Social and Economic Policy

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

Two months of “Gilets Jaunes”

On Saturday 5 January, an estimated 50,000 demonstrators came onto the streets of France to take part in “Act VIII”, the eighth national protest of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. In Paris, a bloc of working¬class women in yellow jackets came to the fore and broke police encirclements. The movement has shrunk since “Act I” on 17 November 2018, which saw an estimated 300,000 on the streets, but it has defied predictions that it would die off during the Christmas¬New Year break. The protests began in the autumn, against a hike in fuel tax that would have hurt millions of workers and...

Labour and housing markets breed insecurity

When the Minimum Wage was introduced, the bottom scale of local government pay was well above it. Now each time the Minimum Wage is increased, a couple of points at the bottom of the local government pay scales have to be removed because they’re now below that Minimum Wage. One reason why the decline in local government services is not so noticeable is that there’s been a huge hit to the pay of what was always mostly a low-paid workforce. Productivity figures are usually dubious — on the standard measures, real estate is reckoned to have the highest labour productivity of any sector — but it...

A left case for Brexit

The left was right to campaign against leaving the EU in 2016. Based on the tenor of the campaign, it was clear the Leave campaign would embolden the xenophobes and nationalists that exist across the class spectrum in the UK. This prediction was proven chillingly correct with both the spike in hate crime that followed the referendum and the movement that has emerged around Tommy Robinson over the last few weeks. The left should deplore and, if necessary, physically resist such acts of violent racism. But fighting fascism does not mean accepting globalisation. The fact is, working class people...

The Tory Scissors

Theresa May suggests an “end to austerity” if she gets a workable Brexit deal. First get your deal. Then even the deftest negotiation is going to do no better than limit the damage from Brexit. And by decisions already made by the Tory government, large further cuts in benefits and social spending are pre-programmed for the coming years. A new survey has just shown 60% of people in favour of higher taxes (in general, not just higher taxes on the rich, as Solidarity would advocate) to get more money for schools and the NHS. It’s the highest percentage saying that for a long time. In 2010 only...

Why the Labour right praises McDonnell

The social-democratic worthy Will Hutton, in his heyday the chief advocate that Britain can come good by adopting “Rhenish capitalism” on the German model, is happy about Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell's plan for a bit of worker shareownership, as announced at (but not put for debate to) Labour Party conference. Hutton's praise is sincere, but double-edged if read by socialists. “Today John McDonnell has crossed a line: by wanting workers as shareholders and represented on boards, he signals that capitalism can be made to work for the common good. His comrades from the 1970s would...

The roots of antisemitism in Hungary

For part one click here In the last part of this article I looked at how Bibó analysed the historical background of antisemitism in Hungary. But on a more general level what makes an anti-semite “tick”? Bibó begins by considering the personal experiences of anti-semites, “[…] anyone who knows anti-semites even a little, knows that they base their claims about Jews on very personal experiences, presented in honest and passionate form. It would be incorrect to claim that they invent their experiences because of their shared prejudices, interests and ideologies; there are indications that the...

Stop Brexit! Fight Poverty!

At its conference on 22-26 September Labour has the chance to galvanise its new and enthused activist layer into becoming a serious force against the Tories, their disastrous policies for working-class people pushed through over eight years. To do that Labour needs to overhaul its democracy and commit itself to a radical programme. Top of the kind of political shift Labour needs to make is on Brexit. With over 100 motions submitted by local Labour parties, it is likely that t full debate on Brexit and the demand for another referendum or “People’s Vote” will be aired at the conference...

The development of antisemitism in Hungary

For part two click here Bibó was not a Marxist but a member of the National Peasant Party (NPP) — a party of radical reformists who adhered to a political position which was loosely described as “the third road” (or “third way”): neither Communist (i.e. Stalinist) or capitalist. It was, in effect, left-reformist and probably closer to the politics of Bennism (but with an agrarian orientation) than anything else to which it could be compared in the UK today. That political stream had a short existence from 1939 to 1948. In the Hungarian elections of 1945 the NPP won 42 seats in the National...

The pitfalls of “everything is getting worse”

Until the late 1950s, with decreasing conviction, the official Communist Parties in western Europe promoted as a dogma the idea that working-class living-standards were falling because an iron law of capitalism made it so, and of course were worse than workers’ living standards in the USSR. CP writers were commissioned to select and shape statistics to “prove” that claim. In France, critical Marxists denounced this attitude as “misérabilisme”. Workers whose households had for the first time fridges, washing machines, TVs, central heating could not fail to conclude that the trade-union and...

Labour fails to stand up against Heathrow expansion

With the support of 119 Labour MPs the government got a proposed third runway at Heathrow through the House of Commons on 26 June. The government cites numerous benefits from expansion — to international trade and new foreign direct investment for example. Unite and the GMB, the largest unions representing workers at Heathrow, are uncritical backers of the project, citing only the prospect of new jobs as the key factor in assessing whether an infrastructure project is good or bad. The Transport Select Committee’s report on the proposal stated that the government were unclear on the...

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