Social and Economic Policy

The year 2022, summarises the broadly Blairite but fact-rich and realistic Resolution Foundation, “was a disaster for living standards” — “but the worst is yet to come”. A lot more people are dependent on food banks. A lot of people this winter will not afford to heat their homes or cook properly. Many people are now paying cash for private medical treatments where NHS waiting lists are impossibly long, and many others can’t possibly afford that. Beyond the issue of people being unable to afford basics, broader class inequality, with its taunting wounds to worse-off people from the sight of...

September marks one year since the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman who was killed in detention following her arrest for allegedly violating Iran ’s compulsory hijab law. Her murder sparked the most significant protests against the Iranian regime since the 1980s and the strength of the uprising prompted the Iranian regime to take the notorious morality police off the streets. CRACKDOWN It has been confirmed that more than twenty thousand people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the subsequent crackdown, with the real number expected to be much higher. Sentences...

In September 2021 thousands of healthworkers launched an indefinite strike at Charité and Vivantes, two of Berlin’s large municipal hospitals. So began the Krankenhausbewegung - Berlin’s Hospital Movement. After a month, they won. A year later, nurses in the UK underwent their own industrial awakening, as the Royal College of Nursing balloted for nationwide strike action over pay. The differences between the disputes could not have been more stark, as a series of obstacles — some erected by anti-union laws, others by their own union — combined to defeat the UK nurses, despite overwhelming...

On 5 August, the historic Crooked House pub in Staffordshire was burned down in an incident later declared to be arson

Wage rises are not the cause of inflation

On Monday 10 July Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt, alongside Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey, assured City plutocrats at a Mansion House dinner that he would hold a hard line against public sector wage claims. He said that was to damp inflation. In fact, conceding to the school workers, the doctors, the rail and Tube workers, and others, would cost a tiny part of the government’s budget. Even if it led to a bigger government deficit, its effect on inflation would be impossible to calculate, and small anyway. And that effect could be reduced to zero, even notionally, by covering the rises from...

The French poet and journalist, Anatole France, commented 130 years ago: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” France’s point, of course, is that it is not necessary for the rich to steal food, and formal equality under the law impacts differently on the well-off and the badly-off. Last week, in Blackpool, a 29-year-old man, Gage Blundell, a father of two children and a heroin addict, was jailed for three months for shoplifting £100-worth of cheese and butter. Someone with a problem which should...

In August 1869 Karl Marx argued in the First International, the big workers’ movement of that time, for schools as a public service, but not controlled from above by the government. At that time fewer than half of primary-age children attended (mostly church) schools in Britain, and many were sent to wage-work. “National education”, said Marx, “had been looked upon as governmental, but that was not necessarily the case”. He mentioned schooling in the USA, more widespread than in Britain but too patchy and localised. “Education might be national without being governmental. Government might...

The Tory government remains hardline on public sector pay. It now threatens to dismiss even the miserly recommendations of its own official Pay Review Bodies for 2023-4. The Tories say that squeezes on pay and NHS spending are necessary to slow inflation. But: • It now looks as if inflation will remain high (probably not as high as now) for longer than the Bank of England estimated when the Pay Review Bodies were pondering. Meagre pay rises will mean new real-wage cuts in 2023-4. • Profits were up in the early months of 2023, as spending power stashed during lockdowns flowed into markets. The...

The Chartists, Britain’s first great workers’ movement from 1838 to the early 1850s, demanded parliamentary elections every year, not every five years. One of the reasons why Karl Marx identified the Paris Commune of 1871 as especially democratic is that the representatives could be “recalled” — subject to new election — at any time when sufficiently many of their electors demanded it. Lenin later, in State and Revolution , identified that right of recall as a key democratic feature of the “workers’ semi-state” exemplified by the workers’ councils (Soviets). In Britain today we have a Tory...