Social and Economic Policy

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...

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...

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...

Whether Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak becomes prime minister on 5 September, the Tory regime will shift even further rightwards — unless the labour movement hobbles it. The heat the Tory leadership contest has generated should not obscure the fact that Sunak and Truss are not so much on the same page as in the same paragraph. In many respects the Tories’ position is weak. The new government will, for a while, be constrained by multiple crises. Yet those crises pose a greater threat to the working class and labour movement, unless we act more decisively. Liz Truss is more “on a holiday from reality”...

Price controls don’t work in a market-based economy, i.e. an economy where prices are central. The Tory government of the time froze all prices in late 1972, then inflation was 9% in 1973, 17% in 1974. Even a workers’ government, as long as it had to use price mechanisms a lot, would have no quick-fix to stop inflation, especially inflation pushed by world-market factors. A worker revolt, seeking wage and benefit rises, and increased funding for public services, to match price rises, is more effective than a consumer revolt petitioning the government to control prices. Bourgeois governments...

In the financial year 2022-3, the government will pay out about £113 billion of its tax revenue to rich people and institutions as interest on government bonds (IOUs) they hold. In 2023-4 it will be more than £130 billion, or so the Financial Times estimates, starting from reports of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility. In 2021-2 it was £24 billion; even in 2021-2, boosted by extra government borrowing for Covid measures, effective or ineffective, the payout was £54 billion. Comparisons? The wages before taxes of all NHS workers total about £60 billion a year. Keir Starmer estimates his...

The best answer to price surges is to win pay, benefit, and pension increases. It is the readiest to hand for the working class. We already have organisations built for that purpose. Many of those trade unions already have strike mandates. The deciding factor will be whether those unions unite, accelerate and spread the strikes, as a sprint rather than a marathon. Political campaigning is also important. Many unions have sway (if they choose to use it) in the Labour Party. They should demand that Labour campaigns for benefit, pension, and public-sector real-wage rises; for public ownership of...

On 13 August , the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with the TUC, the National Education Union, and dozens of charities and campaigns concerned with poverty, called for the package of relief payments announced in May to be at least doubled. That was £1,200 for worse-off families, through a variety of payments. The JRF reckons that worse-off households face an average of £2,800 increased costs, so similar relief plus 130% would do what the May package promised. The JRF and others also call for deductions from benefits for debts to be eased or paused. As of November 2020 (the most recent...

Johnson is going. The Tories are discredited and at odds with each other. Yet polling data, and mountains of evidence from everyday life, suggest that, while the Tories are reviled, they still have a strong base of right-wing, nationalist support. They also tell us there is little positive enthusiasm for Starmer Labour. Keir Starmer’s leadership is offering little on the huge issues facing workers and society: collapsing living standards, the threat of climate change, and the mess of Brexit. The relatively left-wing pledges Starmer made in the 2020 Labour leadership election have been ditched...

“Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals”. So the Guardian summarises its exposé of platform delivery and transport corporation Uber, based on 124,000 leaked documents. On 10 and 11 July it published 26 articles as part of its series on “The Uber files”, with more to come on 12 and 13 July. As well as illustrating vividly many things about the nature of the profit system, of capitalism­ ­— the Guardian reporting covers both the super-exploitation of Uber’s drivers and, in more depth, the corporation’s wider anti-social activities — the revelations also...