be limited to private-sector rented housing. And, paradoxically, that can often be more expensive than the mortgage that they have defaulted on. It will certainly be less secure and in a less desirable and cheaper area. It's also likely that those who have lost their homes have done so because of an unexpected change in their circumstances, such as job loss through redundancy, factory closure or cutbacks. Losing their home is just one more aspect of a wider family crisis.
The human cost of these crises is difficult to imagine if you haven't gone through it personally. The sheer shock of such an upheaval can have serious consequences for people's relationships, for their self-esteem and for their health. And there are likely to be many more of them in the coming year if Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has anything to do with it. It is doubtful that his assurance to the academic community yesterday that they were not being singled out to bear the brunt of government cuts did anything to calm the universities' fears. It certainly didn't do anything to calm ours, since the reason he gave was that universities needn't feel singled out because everybody was going to be battered in the same way that they are. The university funding cuts are likely to cost several thousand jobs in the academic sphere. If that is paralleled across the rest of the public sector, as Lord Mandelson seems to be saying, the cost in jobs will be astronomical.
Many thousands more families will be precipitated into life-changing crisis and driven down the income ladder as they come to terms with either unemployment or re-employment in inferior jobs. All to pay for bailing out banks which are either refusing to pay the cost themselves or are being indemnified by Mandelson and new Labour from having to face the consequences of their irresponsibility. And that will result in lower demand in the shops and yet more jobs will go, in a spiral of decline which will be difficult, if not impossible, to control.
But there is another penalty that people will pay, one way or another and that was set out clearly and frighteningly by epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot in yet another story. Dr Marmot reports something that we all knew must have been the case, but is brought home hard by the figures. The good doctor warns that people in England's poorest areas live an average of seven years less than those in the richest ones. People in the poorest neighbourhoods will also spend a greater proportion of those shorter lives unwell, he adds.
Inequality results in illness accounting for £33 billion of lost productivity every year. And to wind up, he also warns that the current minimum wage of £5.80 an hour is below the level needed for a healthy life.
So, if you are, or are likely to become, one of the victims of the great bank robbery, either directly or indirectly by Mr Mandelson's hand, watch out. Damaging your employment status, your income, your social services, your home life and your children's education are not the only costs that you will face. It could also cost you years off your life. Ever since the banks brought the economy of the country to the edge of meltdown and were bailed out by massive injections of public money, the question of how the bail-out could be paid for has loomed large. Because the bail-out was funded with borrowed cash, as it had to be given the sums involved, it pushed the country's debt levels to hitherto unheard-of levels. And that means large annual interest payments as well as the eventual redemption of the debt. Immediately the debt was incurred, the pressures began to be exerted for its repayment. The credit analysis firms started making loud warnings about Britain's rating - at present AAA, the highest that there is. Moody's, one of the biggest, has warned that it could cut Britain's rating if the Treasury doesn't bring borrowing under control. Standard and Poor's, the other big player in the game, recently downgraded its view of the UK to "negative" from "stable."
Governments worry about this rating because a reduced rating makes the cost of borrowing higher and thus increases the debt level. Just a few weeks ago, the Bank of England warned that Britain is in danger of losing its credit standing. Greece was downgraded in December and the results are now plain to see. But the dangers are for working people and not government in the downgrading or otherwise of Britain's credit rating. Because there is only one way in which that rating can be preserved and that is by bringing the level of public expenditure down. And, if the government is unprepared to charge the banks and their super-rich shareholders for the cost of their bail-out, it will do it the only other way that it has available. That is by swingeing cuts in the public sector, reducing its wage bills and thus the services that it supplies to the public. This would mean massive job cuts in the NHS, the civil services, in local authority subsidies, benefit reductions and all the safety-net provisions for the elderly, the low paid, single parents, education, in short, the decimation of the welfare state apparatus. What has happened with Greece is worrying all governments, like Britain's, which have laid out inconceivably large sums of borrowed money to underwrite their banking industries.
It's right that it should. Because Greece hit the buffers when its borrowing came due for repayment and those buffers are on the horizon for them as well. But the race to kill the public sector with the death of a thousand cuts is no way to solve the problems. Hack the public sector to death and tax income goes down, benefit claims go up, demand collapses for manufactured goods and the economy declines. Certainly, the Tories would love it. They have been trying to kill off the welfare state since its inception. Shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has gloated that the Tories would cut spending more severely than the Conservative government did in the 1980s. "We are going to have to be much tougher on public spending than Margaret Thatcher," he said. New Labour sounds much the same in Alistair Darling's contribution to the race to the bottom. But we must remember the damage the Thatcher government did. And remember also that the ratings agencies are not neutral. They are part of the banking business and market greed is their stock in trade. While they threaten, the banks are continuing on their own sweet way as if nothing has happened, with big bonuses and profits the order of the day.
There is no other alternative except for governments, through taxation on profits and transactions, to make the banks pay for their bail-outs, and pay soon. They cannot be allowed to drive the economy to ruin while wallowing in excess profits as a result. We cannot stand by and watch the bankers fiddle while home burns
The human cost of these crises is difficult to imagine if you haven't gone through it personally. The sheer shock of such an upheaval can have serious consequences for people's relationships, for their self-esteem and for their health. And there are likely to be many more of them in the coming year if Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has anything to do with it. It is doubtful that his assurance to the academic community yesterday that they were not being singled out to bear the brunt of government cuts did anything to calm the universities' fears. It certainly didn't do anything to calm ours, since the reason he gave was that universities needn't feel singled out because everybody was going to be battered in the same way that they are. The university funding cuts are likely to cost several thousand jobs in the academic sphere. If that is paralleled across the rest of the public sector, as Lord Mandelson seems to be saying, the cost in jobs will be astronomical.
Many thousands more families will be precipitated into life-changing crisis and driven down the income ladder as they come to terms with either unemployment or re-employment in inferior jobs. All to pay for bailing out banks which are either refusing to pay the cost themselves or are being indemnified by Mandelson and new Labour from having to face the consequences of their irresponsibility. And that will result in lower demand in the shops and yet more jobs will go, in a spiral of decline which will be difficult, if not impossible, to control.
But there is another penalty that people will pay, one way or another and that was set out clearly and frighteningly by epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot in yet another story. Dr Marmot reports something that we all knew must have been the case, but is brought home hard by the figures. The good doctor warns that people in England's poorest areas live an average of seven years less than those in the richest ones. People in the poorest neighbourhoods will also spend a greater proportion of those shorter lives unwell, he adds.
Inequality results in illness accounting for £33 billion of lost productivity every year. And to wind up, he also warns that the current minimum wage of £5.80 an hour is below the level needed for a healthy life.
So, if you are, or are likely to become, one of the victims of the great bank robbery, either directly or indirectly by Mr Mandelson's hand, watch out. Damaging your employment status, your income, your social services, your home life and your children's education are not the only costs that you will face. It could also cost you years off your life. Ever since the banks brought the economy of the country to the edge of meltdown and were bailed out by massive injections of public money, the question of how the bail-out could be paid for has loomed large. Because the bail-out was funded with borrowed cash, as it had to be given the sums involved, it pushed the country's debt levels to hitherto unheard-of levels. And that means large annual interest payments as well as the eventual redemption of the debt. Immediately the debt was incurred, the pressures began to be exerted for its repayment. The credit analysis firms started making loud warnings about Britain's rating - at present AAA, the highest that there is. Moody's, one of the biggest, has warned that it could cut Britain's rating if the Treasury doesn't bring borrowing under control. Standard and Poor's, the other big player in the game, recently downgraded its view of the UK to "negative" from "stable."
Governments worry about this rating because a reduced rating makes the cost of borrowing higher and thus increases the debt level. Just a few weeks ago, the Bank of England warned that Britain is in danger of losing its credit standing. Greece was downgraded in December and the results are now plain to see. But the dangers are for working people and not government in the downgrading or otherwise of Britain's credit rating. Because there is only one way in which that rating can be preserved and that is by bringing the level of public expenditure down. And, if the government is unprepared to charge the banks and their super-rich shareholders for the cost of their bail-out, it will do it the only other way that it has available. That is by swingeing cuts in the public sector, reducing its wage bills and thus the services that it supplies to the public. This would mean massive job cuts in the NHS, the civil services, in local authority subsidies, benefit reductions and all the safety-net provisions for the elderly, the low paid, single parents, education, in short, the decimation of the welfare state apparatus. What has happened with Greece is worrying all governments, like Britain's, which have laid out inconceivably large sums of borrowed money to underwrite their banking industries.
It's right that it should. Because Greece hit the buffers when its borrowing came due for repayment and those buffers are on the horizon for them as well. But the race to kill the public sector with the death of a thousand cuts is no way to solve the problems. Hack the public sector to death and tax income goes down, benefit claims go up, demand collapses for manufactured goods and the economy declines. Certainly, the Tories would love it. They have been trying to kill off the welfare state since its inception. Shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has gloated that the Tories would cut spending more severely than the Conservative government did in the 1980s. "We are going to have to be much tougher on public spending than Margaret Thatcher," he said. New Labour sounds much the same in Alistair Darling's contribution to the race to the bottom. But we must remember the damage the Thatcher government did. And remember also that the ratings agencies are not neutral. They are part of the banking business and market greed is their stock in trade. While they threaten, the banks are continuing on their own sweet way as if nothing has happened, with big bonuses and profits the order of the day.
There is no other alternative except for governments, through taxation on profits and transactions, to make the banks pay for their bail-outs, and pay soon. They cannot be allowed to drive the economy to ruin while wallowing in excess profits as a result. We cannot stand by and watch the bankers fiddle while home burns
Monday, 15 March 2010
Lib Dems are the faithless party
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has announced that the politics of plenty are over. I assume by this he means plenty of war, plenty of cuts and plenty of sell-offs because he could not possibly be saying that up to now we have never had it so good. Or could he? Clegg set out to show what a serious bunch the third party can be by dropping a swath of its own policies as unrealistic. It's an interesting way to try to give people confidence in your manifesto by tearing half of it up shouting: "This is all rubbish! We were never going to do any of it." In a press release entitled "Four steps to a fairer Britain," the Lib Dems criticised the Labour and Conservative parties for pretending the recession wasn't happening and not being prepared to take the necessary tough decisions to dig us out of this hole. Describing the two largest parties as engaging in "make-believe economics" and failing to face up to the fact that we're living in difficult economic times is quite a staggering thing to say.
I really don't know where Clegg has been for the last year and a half, but the idea that the other parties' economic policies proffer an Aladdin's cave of giveaway policies seems a bit far-fetched. The Labour Chancellor has, for instance, just promised the toughest spending cuts in 20 years. The Tories criticise them for not going far enough. Now Clegg wades in saying they are both sugar-coating their policies? That's actually quite frightening. A number of commentators have described the coming general election as a turning point for a generation - that's over-hyping it. The difference between the parties' spending plans are marginal at best. Particularly since the failed coup attempt against the Prime Minister last week, the new Labour Cabinet has shifted towards a more full-scale cuts approach that differs from the Conservative version only in that neither have been fully spelled out to the electorate. One Lib Dem said the difference between the three main parties was that his party would "cut with a heavy heart."
Presumably that means if you're laid off you are meant to feel sorry for them. Perhaps redundant workers could send the Liberals a condolence card to commiserate with what they must have gone through sending out all those notices. After describing voters as grown-ups, Clegg then announced that he would introduce caps on public-sector pay, scrap the government baby bonds scheme, ditch the commitment to free childcare and their "citizen's pension" and that he would no longer advocate free personal care for the old and disabled. Added to this the Lib Dems would keep tuition fees, at least until the good times roll again. Clegg described this bonfire of the policies by saying: "We have stripped away everything that is not essential because the country cannot afford it." There was me thinking that policies like free child and personal care existed because parents and the disabled couldn't afford them. Maybe they aren't part of "the country." The abolition of tuition fees was seen as a defining policy for the Lib Dems and for the leader to describe this as "not essential" speaks volumes about the shift at the heart of mainstream politics.
Far from demonstrating how different the Lib Dems are from the other parties, this announcement demonstrates the tight consensus that exists at the top of all three parliamentary parties, which are determined to deny the voters any viable choice. Clegg may think that you treat people like adults by reducing their living standards, but he could have taken a very different approach - one that stems the growing tide of unemployment rather than adds to it. He disparagingly described long-held political commitments as a "shopping list of pledges" to voters, adding that he wasn't going to "buy their favour with cheap trinkets." One moment it's a point of honour and principle to abolish tuition fees, the next the right to an education regardless of your wealth is a "cheap trinket." Fascinating stuff. One less high-profile announcement was that the Lib Dems would create "a new national infrastructure bank to bring in private money to build the transport links, energy grid and public buildings we need for a sustainable, low-carbon economy in every part of Britain." This commitment to deepen the privatisation agenda shared by the Conservatives and new Labour is another expression of how barren the state of progressive political ideas is today.
In the past many people who have leaned to the left of politics have voted Lib Dem. The party's stance on ID cards, tuition fees or opposing the Iraq invasion - until it started - gave it some appeal to those who could no longer stomach voting Labour. But even this option has gone now. Ditching policies designed to help the poorest in society while giving big business the wink that there will be plenty of profits to be made out of a Lib Dem-influenced government is an indication that their leader's priorities are far from progressive, a fact that many on the left of the party are all too aware of. If Clegg really wanted to be treated like a grown-up he should have taken the risk of presenting his party as a genuine political alternative, not another shade of the same failed approach. He even dropped the idea of proportional representation at the very time that it is gaining a hearing, watering it down to a commitment to "abolish safe seats" - presumably those of his colleagues, judging by his current uninspired performance.
This approach, based on the idea that the country is moving to the right, is unlikely to win much support among Tory voters who already have a right-wing party to vote for and seems almost designed to put off those to the left who lent them their vote in previous elections. Disaffected Labour voters and those who support smaller left-wing parties have been given a clear warning that the Lib Dems are not for them. They would do well to heed it. At last the Liberal Democrats have answered the question that someone, somewhere may well have been asking. Who would they favour if they held the balance of power in a hung Parliament? It turns out that the answer is anyone who will let them sit at the big table and is willing to sign Nick Clegg's autograph book. There's been a certain amount of straw-clutching in the last few days because one poll has suggested that the gap between Labour and the Tories is narrowing, which would increase the chances of neither party commanding a majority in the House of Commons. The poll has been built up into far more than it really is with those who see what they want to see, forgetting that one extremely unlikely swallow does not make a spring.
At the weekend Clegg announced that "whichever party have the strongest mandate from the British people, it seems to me that they have the first right to try and govern." While he was right to point out that in a democracy it should be the people who decide who governs, it does rather ignore the fact that those who vote for Clegg's party are making a political decision which should count for something. In effect Clegg has decided to cast his party in the mould of a neutral referee without philosophical allegiance or strong opinions either way. He may as well have indicated that if you want to decide who runs the country after the election, don't vote Lib Dem because they'll take their lead from everyone else anyway. What makes it even more bizarre is that this damp cloth of an announcement is seen as the strongest statement Clegg has ever made on the subject and, as such, is news. Just don't ask him what his favourite biscuit is for heaven's sake or we'll be here all day. Tony Benn often remarks that politicians are either weathercocks or sign posts - that is, those who point whichever way they are blown and those who stick to their principles no matter what. However, it appears he left out the category of limp knitted windsock, which is where Clegg is building his electoral niche.
Just because someone's in an organisation that has more in common with uncultured yoghurt than a political party, that doesn't mean they should be demonised. There are good people in campaigns to defend council housing, against various wars and to protect particular public services who also happen to be members of the Lib Dems. When Lib Dem Cambridge MP David Howarth attended the G20 protests as a legal observer and eloquently spoke out against the behaviour of the police, I don't have the slightest inclination to moderate my praise with a "yeah, but..." There's no question that some of the vote the Lib Dems receive is to the left of new Labour. Those whose progressive instincts are repelled by Trident, ID cards, the Iraq occupation and a host of other monstrosities that I don't need to go into here have often lent their vote to the Lib Dems.
What these people rarely do though is begin to see themselves as "Lib Dem voters" and, as such, that vote is extremely soft and vulnerable.
In recent times we've seen the new Lib Dem leadership begin to shift the party towards a more Cameron-lite style of politics - which is no mean feat when you consider that helium has difficulty being lighter than Cameron. Clegg's announcement at conference that he was for savage cuts and was ditching the commitment to scrapping tuition fees was an attempt to look more substantial in an era of financial crisis. But for many this simply came across like the sidekick of an Eton bully egging on the violence without the clout to actually join in themselves. When Clegg surprised his party's policy-making body on the abolition of tuition fees he hoped to signal that he was up to the task of handling the recession, but he ended up showing that he was just an identikit politician, as undemocratic and cynical as other party leaders but less influential. A party without an identity is hardly up to the task of tackling global problems like climate change, the financial collapse or war.
