Social and Economic Policy

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

Beat the freeze

As the weather gets colder, higher energy bills are biting. Maybe 10,000 households across Britain are being added to the 4.3 million already on pre-payment meters. Pre-payment means that you get no electricity or gas if you run out of cash one week, while with direct debit you incur debt but will not be cut off. It is more expensive, and loads the cost onto colder months rather than spreading it over the year. Energy firms can switch households on smart meters to pre-payment remotely, without having to send out an engineer. People on pre-payment meters are dependent on vouchers to get...

Making imagination, and remaking reality

The Economist magazine in its 26 November issue recalled Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism , a book from 2009 which asserted (glumly, from the author’s viewpoint) that it had become “easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. Even the crash of 2008, argued Fisher, had narrowed socialist imagination. According to the Economist ’s columnist, the Tory crises and the Tories’ current offer — stable management of... a record drop in living standards and a near-collapse of public services — have had a similar paradoxical effect. It has become, the column says, “easier to imagine...

The Tories and the uncaring economy

Sue Himmelweit is a feminist economist, emeritus professor of economics at the Open University, and active with the Women’s Budget Group. She talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . Jeremy Hunt has call for a report on the increasing levels of “economic inactivity” among working-age people in the UK. I think what he’s looking for ways to tighten up the conditionality in Universal Credit in order to get more people into the labour force. Really the inquiry should be into the conditions under which people can get into the labour market. There are a lot of people waiting for NHS treatment. You...

Which side are you on?

After 12 grisly years of “austerity” — cuts to living standards and public services to further enrich employers and the rich — and decades of rising inequality, the working class in the UK faces a dramatic new assault. One that poses a stark challenge to workers, the labour movement and every individual who wants a better society. The growing surge of workers’ struggles can defeat these attacks and start to turn things around — but only if we organise to take it much further . Under the Tories’ plan, people in this country will suffer the biggest fall in living standards on record: a 4.3% cut...

The politico-economic consequences of Liz Truss

Andrew Gamble, author of The Conservative Nation and other books, talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . There’s been a long civil war in the Conservative Party over Europe. It became more intense after the 2016 referendum. A majority of Conservative MPs and Cabinet Ministers voted Remain, but 57% of voters who had voted Conservative at the general election only a year before in 2015 repudiated David Cameron and voted Leave. Ever since 2016, the party has been disoriented. It has radical factions who want to do different things with Brexit, and a bigger group of MPs who haven’t known what...

Stop Sunak’s cuts! Tax the rich!

In British capitalist society, vast amounts of wealth and income are held by a rich or well-off minority, much more than is needed to repair the NHS and pay workers wage and benefit increases matching inflation. In round figures, Britain’s 32.6 million workforce produces £2.2 trillion (thousand billion) of output each year, or £67,000 per person. That is inexact. A good chunk of the “output” is not actual goods and services (“use-values”, as Karl Marx called them), but a counting-as-output of fees and the like generated as surplus-value from production is whirled through financial markets and...

Letter: Less work? Less capitalism

Stuart Jordan in “Winning the cooperation we need” ( Solidarity 652 ) makes a persuasive case that workers’ action to win democratic rational economic planning — not moral appeals to capitalist leaders — is needed to halt climate catastrophe. But one of his claims is incomplete at best. “We need to slow down, do less work and have more leisure time, resisting the bosses’ incessant drive to intensify the rate of work.” There are many important reasons to fight for a shorter working week and against intensification. Longer weeks and overworking degrade our quality of life, harming workers for...

To make good damage, seize capitalist wealth!

“We became a victim of something with which we had nothing to do, and of course it was a man-made disaster. Imagine, on one hand we have to cater for food security for the common man by spending billions of dollars and on the other we have to spend billions of dollars to protect flood-affected people from further miseries and difficulties. “How on earth can one expect from us that we will undertake this gigantic task on our own?” With these words Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, appealed to the assembled world leaders at COP27 in a key intervention in the loss and damages debate. The...

Behind the £30 billion cuts

Thirty-odd billion pounds of cuts are trailed for 17 November. The Tories plan to “repair” economic life by deliberately running down the public services and public investment which underpin it, and by deliberately further pauperising people who depend on state benefits. This upside-down economics come from economic life being ruled by markets rather than collective conscious human decision. In a capitalist market economy, as Karl Marx wrote, “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between people at work, but as what...

Worker power can defy “the markets”

The Tories will say that their cuts coming on 17 November, and their hard line against public sector wage rises, are unavoidable adjustments to “market realities”. Almost the whole political spectrum, apart from working-class socialists, agrees. After the Truss-Kwarteng experiment in maverick “Reaganite” bourgeois economics, which lasted only two weeks after the “mini-budget” of 23 September before starting to collapse, all the economists say that tax rises and cuts are no less unavoidable than heating your house or wearing warm clothes if you want to stay healthy in cold weather. The writers...

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