Report on the LEAP conference

LEAP (Left Economic Advisory Panel), part of the LRC, had its first conference yesterday. LEAP is a panel of individuals developing a left political alternative to the economic policies of New Labour. John McDonnell and Tony Benn opened the conference.

The economic policies of NL along with neo-liberal policies throughout the world have created a wider gap between the rich and poor, marketisation, emphasis on private equity, below inflation pay increases, debt spiralling out of control, housing crisis and so on. When NL were first elected in 1997 there was around 40,000 homeless. Under NL it peaked at 100,000 and now it stands at 80-90,000.

There were workshops, I attended the one on drowning in debt: transforming the financial system. I wrote around a week ago, a post on tax avoidance. It is estimated that £105bn is lost through both tax avoidance and tax evasion (but spotlighting and scapegoating the poor regarding benefit fraud is so much easier than targeting the rich and powerful!). The City of London is the biggest tax haven (along with New York) that indulges in insider trading, market rigging and screwing the poor  and so on sans corporate accountability and responsibility everything shrouded in secrecy.

This mass scale of criminal activity is one form of social harm that is well hidden. And NL protects the City of London.  For example there is the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) an “independent” privately-funded accounting standard-setter based in London, UK. and an extremely powerful organisation who are unaccountable and a law onto themselves:

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB,) a curious organisation that decides how companies publish their company accounts. Despite its grand-sounding name, the IASB – which takes decisions that will profoundly affect all of us – is a wholly private company based in London and registered in the American secrecy jurisdiction of Delaware. It is funded by the Big Four accountancy companies and by some of the biggest multinationals in the world. In effect, this private company, which is subject to no democratic processes, is writing some of our most important laws.

We have the highest personal debt in the world that has risen dramatically under NL. This creates a very vulnerable economic system (and add the impact of the credit crunch) unlike the USA which can offload inflationary pressure onto other countries.

Globalisation isn’t a new ideology but it has intensified and there has been a new qualitative leap, such as overcapacity of production, liberalisation of finance, easy cheap credit and more personal debt. And now with the credit crunch that will put this economic system into further crisis with the predictable mass unemployment, recession, cuts in public services and so on. NL has to break with this economic system….

Towards the end of the workshop we put together proposals to take back to the final session. These included mutualisation (there was a lively discussion about nationalisation versus mutualisation), more democracy and transparency, credit controls, ending PFI (funding through government bonds), cutting lending to reduce personal debt (more credit unions), highlighting the problems of house price inflation and the crisis in obtaining affordable housing, abolishing hedge funds, progressive taxation, pension funds, abolish student loans

The common theme throughout the day incorporated in John McDonnell’s speech is how do we work together in the global economy? How do we link the theory with practice to deliver practical activism?

NB: Latest document from LEAP on the Credit Crunch.

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