If you don't believe in anything you're not fit to govern. Currently the Lib Dems' local campaigns even seem to be pushing the party towards a kind of "patriotic" pro-war position and they are making more than clear that the one area of spending they won't be trying to make cuts in is the armed forces.
The leaflet that came through doors in late November this weekend focused solely on the local candidate's loyalty to the troops in Afghanistan. This isn't just unconvincing - it means that none of the three largest parties is even trying to represent public opinion on ending the occupation. The nation's forgotten third party seems to be on a mission to become completely indistinguishable from the very worst parts of the stifling consensus at the heart of so-called respectable politics. Clegg's announcement that he'd just go with the flow after the next election and isn't bothered either way is hardly inspiring. Partly because it emphasises that his party is always "the would-be king-maker," never the "would-be king," but mainly because it demonstrates how alien conviction politics is to the leadership. Judging from the early reaction from Lib Dem blogs even their activists aren't too impressed with the new announcement. This may partly be due to the way they get to act as spectators to major decisions made by their party rather than actual participants.
Some thought they'd already ruled out a coalition with Labour, others that they'd taken a vow against the Tories, but no-one seemed astonished that the actual position was a rather feeble "whoever." There's no doubt the Lib Dems will swing left again when the wind blows them that way. But whether leaning to the left or the right, without a philosophical anchor there's nothing much to get excited about.
I really don't know where Clegg has been for the last year and a half, but the idea that the other parties' economic policies proffer an Aladdin's cave of giveaway policies seems a bit far-fetched. The Labour Chancellor has, for instance, just promised the toughest spending cuts in 20 years. The Tories criticise them for not going far enough. Now Clegg wades in saying they are both sugar-coating their policies? That's actually quite frightening. A number of commentators have described the coming general election as a turning point for a generation - that's over-hyping it. The difference between the parties' spending plans are marginal at best. Particularly since the failed coup attempt against the Prime Minister last week, the new Labour Cabinet has shifted towards a more full-scale cuts approach that differs from the Conservative version only in that neither have been fully spelled out to the electorate. One Lib Dem said the difference between the three main parties was that his party would "cut with a heavy heart."
Presumably that means if you're laid off you are meant to feel sorry for them. Perhaps redundant workers could send the Liberals a condolence card to commiserate with what they must have gone through sending out all those notices. After describing voters as grown-ups, Clegg then announced that he would introduce caps on public-sector pay, scrap the government baby bonds scheme, ditch the commitment to free childcare and their "citizen's pension" and that he would no longer advocate free personal care for the old and disabled. Added to this the Lib Dems would keep tuition fees, at least until the good times roll again. Clegg described this bonfire of the policies by saying: "We have stripped away everything that is not essential because the country cannot afford it." There was me thinking that policies like free child and personal care existed because parents and the disabled couldn't afford them. Maybe they aren't part of "the country." The abolition of tuition fees was seen as a defining policy for the Lib Dems and for the leader to describe this as "not essential" speaks volumes about the shift at the heart of mainstream politics.
Far from demonstrating how different the Lib Dems are from the other parties, this announcement demonstrates the tight consensus that exists at the top of all three parliamentary parties, which are determined to deny the voters any viable choice. Clegg may think that you treat people like adults by reducing their living standards, but he could have taken a very different approach - one that stems the growing tide of unemployment rather than adds to it. He disparagingly described long-held political commitments as a "shopping list of pledges" to voters, adding that he wasn't going to "buy their favour with cheap trinkets." One moment it's a point of honour and principle to abolish tuition fees, the next the right to an education regardless of your wealth is a "cheap trinket." Fascinating stuff. One less high-profile announcement was that the Lib Dems would create "a new national infrastructure bank to bring in private money to build the transport links, energy grid and public buildings we need for a sustainable, low-carbon economy in every part of Britain." This commitment to deepen the privatisation agenda shared by the Conservatives and new Labour is another expression of how barren the state of progressive political ideas is today.
In the past many people who have leaned to the left of politics have voted Lib Dem. The party's stance on ID cards, tuition fees or opposing the Iraq invasion - until it started - gave it some appeal to those who could no longer stomach voting Labour. But even this option has gone now. Ditching policies designed to help the poorest in society while giving big business the wink that there will be plenty of profits to be made out of a Lib Dem-influenced government is an indication that their leader's priorities are far from progressive, a fact that many on the left of the party are all too aware of. If Clegg really wanted to be treated like a grown-up he should have taken the risk of presenting his party as a genuine political alternative, not another shade of the same failed approach. He even dropped the idea of proportional representation at the very time that it is gaining a hearing, watering it down to a commitment to "abolish safe seats" - presumably those of his colleagues, judging by his current uninspired performance.
This approach, based on the idea that the country is moving to the right, is unlikely to win much support among Tory voters who already have a right-wing party to vote for and seems almost designed to put off those to the left who lent them their vote in previous elections. Disaffected Labour voters and those who support smaller left-wing parties have been given a clear warning that the Lib Dems are not for them. They would do well to heed it. At last the Liberal Democrats have answered the question that someone, somewhere may well have been asking. Who would they favour if they held the balance of power in a hung Parliament? It turns out that the answer is anyone who will let them sit at the big table and is willing to sign Nick Clegg's autograph book. There's been a certain amount of straw-clutching in the last few days because one poll has suggested that the gap between Labour and the Tories is narrowing, which would increase the chances of neither party commanding a majority in the House of Commons. The poll has been built up into far more than it really is with those who see what they want to see, forgetting that one extremely unlikely swallow does not make a spring.
At the weekend Clegg announced that "whichever party have the strongest mandate from the British people, it seems to me that they have the first right to try and govern." While he was right to point out that in a democracy it should be the people who decide who governs, it does rather ignore the fact that those who vote for Clegg's party are making a political decision which should count for something. In effect Clegg has decided to cast his party in the mould of a neutral referee without philosophical allegiance or strong opinions either way. He may as well have indicated that if you want to decide who runs the country after the election, don't vote Lib Dem because they'll take their lead from everyone else anyway. What makes it even more bizarre is that this damp cloth of an announcement is seen as the strongest statement Clegg has ever made on the subject and, as such, is news. Just don't ask him what his favourite biscuit is for heaven's sake or we'll be here all day. Tony Benn often remarks that politicians are either weathercocks or sign posts - that is, those who point whichever way they are blown and those who stick to their principles no matter what. However, it appears he left out the category of limp knitted windsock, which is where Clegg is building his electoral niche.
Just because someone's in an organisation that has more in common with uncultured yoghurt than a political party, that doesn't mean they should be demonised. There are good people in campaigns to defend council housing, against various wars and to protect particular public services who also happen to be members of the Lib Dems. When Lib Dem Cambridge MP David Howarth attended the G20 protests as a legal observer and eloquently spoke out against the behaviour of the police, I don't have the slightest inclination to moderate my praise with a "yeah, but..." There's no question that some of the vote the Lib Dems receive is to the left of new Labour. Those whose progressive instincts are repelled by Trident, ID cards, the Iraq occupation and a host of other monstrosities that I don't need to go into here have often lent their vote to the Lib Dems.
What these people rarely do though is begin to see themselves as "Lib Dem voters" and, as such, that vote is extremely soft and vulnerable.
In recent times we've seen the new Lib Dem leadership begin to shift the party towards a more Cameron-lite style of politics - which is no mean feat when you consider that helium has difficulty being lighter than Cameron. Clegg's announcement at conference that he was for savage cuts and was ditching the commitment to scrapping tuition fees was an attempt to look more substantial in an era of financial crisis. But for many this simply came across like the sidekick of an Eton bully egging on the violence without the clout to actually join in themselves. When Clegg surprised his party's policy-making body on the abolition of tuition fees he hoped to signal that he was up to the task of handling the recession, but he ended up showing that he was just an identikit politician, as undemocratic and cynical as other party leaders but less influential. A party without an identity is hardly up to the task of tackling global problems like climate change, the financial collapse or war.
If you don't believe in anything you're not fit to govern. Currently the Lib Dems' local campaigns even seem to be pushing the party towards a kind of "patriotic" pro-war position and they are making more than clear that the one area of spending they won't be trying to make cuts in is the armed forces.
The leaflet that came through doors in late November this weekend focused solely on the local candidate's loyalty to the troops in Afghanistan. This isn't just unconvincing - it means that none of the three largest parties is even trying to represent public opinion on ending the occupation. The nation's forgotten third party seems to be on a mission to become completely indistinguishable from the very worst parts of the stifling consensus at the heart of so-called respectable politics. Clegg's announcement that he'd just go with the flow after the next election and isn't bothered either way is hardly inspiring. Partly because it emphasises that his party is always "the would-be king-maker," never the "would-be king," but mainly because it demonstrates how alien conviction politics is to the leadership. Judging from the early reaction from Lib Dem blogs even their activists aren't too impressed with the new announcement. This may partly be due to the way they get to act as spectators to major decisions made by their party rather than actual participants.
Some thought they'd already ruled out a coalition with Labour, others that they'd taken a vow against the Tories, but no-one seemed astonished that the actual position was a rather feeble "whoever." There's no doubt the Lib Dems will swing left again when the wind blows them that way. But whether leaning to the left or the right, without a philosophical anchor there's nothing much to get excited about.
The politicians who cried 'fox'
I have a confession to make. I don't care about fox-hunting. No, really. Couldn't give a fox's hastily retreating arse either way. When Labour's anti-hunting campaign was in full swing in 2001-4, it was the number one issue for kids at my private school. The farmers' sons and aristocratic daughters who helped to run hunts or even hunted themselves versus the humane, urbane liberal kids who went around with tiny foxes pinned to their lapels. They may not have understood about poverty and unemployment, they may not have had an opinion on the wars that Tony Blair's government was unleashing, the cluster bombs and civilian death tolls and blood on the sand, but by gosh they had an opinion on fox-hunting. Stumbling out of my mother's house early last Boxing Day in search of coffee, I unintentionally ambled into the middle of the Boxing Day Hunt and supporters' drinks. The entire aristocracy of Sussex were assembled on Lewes High Street in a boozy throng of tweed, wellies and jodhpurs to defend the right of a handful of chuntering poshos to set the dogs on woodland predators.
Three weeks after a disastrous Copenhagen climate conference, in the teeth of a recession that is tearing the soul out of the young, this was the pressing issue of the day for our soon-to-be lords and masters. Brilliant. I'd seen the hunt meet before, but never in these numbers. The hunt saboteurs - as much a traditional part of the day as the hunt itself - by now were nowhere to be seen and the smattering of frozen placards called for a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting that Labour fought so hard and so publicly to push through in 2004. The same ban that David Cameron, a former huntsman himself, has pledged to review should the Tories form the next government. And for what? To give the finger to a dying Labour administration. To demonstrate the right of landowning Tory supporters to do what the hell they please. The entire issue encapsulates the politics of symbolism over substance. With months to go before the election, have we not got more pressing things to be concerned about? Yes, fox-hunting is stupid. It's cruel, it's outdated and it's barbaric. Lots of things are barbaric.
The wars that Labour took us into and that Cameron may well extend continue to be barbaric. The welfare state butchery, tax cuts and reassertion of "hierarchy," which according to "Red Tory" Phillip Blond is what we all need a dose of, will be barbaric too. Thousands of women are abused, brutalised and murdered by their partners every year - that's barbaric. Six thousand people, most of them men, commit suicide in this country every year - that's barbaric. Right now in Britain, over 1,000 immigrant children are imprisoned indefinitely without trial, most of them in Yarl's Wood - that's barbaric. Government ministers making oh-for-shame noises over the fate of poor ickle foxes is a gutless gimmick. And the fact that the loudest noise being made by Labour over fox-hunting came at the height of Iraq invasion was no coincidence. The issue is a foil, a political bauble to toss between those who nominally represent the working class and the wealthy without ever mentioning the words "wealth redistribution." It's a stick to beat the Tories with, a way of evoking class sensibilities without actually raising class issues. And now, scenting blood, the Tories have turned the issue back on the government.
Labour is playing right along. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn is attempting to drum up support for the hunting ban with an online petition, another fabulous bit of jimmied activist astroturfing by Labour. Benn himself is a staunch supporter of the ban, not because of cruelty to animals per se but because of what it says about inter-party ideology. "He used to hunt foxes," Benn said of Cameron. "He has said that if he becomes prime minister he will get rid of the fox-hunting ban ... if you think the Tories have changed, their views on fox-hunting with dogs make it absolutely clear that their priorities haven't." Unfortunately, the way this issue has been used reveals as much of Labour's priorities as it does the Tories'. It will not be the repeal of the hunting ban that will affect the the lives of ordinary people under a Tory government but the brutality of welfare and tax schemes and spending cuts.
The open return of inherited privilege and hierarchy to the game of government will probably make some small difference too, but the government needs to step up and say so rather than making knowing asides about what fox-hunting means to the rich. The hunting ban is the scented rag in the bloodsport of Whitehall politics, tossed in the faces of the opposition to get them roused and snarling for a really nasty fight. I don't want to see hordes of drooling poshos back in power any more than Benn does, but if the left wants to outrun the Tories it must abandon the politics of symbolism. Britain still needs a politics of the people, for the people. The foxes can look after themselves.
Three weeks after a disastrous Copenhagen climate conference, in the teeth of a recession that is tearing the soul out of the young, this was the pressing issue of the day for our soon-to-be lords and masters. Brilliant. I'd seen the hunt meet before, but never in these numbers. The hunt saboteurs - as much a traditional part of the day as the hunt itself - by now were nowhere to be seen and the smattering of frozen placards called for a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting that Labour fought so hard and so publicly to push through in 2004. The same ban that David Cameron, a former huntsman himself, has pledged to review should the Tories form the next government. And for what? To give the finger to a dying Labour administration. To demonstrate the right of landowning Tory supporters to do what the hell they please. The entire issue encapsulates the politics of symbolism over substance. With months to go before the election, have we not got more pressing things to be concerned about? Yes, fox-hunting is stupid. It's cruel, it's outdated and it's barbaric. Lots of things are barbaric.
The wars that Labour took us into and that Cameron may well extend continue to be barbaric. The welfare state butchery, tax cuts and reassertion of "hierarchy," which according to "Red Tory" Phillip Blond is what we all need a dose of, will be barbaric too. Thousands of women are abused, brutalised and murdered by their partners every year - that's barbaric. Six thousand people, most of them men, commit suicide in this country every year - that's barbaric. Right now in Britain, over 1,000 immigrant children are imprisoned indefinitely without trial, most of them in Yarl's Wood - that's barbaric. Government ministers making oh-for-shame noises over the fate of poor ickle foxes is a gutless gimmick. And the fact that the loudest noise being made by Labour over fox-hunting came at the height of Iraq invasion was no coincidence. The issue is a foil, a political bauble to toss between those who nominally represent the working class and the wealthy without ever mentioning the words "wealth redistribution." It's a stick to beat the Tories with, a way of evoking class sensibilities without actually raising class issues. And now, scenting blood, the Tories have turned the issue back on the government.
Labour is playing right along. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn is attempting to drum up support for the hunting ban with an online petition, another fabulous bit of jimmied activist astroturfing by Labour. Benn himself is a staunch supporter of the ban, not because of cruelty to animals per se but because of what it says about inter-party ideology. "He used to hunt foxes," Benn said of Cameron. "He has said that if he becomes prime minister he will get rid of the fox-hunting ban ... if you think the Tories have changed, their views on fox-hunting with dogs make it absolutely clear that their priorities haven't." Unfortunately, the way this issue has been used reveals as much of Labour's priorities as it does the Tories'. It will not be the repeal of the hunting ban that will affect the the lives of ordinary people under a Tory government but the brutality of welfare and tax schemes and spending cuts.
The open return of inherited privilege and hierarchy to the game of government will probably make some small difference too, but the government needs to step up and say so rather than making knowing asides about what fox-hunting means to the rich. The hunting ban is the scented rag in the bloodsport of Whitehall politics, tossed in the faces of the opposition to get them roused and snarling for a really nasty fight. I don't want to see hordes of drooling poshos back in power any more than Benn does, but if the left wants to outrun the Tories it must abandon the politics of symbolism. Britain still needs a politics of the people, for the people. The foxes can look after themselves.
Monday, 8 February 2010
The axemen cometh - but we shall fight them off!
