More than “tax the rich”

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 to luxury-class living and the business investments the ultra-rich choose solely on prospects of profit.

Solidarity argues that the working class and its allies, the huge majority, should instead have social ownership and control of the productive wealth we create, and of directions of investment.

Also, world economic conditions will probably get worse, and may tip into outright slump, in the coming year.

The closing of the Strait of Hormuz generates price inflation, working its way through the system. Any one of the economic bubbles in AI, cryptocurrency, “private credit”, and private buying of US Treasury bonds, could burst.

Only radical measures will serve then. Number one should be public ownership and democratic control of the whole of high finance.