Social and Economic Policy

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

The economic problem is not overspend

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s speech about “fiscal responsibility” on 11 March was probably intended to buy him space to attack Osborne’s 16 March Budget cuts. However, all the anxious promises that a future Labour government will balance current spending with current revenues — although Osborne still doesn’t do that after six years as chancellor — only feed the superstition that the economic problems since 2008 are due to the Blair and Brown Labour governments “overspending”. They aren’t. The reason for the crash and the slump was the giddy profiteering and speculating by the banks, not...

Bring down the borders!

The EU is bureaucratic, capitalist, mean-spirited towards refugees, a mess. Surely Brexit would be better? As if Britain is less capitalist! In any case, none of the Brexiters - not Ukip, not even the fantasists talking about a "left exit" - really believes in a Britain cut off from the naughty world by high barriers and doing its own idyllic thing on its own as if the world ended at Dover. Oh? So what do they want? In practice, they want a Britain tied into the capitalist world by a equally bureaucratic, equally capitalist, but messier set of treaties and agreements, and with a even more mean...

A Schäuble road to socialism?

A long article in the Socialist Economic Bulletin (15 February) and on the Labour Left website Left Futures argues that the “centrepiece” of Labour Party economic policy should be a national investment bank. This would be a publicly-owned bank, able to borrow more cheaply than commercial banks because of its government backing, and lending for infrastructure and industrial projects. The model is the KfW, the German state’s federal investment bank, set up under the Marshall Plan in the 1940s and still going strong. A safe, conservative model, maybe a useful capitalist technique, but in no way...

Make banks public utilities!

Banks should be public utilities, or at least so closely regulated that they must behave like public utilities. They shouldn’t be free to do whatever brings most profit to their bosses and shareholders. If you’re a regular reader, you will know that’s Solidarity ’s view. You may not be surprised to hear that in 2012 the TUC voted for public ownership and democratic control of the banks. You may be disappointed that the new Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell has not yet taken that TUC demand into their economic policy, or that Bernie Sanders in the USA calls only for...

How states compete to offer low taxes

Law professor Sol Picciotto has proposed a new approach to stop tax avoidance by transnational corporations. He spoke to Ed Maltby from Solidarity. Taxing transnational corporations already involves international agreement, based on tax treaties. The issue is, what kind of agreement? Until now, there has only been loose coordination. That's because governments like to hang onto what they call "sovereignty". This means that TNCs can play off one government against another. Current agreements mean governments compete to offer tax breaks to MNCs. Governments need stronger co-operation, but so far...

Google agrees token tax deal

Chancellor George Osborne claims the UK’s £130 million tax deal with Google “is a major success [for UK] tax policy.” Google agreed to pay £117 million for ten years’ worth of non-payment of taxes, plus £13 million in interest. But Google’s sales figures for 2015 alone were an £4.6 billion! Google's effective tax rate is just 3%! UK corporation tax is currently 20% (already reduced from 28% by the Tories in 2010), the lowest in the group of G8 countries. That Italy is pursuing Google for €227 million in back taxes from Google makes the UK deal even more risible. In case you were thinking the...

Capitalism vs human life

Capitalism has created life-enhancing possibilities. It has even realised some of them. My older daughter has epilepsy. In pre-capitalist times, if she’d had medication at all, it would have had no, or harmful, effects, and the seizures would probably have become more severe until they disabled and killed her. Today, she has been able to end the seizures with just a few pills, without side-effects. Not only in Britain, but in many poorer countries too, almost everyone learns to read and write, almost everyone has easy access to music and visual arts, a sizeable proportion can study at...

Expropriate the banks, not go for AES!

Dave Osland ( Solidarity 390) is right that Jeremy Corbyn’s and John McDonnell’s opposition to austerity is to be welcomed, and opens many more exit doors from the Thatcher-Blair-Brown-Cameron neo-liberal consensus than anything previously-established powers of the Labour Party had come up with for decades. He is also right that Corbynomics is far from “Leninism”, “all power to the Soviets”, or even “socialism in the strict sense of the term, namely the dominance of social ownership of the means of production”. However, he indicates that this remoteness from socialism proper, this closeness...

Flogging off the last of the family silver

Most of us mere mortals only have to deal with the Land Registry on the rare occasion we are buying or selling a house (and given current house prices we can dream on). But supposing you have a house and for whatever reason you needed to find who owns the land your house stands on, or the open land, wasteland or coppice at the back of your house? Easy (or rather, c’est facile). You go to the local Mayor’s office and he or she will get out a huge book of maps which show all the land ownership (its fancy name is a cadastre) in your local area. Even better — you won’t be charged for this, the...

Equality makes us live longer

Someone (possibly Stalin) once said “When one man dies, it’s a tragedy. When a million die, it’s a statistic.” But, to Professor Sir Michael Marmot, a million deaths is not just a statistic. A million people have died prematurely in just the last five years in Britain, according to the renowned epidemiologist Michael Marmot, author of The Health Gap, who has spent a lifetime trying to counteract such cynicism. For him, the deaths of millions worldwide from same cause, inequality, are millions of tragedies which could and should be prevented. Marmot was a medical student in the 60s when he...

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