Earlier this week in New York, Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and other environmental activists shared a platform in an event entitled ‘The Right to a Future’. In the face of growing public concern about the consequences of climate change (see last week’s blog) the discussion focused on how to break through the political and economic barriers which are preventing addressing the climate crisis, and how best to secure a future in which human beings can survive and thrive.
Greta Thunberg’s lonely protests outside her own Swedish parliament have grown into a world-wide movement. Next week on September 20th a series of climate strikes will take place on every continent across the world (link here). Young people who have the most to lose will be joining hands in an act of world-wide resistance and asking politicians to take their heads out of the sand and act before it is too late.
Greta’s simple message to the world in the face of those who claim that action will be too expensive was; ‘’If we can save the banks, we can save the world. If there is something we are not lacking in this world it’s money. Of course, many people do lack money, but governments and these people in power, they do not lack money’.
In the light of the growing campaign to challenge the monetary orthodoxy of the past decades by bringing an understanding of modern monetary realities to ordinary people and shining a lens on the consequences of austerity and public spending cuts, this simple message was a heartening one. Such public figures as Greta Thunberg and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez espousing such ideas in a public arena allow us to explore and challenge the narratives of destruction and go boldly forward in the knowledge that a Green New Deal is not just affordable, but vital to our existence.
As Professor L Randall Wray and Yeva Nersisyan write in their paper entitled ‘How to pay for a Green New Deal’ which they explain mimics that of J.M Keynes famous book ‘How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer’;
“We already have the financial wherewithal needed to afford whatever is technologically possible. We do not need to go hat-in-hand to rich folks to get them to pay for it. We do not have to beggar our grandkids to pay for it. We do not have to borrow from China to pay for it. We do not have to get the Fed to “print money” to pay for it. All we need to do is to remove the self-imposed constraints, the myths, and the misplaced morality; then budget for it, approve the budget, and spend. […] That is how you pay for it.” *
*For federal reserve read Bank of England.
Prior to last week’s Spending Review, Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth urged the Chancellor to invest at least £42bn to tackle the climate crisis. Much of course has been made of the loosening of the fiscal purse strings (along with dire warnings by the economic sirens of orthodoxy) but the £32m allocated by Javid amounted to little more than a gesture and was just 0.l% of what is needed to help the country meet Theresa May’s 2050 net-zero target. In fact, as the Friends of the Earth noted, ‘it completely undermines the government’s commitment to taking climate and biodiversity seriously’. Instead of putting its money where its mouth is, it is showing the complete contempt with which it holds our young people who will inherit the consequences of its failure to act.
Of course, that may come as no surprise when you know that the some of the signatories of a letter (a former founder of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute) sent to the EU and the UN last week entitled ‘There is no Climate emergency’ are reported to be advising Javid, Johnson and Truss.
Naomi Klein climate activist and campaigner wrote in her book ‘This Changes Everything’ (2014): ‘
“The bottom line is what matters here; our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately our economy is at war with many forms of life including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources: what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”
Our governments and the corporations they serve need to move beyond viewing the natural world and its citizens as resources to consume and throw away in their constant search for profit. As Klein says, we need a ‘shift in worldview at every level’. In her new book On Fire: The Burning case for a Green New Deal to be published next week she makes the point that ecological breakdown and economic injustice are inseparable. From action to deliver a greener and more sustainable world to addressing the inequality which leaves too many without enough food, adequate shelter, healthcare and education, the Green New Deal (GND) provides a radical framework upon which we can build for real change.
However, we should also not forget the importance of the Job Guarantee which is fundamental to delivering a GND. We need to manage the transition for workers currently employed in carbon heavy industries, towards a green pathway that not only cleans up the environment but redresses the exploitation of both humans and finite resources in the search for surplus value. This exploitation has formed the basis for the economic and societal injustices that have prevailed for far too long and the adjustments which will have to be made must not impoverish further or place any more burden on those who have already paid a heavy price and suffered enough.
