Social and Economic Policy

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

The land under your feet

“We live on a small, overcrowded island”, is a common enough refrain whether the subject under discussion is housing, road building, airport expansion or the arrival of refugees. As this book reveals this is a myth, partly perpetuated by those with a vested interest in maintaining their privileges and elite position with regard to the land. The UK is not, as “emotionally claimed” by some, being “concreted over”, in fact only 6% of the UK is urbanised. What agitates the author and I hope his readers, is not so much the question of urban spread but who owns the land underneath the buildings, the...

Leaving the vulnerable to charity

Kids Company — a charity that provided practical, emotional and educational support to deprived and vulnerable inner-city children and young people, in London, Liverpool and Bristol — closed its doors on 5 August due to a lack of funding. Founded in 1996 by Camila Batmanghelidjh, Kids Company attracted significant “celebrity” and governmental support — in 2013 23% of its income came from central and local government and much of the rest from high-profile supporters, including Prince Charles, Coldplay, Richard Branson, J.K. Rowling and others. Why did it fail? The simple answer seems to be a...

Why banking is bad for the economy

Banking is bad for economic growth and fuels inequality. This is not the judgement of Solidarity but of the OECD, the pro-market voice of some of the biggest western economies, in their new report, How to restore a healthy financial sector that supports long-lasting, inclusive growth? The report does not go as far as saying that bank credit is parasitic on the rest of the economy, but it states that for every 30 per cent growth in bank credit, one per cent is knocked off long term growth. The picture it builds is of a banking system that has boomed through neo-liberal deregulation and an...

HSBC tries to play the victim

The HSBC banking group is threatening to leave the UK over very the mild regulations on the financial sector that have been implemented since the 2008 crash. HSBC bosses have previously said they are considering moving the operation, probably to Hong Kong, in response to new banking levies. The bank’s chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, is set to lay out the banks plans for making the decision to an audience of top bankers on 9 June. The loud speculations about the possibility of upping sticks is believed to be timed to put pressure on Tory chancellor George Osborne, who will be delivering a...

A workers’ government will seize the banks

It wasn’t the stars, or geology. It wasn’t ocean currents, or the weather. The world economy was brought crashing down in 2008 by the particular way we have allowed it to be organised. It was brought down by being organised around the priority of maximum competitive greed and gain of a small exploiting minority. From the early 1980s to 2008, world capitalism became more and more governed by the drive for quick, fluid gains, measured and coordinated through an increasingly complex and fast-flowing system of world financial markets. Ever more elaborate forms of credit were packaged and traded...

Basic Income: on the side of the people

In his article “Basic Income: Side –stepping struggle?” ( Solidarity 359) Kieran Miles gets a number of things wrong. I will attempt to pick up on some of these errors and then address his “questions for the UBI advocates”. Before proceeding, a point on terminology. Kieran uses the term universal basic income while I prefer citizen’s income. However, the most common term in use seems to be the shorter basic income and I would suggest using this in any future discussion. In a number of places Kieran is simply not comparing like with like. A “minimum income” is not a basic income and the...

Tax the rich!

The Tories, their arrogance boosted by having got through five years of cuts and wage squeeze and still having some chance of re-election, promise a cut in inheritance tax. They have already cut corporation tax and the top rate of income tax. The Labour leadership promises bitty taxes on the rich here and there, but nothing large-scale. On 13 April Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls publicly rebuked the right-wing leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Jim Murphy, for saying there will be no new cuts under a Labour government. Murphy was striving to make ground against the Scottish National Party, which...

Nationalise land!

We should add two demands to Pete Gilman's list in his excellent article on socialist housing policy ( Solidarity 358): nationalisation of land, and public ownership (state and municipal) of construction. As Pete points out, most of the dwellings being built in London and other housing-shortage areas are for sale or rent at luxury levels. Yet they are not palaces with huge gardens. Mostly they are small flats built to ordinary construction specifications. The profits from their high prices go to property developers or landlords. The real-estate advisers Savills report that: "London residential...

A record of plutocracy

All the main storylines of Cameron’s Britain are there in this book. The food banks. The explosion of payday loans. Plunging wages for young workers, soaring rents and house prices, and almost no social house-building. The hype about government debt as the monster threatening us all. The social cuts first pushed with the story that they were necessary to tame debt, and then continued, when they leave debt still rising fast, with the story that the capitalist free market will eventually bring prosperity if only liberated from social overheads and from taxes on profits and high incomes. The...

The case for Citizens' Income

The run-in to the General Election in May prompted me to look more closely at the politics of Left Unity and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, both of whom are standing candidates in the election. Neither of them mentions the Citizen’s Income (CI) also referred to as Basic Income (BI). Prompted by this discovery I then looked at the websites of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Morning Star, Workers’ Liberty and the Socialist Party. The result was the same. CI does not appear to be on the agenda, even as an item for discussion, of any of the main left groupings in the UK although...

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