General election campaigning has begun in Britain with the establishment parties unveiling plans for deep public-sector cuts. The details may vary. But they all agree that workers and sections of the middle class should pay for the economic devastation wrought by the bankers and the failures of the capitalist system. only determined, militant action will be able to push back this offensive. One issue will override all others during the coming years: Who will pay for the economic crisis? Top bankers’ bonuses have returned to record levels, with £40 billion expected to be paid in the City in the first two months of the year. Meanwhile, youth unemployment has reached 18.4% according to official figures, with total unemployment at 7.9% and rising. The number of children living in dire poverty increased by 21,000 in the first eight months of last year. House repossessions have increased, and will increase further as the one million people who currently use their credit cards to pay rents or mortgages reach their credit limits. Capitalism is determined that the bill for the recession – triggered by the implosion of the banking system – is paid by the working class, the public sector in particular. However, it will not be possible for governments to carry out the brutal cuts in public spending demanded by the world’s capitalist classes without facing mass revolts and opposition. In the last year this has been shown across Europe – by the movements in Iceland, France, Spain, Greece and elsewhere, but also by militant strike action in Britain.
The huge state debts accumulated over the last two years, transferred from the private finance sector, were unavoidable for world capitalism if a great depression, worse even than the 1930s, was to be avoided. The representatives of capitalism have learnt something since then. When economic crisis hit this time, the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the previous three decades was jettisoned overnight in favour of massive state bailouts of the finance sector. As Robert Lucas, known as ‘the high priest’ of neo-liberalism, put it: "In a foxhole, we are all Keynesians". In Britain, the amount spent by the government in bailing out and underwriting the banks and finance sector is estimated at £1.2 trillion. This is equal to one week of world output! Combined with a dramatic fall in tax receipts, this has led to the government deficit spiralling upwards. In 2009, government borrowing reached £178 billion, taking total net public debt to £798 billion. Borrowing will exceed 12% of national income in 2009-10, Britain’s worst ever annual deficit in peacetime. The central theme of the general election campaign is the size of the deficit, with the Tories accusing New Labour of profligacy. However, had a Tory government been in power in 2008, when the country was within 48 hours of a complete collapse of the banking system, it would have been forced to take, in essence, the same measures.
Just as George W Bush had no choice but to empirically adopt Keynesian measures to bail out Wall Street, so Gordon Brown – who just weeks earlier had criticised other European governments for not taking financial deregulation far enough – had to do a 180-degree turn and intervene in the finance sector on a massive scale. Faced with further financial crises it cannot be ruled out that a Cameron-led government would have to carry out further Keynesian measures. Now, however, in a gigantic con trick, the blame for increased government debt is being laid at the feet of the working class and public-sector workers. There are no fundamental disagreements between the different wings of the capitalist class on this issue – although there are policy differences. This is true also for the major political parties. Many workers rightly fear the return of a Tory government, which would launch an all-out assault on the public sector. Brown, in an attempt to win the election, is emphasising that New Labour would wield the axe more gently than the Tories. For example, whereas New Labour is proposing a maximum 1% pay increase for all public-sector workers for two years or more from 2011, the Tories are proposing to freeze pay for 80% of public-sector workers.
For example, whereas New Labour is proposing a maximum 1% pay increase for all public-sector workers for two years or more from 2011, the Tories are proposing to freeze pay for 80% of public-sector workers. Both are pay cuts in real terms but the Tories’ are more severe. However, as a Financial Times editorial pointed out: "Despite heated rhetoric, the differences between Labour and Conservatives on this issue are rather slight". The Liberal Democrats have also joined the axe-wielding frenzy, ditching their policy of abolishing tuition fees along with other promises. In essence, all three parties put forward the same position: taxes will increase for the working class, and ‘the axeman cometh’ for public-sector pay and services. Vicious cuts to university funding – one third of the total budget – give a glimpse of what a fourth New Labour government would be like. Chancellor Alistair Darling has said that Britain faces the worst cuts in 20 years and has consistently refused to rule out cuts of 17% in ‘non-ring-fenced’ parts of the public sector. New Labour’s real position was clearly indicated in Darling’s pre-budget report, of which the Financial Times declared: "Not in the past 40 years has Britain experienced such a sustained squeeze on public spending than that planned by this government. The International Monetary Fund in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and John Major in the 1990s, were mice compared with the lions of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in the desire to curtail the role of the state in the years ahead".
Incredibly, the majority of the cabinet seem to believe that the best chance of winning the election is to admit the scale of cuts they would carry out. This shows how far removed they are from reality. Brown appears to favour a different presentation, emphasising that New Labour cuts will not be as brutal as under a Tory government. However, there are no substantive differences between members of his cabinet, only an argument about how much sugar with which to coat the bitter pill. To suggest, as Larry Elliott has in The Guardian, that Brown is following a similar approach to the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) of the Labour left of the 1970s is completely wrong. The AES, while very limited, did call for the permanent nationalisation of the finance institutions and defence of public services, whereas Brown has only nationalised banks under duress, in order to prop them up and sell them back to the private sector at the earliest opportunity, and is in favour of massive cuts in public spending. This is not to say that there are no real disagreements between New Labour and the Tories on these issues. But they are mainly on how fast the axe should fall. According to the Financial Times, at the 2009 conference of the Confederation of British Industry, there was no agreement on when cuts in public spending should begin: "Forty per cent thought the risk lay in tightening [ie cutting] too quickly, while 60% thought it lay in doing so too late".
Faced with an intractable crisis, the political representatives of capitalism are trying to decide whether the rock or the hard place is better. There are those, now wholehearted converts to a Keynesian approach, who believe that the government deficit should be allowed to grow for a considerable period. They rightly fear that short-term cuts in public spending would lead to a catastrophic double-dip recession. David Blanchflower, ex-member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, was correct when he said: "The Tories’ economic proposals have the potential to push the British economy into a death spiral of decline that would be almost impossible to reverse for a generation". (The Guardian, 10 October 2009) He and others recognise that it is only the intervention of the state that has so far prevented British – and world – capitalism falling into that ‘death spiral’. Figures from the Office for National Statistics have shown how, for example, the government was entirely responsible for the 2.2% increase in investment in the third quarter. Public investment was up 10.7%, private business investment was down by 0.6%. Bank lending remains at historically low levels. In other words, the private sector remains on a life-support machine, only functioning as a result of huge state sector blood transfusions.
From the point of view of capitalism, however, allowing state deficits to spiral unchecked is only viable if there is a prospect of healthy economic growth in the not-too-distant future. Econ Samuel Brittan wrote: "My own bottom line is that all this is in response to a largely imaginary budget crisis. If we have a normal economic recovery the red ink will diminish remarkably quickly". Brittan draws a comparison with the immediate post-war period when Britain’s total national debt was over 200% of GDP, compared to today when it is just under 60% and forecast to reach 100%. In the immediate aftermath of the war, public spending was cut severely. However, the fundamental reason that the size of the debt was reduced over the following decades was the unparalleled economic growth of the post-war upswing. By 1973, when the upswing ended, output in the advanced capitalist countries was almost three times that of 1950. More was produced in that quarter century than in the previous three quarters. In that situation, not only was the national debt reduced dramatically, but capitalism was prepared to buy social peace by accepting a steady increase in living standards for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and a huge expansion of the ‘social wage’ – spending on pensions, the health service, unemployment benefits and so on.
Although these policies are associated with Keynesianism, they are not really classical Keynesian policies, which are designed to pump-prime the economy at times of crisis, rather than be applied during an upswing. In addition, the increased public spending during the boom was overwhelmingly financed by taxation, not by government borrowing. The exceptional ‘golden era’ could not be more different to what we face today. Following the end of the post-war upswing, capitalism set about restoring its profits, in large part by driving down the share of wealth taken by the working class in wages and the social wage. In Britain, the last 16 years of boom – driven by huge finance sector bubbles – masked the underlying problems of capitalism. They have now been laid bare. During the recent boom, inequality reached its highest levels since the 1930s, as globalisation was used to drive wages down. Inevitably, this exacerbated the underlying problems of overproduction and overcapacity as, in essence, workers were less able to buy back the goods produced. This was partially disguised by the expansion of consumer credit, but has turned dramatically into its opposite with the onset of recession. The consumer debt overhang in Britain is a vast £1.5 trillion.
It is likely that, as the economic stimuli are withdrawn, the world will enter the second dip of recession. We are faced with a protracted, drawn-out crisis, interspersed with periods of anaemic growth. Mass unemployment, and the accompanying, dramatic increases in poverty, homelessness and misery, will not go away even when economies stutter into growth. In a world of economics in intensive care, Britain, the last OECD country to crawl out of recession, is among the weaker patients. Government figures show that the cumulative output loss since the beginning of 2008 has been over 5%. This makes the problems of British capitalism intractable. As Larry Elliot writes: "The hope, of course, is that the willingness to slash interest rates, create electronic money and run up hefty record peacetime budget deficits has bought time for the private sector, so that when state intervention in the economy starts to diminish, consumers and businesses will be in a fit enough state to grab the baton. There is no guarantee that this will happen, particularly since it will prove mightily difficult – nigh-on impossible, perhaps – for policymakers to judge when and how to remove the stimulus".
Given this reality, from the point of view of capitalism, the seemingly insane policies of the Tories – to follow the ‘Irish road’ and proceed quickly to slash the public sector to the bone – have a certain brutal logic. This is reflected in the overwhelming switch of big business funding from New Labour to the Tories, as the party they believe can most effectively manage capitalism in the next period. Without doubt, the Tories’ plans would throw millions more workers onto the dole. In the end, however, the concern of capitalism is not about more or less misery for working- and middle-class people, but about restoring profitability. Given the overweening dominance of the finance sector in Britain, primarily, this means restoring the profits of the ‘banksters’. For the finance sector in particular, the real dangers that Britain’s debt will be downgraded and/or there will be a run on the pound, plus the danger of inflation further into the future, are threats to future profits.
Following the Armageddon that the City has wreaked, a section of Britain’s ruling class harbours the dream of moving Britain back towards a concentration on manufacturing. This is utopian given the sickly character of Britain’s manufacturing and the weight of the finance sector. The manufacturing sector of every advanced capitalist country has been hollowed out, but Britain leads the way with it making up just 16% of output before the recession. Productivity in Britain also lags behind – at eleventh place in the OECD league. In any case, those Keynesian commentators who suggest that a greater emphasise on manufacturing would mean a more equitable form of capitalism are mistaken. In reality, the manufacturing and financial sectors are intertwined. Even from the point of view of manufacturing capitalism, it is the restoration of profits that matters. British capitalism has spent 30 years positioning itself as a provider of cheap labour. A further dramatic increase in unemployment, which the Tories’ plans would lead to, would act as what Karl Marx called ‘a reserve army of labour’, a big stick with which to try and frighten workers into accepting lower wages. Driving down wages would, in turn, exacerbate the crisis of overproduction and overcapacity. However, individual capitalists are not driven by the medium- or long-term interests of capitalism as a whole, but by how best to maximise their own profits.
The arbiters of the logic of the market, such as Moody’s ratings agency, have declared that Britain’s "affordability is stretched to the limits of what is consistent with a top rating", and are threatening that Britain, like Greece, will face its debt being downgraded at some point if cuts are not made fast enough. As an editorial in The Guardian correctly explained, the ratings agencies have the attitude of money-lenders and are not interested in human misery, in "unemployment or long-term growth". Nor are they accurate. The agencies regularly commit huge blunders. At the beginning of 2008, there were about a dozen top-rated countries in the entire world, according to Moody’s and Co – but there were 64,000 Collateralised Debt Obligations securities, CLOs and the like that were at the same notch, much of which turned out to be rubbish. The agencies thought Enron was fine – until just four days before it went bust. They got southeast Asia wrong, and before that Latin America. The past couple of years should have finally given the lie to the notion that the City experts know best.
The majority of the population would agree wholeheartedly, but capitalist governments continue to dance to the tune of the rating agencies. But ‘the logic of the market’ will not seem logical to the working class. At a certain stage, the cuts being threatened by the next government will lead to massive social upheavals. Even Thatcher, the axe-woman par excellence – who, it has been revealed to no-one’s surprise, scrawled ‘not nearly tough enough’ and ‘too small’ on her ministers’ proposals to cut public spending – did not cut on anywhere near the scale of Darling’s pre-budget report, never mind those proposed by today’s Tory leader, David Cameron. Apart from the brief period at the end of the second world war, only once has Britain’s government implemented an absolute cut in public spending. The infamous Geddes Report attempted to cut public spending from £603 million to £428 million in the 1920s, and was one of the main factors behind the 1926 general strike. At this stage, the overwhelming propaganda laying the blame for the size of the deficit on public-sector workers has some effect. A YouGov poll on 13 September 2009 showed 60% of people in favour of public spending cuts. Many workers blame the City of London for the crisis, whilst believing that there is no option but to accept cuts as the banksters will never pay for the crisis.
However, the mood will change when cuts become concrete. A more recent poll showed that the majority of public-sector workers do not believe that they will suffer a pay freeze. It is one thing to acquiesce to cuts when you do not think that they will have any direct effect on you or your family, another when it is your pay that is being frozen, or your job, pension, school and hospital that it is facing cuts. Despite the attempts of the representatives of capitalism to divide public- and private-sector workers, once public-sector workers enter action, there will be enormous potential to win the support of other workers in a united struggle to defend public services. An indication of this was the public support for the postal workers’ strike, which remained at 2:1 despite the media onslaught against the Communication Workers Union. Even before the huge attacks begin, cuts have started and workers are having no choice but to resist. The Guardian explained: "Britain is ushering in the new year with the threat of widespread unrest as civil servants, tube drivers and rail workers are poised to ballot on strike action". (31 December 2009) In addition, the postal workers’ strike ballot is still live. Also on the agenda are movements of students against university cuts, alongside the fight back against youth unemployment led by Youth Fight for Jobs. These battles, looming in the first part of 2010, are preparation for the enormous struggles that will be necessary under the next government.
Philip Hammond, shadow treasury secretary, declared that there is no danger of a ‘winter of discontent’ after a Tory victory, as trade union leaders were only doing their job when they "came out and rattled their sabres" at the TUC conference. Behind the scenes, the shadow cabinet had established "cordial relations" with them, Hammond said. Unfortunately, it is all too likely that the majority of union leaders see that the best way of defending their members against a Tory government is by establishing ‘cordial’ – that is, supine – relations with it. This was the case when Thatcher came to power. Her government responded to their friendly overtures by launching an onslaught on the trade union movement and workers’ rights. Cameron would be no different. However, Hammond and the Tories the Tories are making a big mistake if they confuse the approach of the union leaders with that of the rank and file. Last year saw important struggles – from Lindsey oil refinery, the post, to the Leeds bin workers, etc. Faced with vicious attacks on pay and conditions, workers are prepared to fight, and can win victories. Flying pickets, unofficial and all-out strikes for weeks at a time were some of the militant methods of the 1970s and 1980s which were re-adopted in 2009. The shrinking size of the pot available – as a result of the crisis – is already sharpening the struggle between capital and labour enormously.
This process will accelerate in the coming years. The outrageous decision by the courts to ban the British Airways cabin crew strike is a declaration that any strike can be declared illegal and is a foretaste of the oppression to come. It is likely that a Tory government would add to the already formidable armoury of anti-trade union laws. It will take a concerted struggle to push aside these laws but, as the Lindsey workers demonstrated, it is possible to do so. Leaders of the general union, UNITE, correctly called the BA decision "disgraceful" but were not prepared to defy it. Socialists are not light-minded about the need to protect the trade union funds and resources built up by members over a long period. Ultimately, however, the only way to defeat the anti-union laws will be to defy them. In the case of the cabin crew, UNITE could have called on all its BA members to strike for at least a day and call a massive demonstration at Heathrow airport against the court ruling. If the courts had then come for the union’s funds, the whole of the trade union movement would have needed to mobilise in defence of democratic rights and the unions.
The anti-union laws are just one aspect, although a crucial one, of the struggles that are coming. Socialists have a vital role to play in politically arming the working class for those struggles. The starting point has to be that the working class will not pay for the capitalist crisis: it is not our bill and we will not pick it up. We will not accept a single cut in workers’ pay or public services. The logic of capitalism means that an assault on public services is inevitable, but not that its success is inevitable. If the working class meets the assault with a sufficiently militant and determined response, the representatives of capitalism can be forced back. The next government – whether New Labour, Tory, coalition or hung – will be fundamentally weak, with very shallow social support. This would be true even if the Tories win a large majority, which does not seem the most likely outcome. There is a possibility of a second general election within quite a short space of time if the government faces mass opposition to its policies.