On the one hand, we have politicians on the right barricading themselves in with nonsensical fiscal rules which, despite a loosening of the purse strings to offer a few crumbs from the table, still favour financial prudence over societal and planetary well-being to keep the status quo in place. On the other we have economists and politicians on the left discussing how the green new deal can be paid for through borrowing because interest rates are so low. They, in their different ways both deny the monetary reality that a government which issues its own currency doesn’t have to borrow to fund its spending and fail to grasp that such financial constraints could put the brakes on government action to address climate change. Instead of imposing monetary constraints which do not reflect monetary reality, our leaders and their advisors should be looking at how we can best manage the resources that will be needed to put the GND into action without exceeding the productive capacity of a nation and indeed the planet.
It is imperative that our young people grasp monetary realities and challenge the stale paradigms and incorrect narratives on both sides of the political divide which will deprive them of a future if not addressed urgently. On a dead planet there are no workers – well actually there are potentially no people!
In other news this week our NHS is still on the endangered/critical list as budgets are squeezed and services increasingly put under pressure thus creating the perfect conditions for a long-planned takeover by a privatised US style Medicare system. What began with Thatcher and was enthusiastically embraced by Blair and later Cameron’s Tory/Lib Dem coalition now is in its endgame as US private healthcare companies circle for the ‘prize’. Brexit or no.
It was reported that London GPs have been told to restrict specialist referrals under an NHS plan to ration services in order to plug the growing hole in healthcare budgets. This will amount to cost-cutting at the expense of patient care whilst also and very importantly removing from doctors in GP Practices or in hospitals the ability to make decisions about what is best for their patient. Financial accountability trumps the clinical needs of patients. Health Campaigners rightly fear that similar cuts will be imposed in other Clinical Commissioning Groups across the country, which also have substantial deficits.
However, the public needs to be aware that this is all part of a long-term plan, which began in the 80s and was pursued by successive governments, to whittle down the NHS to its barest essentials to make it a profit-making enterprise for the private healthcare sector and allow it access to a ready market of private/insurance paying patients thus creating an unequal two-tier health service of haves and have nots. The Americanisation of the NHS has been with us for decades and whilst the focus is often on funding, as if somehow addressing that would be a solution, we should be directing our attention to campaigning to reinstate the NHS as a publicly owned, funded and managed organisation for the benefit of the nation and its health and not the coffers of private companies.
In the same week it has been reported by the left-wing think tank the IPPR (link here) that NHS trusts crippled by the Private Finance Initiative still have £55bn of their debt outstanding, which it says represents a huge burden on already squeezed budgets at a time when trusts are struggling to provide patient services and meet the spiralling costs of estate maintenance. Whilst noting that PFI had proved to be a very bad deal which by 2050 will have cost around £80bn for just £13bn of assets, it suggested incorrectly that although they were bad deals, they were the only mechanism that could have brought enough capital into the health system.
The truth of the story is that PFI (introduced by John Major) was embraced enthusiastically by Blair and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown who used it as a mechanism to keep expenditure off the public accounts in order to remain within the government’s fiscal rules. Contrary to the suggestion made by the IPPR that they were the only means of funding NHS infrastructure, the government as the currency issuer could have funded that capital investment without borrowing a bean. Interestingly, at the time the Chief Economist of the IPPR, Peter Robinson, said that the idea that government could not have afforded new schools and hospitals without the PFI was ‘economically illiterate’ although it has to be said that that was in the context of the state being able to borrow more cheaply.
As Chris Thomas, an IPPR fellow, who carried out the research notes ‘Toxic PFI contracts are still driving billions away from patients and into private bank accounts.’ Our NHS is now paying the price for an accounting trick to give the impression of a financially prudent government which has financially burdened the NHS and enabled the privatisers to achieve their objectives under cover and with impunity. And we should not imagine that this just applies to PFI. Clinical and back office services which have landed in the lap of private companies through tendered contracts also take public money away from patients. The State has become nothing less than a profit-oriented cash cow for the private sector to leach from at the expense of patient care.
Continuing with the NHS theme, if you’re a tweeter you may have seen this earlier in the week. Helpforce is an organisation that in its words is ‘working with NHS Trusts to create exciting roles for safe, reliable and effective volunteering’. In the tweet, reference is made to Emma Valentine who is explaining to the assembled audience the flexibility that NHS England offer their employees should they wish to volunteer within healthcare and praising what a difference volunteering can make to our society.
