Social and Economic Policy

Tax Justice UK has a worked-out package of tax changes — mostly wealth tax and levelling up capital gains tax — to raise £50 billion a year for public services. That would make a difference. It would stop the cuts still going on in the NHS, and start a national social-care service. It would help councils start restoring some of the services lost since 2010. It would enable SEND provision in schools. It would start some council house building. But we need also to look further, for two reasons. £50 billion is less than 2% of all economic output. It is a small fraction of the loot extracted to go...

Who owns land? Open the books! By Robert Bau Seeing a name on the land registry might suggest that person owns the property. In reality, the legal position is more complex and differs across the UK. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the law makes a distinction between two types of ownership: legal ownership and beneficial ownership. The Land Registry records the legal owner, known as the “registered proprietor”. This is the person with the legal right to sell, mortgage or otherwise deal with the property. However, this register does not show who actually benefits from the property...

Dyonissis Zoes, a school teacher in Liège, Belgium, talked to Solidarity. Pic: Demonstrators in Brussels, 14 June. School teachers in and around Liège, in Belgium, have been striking for weeks now against government cuts, and will continue to strike until the term ends on 4 July. These cuts have been coming for two years, but now the two ministers in charge are saying they want to discuss and they're asking for a truce. It shows that if we organise together, they have to listen. On 23 April, the government sent documents to the headmasters and directors of school on implementing the cuts,...

Doctors were due to strike from 15-19 June.

The headline finding from Alan Milburn’s report on young people and work is that over a million people aged 16-24 are “NEETs” – not in education, employment or training. In the next five years, that could rise to one in six young people. Given that the socialist movement, and the workers’ movement more generally, relies on an influx of young workers, this is sobering news that deserves our attention. But it would be easy to jump to wrong conclusions, as several prominent politicians already have. Milburn’s report cites a combination of multiple factors leading to the rise: young people are...

The current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is growing rapidly. It is centred in Ituri, a province in the northeast of the country which borders Uganda and South Sudan. So far there have been roughly a thousand suspected cases and a quarter as many deaths, with cases now being reported in Uganda as well. The DRC government’s response to the outbreak has been ineffective and unpopular. This is particularly the case regarding the decision to ban almost all flights in and out of Bunia (the capital of Ituri), which has severely hampered aid efforts. A recent report...

A fundamental principle of English law is that property cannot exist without an owner. Where no private individual can be identified, the law must prevent assets from falling into a legal vacuum. In the United Kingdom, that role has historically been fulfilled by the Crown, which acts as the ultimate holder of property where ownership otherwise fails. This principle is found in the doctrine of bona vacantia — “ownerless goods” — under which property without an identifiable owner passes to the Crown (as mentioned in the last article, in specific historic areas that right rests with the Duchy of...

You wouldn’t think it, but the figures show real wages rising modestly over the last two years (on average, though that means many have suffered falls); the minimum wage and Real Living Wage rising more; resort to food-banks dwindling; more spent on the NHS and on central funding for local councils. Price inflation has bounced around, and is a bit higher than it was on average from the early 1990s to 2021, but is much lower than in 2022-3. The Employment Relations Act is limited, but a real advance. Ditto the Renters’ Reform Act. Yet working-class people wanted a real turnaround in 2024, after...

The top ten per cent in Britain own 43% of all wealth, according to the latest figures from the Equality Trust. The top 0.1% in the UK own 9%, double their share in the early Thatcher years. Nine per cent seems not that much. But the top 0.1%, and the top 10%, own a much bigger part of the wealth that brings power - financial wealth, and ownership of companies. Even among the “next” 20% who are much more well-off than average readers of Solidarity, most of the wealth is “personal”, their own houses and pension rights. The statistics bounce around from year to year as share prices vary, but the...

Sunday was a strange day growing up in the late fifties and early sixties. My grandfather would send me on fruitless errands to buy newspapers that no longer existed: Lloyd’s Weekly, or if they didn’t have that Reynold's News