The strategy of the ‘dented shield’ – that it is necessary to accept some cuts to show that the working class is ‘reasonable’ and prepared to make ‘sacrifices’ for the common good – would be a disaster. Weakness invites aggression and sacrifice does not sate the drive for profit. It only gives the capitalists confidence and allows workers to be divided over which sectors should accept cuts. In reality, without united struggle against all cuts, unimaginably vicious attacks will be made. For example, the IMF has used the economic crisis to renew its demands for ‘healthcare reforms’: "These reforms have basically to be confronted. The idea of [just] introducing these fiscal rules and not doing these reforms is a joke". This is the real position of world capitalism. The depth of public support for the National Health Service means that no government dares to openly agree with the IMF but, despite claims that the NHS is ring-fenced, cuts are already taking place. The NHS Confederation estimates that the health service will have to find £15-20 billion of ‘efficiency savings’ over the next five years. If the working class does not resist, the complete destruction of a publicly-owned health service will be on the agenda.
It is impossible possible to predict exact timescales, but it is certain that the working class will resist. Look at Iceland, with a population of 330,000, where the cuts being demanded to pay back the debts of Iceland’s bankers – costing £10,700 per person – have led to a powerful movement of opposition. Under the impact of the crisis, Iceland first elected a supposedly left government which accepted the demands of the European Union (EU) and IMF. But, under pressure from the movement, it was the right-wing president who called a referendum. No wonder. It was compared to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accompanying catastrophic drop in life expectancy.This is recognition that, given the scale of the threatened revolt, it makes sense to retreat in this instance – particularly given the small sums involved on a global scale. This shows that state debt is not only an economic question but also a political one. Faced with a powerful enough movement, the capitalists can be forced to retreat to defend their system. Capitalist propaganda insists that major cuts are inevitable. In more private discussions, however, capitalist commentators admit a different reality. For example, discussion is taking place in the pages of the Financial Times on the question of Greece, with some arguing that it should leave the eurozone sooner rather than later. In essence, their reasoning is that working-class resistance to the scale of the cuts demanded by the EU will be too great and it is therefore utopian to try and force them through. Desmond Lachman drew a comparison with Argentina, which defaulted on its debt in 2002, after the IMF-proposed ‘adjustment plan’ led to "rioting in the streets" – in reality, a mass movement with revolutionary features. Today, the Argentinian ruling class is unable to enforce through brutal enough cuts to sdatisfy global capital; this may well cause it to default again.
Of course, as long as the capitalist profit system remains, the ruling class will attempt to defend its profits by whatever means necessary. Blocked in one direction it will try another. Faced with massive struggles to defend wages and public services, it could in the future consciously use inflation to undermine the size of the debt and workers’ wages. It is only by fighting back at each stage – in that situation, for wage increases in line with inflation – that the working class will be able to prevent capitalism driving it into the dirt. To be fully effective, however, those struggles will need a perspective for an alternative to capitalism. They will have to be linked to the socialist transformation of society. The majority of national trade union leaders have been completely bewildered by the economic crisis. Having largely accepted the ‘logic of the market’ they became used to decades of ‘concession bargaining’ trade unionism, and act as an enormous fetter on the ability of the working class to struggle. This does not mean that they will hold back struggle indefinitely. On the contrary, as was shown by the GMB and UNITE’s eventual official backing for the construction workers’ strikes last June, they can be forced into action by their members. Nonetheless, left-led trade unions, such as the PCS civil servants union and the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union (RMT), will have an important role to play in putting forward a united strategy to defend jobs and public services. At the same time, the development of genuine militant ‘broad left’ organisations within the trade unions will be a crucial part of fighting to transform them into democratic, fighting bodies.
The importance of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition standing in the general election is that it will begin to prepare the ground for the struggle beyond the election, and can begin to popularise the case for socialism amongst broader sections of the working class. That is why it is a step forward that it is standing on a socialist programme, including the call "for a democratic socialist society run in the interests of people not millionaires. For bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment". The onset of the economic crisis in 2008 has already had a profound effect on the outlook of the working class. At this stage, however, this is not immediately obvious, as the majority still hope against hope that it will pass and life will return to normal. In the next two years, the hammer blows of events will demonstrate to millions that we face a new, far worse, version of normality. Mass struggles, unlike anything we have seen in the last 20 years, will be on the agenda. The potential to build mass support for socialist ideas will once again be posed.
The huge state debts accumulated over the last two years, transferred from the private finance sector, were unavoidable for world capitalism if a great depression, worse even than the 1930s, was to be avoided. The representatives of capitalism have learnt something since then. When economic crisis hit this time, the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the previous three decades was jettisoned overnight in favour of massive state bailouts of the finance sector. As Robert Lucas, known as ‘the high priest’ of neo-liberalism, put it: "In a foxhole, we are all Keynesians". In Britain, the amount spent by the government in bailing out and underwriting the banks and finance sector is estimated at £1.2 trillion. This is equal to one week of world output! Combined with a dramatic fall in tax receipts, this has led to the government deficit spiralling upwards. In 2009, government borrowing reached £178 billion, taking total net public debt to £798 billion. Borrowing will exceed 12% of national income in 2009-10, Britain’s worst ever annual deficit in peacetime. The central theme of the general election campaign is the size of the deficit, with the Tories accusing New Labour of profligacy. However, had a Tory government been in power in 2008, when the country was within 48 hours of a complete collapse of the banking system, it would have been forced to take, in essence, the same measures.
Just as George W Bush had no choice but to empirically adopt Keynesian measures to bail out Wall Street, so Gordon Brown – who just weeks earlier had criticised other European governments for not taking financial deregulation far enough – had to do a 180-degree turn and intervene in the finance sector on a massive scale. Faced with further financial crises it cannot be ruled out that a Cameron-led government would have to carry out further Keynesian measures. Now, however, in a gigantic con trick, the blame for increased government debt is being laid at the feet of the working class and public-sector workers. There are no fundamental disagreements between the different wings of the capitalist class on this issue – although there are policy differences. This is true also for the major political parties. Many workers rightly fear the return of a Tory government, which would launch an all-out assault on the public sector. Brown, in an attempt to win the election, is emphasising that New Labour would wield the axe more gently than the Tories. For example, whereas New Labour is proposing a maximum 1% pay increase for all public-sector workers for two years or more from 2011, the Tories are proposing to freeze pay for 80% of public-sector workers.
For example, whereas New Labour is proposing a maximum 1% pay increase for all public-sector workers for two years or more from 2011, the Tories are proposing to freeze pay for 80% of public-sector workers. Both are pay cuts in real terms but the Tories’ are more severe. However, as a Financial Times editorial pointed out: "Despite heated rhetoric, the differences between Labour and Conservatives on this issue are rather slight". The Liberal Democrats have also joined the axe-wielding frenzy, ditching their policy of abolishing tuition fees along with other promises. In essence, all three parties put forward the same position: taxes will increase for the working class, and ‘the axeman cometh’ for public-sector pay and services. Vicious cuts to university funding – one third of the total budget – give a glimpse of what a fourth New Labour government would be like. Chancellor Alistair Darling has said that Britain faces the worst cuts in 20 years and has consistently refused to rule out cuts of 17% in ‘non-ring-fenced’ parts of the public sector. New Labour’s real position was clearly indicated in Darling’s pre-budget report, of which the Financial Times declared: "Not in the past 40 years has Britain experienced such a sustained squeeze on public spending than that planned by this government. The International Monetary Fund in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and John Major in the 1990s, were mice compared with the lions of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in the desire to curtail the role of the state in the years ahead".
Incredibly, the majority of the cabinet seem to believe that the best chance of winning the election is to admit the scale of cuts they would carry out. This shows how far removed they are from reality. Brown appears to favour a different presentation, emphasising that New Labour cuts will not be as brutal as under a Tory government. However, there are no substantive differences between members of his cabinet, only an argument about how much sugar with which to coat the bitter pill. To suggest, as Larry Elliott has in The Guardian, that Brown is following a similar approach to the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) of the Labour left of the 1970s is completely wrong. The AES, while very limited, did call for the permanent nationalisation of the finance institutions and defence of public services, whereas Brown has only nationalised banks under duress, in order to prop them up and sell them back to the private sector at the earliest opportunity, and is in favour of massive cuts in public spending. This is not to say that there are no real disagreements between New Labour and the Tories on these issues. But they are mainly on how fast the axe should fall. According to the Financial Times, at the 2009 conference of the Confederation of British Industry, there was no agreement on when cuts in public spending should begin: "Forty per cent thought the risk lay in tightening [ie cutting] too quickly, while 60% thought it lay in doing so too late".
Faced with an intractable crisis, the political representatives of capitalism are trying to decide whether the rock or the hard place is better. There are those, now wholehearted converts to a Keynesian approach, who believe that the government deficit should be allowed to grow for a considerable period. They rightly fear that short-term cuts in public spending would lead to a catastrophic double-dip recession. David Blanchflower, ex-member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, was correct when he said: "The Tories’ economic proposals have the potential to push the British economy into a death spiral of decline that would be almost impossible to reverse for a generation". (The Guardian, 10 October 2009) He and others recognise that it is only the intervention of the state that has so far prevented British – and world – capitalism falling into that ‘death spiral’. Figures from the Office for National Statistics have shown how, for example, the government was entirely responsible for the 2.2% increase in investment in the third quarter. Public investment was up 10.7%, private business investment was down by 0.6%. Bank lending remains at historically low levels. In other words, the private sector remains on a life-support machine, only functioning as a result of huge state sector blood transfusions.
From the point of view of capitalism, however, allowing state deficits to spiral unchecked is only viable if there is a prospect of healthy economic growth in the not-too-distant future. Econ Samuel Brittan wrote: "My own bottom line is that all this is in response to a largely imaginary budget crisis. If we have a normal economic recovery the red ink will diminish remarkably quickly". Brittan draws a comparison with the immediate post-war period when Britain’s total national debt was over 200% of GDP, compared to today when it is just under 60% and forecast to reach 100%. In the immediate aftermath of the war, public spending was cut severely. However, the fundamental reason that the size of the debt was reduced over the following decades was the unparalleled economic growth of the post-war upswing. By 1973, when the upswing ended, output in the advanced capitalist countries was almost three times that of 1950. More was produced in that quarter century than in the previous three quarters. In that situation, not only was the national debt reduced dramatically, but capitalism was prepared to buy social peace by accepting a steady increase in living standards for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and a huge expansion of the ‘social wage’ – spending on pensions, the health service, unemployment benefits and so on.
Although these policies are associated with Keynesianism, they are not really classical Keynesian policies, which are designed to pump-prime the economy at times of crisis, rather than be applied during an upswing. In addition, the increased public spending during the boom was overwhelmingly financed by taxation, not by government borrowing. The exceptional ‘golden era’ could not be more different to what we face today. Following the end of the post-war upswing, capitalism set about restoring its profits, in large part by driving down the share of wealth taken by the working class in wages and the social wage. In Britain, the last 16 years of boom – driven by huge finance sector bubbles – masked the underlying problems of capitalism. They have now been laid bare. During the recent boom, inequality reached its highest levels since the 1930s, as globalisation was used to drive wages down. Inevitably, this exacerbated the underlying problems of overproduction and overcapacity as, in essence, workers were less able to buy back the goods produced. This was partially disguised by the expansion of consumer credit, but has turned dramatically into its opposite with the onset of recession. The consumer debt overhang in Britain is a vast £1.5 trillion.
It is likely that, as the economic stimuli are withdrawn, the world will enter the second dip of recession. We are faced with a protracted, drawn-out crisis, interspersed with periods of anaemic growth. Mass unemployment, and the accompanying, dramatic increases in poverty, homelessness and misery, will not go away even when economies stutter into growth. In a world of economics in intensive care, Britain, the last OECD country to crawl out of recession, is among the weaker patients. Government figures show that the cumulative output loss since the beginning of 2008 has been over 5%. This makes the problems of British capitalism intractable. As Larry Elliot writes: "The hope, of course, is that the willingness to slash interest rates, create electronic money and run up hefty record peacetime budget deficits has bought time for the private sector, so that when state intervention in the economy starts to diminish, consumers and businesses will be in a fit enough state to grab the baton. There is no guarantee that this will happen, particularly since it will prove mightily difficult – nigh-on impossible, perhaps – for policymakers to judge when and how to remove the stimulus".
Given this reality, from the point of view of capitalism, the seemingly insane policies of the Tories – to follow the ‘Irish road’ and proceed quickly to slash the public sector to the bone – have a certain brutal logic. This is reflected in the overwhelming switch of big business funding from New Labour to the Tories, as the party they believe can most effectively manage capitalism in the next period. Without doubt, the Tories’ plans would throw millions more workers onto the dole. In the end, however, the concern of capitalism is not about more or less misery for working- and middle-class people, but about restoring profitability. Given the overweening dominance of the finance sector in Britain, primarily, this means restoring the profits of the ‘banksters’. For the finance sector in particular, the real dangers that Britain’s debt will be downgraded and/or there will be a run on the pound, plus the danger of inflation further into the future, are threats to future profits.
Following the Armageddon that the City has wreaked, a section of Britain’s ruling class harbours the dream of moving Britain back towards a concentration on manufacturing. This is utopian given the sickly character of Britain’s manufacturing and the weight of the finance sector. The manufacturing sector of every advanced capitalist country has been hollowed out, but Britain leads the way with it making up just 16% of output before the recession. Productivity in Britain also lags behind – at eleventh place in the OECD league. In any case, those Keynesian commentators who suggest that a greater emphasise on manufacturing would mean a more equitable form of capitalism are mistaken. In reality, the manufacturing and financial sectors are intertwined. Even from the point of view of manufacturing capitalism, it is the restoration of profits that matters. British capitalism has spent 30 years positioning itself as a provider of cheap labour. A further dramatic increase in unemployment, which the Tories’ plans would lead to, would act as what Karl Marx called ‘a reserve army of labour’, a big stick with which to try and frighten workers into accepting lower wages. Driving down wages would, in turn, exacerbate the crisis of overproduction and overcapacity. However, individual capitalists are not driven by the medium- or long-term interests of capitalism as a whole, but by how best to maximise their own profits.
The arbiters of the logic of the market, such as Moody’s ratings agency, have declared that Britain’s "affordability is stretched to the limits of what is consistent with a top rating", and are threatening that Britain, like Greece, will face its debt being downgraded at some point if cuts are not made fast enough. As an editorial in The Guardian correctly explained, the ratings agencies have the attitude of money-lenders and are not interested in human misery, in "unemployment or long-term growth". Nor are they accurate. The agencies regularly commit huge blunders. At the beginning of 2008, there were about a dozen top-rated countries in the entire world, according to Moody’s and Co – but there were 64,000 Collateralised Debt Obligations securities, CLOs and the like that were at the same notch, much of which turned out to be rubbish. The agencies thought Enron was fine – until just four days before it went bust. They got southeast Asia wrong, and before that Latin America. The past couple of years should have finally given the lie to the notion that the City experts know best.
The majority of the population would agree wholeheartedly, but capitalist governments continue to dance to the tune of the rating agencies. But ‘the logic of the market’ will not seem logical to the working class. At a certain stage, the cuts being threatened by the next government will lead to massive social upheavals. Even Thatcher, the axe-woman par excellence – who, it has been revealed to no-one’s surprise, scrawled ‘not nearly tough enough’ and ‘too small’ on her ministers’ proposals to cut public spending – did not cut on anywhere near the scale of Darling’s pre-budget report, never mind those proposed by today’s Tory leader, David Cameron. Apart from the brief period at the end of the second world war, only once has Britain’s government implemented an absolute cut in public spending. The infamous Geddes Report attempted to cut public spending from £603 million to £428 million in the 1920s, and was one of the main factors behind the 1926 general strike. At this stage, the overwhelming propaganda laying the blame for the size of the deficit on public-sector workers has some effect. A YouGov poll on 13 September 2009 showed 60% of people in favour of public spending cuts. Many workers blame the City of London for the crisis, whilst believing that there is no option but to accept cuts as the banksters will never pay for the crisis.
However, the mood will change when cuts become concrete. A more recent poll showed that the majority of public-sector workers do not believe that they will suffer a pay freeze. It is one thing to acquiesce to cuts when you do not think that they will have any direct effect on you or your family, another when it is your pay that is being frozen, or your job, pension, school and hospital that it is facing cuts. Despite the attempts of the representatives of capitalism to divide public- and private-sector workers, once public-sector workers enter action, there will be enormous potential to win the support of other workers in a united struggle to defend public services. An indication of this was the public support for the postal workers’ strike, which remained at 2:1 despite the media onslaught against the Communication Workers Union. Even before the huge attacks begin, cuts have started and workers are having no choice but to resist. The Guardian explained: "Britain is ushering in the new year with the threat of widespread unrest as civil servants, tube drivers and rail workers are poised to ballot on strike action". (31 December 2009) In addition, the postal workers’ strike ballot is still live. Also on the agenda are movements of students against university cuts, alongside the fight back against youth unemployment led by Youth Fight for Jobs. These battles, looming in the first part of 2010, are preparation for the enormous struggles that will be necessary under the next government.
