Social and Economic Policy

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

Labour manifesto: clawing back from the rich

The output (value-added) of the UK economy these days is around £1900 billion a year. Of that, about £360 billion is goods and services bought by central and local government, about £320 billion is capital investment, and about £1,130 billion is stuff bought by households. The sub-totals do not add up to the overall total because of other categories, and the figures are rough, based on the last available official figures, for 2014. The UK government produces many useful statistics on the distribution of household income, but not for the percentage of household income taken by the rich, the top...

Letters

I thought Charlotte Zalens’ article “Does £70,000 make you rich?” ( Solidarity 436) was really useful, informative and thought provoking. Charlotte made three important points. One, that £70,000 is way beyond the £22,400 median wage. Two, that a salary of £70,000 places someone in the top tenth of the population by income. And, three that income inequality at the top of the scale is far greater than at the bottom. So, while £70,000 will place someone in the top tenth, this is relatively small beer when compared with the average £270,000 for the top 1%, chicken feed compared with £1 million...

Tories seek mandate to increase cuts, inequality, poverty

“Mrs May”, writes the Tory-leaning columnist of the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh, “could not survive an election campaign saying so little so often if people paid attention”. Since so many don’t, “the repetition of slogans in lieu of answers carries no cost”. Fraser Nelson, another Tory, comments in the Spectator: “She seems to think that, if you refuse to give the press anything, the public won’t care. Worse, she seems to be right – for now, at least”. May’s purpose, so Nelson writes, is not to “seek a mandate”, but to evade one. “That’s what this election is really about: a bonfire of these...

Make the rich pay!

Wages are the clearest measure of how well or badly workers are doing in capitalist society. Between 1979 and 2008 the share of national output (GDP) going on wages fell from 65% to around 54%. This represents a huge shift of wealth in favour of the profit system and the capitalist class who benefit from it. Following an economic crisis in the 1970s, the capitalists set out to roll back the gains made by workers in the previous decades, Over thirty years global capitalism has reduced relative wages and fundamentally undermined the strong trade union organisation and workplace militancy which...

Reverse the rise in inequality!

The Resolution Foundation, a statistical think-tank, reported in March on the economic prospects if the Tories win on 8 June. "If nothing is done to change [the] outlook... [2015-20] will go down as being the worst [period] on record for income growth in the bottom half of the income distribution. "It will also represent the biggest rise in inequality since the end of the 1980s". The toxic mix comes from low wage growth — which the government's own Office for Budgetary Responsibility predicts — and a great wave of pre-programmed cuts in working-age welfare benefits. The percentage of children...

Labour needs a bold socialist programme for education

It’s about time! Labour has made a policy commitment to impose VAT on private school fees and use the money raised to finance the provision of free school meals for all children in primary schools. Just 7% of children go to private schools. They are overwhelmingly from wealthier, more privileged families — people who should be paying more tax. The 83% of children who go to state schools will benefit from the free school meals policy. It will ease the financial pressures on families who currently just fail the “means test” for free school meals; who may not realise that they qualify; or who are...

End the "tampon tax” Stop funding anti-abortionists!

In March last year, then Prime Minister David Cameron announced to Parliament that the 5% VAT levy on period-related products — the “tampon tax” — would soon come to an end. Parliament was told the European Commission would allow countries to extend zero rates on VAT, and more generally to have more autonomy over the VAT applied to individual products and services. The European Court of Justice has been called upon numerous times to clarify the rules about individual, esoteric products and services — such as whether or not coin-operated booths in a Bruges sex shop counted as a cinema. Former...

Marxism and autism (article and video)

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation? There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”. This approach is based on the concept of...

Fight Brexit all the way

On 29 March, Theresa May will trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, starting the clock on the UK leaving the EU. Unless the UK and all the EU states agree to a special extension on negotiations, the UK will quit the EU in or before March 2019. Already, the Brexit vote is leading to stresses on migrant workers, and an increase in nationalism and xenophobia in the UK; and strengthens the worst, most right-wing elements in the ruling class and their political party, the Tories. The labour movement needs to carve out a pro-worker, pro-migrant vision of the future, with ties as close...

G20 deletion signals danger

When twenty governments met for the G20 summit in late 2008, at the worst of the global credit crash, their agreed joint statement included just one hard commitment: to resist protectionism, to avoid new trade barriers. Not perfectly, but on the whole, that commitment held, and helped the slump level out in late 2009 rather than continuing downwards for three or four years as in the 1930s, when states spiralled into competitive tariff-raising and world trade collapsed. On 18 March, the statement from a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors deleted the now-traditional...

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