Social and Economic Policy

The EU, after a long investigation, found on 30 August that Apple has evaded $13 billion (£10 billion) in taxes. That’s just Apple. The EU has also ordered Starbucks to pay €30 million to the Netherlands, and is likely to order Amazon to pay €400 million to Luxemburg. And then there’s Google. And all the other tax-dodging billionaire corporations and their tax-dodging billionaire owners. The worst-off households pay a bigger percentage of income in tax (including VAT and such) than the best-off. In 2011-2, the worst-off 20% were paying 36.6% in tax, the best-of 20% were paying 35.5%, and the...

In the post-Brexit crisis the Tories will use any opportunity to make workers pay and prove that Britain PLC is a ″good place for business″. Signs are, despite Theresa May′s rhetoric of a ″government not just for the privileged few″, they are looking at a whole raft of anti-worker measures. The new head of Theresa May′s policy board is George Freeman MP, known for saying that people working in new companies should have no employment rights — including maternity pay, paid leave, and the minimum wage. He has also previously suggested that the biggest companies should pay just 10% corporation tax...

In the post-Brexit crisis the Tories will use any opportunity to make workers pay and prove that Britain PLC is a ″good place for business″. Signs are, despite Theresa May′s rhetoric of a ″government not just for the privileged few″, they are looking at a whole raft of anti-worker measures. The new head of Theresa May′s policy board is George Freeman MP, known for saying that people working in new companies should have no employment rights — including maternity pay, paid leave, and the minimum wage. He has also previously suggested that the biggest companies should pay just 10% corporation tax...

“Having already broken two of his self-imposed fiscal rules”, reported the Financial Times on 1 July, chancellor George “Osborne indicated on Friday [1st] that he would activate the get-out clause on his third and final rule. “At the Budget in March, Mr Osborne admitted he would fail to meet his promise to cut debt as a share of gross domestic product this year. Last year he rowed back on his cap on welfare spending”. Now he has dropped his promise to put the government budget in surplus by 2020. The rules were only ever shams designed to help the Tories pretend that their social cuts are not...

“Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain”, Goethe. Towards the end of January, “mostly supine” MPs passed a bill after a “clueless debate”. The Psychoactive Substances Act which is intended to ban “legal highs” (novel psychoactive substances — NPSs) is “one of the stupidest, most dangerous and unscientific pieces of drugs legislation ever conceived." “Watching MPs debate...it was clear most didn’t have a clue. They misunderstood medical evidence, mispronounced drug names, and generally floundered. It would have been funny except lives and liberty were on the line.” Not my words...

The Labour Party has launched a new initiative, entitled “Workplace2020”, aimed at developing policies for workers’ and trade union rights. The scheme is part consultation, part policy platform, with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announcing that the approach would be “based on full employment, a high-skilled workforce with decent pay, rights of the self-employed and the employed, and a voice that works for a collective bargain.” Unite general secretary Len McCluskey has welcomed the initiative, and says Unite will be encouraging its members to take part in the consultation. “Workplace 2020” is a...

This is a review of the new book by Workers' Liberty Can socialism make sense? The last period has been tough for the working class, arduous for the labour movement and a nightmare for socialists. We’ve had decades of accelerated capitalist globalisation, the US hyper-power bestriding the world and the mass belief in markets as the regulator of all social affairs. But the tremendous mystique world capitalism built in the two decades after the collapse of Russian and European Stalinism fractured during the economic crisis of 2008 and its aftershocks. The need for socialism has never been...

A rising mood that cuts are not inevitable, a rising anger against economic inequality, and a rising confidence that alternatives are possible, has damaged the Tories in recent months. Ian Duncan Smith resigned, demagogically spilling the truth that the Tories have been victimising the worst-off to benefit the rich. That was one of the side-products of the Tories’ splits over Europe, which have seen Tory right-wingers suddenly “discovering” that the NHS is underfunded and suggesting Britain’s EU budget contributions could fill the gap. The Tories were forced to retreat on disabled benefits...

A 12 April opinion poll put Labour ahead of the Tories, 34/31, for only the second time since the 2015 general election. Among people aged 18 to 24, it showed a Labour lead of 51/20. The Tories have been battered by Ian Duncan Smith’s resignation, by their splits over Europe, by their forced retreat on disabled benefits, and by the Panama Papers. Labour can get ahead. It will be hard on 5 May. Sadiq Khan should win London mayor for Labour. But an SNP landslide in Scotland is almost certain. In polls for the Welsh Assembly, Labour is still ahead of the Tories and Plaid Cymru, but less than it...

Matt Cooper is right to criticise the article about Basic Income, written by Andrew Harrop on the Fabian website, for its timidity ( Solidarity 400). However, a bigger problem is that Harrop makes something fairly simple unnecessarily complicated. A major advantage of BI is that it does not require much in the way of paper work, calculations, assessments and, most important of all, there is no means testing. Harrop’s “half-way house” proposal gives us the worst of all worlds: it is not a BI and it requires some kind of means testing. There is no reason for this. Experience demonstrates that a...