Philip Hammond, shadow treasury secretary, declared that there is no danger of a ‘winter of discontent’ after a Tory victory, as trade union leaders were only doing their job when they "came out and rattled their sabres" at the TUC conference. Behind the scenes, the shadow cabinet had established "cordial relations" with them, Hammond said. Unfortunately, it is all too likely that the majority of union leaders see that the best way of defending their members against a Tory government is by establishing ‘cordial’ – that is, supine – relations with it. This was the case when Thatcher came to power. Her government responded to their friendly overtures by launching an onslaught on the trade union movement and workers’ rights. Cameron would be no different. However, Hammond and the Tories the Tories are making a big mistake if they confuse the approach of the union leaders with that of the rank and file. Last year saw important struggles – from Lindsey oil refinery, the post, to the Leeds bin workers, etc. Faced with vicious attacks on pay and conditions, workers are prepared to fight, and can win victories. Flying pickets, unofficial and all-out strikes for weeks at a time were some of the militant methods of the 1970s and 1980s which were re-adopted in 2009. The shrinking size of the pot available – as a result of the crisis – is already sharpening the struggle between capital and labour enormously.
This process will accelerate in the coming years. The outrageous decision by the courts to ban the British Airways cabin crew strike is a declaration that any strike can be declared illegal and is a foretaste of the oppression to come. It is likely that a Tory government would add to the already formidable armoury of anti-trade union laws. It will take a concerted struggle to push aside these laws but, as the Lindsey workers demonstrated, it is possible to do so. Leaders of the general union, UNITE, correctly called the BA decision "disgraceful" but were not prepared to defy it. Socialists are not light-minded about the need to protect the trade union funds and resources built up by members over a long period. Ultimately, however, the only way to defeat the anti-union laws will be to defy them. In the case of the cabin crew, UNITE could have called on all its BA members to strike for at least a day and call a massive demonstration at Heathrow airport against the court ruling. If the courts had then come for the union’s funds, the whole of the trade union movement would have needed to mobilise in defence of democratic rights and the unions.
The anti-union laws are just one aspect, although a crucial one, of the struggles that are coming. Socialists have a vital role to play in politically arming the working class for those struggles. The starting point has to be that the working class will not pay for the capitalist crisis: it is not our bill and we will not pick it up. We will not accept a single cut in workers’ pay or public services. The logic of capitalism means that an assault on public services is inevitable, but not that its success is inevitable. If the working class meets the assault with a sufficiently militant and determined response, the representatives of capitalism can be forced back. The next government – whether New Labour, Tory, coalition or hung – will be fundamentally weak, with very shallow social support. This would be true even if the Tories win a large majority, which does not seem the most likely outcome. There is a possibility of a second general election within quite a short space of time if the government faces mass opposition to its policies.
The strategy of the ‘dented shield’ – that it is necessary to accept some cuts to show that the working class is ‘reasonable’ and prepared to make ‘sacrifices’ for the common good – would be a disaster. Weakness invites aggression and sacrifice does not sate the drive for profit. It only gives the capitalists confidence and allows workers to be divided over which sectors should accept cuts. In reality, without united struggle against all cuts, unimaginably vicious attacks will be made. For example, the IMF has used the economic crisis to renew its demands for ‘healthcare reforms’: "These reforms have basically to be confronted. The idea of [just] introducing these fiscal rules and not doing these reforms is a joke". This is the real position of world capitalism. The depth of public support for the National Health Service means that no government dares to openly agree with the IMF but, despite claims that the NHS is ring-fenced, cuts are already taking place. The NHS Confederation estimates that the health service will have to find £15-20 billion of ‘efficiency savings’ over the next five years. If the working class does not resist, the complete destruction of a publicly-owned health service will be on the agenda.
It is impossible possible to predict exact timescales, but it is certain that the working class will resist. Look at Iceland, with a population of 330,000, where the cuts being demanded to pay back the debts of Iceland’s bankers – costing £10,700 per person – have led to a powerful movement of opposition. Under the impact of the crisis, Iceland first elected a supposedly left government which accepted the demands of the European Union (EU) and IMF. But, under pressure from the movement, it was the right-wing president who called a referendum. No wonder. It was compared to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accompanying catastrophic drop in life expectancy.This is recognition that, given the scale of the threatened revolt, it makes sense to retreat in this instance – particularly given the small sums involved on a global scale. This shows that state debt is not only an economic question but also a political one. Faced with a powerful enough movement, the capitalists can be forced to retreat to defend their system. Capitalist propaganda insists that major cuts are inevitable. In more private discussions, however, capitalist commentators admit a different reality. For example, discussion is taking place in the pages of the Financial Times on the question of Greece, with some arguing that it should leave the eurozone sooner rather than later. In essence, their reasoning is that working-class resistance to the scale of the cuts demanded by the EU will be too great and it is therefore utopian to try and force them through. Desmond Lachman drew a comparison with Argentina, which defaulted on its debt in 2002, after the IMF-proposed ‘adjustment plan’ led to "rioting in the streets" – in reality, a mass movement with revolutionary features. Today, the Argentinian ruling class is unable to enforce through brutal enough cuts to sdatisfy global capital; this may well cause it to default again.
Of course, as long as the capitalist profit system remains, the ruling class will attempt to defend its profits by whatever means necessary. Blocked in one direction it will try another. Faced with massive struggles to defend wages and public services, it could in the future consciously use inflation to undermine the size of the debt and workers’ wages. It is only by fighting back at each stage – in that situation, for wage increases in line with inflation – that the working class will be able to prevent capitalism driving it into the dirt. To be fully effective, however, those struggles will need a perspective for an alternative to capitalism. They will have to be linked to the socialist transformation of society. The majority of national trade union leaders have been completely bewildered by the economic crisis. Having largely accepted the ‘logic of the market’ they became used to decades of ‘concession bargaining’ trade unionism, and act as an enormous fetter on the ability of the working class to struggle. This does not mean that they will hold back struggle indefinitely. On the contrary, as was shown by the GMB and UNITE’s eventual official backing for the construction workers’ strikes last June, they can be forced into action by their members. Nonetheless, left-led trade unions, such as the PCS civil servants union and the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union (RMT), will have an important role to play in putting forward a united strategy to defend jobs and public services. At the same time, the development of genuine militant ‘broad left’ organisations within the trade unions will be a crucial part of fighting to transform them into democratic, fighting bodies.
The importance of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition standing in the general election is that it will begin to prepare the ground for the struggle beyond the election, and can begin to popularise the case for socialism amongst broader sections of the working class. That is why it is a step forward that it is standing on a socialist programme, including the call "for a democratic socialist society run in the interests of people not millionaires. For bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment". The onset of the economic crisis in 2008 has already had a profound effect on the outlook of the working class. At this stage, however, this is not immediately obvious, as the majority still hope against hope that it will pass and life will return to normal. In the next two years, the hammer blows of events will demonstrate to millions that we face a new, far worse, version of normality. Mass struggles, unlike anything we have seen in the last 20 years, will be on the agenda. The potential to build mass support for socialist ideas will once again be posed.
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Labour circles the drain
The richest 1% of people own a quarter of all wealth in Britain. The bottom half of the population-28 million people-own between them just 6 percent of national wealth. The gulf between the super-rich and the majority is widening. Government ministers say this gap does not matter, and that everyone is getting better off, even if the rich are soaring ahead. They dismiss poverty figures, saying people in modern Britain face only "relative poverty", not genuine hardship. In fact the figures in the Child Poverty Action Group report are not based simply on some statistical measure or device which masks the reality of people's lives. They rely on measures related to concrete things such as people's access to essential goods. The most chilling parts of the report show how real poverty is inflicting real suffering. It is killing people. The report says, "Although overall death rates for babies and young children have declined over time, disparities remain. In 1999 infant mortality was almost twice as high in unskilled manual classes than in professional classes." The gap between rich and poor does not stop in childhood. Life expectancy for men in the bottom social classes is 5.2 years less than at the top. For women the gap in life expectancy is 3.4 years. There is nothing natural about this class devide. The simple explanation for it can be gleaned from what happens every year in Britain.
Death rates increase by 30 percent in the winter months. There were estimated to be over 54,000 "excess winter deaths" in Britain in 1999-2000. Many of those who die unnecessarily are pensioners. The winter death rate is three times that of far colder Scandinavian countries. It is poverty that is killing people. Every other area of life from health to education is hit by this divide. The report also shows that people tend to stay poor. Those who get above the poverty line tend to remain just above it. Even those who do get decent jobs face increasing risk of being pushed down as employment becomes less secure. Those at the very top tend to stay where they are. All that has happened under New Labour is that for many of the poorest people things have not got worse as quickly. Some-especially single parents-are actually worse off. Larger numbers of workers are on the verge of sinking under huge debts. This is in the good years-before, as Tony Blair says, "The government has to make difficult choices." "I try to cut down on my electric. Many a Sunday afternoon our electric has gone. We've just waited till Monday." That's how Trudy, quoted in the report, describes the reality of life for the poorest in Britain today. One survey shows that 6 percent of all people had been disconnected from gas or electricity. Gas disconnections soared from 18,600 in 1991 to 29,500 in 1998.
Remember New Labour's general election campaign in 2001? There were billboards and television ads reminding us of the nightmare Tory years of recession in the early 1990s. One of the most frightening effects of the last recession was the explosion in the number of repossessions, as people could not keep up with mortgage payments. Incredibly, this report shows that more people were in danger of losing their homes under New Labour's "boom" than during the depths of the recession ten years ago. Courts issued 137,000 warrants to repossess homes in 1999. That is higher than the previous peak of 134,000 in 1991. Increasing numbers are falling behind with mortgage payments, even before full-blown recession hits the economy as a whole. Over a million households in England were homeless at some point in the ten years to 1998. It is very difficult to be officially accepted as homeless; less than half of those who apply to councils are put on the homelessness register. Renting a home is becoming more expensive. More people are living in damp homes than in 1990. Three million people are in substandard housing. A study for the Scottish Executive found that "cold, damp and mouldy conditions pose the greatest risk to health, and the prevalence of illness appears to increase with the level of dampness". One person told other researchers, "I have asthma, and when I get worried or I'm not warm I get worse. We put on the heaters for the children because you have to, but for ourselves we say no."
Labour is in chaos. The Brownite and Blairite wings of the party are still at each others’ throats as their election strategy collapses in slow motion. The third failed coup against Gordon Brown fizzled out last week – but it revealed divisions that go to the heart of the Labour government. In the hours between former ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt writing letters demanding a secret vote on Brown’s leadership – and ministers issuing statements of support for Brown – a flurry of meetings took place between Brown and senior cabinet figures. In return for keeping Brown on political life support, a group of ministers around Peter Mandelson demanded more cuts, more quickly – and no more talk of “class war” against the Tories. Brown had used some left rhetoric when he said that Tory tax cuts for the rich were “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”. But even that was too much for ministers. So chancellor Alistair Darling stressed, “To me, cutting the borrowing was never negotiable. Gordon accepts that, he knows that.” He went on to say that the next spending review will be the “toughest” for 20 years. So the axemen are now pulling Brown’s strings. But they’re not the only ones propping him up. Despite more than a decade of New Labour attacks on working class people, many trade unions are still bankrolling the party. The Unite union gave Labour £4 million last year – almost a quarter of the party’s total funding.
But, in contrast to Mandelson and his puppets, the unions have got no say in Labour’s policies whatsoever. Unite has policies to protect jobs, support council housing, oppose the war, and much more besides. Union members should ask what we get for our money when it’s handed over to Brown – and the unions should stop signing blank cheques to Labour. Having spent the past decade attacking its own supporters, the Labour Party is now in deep crisis. Elected on a wave of revulsion with the Tories in 1997, New Labour today is in crisis. The party faces wipeout at the next election. Opinion polls predict it could lose 17 of its 44 MPs in London alone. Millions who hoped that Labour would be different are now asking questions – about why the party attacks ordinary people, what that shows about the nature of Labour, and whether the party has a future. Talk of the “death of Labour” is premature – even if a Tory government is elected. The party could revive as a symbol of opposition and could even shift its rhetoric to the left. For people who are shocked by the scale of Tory cuts, Labour could become a beacon of hope, even if it maintains its right wing policies. Part of the reason for this is the strength of reformist ideology. Reformism – the belief that capitalism can be improved to meet the needs of working people without the need for more radical social change – is common sense to most people, most of the time.
This is hardly surprising - the key institutions of society perpetuate the ideology of capitalism. The parliamentary system, schools and the media all present the world in a way that makes alternative ways of organising seem unrealistic, or worse, dangerous. The main reason why working class people accept reformist ideas has to do with their position in society. Workers produce all of the wealth. But because they have no control over what is produced or what happens to it afterwards, rather than feeling like they are players, workers usually feel like pawns. Society becomes something that shapes them, rather than something they can shape. Reformism flows from these feelings of powerlessness. Because it raises confidence, workers’ self-activity – such as strikes and industrial action – is a key element in weakening the hold of reformism. The ideas it rests on can be broken down when we assert control over our lives. When workers’ experiences don’t coincide with what they’ve been told, many will question aspects of the system. But some experiences, like big strikes or major campaigns, can lead people to question the system as a whole and push them to look to alternatives like socialism.
Nevertheless, even at times of mass struggle, people often still have contradictory ideas – on the one hand embracing new notions of militancy and solidarity, while as the same time continuing to hold on to old prejudices. Therefore reformist ideas won’t completely melt away. And even if workers are driven away from a reformist party, like Labour, this is not necessarily a wholesale rejection of reformism. It is for this reason that the Labour Party has been able to rebound from crushing defeats. The fact that Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are all united in demanding spending cuts adds to a general assumption that all the main parties are essentially the same. But for all its crimes, Labour is not the same as the Tories. The party’s history and connection to the workers’ movement mean that despite its betrayals, millions of workers have seen it as their party. Trade unionists and socialists formed the Labour Party in the early 20th century because they wanted workers to have a political voice. Much to the disgust of New Labour “modernisers”, the party retains a political and financial link to the trade unions. And, unlike the Tories and Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party contains a few principled left-wingers who take up battles on the side of ordinary people. But today’s Labour left is both small and politically weak; while it wants to push for left wing policies, it does not want to risk damaging the government.
Many on the left of the party share the pessimism that lay behind the creation of New Labour – that class struggle is a thing of the past. They believe the left must “modernise” if its ideas are to get a hearing. Many former left wingers have found that rather than changing the party, they are changed by it. Those like Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, who were once proud to stand on picket lines, can become cheerleaders for the most horrendous attacks on workers and the poor – particularly at times of economic crisis. Labour’s history of attacking the working class did not begin with Tony Blair. New Labour represents a serious shift in ideology from Old Labour, but it doesn’t represent a fundamental break. It is true that New Labour has enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism and the idea that big business can run society more efficiently than the state. Its attacks on jobs, pensions, welfare provision and services are a direct assault on its own core supporters. Yet so-called “Old Labour” attacked workers too. Within a few years of heralding the birth of the welfare state, a Labour government began rolling back its reforms. The 1948 budget froze wages and changed tax rules to benefit the rich. The prescription and dental charges that were to undermine the NHS started as ideas under Labour.
Labour prime minister Harold Wilson responded to a financial crisis in the 1960s with cuts to wages and spending on health, housing and pensions. His government worked with the security services to break a strike by the National Union of Seamen. During the economic crisis of the 1970s, it was a Labour government that slashed pay and spending and created the demoralisation that was a prerequisite for the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in 1979. And, to the shock of many on the left, it was precisely the link between the party and the workers’ movement that allowed Labour governments to get away with it. The leaders of the trade unions would greet the announcement of every new assault with the cry, “however bad this is, it would be worse under the Tories”. Surely if the government rejected bosses’ demands for cuts and instead implemented policies that people actually want, it would stand more chance of being re-elected? Most people who have voted Labour in the past are opposed to policies that allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor. They want to see an end to privatisation and war, and support greater funding for services like health and education. So why does Labour continue to attack them? The answer to this conundrum lies not only with the free market ideology that Labour has so wholeheartedly adopted. It lies in the very nature of the Labour Party itself – and the nature of capitalism.
Labour was formed by the trade union bureaucracy. It is a reformist party that accepts the constraints of the capitalist system. Crucially, it believes in the concept of a “national interest”. In reality this means that the profits must come before people, and that what’s good for big business is good for us all. Past Labour governments that have attempted to resist this pressure have quickly found that power lies not with parliament, but with the ruling class – those who own the factories and workplaces and run all of the major institutions of society. On the rare occasions when Labour has tried to challenge this power, it has backed down under pressure. In the mid-1970s Labour cut business taxes after bosses caused a crisis by moving their money abroad and caused the value of the pound to collapse. Having learnt its lesson, the government set about making workers pay for the crisis with the biggest assault on living standards since the Second World War. Progressive reforms, like the welfare state and the NHS, can’t simply be explained by looking at which party introduced them. Sometimes even the most profit-hungry capitalists will support reforms they think they will benefit them – or ones that could prevent social explosions.
