Social and Economic Policy

“We became a victim of something with which we had nothing to do, and of course it was a man-made disaster. Imagine, on one hand we have to cater for food security for the common man by spending billions of dollars and on the other we have to spend billions of dollars to protect flood-affected people from further miseries and difficulties. “How on earth can one expect from us that we will undertake this gigantic task on our own?” With these words Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, appealed to the assembled world leaders at COP27 in a key intervention in the loss and damages debate. The...

Thirty-odd billion pounds of cuts are trailed for 17 November. The Tories plan to “repair” economic life by deliberately running down the public services and public investment which underpin it, and by deliberately further pauperising people who depend on state benefits. This upside-down economics come from economic life being ruled by markets rather than collective conscious human decision. In a capitalist market economy, as Karl Marx wrote, “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between people at work, but as what...

The Tories will say that their cuts coming on 17 November, and their hard line against public sector wage rises, are unavoidable adjustments to “market realities”. Almost the whole political spectrum, apart from working-class socialists, agrees. After the Truss-Kwarteng experiment in maverick “Reaganite” bourgeois economics, which lasted only two weeks after the “mini-budget” of 23 September before starting to collapse, all the economists say that tax rises and cuts are no less unavoidable than heating your house or wearing warm clothes if you want to stay healthy in cold weather. The writers...

The Don’t Pay campaign is calling for a household energy bill paymens strike from 1 December, with the demand to reduce the energy price cap to the level before April 2021 (£1,042 for a “typical” household, as against £2,500 now). The campaign started in June 2022. At first it planned to get a million people signed up to payment-strike from 1 October. It dropped that when it didn’t get the numbers and after Liz Truss announced a £150-billion energy prices support scheme (via government subsidies to energy companies). It has revived the payment-strike plan now that the Tories have said that the...

The Tory party melée may now subside a bit, with Rishi Sunak nodded in as the new prime minister on 24 October. But it has triggered an economic crisis. It has taken the lid off a swirl of dispute in the Tory party. And it has raised the stakes for the labour movement. The usual pattern of capitalist crises is that debt builds up in a boom, with easy credit and speculative ventures, then a jolt reveals that many debtors are unlikely to pay, and collapse snowballs. Not through a boom, but through the Covid lockdowns, government debt has increased hugely since early 2020, corporate debt mildly...

“We now have the prospect of having a Conservative Party leader who doesn’t have a mandate from the country and won’t even have a mandate from the membership either... I think a general election is the only answer, otherwise we’re just going to go from bad to worse.” That’s not a Labour or Lib-Dem politician, but a Tory MP, admittedly a somewhat maverick one, Christopher Chope. Socialists advocate a thorough representative democracy, based on the right to recall representatives at any time, abolition of privileges for representatives and officials, and ending the separation of legislative and...

A slump is coming. There will be an economic “crisis”, not just in the sense of bad times, but in the more precise sense of a wave of collapses, failures, unemployment. It will come together with high inflation and social cuts. It may be mild or it may be sharp. Maybe it will be mild enough to be just a slowdown, rather than a crisis, but that looks less and less likely. The signs are bad worldwide, and worse in the UK. The price inflation which many central banks, early this year, thought might be a temporary result of supply blockages, is now well “embedded”. Central banks are increasing...

The idea that socialism is about workers getting the “full proceeds” of our labour was influential in the 19th century, enough so that a version of it appeared in the old (1918-95) Clause Four of the Labour Party rulebook. Karl Marx debunked it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme . Many items must be deducted from the “proceeds of labour” before an individual distribution. Notably “that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion...

The new mini-budget of Jeremy Hunt, on 17 October, reverses “almost all” the tax cuts promised by Liz Truss, and reduces energy-bill subsidies to six months (from two years). Truss herself may not last much longer. For the working class this means: • Social cuts. Liz Truss’s early promise of “no spending cuts” never really meant that: NHS, local government, and school budgets are being cut in real terms already because of rising prices for what they buy in. Now Hunt promises more cuts. Benefits have shrunk in real terms and will shrink again up to April, whatever the increase then. • The...

Liz Truss, elevated to prime minister by the votes of 81,000 Tory party members to the horror of the wider electorate, is trying to make a turn in policy defined even by more cautious Tories as unjust and unworkable. She can do so only because MPs elected for five years are insulated from recall or accountability for those five years, and because even those elected MPs are usually more controlled by the prime minister than controlling. Once Liz Truss had won the Tory contest, she could appoint whom she liked to the ministries, and thus protect herself by a “payroll vote” against most...