Social and Economic Policy

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Energy bills: worker revolt and consumer revolt

The Don’t Pay campaign is calling for a household energy bill paymens strike from 1 December, with the demand to reduce the energy price cap to the level before April 2021 (£1,042 for a “typical” household, as against £2,500 now). The campaign started in June 2022. At first it planned to get a million people signed up to payment-strike from 1 October. It dropped that when it didn’t get the numbers and after Liz Truss announced a £150-billion energy prices support scheme (via government subsidies to energy companies). It has revived the payment-strike plan now that the Tories have said that the...

Tory fiasco raises the stakes

The Tory party melée may now subside a bit, with Rishi Sunak nodded in as the new prime minister on 24 October. But it has triggered an economic crisis. It has taken the lid off a swirl of dispute in the Tory party. And it has raised the stakes for the labour movement. The usual pattern of capitalist crises is that debt builds up in a boom, with easy credit and speculative ventures, then a jolt reveals that many debtors are unlikely to pay, and collapse snowballs. Not through a boom, but through the Covid lockdowns, government debt has increased hugely since early 2020, corporate debt mildly...

Kick the Tories out: general election now!

“We now have the prospect of having a Conservative Party leader who doesn’t have a mandate from the country and won’t even have a mandate from the membership either... I think a general election is the only answer, otherwise we’re just going to go from bad to worse.” That’s not a Labour or Lib-Dem politician, but a Tory MP, admittedly a somewhat maverick one, Christopher Chope. Socialists advocate a thorough representative democracy, based on the right to recall representatives at any time, abolition of privileges for representatives and officials, and ending the separation of legislative and...

Capitalism: a new crisis

A slump is coming. There will be an economic “crisis”, not just in the sense of bad times, but in the more precise sense of a wave of collapses, failures, unemployment. It will come together with high inflation and social cuts. It may be mild or it may be sharp. Maybe it will be mild enough to be just a slowdown, rather than a crisis, but that looks less and less likely. The signs are bad worldwide, and worse in the UK. The price inflation which many central banks, early this year, thought might be a temporary result of supply blockages, is now well “embedded”. Central banks are increasing...

Private affluence and public squalor

The idea that socialism is about workers getting the “full proceeds” of our labour was influential in the 19th century, enough so that a version of it appeared in the old (1918-95) Clause Four of the Labour Party rulebook. Karl Marx debunked it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme . Many items must be deducted from the “proceeds of labour” before an individual distribution. Notably “that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion...

Kick the Tories out!

The new mini-budget of Jeremy Hunt, on 17 October, reverses “almost all” the tax cuts promised by Liz Truss, and reduces energy-bill subsidies to six months (from two years). Truss herself may not last much longer. For the working class this means: • Social cuts. Liz Truss’s early promise of “no spending cuts” never really meant that: NHS, local government, and school budgets are being cut in real terms already because of rising prices for what they buy in. Now Hunt promises more cuts. Benefits have shrunk in real terms and will shrink again up to April, whatever the increase then. • The...

Kick the Tories out!

Liz Truss, elevated to prime minister by the votes of 81,000 Tory party members to the horror of the wider electorate, is trying to make a turn in policy defined even by more cautious Tories as unjust and unworkable. She can do so only because MPs elected for five years are insulated from recall or accountability for those five years, and because even those elected MPs are usually more controlled by the prime minister than controlling. Once Liz Truss had won the Tory contest, she could appoint whom she liked to the ministries, and thus protect herself by a “payroll vote” against most...

Truss: foolish but dangerous

Liz Truss’s energy-bills measure will give people high bills instead of huge ones. The tax cuts predicted by Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” on 23 September will give £30 billion more relief, mostly to the well-off. What’s not to like? A lot. The Tories moved under the threat of worse-placed energy retailers and businesses with high gas usage going bust, and Tory or floating voters with big houses being alienated by huge bills. The energy-bills measure will also save the government some billions in interest payments on RPI-linked bonds by reducing the predicted rise in measured inflation rates...

Energy: make Labour demand public ownership

As Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, put it: “Public ownership and democratic control of our energy system provides the answer to a whole series of problems faced by working-class people. Public ownership and workers’ control make the perpetrators of the energy crisis pay for the damage they have done, while giving democratic power back to those who produce this wealth and those who need it.” The last two Labour Party conferences, in 2019 and 2021, voted overwhelmingly for public ownership of energy. In August the TUC came out for taking the energy firms (retail only...

Wage spiral to beat bills spiral

Liz Truss was elected as new Tory leader, and so prime minister, on 5 September, with a programme of new anti-union laws, tax cuts for the well-off, a “bonfire” of EU-derived social standards, and more. It is even more urgent to unite, accelerate, and spread the strikes now underway, to beat back Truss before she can settle into office and consolidate Tory support. Truss said she was against “handouts”. However, she has now promised, for Thursday 8 September, measures to ease the household energy shock. It looks like Truss will go for something like the scheme of the energy retailers...

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