In boom times, more reforms may be possible. But accepting the logic of capitalism means that, in times of crisis, Labour will advocate sacrifices. New Labour will likely lose the next election – not because most people want David Cameron’s Tories in power, but because they are so disgusted with Labour that they can’t bring themselves to vote for the party any more. Building resistance to the attacks – whether they come from a Labour or Tory government – is crucial to defending our living standards. But is also key to revival of working class confidence necessary to both break the hold of reformism and fight for a system that does not fail the majority. In its prebudget statement, the government last week claimed it planned to squeeze the rich in an effort to boost income, and spare “core” public services from any serious cuts. In reality, Chancellor Alistair Darling declared war on working people on a scale not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in the 1980s. Darling wants to cut £47 billion from public spending over the next four years—and the true scale of the assault could be much higher. As the chancellor announced his plans, the Tories rubbed their hands with glee, knowing he had opened the door to even more savage slashing if they come to power.
Public services will face brutal cuts. The Financial Times newspaper estimates that, excepting police, hospitals and schools, most will face a 14% spending reduction over three years. That will mean hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Even the so-called ring fenced services, such as the NHS, are to feel the pain. The government wants to slash an astonishing £20 billion from the health service. And, as the government measure of inflation rose to 1.9 percent, Darling declared that six million public sector workers will have their pay and pension “rises” capped at 1 percent from 2011. Working people have also been hit hardest by the rise in VAT to 17.5% on 1 January, as the tax takes no account of income. The government claims that its increases to National Insurance contributions will only affect the well off. The reality is that everyone who earns more than £20,000 a year will lose out. David Phillips, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, points out, “National Insurance is, ultimately, paid by workers. In the short-term, bosses might take on the cost themselves. But, in the long-term, employers will cut gross pay.” The response of the union leaders to this assault is mixed. Unite’s joint general secretary Derek Simpson said, “When it comes to a choice at the next election voters will reflect on who acted to save jobs, protect our services and build a fairer future.”
If the choice is reduced to Labour’s pay cap or the Tories’ pay freeze then it is no choice at all. Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, was more outspoken. He said, “I am not going to sign up to this. It is just not on to make nurses, social workers, dinner ladies, cleaners and hospital porters pay the price for the folly of the bankers. The people who earn most should pay the most.” That means that every service threatened by cuts must be defended by the most militant means possible. If the axe falls on your local library, organising a community sit-in that involves workers and service users could save it. If council bosses shut your child’s nursery, occupying the building is one of the few weapons capable of making them change their minds. The bosses and politicians of all parties have thrown down the gauntlet. Now it’s up to us all to ensure that working people aren’t made to pay for their crisis. Gordon Brown has crushed any lingering belief that Labour is going to run an election campaign that addresses the needs of working class people. In a speech to the Fabian Society conference last month, he declared his commitment to the “squeezed middle”, adding, “My predecessor and friend Tony Blair said that we had campaigned as New Labour and would govern as New Labour. Let me say to you today, we have governed as New Labour and now we will campaign as New Labour.”
The speech completely repudiated what some commentators have called Labour’s “class war” approach. Last year Brown called Conservative plans to raise the threshold for inheritance tax as “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”. Such statements were enough to send papers like the Daily Mail into fits. More importantly they upset Lord Mandelson, the unelected minister for nearly everything. Coming after 13 years of a Labour government that has betrayed working people on every issue, Brown’s attempt to talk about class was empty. Still his slight tack leftwards saw a small improvement in Labour’s poll ratings; but Labour does not talk about class anymore, and so such talk must go. That is why Brown made his speech in late January. He defined the key issue of the general election as “social mobility”. This means that class differences will not be eliminated, but Labour will allow a few more children from poorer backgrounds to “make it good”. Even in its own terms New Labour has failed on social mobility. The longest ever period of a Labour government has seen the greatest inequalities for a century. An OECD study put Britain at the bottom of a panel of 12 countries for social mobility and on many indicators the figures are getting worse.
The Financial Times newspaper reported, “Alistair Darling will order ministers this week to start work on the most swingeing public spending review in a generation, as officials acknowledged that some departments could see cuts of about 16 percent over three years.” Darling told the paper he would “emphasise the importance of London as a financial services centre”. He added that there would be no repeat of the (wholly ineffective) tax on bankers’ bonuses, and that he wanted to reduce taxes for the richest. In other words Labour has now adopted vacuous policies that are even closer to those peddled by the Tories. That means hundreds of thousands more job losses, a squeeze on living standards, more children in poverty, more pensioners dying from the cold and more young people without a future. Inside the Labour Party, after the last Blairite coup failed to shift him, there seems to be agreement that Brown is the best man to lead the party to defeat at the election. But clinging to Labour as a real alternative to the Tories is becoming less realistic every day. We need more resistance to the cuts and job losses, to the wars and the obscene level of military spending. And it must not be held back by fears that such struggles will undermine Labour.
Death rates increase by 30 percent in the winter months. There were estimated to be over 54,000 "excess winter deaths" in Britain in 1999-2000. Many of those who die unnecessarily are pensioners. The winter death rate is three times that of far colder Scandinavian countries. It is poverty that is killing people. Every other area of life from health to education is hit by this divide. The report also shows that people tend to stay poor. Those who get above the poverty line tend to remain just above it. Even those who do get decent jobs face increasing risk of being pushed down as employment becomes less secure. Those at the very top tend to stay where they are. All that has happened under New Labour is that for many of the poorest people things have not got worse as quickly. Some-especially single parents-are actually worse off. Larger numbers of workers are on the verge of sinking under huge debts. This is in the good years-before, as Tony Blair says, "The government has to make difficult choices." "I try to cut down on my electric. Many a Sunday afternoon our electric has gone. We've just waited till Monday." That's how Trudy, quoted in the report, describes the reality of life for the poorest in Britain today. One survey shows that 6 percent of all people had been disconnected from gas or electricity. Gas disconnections soared from 18,600 in 1991 to 29,500 in 1998.
Remember New Labour's general election campaign in 2001? There were billboards and television ads reminding us of the nightmare Tory years of recession in the early 1990s. One of the most frightening effects of the last recession was the explosion in the number of repossessions, as people could not keep up with mortgage payments. Incredibly, this report shows that more people were in danger of losing their homes under New Labour's "boom" than during the depths of the recession ten years ago. Courts issued 137,000 warrants to repossess homes in 1999. That is higher than the previous peak of 134,000 in 1991. Increasing numbers are falling behind with mortgage payments, even before full-blown recession hits the economy as a whole. Over a million households in England were homeless at some point in the ten years to 1998. It is very difficult to be officially accepted as homeless; less than half of those who apply to councils are put on the homelessness register. Renting a home is becoming more expensive. More people are living in damp homes than in 1990. Three million people are in substandard housing. A study for the Scottish Executive found that "cold, damp and mouldy conditions pose the greatest risk to health, and the prevalence of illness appears to increase with the level of dampness". One person told other researchers, "I have asthma, and when I get worried or I'm not warm I get worse. We put on the heaters for the children because you have to, but for ourselves we say no."
Labour is in chaos. The Brownite and Blairite wings of the party are still at each others’ throats as their election strategy collapses in slow motion. The third failed coup against Gordon Brown fizzled out last week – but it revealed divisions that go to the heart of the Labour government. In the hours between former ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt writing letters demanding a secret vote on Brown’s leadership – and ministers issuing statements of support for Brown – a flurry of meetings took place between Brown and senior cabinet figures. In return for keeping Brown on political life support, a group of ministers around Peter Mandelson demanded more cuts, more quickly – and no more talk of “class war” against the Tories. Brown had used some left rhetoric when he said that Tory tax cuts for the rich were “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”. But even that was too much for ministers. So chancellor Alistair Darling stressed, “To me, cutting the borrowing was never negotiable. Gordon accepts that, he knows that.” He went on to say that the next spending review will be the “toughest” for 20 years. So the axemen are now pulling Brown’s strings. But they’re not the only ones propping him up. Despite more than a decade of New Labour attacks on working class people, many trade unions are still bankrolling the party. The Unite union gave Labour £4 million last year – almost a quarter of the party’s total funding.
But, in contrast to Mandelson and his puppets, the unions have got no say in Labour’s policies whatsoever. Unite has policies to protect jobs, support council housing, oppose the war, and much more besides. Union members should ask what we get for our money when it’s handed over to Brown – and the unions should stop signing blank cheques to Labour. Having spent the past decade attacking its own supporters, the Labour Party is now in deep crisis. Elected on a wave of revulsion with the Tories in 1997, New Labour today is in crisis. The party faces wipeout at the next election. Opinion polls predict it could lose 17 of its 44 MPs in London alone. Millions who hoped that Labour would be different are now asking questions – about why the party attacks ordinary people, what that shows about the nature of Labour, and whether the party has a future. Talk of the “death of Labour” is premature – even if a Tory government is elected. The party could revive as a symbol of opposition and could even shift its rhetoric to the left. For people who are shocked by the scale of Tory cuts, Labour could become a beacon of hope, even if it maintains its right wing policies. Part of the reason for this is the strength of reformist ideology. Reformism – the belief that capitalism can be improved to meet the needs of working people without the need for more radical social change – is common sense to most people, most of the time.
This is hardly surprising - the key institutions of society perpetuate the ideology of capitalism. The parliamentary system, schools and the media all present the world in a way that makes alternative ways of organising seem unrealistic, or worse, dangerous. The main reason why working class people accept reformist ideas has to do with their position in society. Workers produce all of the wealth. But because they have no control over what is produced or what happens to it afterwards, rather than feeling like they are players, workers usually feel like pawns. Society becomes something that shapes them, rather than something they can shape. Reformism flows from these feelings of powerlessness. Because it raises confidence, workers’ self-activity – such as strikes and industrial action – is a key element in weakening the hold of reformism. The ideas it rests on can be broken down when we assert control over our lives. When workers’ experiences don’t coincide with what they’ve been told, many will question aspects of the system. But some experiences, like big strikes or major campaigns, can lead people to question the system as a whole and push them to look to alternatives like socialism.
Nevertheless, even at times of mass struggle, people often still have contradictory ideas – on the one hand embracing new notions of militancy and solidarity, while as the same time continuing to hold on to old prejudices. Therefore reformist ideas won’t completely melt away. And even if workers are driven away from a reformist party, like Labour, this is not necessarily a wholesale rejection of reformism. It is for this reason that the Labour Party has been able to rebound from crushing defeats. The fact that Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are all united in demanding spending cuts adds to a general assumption that all the main parties are essentially the same. But for all its crimes, Labour is not the same as the Tories. The party’s history and connection to the workers’ movement mean that despite its betrayals, millions of workers have seen it as their party. Trade unionists and socialists formed the Labour Party in the early 20th century because they wanted workers to have a political voice. Much to the disgust of New Labour “modernisers”, the party retains a political and financial link to the trade unions. And, unlike the Tories and Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party contains a few principled left-wingers who take up battles on the side of ordinary people. But today’s Labour left is both small and politically weak; while it wants to push for left wing policies, it does not want to risk damaging the government.
Many on the left of the party share the pessimism that lay behind the creation of New Labour – that class struggle is a thing of the past. They believe the left must “modernise” if its ideas are to get a hearing. Many former left wingers have found that rather than changing the party, they are changed by it. Those like Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, who were once proud to stand on picket lines, can become cheerleaders for the most horrendous attacks on workers and the poor – particularly at times of economic crisis. Labour’s history of attacking the working class did not begin with Tony Blair. New Labour represents a serious shift in ideology from Old Labour, but it doesn’t represent a fundamental break. It is true that New Labour has enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism and the idea that big business can run society more efficiently than the state. Its attacks on jobs, pensions, welfare provision and services are a direct assault on its own core supporters. Yet so-called “Old Labour” attacked workers too. Within a few years of heralding the birth of the welfare state, a Labour government began rolling back its reforms. The 1948 budget froze wages and changed tax rules to benefit the rich. The prescription and dental charges that were to undermine the NHS started as ideas under Labour.
Labour prime minister Harold Wilson responded to a financial crisis in the 1960s with cuts to wages and spending on health, housing and pensions. His government worked with the security services to break a strike by the National Union of Seamen. During the economic crisis of the 1970s, it was a Labour government that slashed pay and spending and created the demoralisation that was a prerequisite for the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in 1979. And, to the shock of many on the left, it was precisely the link between the party and the workers’ movement that allowed Labour governments to get away with it. The leaders of the trade unions would greet the announcement of every new assault with the cry, “however bad this is, it would be worse under the Tories”. Surely if the government rejected bosses’ demands for cuts and instead implemented policies that people actually want, it would stand more chance of being re-elected? Most people who have voted Labour in the past are opposed to policies that allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor. They want to see an end to privatisation and war, and support greater funding for services like health and education. So why does Labour continue to attack them? The answer to this conundrum lies not only with the free market ideology that Labour has so wholeheartedly adopted. It lies in the very nature of the Labour Party itself – and the nature of capitalism.
Labour was formed by the trade union bureaucracy. It is a reformist party that accepts the constraints of the capitalist system. Crucially, it believes in the concept of a “national interest”. In reality this means that the profits must come before people, and that what’s good for big business is good for us all. Past Labour governments that have attempted to resist this pressure have quickly found that power lies not with parliament, but with the ruling class – those who own the factories and workplaces and run all of the major institutions of society. On the rare occasions when Labour has tried to challenge this power, it has backed down under pressure. In the mid-1970s Labour cut business taxes after bosses caused a crisis by moving their money abroad and caused the value of the pound to collapse. Having learnt its lesson, the government set about making workers pay for the crisis with the biggest assault on living standards since the Second World War. Progressive reforms, like the welfare state and the NHS, can’t simply be explained by looking at which party introduced them. Sometimes even the most profit-hungry capitalists will support reforms they think they will benefit them – or ones that could prevent social explosions.
In boom times, more reforms may be possible. But accepting the logic of capitalism means that, in times of crisis, Labour will advocate sacrifices. New Labour will likely lose the next election – not because most people want David Cameron’s Tories in power, but because they are so disgusted with Labour that they can’t bring themselves to vote for the party any more. Building resistance to the attacks – whether they come from a Labour or Tory government – is crucial to defending our living standards. But is also key to revival of working class confidence necessary to both break the hold of reformism and fight for a system that does not fail the majority. In its prebudget statement, the government last week claimed it planned to squeeze the rich in an effort to boost income, and spare “core” public services from any serious cuts. In reality, Chancellor Alistair Darling declared war on working people on a scale not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in the 1980s. Darling wants to cut £47 billion from public spending over the next four years—and the true scale of the assault could be much higher. As the chancellor announced his plans, the Tories rubbed their hands with glee, knowing he had opened the door to even more savage slashing if they come to power.
Public services will face brutal cuts. The Financial Times newspaper estimates that, excepting police, hospitals and schools, most will face a 14% spending reduction over three years. That will mean hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Even the so-called ring fenced services, such as the NHS, are to feel the pain. The government wants to slash an astonishing £20 billion from the health service. And, as the government measure of inflation rose to 1.9 percent, Darling declared that six million public sector workers will have their pay and pension “rises” capped at 1 percent from 2011. Working people have also been hit hardest by the rise in VAT to 17.5% on 1 January, as the tax takes no account of income. The government claims that its increases to National Insurance contributions will only affect the well off. The reality is that everyone who earns more than £20,000 a year will lose out. David Phillips, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, points out, “National Insurance is, ultimately, paid by workers. In the short-term, bosses might take on the cost themselves. But, in the long-term, employers will cut gross pay.” The response of the union leaders to this assault is mixed. Unite’s joint general secretary Derek Simpson said, “When it comes to a choice at the next election voters will reflect on who acted to save jobs, protect our services and build a fairer future.”
If the choice is reduced to Labour’s pay cap or the Tories’ pay freeze then it is no choice at all. Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, was more outspoken. He said, “I am not going to sign up to this. It is just not on to make nurses, social workers, dinner ladies, cleaners and hospital porters pay the price for the folly of the bankers. The people who earn most should pay the most.” That means that every service threatened by cuts must be defended by the most militant means possible. If the axe falls on your local library, organising a community sit-in that involves workers and service users could save it. If council bosses shut your child’s nursery, occupying the building is one of the few weapons capable of making them change their minds. The bosses and politicians of all parties have thrown down the gauntlet. Now it’s up to us all to ensure that working people aren’t made to pay for their crisis. Gordon Brown has crushed any lingering belief that Labour is going to run an election campaign that addresses the needs of working class people. In a speech to the Fabian Society conference last month, he declared his commitment to the “squeezed middle”, adding, “My predecessor and friend Tony Blair said that we had campaigned as New Labour and would govern as New Labour. Let me say to you today, we have governed as New Labour and now we will campaign as New Labour.”
