It was a very interesting conference today organised by LEAP (Left Economic Advisory Panel), Capitalism isn’t working.
The day was a mixture of optimism and pessimism. How did the economic crisis happen? How did it evolve and develop? The toxic mixture of policies that undermined trade union rights, suppressing the ability to organise and pushing down wages, attacks on pay and conditions, onslaught of privatisation, unfair and unjust tax system (banker more likely to pay less tax than a cleaner!), therefore this creates an unequal society. There is a housing crisis, a society starved of social housing, people borrow money, debt bubble emerges and spirals out of control. A bust is inevitable as assets and wages cannot support this debt.
And pays for this crisis…?
Budget 2009 exposes NL’s myopic solution to the crisis. Where is this mythical growth rate coming from..? They believe that capitalism will recover within 2 years time. Again, this is fantasy land….
The Budget included £30bn cuts and £16bn assets sales (privatisation!). And there’s another myth being peddled by the right-wing media that NL is being redistributive regarding the 50pence tax increase for earners over £150,000… But that’s how far they intend to go. Nothing about tax avoidance. Nothing about tax evasion. Nothing about an equitable taxation system!! Further lies peddled by the right-wing media and the Tories regarding out-of-control public spending. But in reality public spending has dropped considerably and is lower than during the Thatcher years.
John McDonnell made a very good point when he said that when Labour was elected in 1997 on an unprecedented majority, they could have transformed society into a more equitable and just society but they squandered it by wedding themselves to neo-liberalism, marketisation and privatisation. And war mongering. NL has destroyed democracy and debate within the Labour Party. Indeed, those Labour MPs who voted for the draconian Welfare Reform Bill should be utterly ashamed and shamed. The Bill represents the politics of the workhouse and ideologically attacks the most powerless in this society. And for it to be turbo-charged through parliament during the height of an economic crisis is beyond shameful.
Some very grim statistics:
- If unemployment benefit had kept pace with earnings since 1980 then JSA would be worth over £100 per wk today. Instead it is £64.30. If an earnings link had been introduced in 1997 it would be £75.
- Until Nov 2008, lone parent benefit was claimable until the youngest child was 16; now it is 12, and by the end of the year it will be 3.
- Housebuilding has fallen 64% in England in the last 12mths.
- UK personal and household debt rose 9.1% to £1,412bn in the year to Jan 2008. Total personal debt now stands at £1,457bn (Jan 2009)
In an extremely interesting fringe meeting at lunchtime Richard Wilkinson gave a lecture based on his book Spirit Level. This looks like being one of the most important books of the decade. What he has found is that all measures of welfare and performance such as levels of crime, mortality rates, educational achievement even the number of patents per head of population vary mainly according to the level of inequality in the society. The work looks at the rich countries of the world.
What is remarkable is not just the strength of the correlations but that the better off in unequal societies actually have a worse time of it than the better off in more equal societies.
The findings set out in the Spirit Level blow apart the right wing claims that somehow it is worth a bit of inequality to get a dynamic high performance society in which people are happy and productive.
The day was about bringing together ideas for the demands we should be making. It is an ongoing political process. It is food for thought.
Reading material:
Unemployed Workers’ Centre have organised a conference on welfare reform in October 2009.
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