Social and Economic Policy

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

The threat from Truss and Sunak

Whether Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak becomes prime minister on 5 September, the Tory regime will shift even further rightwards — unless the labour movement hobbles it. The heat the Tory leadership contest has generated should not obscure the fact that Sunak and Truss are not so much on the same page as in the same paragraph. In many respects the Tories’ position is weak. The new government will, for a while, be constrained by multiple crises. Yet those crises pose a greater threat to the working class and labour movement, unless we act more decisively. Liz Truss is more “on a holiday from reality”...

Price curbs no substitute for wage rises

Price controls don’t work in a market-based economy, i.e. an economy where prices are central. The Tory government of the time froze all prices in late 1972, then inflation was 9% in 1973, 17% in 1974. Even a workers’ government, as long as it had to use price mechanisms a lot, would have no quick-fix to stop inflation, especially inflation pushed by world-market factors. A worker revolt, seeking wage and benefit rises, and increased funding for public services, to match price rises, is more effective than a consumer revolt petitioning the government to control prices. Bourgeois governments...

The other £100 billion

In the financial year 2022-3, the government will pay out about £113 billion of its tax revenue to rich people and institutions as interest on government bonds (IOUs) they hold. In 2023-4 it will be more than £130 billion, or so the Financial Times estimates, starting from reports of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility. In 2021-2 it was £24 billion; even in 2021-2, boosted by extra government borrowing for Covid measures, effective or ineffective, the payout was £54 billion. Comparisons? The wages before taxes of all NHS workers total about £60 billion a year. Keir Starmer estimates his...

“Enough is Enough” and workers’ struggles

The best answer to price surges is to win pay, benefit, and pension increases. It is the readiest to hand for the working class. We already have organisations built for that purpose. Many of those trade unions already have strike mandates. The deciding factor will be whether those unions unite, accelerate and spread the strikes, as a sprint rather than a marathon. Political campaigning is also important. Many unions have sway (if they choose to use it) in the Labour Party. They should demand that Labour campaigns for benefit, pension, and public-sector real-wage rises; for public ownership of...

Beat the winter catastrophe

On 13 August , the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with the TUC, the National Education Union, and dozens of charities and campaigns concerned with poverty, called for the package of relief payments announced in May to be at least doubled. That was £1,200 for worse-off families, through a variety of payments. The JRF reckons that worse-off households face an average of £2,800 increased costs, so similar relief plus 130% would do what the May package promised. The JRF and others also call for deductions from benefits for debts to be eased or paused. As of November 2020 (the most recent...

Change Labour to beat Tories

Johnson is going. The Tories are discredited and at odds with each other. Yet polling data, and mountains of evidence from everyday life, suggest that, while the Tories are reviled, they still have a strong base of right-wing, nationalist support. They also tell us there is little positive enthusiasm for Starmer Labour. Keir Starmer’s leadership is offering little on the huge issues facing workers and society: collapsing living standards, the threat of climate change, and the mess of Brexit. The relatively left-wing pledges Starmer made in the 2020 Labour leadership election have been ditched...

Uber, capitalism, Peter Mandelson and GMB

“Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals”. So the Guardian summarises its exposé of platform delivery and transport corporation Uber, based on 124,000 leaked documents. On 10 and 11 July it published 26 articles as part of its series on “The Uber files”, with more to come on 12 and 13 July. As well as illustrating vividly many things about the nature of the profit system, of capitalism­ ­— the Guardian reporting covers both the super-exploitation of Uber’s drivers and, in more depth, the corporation’s wider anti-social activities — the revelations also...

A public service railway!

Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT rail union, on Peston on ITV, responded to Tory MP Robert Jenrick about how to increase demand for the railways: “The worst way you could do it is by insisting the fares go up by RPI ripping off the commuters, but you won’t give the workers RPI… Last year, profits were made by the train operators — £500m out of that subsidy you gave went to those companies. First Group and Go Ahead, whom we’re negotiating with, are both subject to takeovers from private equity companies. “They’re going to be worth billions because they know you’re going to keep...

Make wages spiral!

A wage-price spiral would be better than the poverty spiral we face now. Prices are rising about 10%. If wages catch up by rising 10%, workers still lose out, but only temporarily, in the catch-up time. If prices rise 10% and wages rise three or four per cent, then workers are six or seven per cent worse off, and not just for a year. Even if price rises slow down in 2023, we have a worse starting-point for the whole future. But, the Tories reply, if workers win 10% rises, then companies will “have to” raise prices by even more than 10%. They don’t “have to” at all. If everything goes up 10%...

"Progressive economics": think tanks or struggles?

I'd guess several hundred people, many young, attended part or all of the “Progressive Economics” conference held by the Progressive Economy Forum (PEF) think tank at Greenwich University on 11 June. There were 150 at the closing plenary. It was an informative and lively event touching on crucial issues and asking important questions. But the dominant politics were not radical and the labour movement as a presence and an idea largely absent. Socialists should work for left-wing economic debate to be rooted in and in dialogue with the workers' movement and workers’ struggles, rather than...

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