The speech completely repudiated what some commentators have called Labour’s “class war” approach. Last year Brown called Conservative plans to raise the threshold for inheritance tax as “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”. Such statements were enough to send papers like the Daily Mail into fits. More importantly they upset Lord Mandelson, the unelected minister for nearly everything. Coming after 13 years of a Labour government that has betrayed working people on every issue, Brown’s attempt to talk about class was empty. Still his slight tack leftwards saw a small improvement in Labour’s poll ratings; but Labour does not talk about class anymore, and so such talk must go. That is why Brown made his speech in late January. He defined the key issue of the general election as “social mobility”. This means that class differences will not be eliminated, but Labour will allow a few more children from poorer backgrounds to “make it good”. Even in its own terms New Labour has failed on social mobility. The longest ever period of a Labour government has seen the greatest inequalities for a century. An OECD study put Britain at the bottom of a panel of 12 countries for social mobility and on many indicators the figures are getting worse.
The Financial Times newspaper reported, “Alistair Darling will order ministers this week to start work on the most swingeing public spending review in a generation, as officials acknowledged that some departments could see cuts of about 16 percent over three years.” Darling told the paper he would “emphasise the importance of London as a financial services centre”. He added that there would be no repeat of the (wholly ineffective) tax on bankers’ bonuses, and that he wanted to reduce taxes for the richest. In other words Labour has now adopted vacuous policies that are even closer to those peddled by the Tories. That means hundreds of thousands more job losses, a squeeze on living standards, more children in poverty, more pensioners dying from the cold and more young people without a future. Inside the Labour Party, after the last Blairite coup failed to shift him, there seems to be agreement that Brown is the best man to lead the party to defeat at the election. But clinging to Labour as a real alternative to the Tories is becoming less realistic every day. We need more resistance to the cuts and job losses, to the wars and the obscene level of military spending. And it must not be held back by fears that such struggles will undermine Labour.
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Labour & Tories clueless on poverty issue
The Office for National Statistics said the broadest measure of unemployment fell by 7,000 to 2.458 million, the first quarterly decline since May 2008, leaving the jobless rate at 7.8%. The narrower measure of people claiming unemployment benefits dropped by more than expected in December, falling by 15,200 to 1.61 million, the biggest drop since early 2007. This rapid rise is a facade in itslef because it doesn't include number of people in the labour force who are neither working nor looking for work, nudging the total to 8 million; this is the most since records began. The rise was largely driven by an increase of 81,000 in the number of students not looking for work. Full-time employment fell by 113,000 to 21.2 million, while part-time employment did not rise fast enough to compensate, increasing by 99,000 to 7.7 million. As has been the pattern for months, the figures are being driven by women finding part-time jobs while men, predominantly, are losing full-time ones. Better news came for the under-24 age group who saw a drop in joblessness of 16,000 - now it's 927,000.
Other figures showed the number of people out of work for more than a year jumped 29,000 on the quarter to 631,000, the highest level since late 1997, as companies continue to shed jobs in the teeth of the UK's worst recession since 1921. Today the power company E.ON announced the closure of a call centre in Essex with the loss of 600 jobs, while last week Bosch said it was closing its car parts factory near Cardiff, losing 900 workers. Unemployment continues to hit regions of Britain differently. The jobless rate rose again in the north-east, to 9.8%, closely followed by the West Midlands on 9.6%. By contrast, the east and south-east had the lowest rates of any region, at 6.3% and 6.2% respectively. The ONS also reported that wage growth slowed to the lowest on record at just 1.1% year-on-year, excluding volatile bonus payments in the three months to November. For November alone, private sector pay showed no growth at all from a year earlier. This may seem like good news for our Labour government, but it's not enought to attract disillusioned voters back by the May 6th elections.
Labour has been harping on about bridging the inequality gap, especially between the rich and poor. A third of children are living in poverty - despite claims they would eradicate child poverty by 2011. The total number of poor pensioners is now 2.8million. The head of a Government-owned firm set up to eliminate world poverty has been criticised after earning almost £1million in a year. Richard Laing, the chief executive of the former Commonwealth Development Corporation now known as CDC. More than 300,000 pensioners face falling into poverty every year whilst Labour and Tories spout hot air and empty promises to address the issue of poverty in Britain; undoubtedly whilst taking backhanders from big business bankers. Nearly a million households in the countryside are trapped in poverty, a government adviser has warned. They live below the official poverty line while the houses around them are snapped up by wealthy second home owners from the cities, Gordon Brown's rural advocate said. Labour is correct to say it has brought down the number of poverty-stricken families since it came to power, although it has not achieved as much as it hoped. Official figures show the number of children in poverty has fallen from 4.4million in 1997 to 3.8million now, a reduction of 600,000.
The Tories are no better, keeping the rich comfortable at the expense of those struggling to scrape together enough cash for survival. A new study shows the Tory married couples’ tax break would deny 120,000 children the chance to escape poverty. One-parent family charity Gingerbread and the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies say diverting the money the Tories plan to Child Tax Credits instead would lift 130,000 children out of poverty as opposed to the 10,000 affected by the married couples’ plan. If the money the Tories have earmarked for the unfair tax break were shifted to the Working Tax Credit, 100,000 children would benefit not just 10,000. Not intent on dividing working class families in their home, Tory spending cuts would put millions of public sector jobs at risk as well as tens of thousands in the private sector. The cover up at yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions wasn't the unpublished Doncaster social services report raised by David Cameron but the Tory leader's failure to raise the issue that will dominate the election campaign: the economy.
An issue the Conservatives thought was a banker a few months ago suddenly looks a weak spot. Cameron didn't dare raise it today after an extraordinary 7,000 dip in unemployment. He was mauled the previous couple of Wednesdays over "messed up" married couple tax breaks and an elitist inheritance handout to the wealthiest few. And I wonder if Cameron will risk going on the economy at next week's session when 24 hours earlier Britain is expected to be declared out of recession. We're little more than 100 days from a General Election - if May 6 is Decision Day - and the Cons are suffering more than poll nerves. Tory MPs whisper they fear the party's draft programme is weak. The economy is no longer a Tory Ace in the pack. Cameron prospered as a one man band when he was new and shiny but he's a little battered these days and, crucially, Gordon Brown seems to be getting his act together. Where is the Shadow Cabinet? Shakespeare was still writing tragedies when Invisible Tory George Osborne last had the confidence to hold a press conference. Brown used a past Ken Clarke "social engineering" dismissal of married couple tax allowances to cause Cameron blush a second consecutive Wednesday. The balance of power has shifted on Wednesday. I suspect it's now Cameron who doesn't relish the confrontations. Labour tribalists sounded foolish mocking Nick Clegg's questions about why state-owned RBS is bankrolling Kraft's takeover of Cadbury. Many Labour MPs silently agreed with the Lib Dem leader. If today had been an election TV debate, Clegg would've won the public vote on this one. Tory school reforms that would stop graduates with poor degrees becoming teachers were exposed as a meaningless gimmick. Figures showed just one in 30 new staff left uni with a third, down from one in 25 a decade ago. And new teachers with top firsts increased from one in 20 to one in 12. More than half now get 2:1s, the Schools Training and Development Agency said. Cameron's plans would also stop his maths Tsar Carol Vorderman from teaching with a third.
Now the elitist Tory toff leader is pleading that money doesn't bring up children. Would he know the plight of struggling parents with hardly two coins to rub together? Are you kidding? Eton-boy Cam will never know what it's like to be underpriveliged because he was born with a silver spoon in his gob. In astonishing remarks, the multimillionaire Tory party leader said "warmth" was more important than wealth to making sure children were happy, healthy and did well at school. He said when parents were "competent and committed", financial circumstances made no "significant" difference to prospects. "What matters most to a child's life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting." How condescending is it that this mega-rich toad can take the moral high ground about money being unimportant when raising a child? And despite Tory plans to cut £200million a year from Sure Start - vital help to struggling families - Mr Cameron said parents should spend more time with children and support them at school. He said: "Research shows responsible parenting is more likely to occur in wealthier households, but children in poor households raised with that style of parenting do just as well.
Parents need policies not platitudes - how dare the Tories think they can get away with attempting to make the poorest think that money is no object in their lives. He has refused to protect funding for schools. He would cut £200million each year from Sure Start and take support away for families on modest and middle incomes. Poverty is a key factor in making the job for parents more difficult; any idiot with half a brain should know this by the time they become parents. The best thing Mr Cameron can do to safeguard all children is to put money in the pockets of the poorest families who need it most Parents need money to buy shoes and clothes for their children. Food isn't free either and toys and trips have to be paid for too. And we all know it costs a small fortune to keep a house warm during the winter. So David Cameron's astonishing statement that money doesn't matter when bringing up kids shows just how out of touch he is. The multi-millionaire Conservative Party leader may be so loaded that he doesn't have to worry about money. But millions of parents are forced to count the pennies every single day. Yes, the affection of caring mums and dads is absolutely vital and there's an old saying that money can't buy you love. But Mr Cameron gives the impression of having no idea whatsoever about the realities of life in Britain. His arrogant lecture should serve as a political warning because the Conservatives see the incomes of low and middle earners as a target for spending cuts. Mr Cameron and his family may not rely on the minimum wage, child benefit, state pension or tax credits - but many people do. It's easy for the wealthy Tory leader to be complacent but voters should remember his ludicrous opinions.
In a 1999 speech Tony Blair declared, “Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a 20 year mission, but I believe it can be done.” To a standing ovation and with tears in the eyes of his supporters, Blair said, “The child born in the run down estate should have the same chance to be healthy and well educated as the child born in the leafy suburbs.” Why then, despite all the rhetoric and good intention, was the government forced to admit last week that it was failing in its pledge to end child poverty? Its own figures showed that child poverty had increased for the first time in six years while overall poverty had risen for the first time under this government. The number of children living in poverty increased by 100,000 to a total of 3.8 million. In a country as wealthy as ours it is a scandal that the number of children still growing up in poverty has increased – poverty which blights their life chances, poverty which for many is simply overwhelming. The effects of poverty are devastating and far reaching. Children from low income families are more likely to live in a poor environment, in poor quality housing and in greater proximity to crime and drugs.
Low income has an affect on educational achievements which in turn can lead to a cycle of disadvantage into adult life. Poverty and deprivation limits choice which in turn affects self esteem, confidence, and health. So what is the government’s solution to tackling child poverty? Gordon Brown stated “The key to the future is how many people you can get into work. That’s the bigger contribution to tackling child poverty.” Welfare reform minister Jim Murphy said the government must encourage the unemployed to think, “Work first, benefits second.” Getting people back into work and off benefits has become the mantra of the Blair government. Lone parents are now obliged to take part in work focused interviews every six months. The government also plans to force lone parents to “actively seek work” once their youngest child reaches the age of 12. Those claiming incapacity benefit have also been targeted, with Blair stating that everyone is expected to “fulfil their responsibilities” to work if able to do so. Incapacity benefit claimants have to undergo medicals as often as every 12 months to assess their capability for work; if the medical defines someone as fit for work their benefits are stopped immediately.
The idea that there exists real choice for people to work their way out of poverty is simply not true and is an insult to families forced to live on benefits. People do not choose to live in poverty, but are often trapped by low pay, working patterns that are too inflexible to match parenting responsibilities, disability, illness or discrimination. For others work has proved to be a precarious and ineffective route out of poverty. Over half of poor children – 54 percent – have a parent in work. Britain has one of the highest employment rates in Europe, yet one of the worst child poverty rates. Access to better jobs can help reduce child poverty, but today’s figures for children in working families suggest that simply resorting to getting more parents into work is not good enough. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that in order to halve child poverty by 2010 the government needs to make an annual investment of £4.3 billion. It needs to ensure that benefit safety nets are set above poverty levels and investment goes into providing better jobs, training and education. In addition it needs to reverse spending cuts in the civil service to ensure that the delivery of benefits is not affected by job cuts and limited services. While New Labour talks about its great desire to end child poverty it spent £76 billion on replacing Trident nuclear missile system. Brown and Cameron's priorities lie with big business, privatisation and war. The reality for 3.8 million children living in poverty in Britain today is that neither New Labour or Conservatives offer any hope for the future.
Other figures showed the number of people out of work for more than a year jumped 29,000 on the quarter to 631,000, the highest level since late 1997, as companies continue to shed jobs in the teeth of the UK's worst recession since 1921. Today the power company E.ON announced the closure of a call centre in Essex with the loss of 600 jobs, while last week Bosch said it was closing its car parts factory near Cardiff, losing 900 workers. Unemployment continues to hit regions of Britain differently. The jobless rate rose again in the north-east, to 9.8%, closely followed by the West Midlands on 9.6%. By contrast, the east and south-east had the lowest rates of any region, at 6.3% and 6.2% respectively. The ONS also reported that wage growth slowed to the lowest on record at just 1.1% year-on-year, excluding volatile bonus payments in the three months to November. For November alone, private sector pay showed no growth at all from a year earlier. This may seem like good news for our Labour government, but it's not enought to attract disillusioned voters back by the May 6th elections.
Labour has been harping on about bridging the inequality gap, especially between the rich and poor. A third of children are living in poverty - despite claims they would eradicate child poverty by 2011. The total number of poor pensioners is now 2.8million. The head of a Government-owned firm set up to eliminate world poverty has been criticised after earning almost £1million in a year. Richard Laing, the chief executive of the former Commonwealth Development Corporation now known as CDC. More than 300,000 pensioners face falling into poverty every year whilst Labour and Tories spout hot air and empty promises to address the issue of poverty in Britain; undoubtedly whilst taking backhanders from big business bankers. Nearly a million households in the countryside are trapped in poverty, a government adviser has warned. They live below the official poverty line while the houses around them are snapped up by wealthy second home owners from the cities, Gordon Brown's rural advocate said. Labour is correct to say it has brought down the number of poverty-stricken families since it came to power, although it has not achieved as much as it hoped. Official figures show the number of children in poverty has fallen from 4.4million in 1997 to 3.8million now, a reduction of 600,000.
The Tories are no better, keeping the rich comfortable at the expense of those struggling to scrape together enough cash for survival. A new study shows the Tory married couples’ tax break would deny 120,000 children the chance to escape poverty. One-parent family charity Gingerbread and the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies say diverting the money the Tories plan to Child Tax Credits instead would lift 130,000 children out of poverty as opposed to the 10,000 affected by the married couples’ plan. If the money the Tories have earmarked for the unfair tax break were shifted to the Working Tax Credit, 100,000 children would benefit not just 10,000. Not intent on dividing working class families in their home, Tory spending cuts would put millions of public sector jobs at risk as well as tens of thousands in the private sector. The cover up at yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions wasn't the unpublished Doncaster social services report raised by David Cameron but the Tory leader's failure to raise the issue that will dominate the election campaign: the economy.
An issue the Conservatives thought was a banker a few months ago suddenly looks a weak spot. Cameron didn't dare raise it today after an extraordinary 7,000 dip in unemployment. He was mauled the previous couple of Wednesdays over "messed up" married couple tax breaks and an elitist inheritance handout to the wealthiest few. And I wonder if Cameron will risk going on the economy at next week's session when 24 hours earlier Britain is expected to be declared out of recession. We're little more than 100 days from a General Election - if May 6 is Decision Day - and the Cons are suffering more than poll nerves. Tory MPs whisper they fear the party's draft programme is weak. The economy is no longer a Tory Ace in the pack. Cameron prospered as a one man band when he was new and shiny but he's a little battered these days and, crucially, Gordon Brown seems to be getting his act together. Where is the Shadow Cabinet? Shakespeare was still writing tragedies when Invisible Tory George Osborne last had the confidence to hold a press conference. Brown used a past Ken Clarke "social engineering" dismissal of married couple tax allowances to cause Cameron blush a second consecutive Wednesday. The balance of power has shifted on Wednesday. I suspect it's now Cameron who doesn't relish the confrontations. Labour tribalists sounded foolish mocking Nick Clegg's questions about why state-owned RBS is bankrolling Kraft's takeover of Cadbury. Many Labour MPs silently agreed with the Lib Dem leader. If today had been an election TV debate, Clegg would've won the public vote on this one. Tory school reforms that would stop graduates with poor degrees becoming teachers were exposed as a meaningless gimmick. Figures showed just one in 30 new staff left uni with a third, down from one in 25 a decade ago. And new teachers with top firsts increased from one in 20 to one in 12. More than half now get 2:1s, the Schools Training and Development Agency said. Cameron's plans would also stop his maths Tsar Carol Vorderman from teaching with a third.
Now the elitist Tory toff leader is pleading that money doesn't bring up children. Would he know the plight of struggling parents with hardly two coins to rub together? Are you kidding? Eton-boy Cam will never know what it's like to be underpriveliged because he was born with a silver spoon in his gob. In astonishing remarks, the multimillionaire Tory party leader said "warmth" was more important than wealth to making sure children were happy, healthy and did well at school. He said when parents were "competent and committed", financial circumstances made no "significant" difference to prospects. "What matters most to a child's life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting." How condescending is it that this mega-rich toad can take the moral high ground about money being unimportant when raising a child? And despite Tory plans to cut £200million a year from Sure Start - vital help to struggling families - Mr Cameron said parents should spend more time with children and support them at school. He said: "Research shows responsible parenting is more likely to occur in wealthier households, but children in poor households raised with that style of parenting do just as well.
Parents need policies not platitudes - how dare the Tories think they can get away with attempting to make the poorest think that money is no object in their lives. He has refused to protect funding for schools. He would cut £200million each year from Sure Start and take support away for families on modest and middle incomes. Poverty is a key factor in making the job for parents more difficult; any idiot with half a brain should know this by the time they become parents. The best thing Mr Cameron can do to safeguard all children is to put money in the pockets of the poorest families who need it most Parents need money to buy shoes and clothes for their children. Food isn't free either and toys and trips have to be paid for too. And we all know it costs a small fortune to keep a house warm during the winter. So David Cameron's astonishing statement that money doesn't matter when bringing up kids shows just how out of touch he is. The multi-millionaire Conservative Party leader may be so loaded that he doesn't have to worry about money. But millions of parents are forced to count the pennies every single day. Yes, the affection of caring mums and dads is absolutely vital and there's an old saying that money can't buy you love. But Mr Cameron gives the impression of having no idea whatsoever about the realities of life in Britain. His arrogant lecture should serve as a political warning because the Conservatives see the incomes of low and middle earners as a target for spending cuts. Mr Cameron and his family may not rely on the minimum wage, child benefit, state pension or tax credits - but many people do. It's easy for the wealthy Tory leader to be complacent but voters should remember his ludicrous opinions.
In a 1999 speech Tony Blair declared, “Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a 20 year mission, but I believe it can be done.” To a standing ovation and with tears in the eyes of his supporters, Blair said, “The child born in the run down estate should have the same chance to be healthy and well educated as the child born in the leafy suburbs.” Why then, despite all the rhetoric and good intention, was the government forced to admit last week that it was failing in its pledge to end child poverty? Its own figures showed that child poverty had increased for the first time in six years while overall poverty had risen for the first time under this government. The number of children living in poverty increased by 100,000 to a total of 3.8 million. In a country as wealthy as ours it is a scandal that the number of children still growing up in poverty has increased – poverty which blights their life chances, poverty which for many is simply overwhelming. The effects of poverty are devastating and far reaching. Children from low income families are more likely to live in a poor environment, in poor quality housing and in greater proximity to crime and drugs.
Low income has an affect on educational achievements which in turn can lead to a cycle of disadvantage into adult life. Poverty and deprivation limits choice which in turn affects self esteem, confidence, and health. So what is the government’s solution to tackling child poverty? Gordon Brown stated “The key to the future is how many people you can get into work. That’s the bigger contribution to tackling child poverty.” Welfare reform minister Jim Murphy said the government must encourage the unemployed to think, “Work first, benefits second.” Getting people back into work and off benefits has become the mantra of the Blair government. Lone parents are now obliged to take part in work focused interviews every six months. The government also plans to force lone parents to “actively seek work” once their youngest child reaches the age of 12. Those claiming incapacity benefit have also been targeted, with Blair stating that everyone is expected to “fulfil their responsibilities” to work if able to do so. Incapacity benefit claimants have to undergo medicals as often as every 12 months to assess their capability for work; if the medical defines someone as fit for work their benefits are stopped immediately.
The idea that there exists real choice for people to work their way out of poverty is simply not true and is an insult to families forced to live on benefits. People do not choose to live in poverty, but are often trapped by low pay, working patterns that are too inflexible to match parenting responsibilities, disability, illness or discrimination. For others work has proved to be a precarious and ineffective route out of poverty. Over half of poor children – 54 percent – have a parent in work. Britain has one of the highest employment rates in Europe, yet one of the worst child poverty rates. Access to better jobs can help reduce child poverty, but today’s figures for children in working families suggest that simply resorting to getting more parents into work is not good enough. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that in order to halve child poverty by 2010 the government needs to make an annual investment of £4.3 billion. It needs to ensure that benefit safety nets are set above poverty levels and investment goes into providing better jobs, training and education. In addition it needs to reverse spending cuts in the civil service to ensure that the delivery of benefits is not affected by job cuts and limited services. While New Labour talks about its great desire to end child poverty it spent £76 billion on replacing Trident nuclear missile system. Brown and Cameron's priorities lie with big business, privatisation and war. The reality for 3.8 million children living in poverty in Britain today is that neither New Labour or Conservatives offer any hope for the future.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Recession & class
2009 will be remembered above all as the year that the political and social fallout from the world capitalist crisis began to dramatically affect hundreds of millions of workers throughout the entire world. But it began with the savage Israeli invasion of Gaza. Millions watched in anger as the Israeli army fought a grossly one-sided war against the Palestinians. At least 1,400 Palestinians were slaughtered while only 13 Israelis were killed. Four of these were killed by so-called friendly fire, although the Palestinians no doubt didn’t think it was friendly. The invasion sparked mass protests which demonstrated the fact that, in the world of the internet and 24 hour news, the crimes of imperialism are a lot more difficult to cover up. But of course everything was apparently about to change with the inauguration of Barack Obama. It’s probably true to say that no other US President in history (including JFK) has ever come into office with so many hopes riding on him. Many of those aspirations and expectations have been cruelly dashed over the past months as US unemployment has continued to rocket, standing now at 15.1 million. As it appears from the last set of elections, the Apathy Party has begun to gain ground.
The consequences of the banking crisis have revealed themselves as a slump. Throughout the world, companies have been falling like ninepins. In Britain unemployment is approaching 3 million and tragically 1 million of these are young people under the age of 25. But that’s not the end of it and next year could see the rate rising to 4 million. As might be expected, figures like these don’t engender a warm, loving feeling towards the government and New Labour’s woes only increased in the June local and European elections. Large swathes of what were previously Labour heartlands have now turned a murky shade of blue and yellow with victories by the Tories and LibDems. The stench of privatisation in these councils is more reminiscent of the sort of bile and brimstone of the Thatcher years. It was 25 years since the beginning of the miners’ strike in March this year, a timely reminder of what a Tory victory nationally would really mean for workers. New Labour’s star is on the wane. Murdoch’s Sun has now nailed itself to the Tory mast and the days when Tony Blair and Mandelson were the toast of News International editors and the bosses are long gone. The MPs’ expenses scandal, though it affected all parties, inevitably served to further discredit New Labour as the party in government.
It is to the eternal shame of Blair, Brown and New Labour that tens and even hundreds of thousands of Labour voters just don’t bother turning out to vote at the moment. After all, the right wing of the party has had 12 years with a huge parliamentary majority but, far from squeezing the rich, Blair and Brown have frustrated many workers with their pro-business policies. A minority of disillusioned workers have turned to the racist programme of the BNP. Griffin and another BNP candidate managed to get elected to the European Parliament, but what was most noticeable in those elections was the abstention rate. The reformist/nationalist programme presented by the Communist Party of Britain and Socialist Party’s NO2EU campaign received a derisory vote, proving that there are no short cuts to fighting in the official labour movement for a socialist programme. This socialist programme is also necessary to undermine the BNP and send them scuttling back under their stones. We saw a glimmer of that fighting approach in November in Glasgow with the Scottish Defence League nazis being fought off by the decent majority. But despite the lack of movement on the political front, the workers have moved towards industrial struggle instead. Notable in 2009 has been the reappearance of factory occupations in Britain. Some readers will be familiar with the wave of occupations in Latin America, but it’s been a long time since we saw factory occupations here. In fact the first examples of occupations in these islands weren’t in Britain, but in Ireland. The workers of Waterford Crystal took over the factory after management announced it was going to close.
While the depth of the recession forced many workers to take a sharp intake of breath in 2008, what’s been noticeable in 2009 has been sections of workers taking a stand against job losses and pay cuts. This was particularly the case with the construction workers at Lindsey who took on the bosses after they had tried to undermine their national trade union agreement. Despite a virulent campaign in the press, which tried to present the strike as a battle around “British Jobs for British workers”, the management were forced to back down in the face of solid united strike action. Just recently the postal workers have been involved in a series of strikes against Post Office privatisation, backed up by an absolutely solid strike ballot result. These struggles have fed through into the trade unions themselves, most notably in Jerry Hicks’ support in the Amicus-Unite General Secretary election. In a sense 2009 represented the passing of one political period and beginning of the next. It was the end of the series of fireworks associated with the banking crisis and little old ladies queuing up outside Northern Rock, and a period where workers began to draw their conclusions from the political and economic crisis that they found themselves in. There are big changes in workers’ consciousness taking place under the surface and big struggles and class conflicts are being prepared, not just in Britain, but on a global level. Three international examples stand out.
On the one hand the enormous movement against the electoral fraud in Iran, which has refused to die down despite repression by the state. From Iran’s history: the revolutionary movement of 1979 demonstrates that the Iranian working class are quite capable of toppling even the most heavily armed regime. On the other hand the mass movement in Honduras against the coup that toppled Mel Zelaya reveals the weakness of reaction. Despite the farcical agreement signed recently, the working class, properly prepared and mobilised, could potentially overthrow the illegitimate government provided that the correct leadership is present. In Venezuela the Bolivarian movement continues to develop and the next period will see the strengthening of the PSUV, the mass party led by Chavez. Sooner or later the Bolivarian Revolution needs to move forward and challenge capitalism in Venezuela, and then in the whole of Latin America, if it is to succeed. The limits of imperialism are further revealed in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which has now spread into Pakistan. The conflict is proving a huge drain on US and British resources - and for what? The recent elections have proven to be a farce with widespread irregularities, and neither Karzai nor the Taliban offer any solution for the masses. If the health of a society is reflected in the way that its women are treated, then Afghanistan looks to be on life-support for decades to come. The only solution for the workers and peasants of Afghanistan lies in a socialist federation in South Asia. That can only come about through the strength and combativity of the South Asian working class.
As 2010 struck across the Middle East, Asia, South America, the ruined European economies and the USA, millions of workers are looking for a way out of the misery of capitalist crisis. Capitalism has reached an impasse. The capitalist crisis has seen a bigger collapse in production than in 1931 but, given the growth of the world market and the interpenetration of the capitalist economies, its political ramifications will echo around the whole of the globe for years. We have a world economy, a world market and world politics. A successful socialist revolution in one major country would have a dramatic effect and would act as a beacon for the entire world. Latin America has been the epicentre of huge movements over the past few years, but the effect of the crisis means that the potential to transform society along socialist lines exists all over the world. World socialism would allow us to transform the lives of millions of people, to plan the harmonious development of society and to lift whole continents out of misery. It would see an end to the horrors of capitalism, sectarianism and poverty, starvation and disease. That’s a big prize.
The consequences of the banking crisis have revealed themselves as a slump. Throughout the world, companies have been falling like ninepins. In Britain unemployment is approaching 3 million and tragically 1 million of these are young people under the age of 25. But that’s not the end of it and next year could see the rate rising to 4 million. As might be expected, figures like these don’t engender a warm, loving feeling towards the government and New Labour’s woes only increased in the June local and European elections. Large swathes of what were previously Labour heartlands have now turned a murky shade of blue and yellow with victories by the Tories and LibDems. The stench of privatisation in these councils is more reminiscent of the sort of bile and brimstone of the Thatcher years. It was 25 years since the beginning of the miners’ strike in March this year, a timely reminder of what a Tory victory nationally would really mean for workers. New Labour’s star is on the wane. Murdoch’s Sun has now nailed itself to the Tory mast and the days when Tony Blair and Mandelson were the toast of News International editors and the bosses are long gone. The MPs’ expenses scandal, though it affected all parties, inevitably served to further discredit New Labour as the party in government.
It is to the eternal shame of Blair, Brown and New Labour that tens and even hundreds of thousands of Labour voters just don’t bother turning out to vote at the moment. After all, the right wing of the party has had 12 years with a huge parliamentary majority but, far from squeezing the rich, Blair and Brown have frustrated many workers with their pro-business policies. A minority of disillusioned workers have turned to the racist programme of the BNP. Griffin and another BNP candidate managed to get elected to the European Parliament, but what was most noticeable in those elections was the abstention rate. The reformist/nationalist programme presented by the Communist Party of Britain and Socialist Party’s NO2EU campaign received a derisory vote, proving that there are no short cuts to fighting in the official labour movement for a socialist programme. This socialist programme is also necessary to undermine the BNP and send them scuttling back under their stones. We saw a glimmer of that fighting approach in November in Glasgow with the Scottish Defence League nazis being fought off by the decent majority. But despite the lack of movement on the political front, the workers have moved towards industrial struggle instead. Notable in 2009 has been the reappearance of factory occupations in Britain. Some readers will be familiar with the wave of occupations in Latin America, but it’s been a long time since we saw factory occupations here. In fact the first examples of occupations in these islands weren’t in Britain, but in Ireland. The workers of Waterford Crystal took over the factory after management announced it was going to close.
While the depth of the recession forced many workers to take a sharp intake of breath in 2008, what’s been noticeable in 2009 has been sections of workers taking a stand against job losses and pay cuts. This was particularly the case with the construction workers at Lindsey who took on the bosses after they had tried to undermine their national trade union agreement. Despite a virulent campaign in the press, which tried to present the strike as a battle around “British Jobs for British workers”, the management were forced to back down in the face of solid united strike action. Just recently the postal workers have been involved in a series of strikes against Post Office privatisation, backed up by an absolutely solid strike ballot result. These struggles have fed through into the trade unions themselves, most notably in Jerry Hicks’ support in the Amicus-Unite General Secretary election. In a sense 2009 represented the passing of one political period and beginning of the next. It was the end of the series of fireworks associated with the banking crisis and little old ladies queuing up outside Northern Rock, and a period where workers began to draw their conclusions from the political and economic crisis that they found themselves in. There are big changes in workers’ consciousness taking place under the surface and big struggles and class conflicts are being prepared, not just in Britain, but on a global level. Three international examples stand out.
On the one hand the enormous movement against the electoral fraud in Iran, which has refused to die down despite repression by the state. From Iran’s history: the revolutionary movement of 1979 demonstrates that the Iranian working class are quite capable of toppling even the most heavily armed regime. On the other hand the mass movement in Honduras against the coup that toppled Mel Zelaya reveals the weakness of reaction. Despite the farcical agreement signed recently, the working class, properly prepared and mobilised, could potentially overthrow the illegitimate government provided that the correct leadership is present. In Venezuela the Bolivarian movement continues to develop and the next period will see the strengthening of the PSUV, the mass party led by Chavez. Sooner or later the Bolivarian Revolution needs to move forward and challenge capitalism in Venezuela, and then in the whole of Latin America, if it is to succeed. The limits of imperialism are further revealed in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which has now spread into Pakistan. The conflict is proving a huge drain on US and British resources - and for what? The recent elections have proven to be a farce with widespread irregularities, and neither Karzai nor the Taliban offer any solution for the masses. If the health of a society is reflected in the way that its women are treated, then Afghanistan looks to be on life-support for decades to come. The only solution for the workers and peasants of Afghanistan lies in a socialist federation in South Asia. That can only come about through the strength and combativity of the South Asian working class.
As 2010 struck across the Middle East, Asia, South America, the ruined European economies and the USA, millions of workers are looking for a way out of the misery of capitalist crisis. Capitalism has reached an impasse. The capitalist crisis has seen a bigger collapse in production than in 1931 but, given the growth of the world market and the interpenetration of the capitalist economies, its political ramifications will echo around the whole of the globe for years. We have a world economy, a world market and world politics. A successful socialist revolution in one major country would have a dramatic effect and would act as a beacon for the entire world. Latin America has been the epicentre of huge movements over the past few years, but the effect of the crisis means that the potential to transform society along socialist lines exists all over the world. World socialism would allow us to transform the lives of millions of people, to plan the harmonious development of society and to lift whole continents out of misery. It would see an end to the horrors of capitalism, sectarianism and poverty, starvation and disease. That’s a big prize.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