GIMMS has covered volunteering before in its blogs so excuse us if we do so again. It is important to reiterate that it is not knocking at all the social value of volunteering both for those doing the volunteering and those on the receiving end. However, we cannot support volunteering when it is a part of a clear strategy to reduce costs and deliver a profitable health and social care system for private providers whilst at the same time denying a person the dignity of a paid job.
In NHS England’s volunteering strategy Consultation Document published in 2017 it wrote in its forward:
‘Volunteers are crucial in both health and social care. […]. The Local Government Association has made proposals that volunteers including those who help care for the elderly, should receive a 10% reduction in their council tax bill […]. We support testing approaches like that, which could be extended to those who volunteer in hospitals and other parts of the NHS. The NHS can go further, accrediting volunteers and devising ways to help them become part of the extended NHS family, not as substitutes for but as partners with our skilled employed staff.
In a world where driving down costs to extract profit is the aim of the capitalist game, it is easy to see why volunteering holds attraction to those in the business of global domination of healthcare. As the campaigner Jo Land wrote last year in her article in the New Internationalist ‘Why neoliberals are pushing ‘Accountable Care’ worldwide’ (link here)
‘Costs are to be kept low through using deskilled staff and telehealth technologies. Another way of keeping costs low are controversial ‘new models of care’ in which populations such as the frail elderly are cared for at home, leveraging maximum (unpaid) support from volunteers and family.’
A new report by the charities ProBono Economics and Helpforce found that around three million volunteers are giving their time in health and social care and that the NHS is planning to increase its voluntary support from 80,000 to 156,000 over the next three years. It suggests that given the NHS’s digital transformation strategy tech-literate young people could teach patients to use new technologies to help them manage their conditions and it also proposes that skilled workers could also offer their skills as unpaid volunteers in project management or data analytics or as economists and lawyers. Such volunteering roles will be prioritised as part of the Helpforce programme which is supported by NHS England and forms part of its long-term plans.
In a lecture in 2014 Andy Haldane, the Chief Economist at the Bank of England and Trustee of Pro-Bono Economics, pointed out the value of volunteering to the economy could exceed £50bn a year. If that is £50bn of unpaid work which is contributing to the well-being of society for free, then surely this is a moment to ask questions? As Harvie and Dowling note in their paper; Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society:
‘capital’s lifeblood is unpaid work, and the Big Society as political economy is an attempt (to) extend the realm of unpaid work that can be appropriated.’
What has been presented as community empowerment aimed essentially at devolving power from the state which has deliberately been marketed to appeal to our human capacity for empathy has been used by government to restructure society as the State increasingly withdraws ‘from fiscal intervention or the provision of welfare’.
Where government should be at the heart of delivering societal and economic well-being through its policies, the public has been persuaded otherwise as part of a long-term divisive strategy to lay blame on individuals rather than the state. Thus, it enables justification of its withdrawal from provision of public services and social security to favour private sector involvement and a restoration of Victorian charitable values.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can and should challenge the mantra of “there is no alternative” because it has done huge damage to people’s lives, their livelihoods and the planet.
Firstly, instead of freebie labour which keeps capital exploiting working people to manage their profit margins we need a better model which gives working people more control over their lives and can also act as an economic stabiliser during an economy’s cyclical ups and down. Why not start with government re-embracing full employment policies – we did once why not again? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to work (article 23 (1)) and both the UN and the International Labour office asserted that full employment should be a national and international goal.
Why not implement a Job or Employment Guarantee to benefit our local communities which would both sustain their economies and also provide a mechanism to address climate change on a local basis? Why not pay people a decent wage and offer training to provide support in socially useful work which would have the added benefit of offering a stepping-stone into private sector employment with skills to match should they choose to? The research is clear about the value of work which allows people to feel socially included, participate in the economy, feed and clothe themselves adequately and also raises their self-esteem.
Secondly, if a skilled job needs to be done, then why are people not being employed on a regular salary to do it? If, for example, there are tasks that need to be accomplished on a regular basis outside of normal nursing and caring duties then why not employ people to do it on a living wage? Full employment policies combined with a job guarantee would put working people back in the driving seat and would have the added benefit of putting money into circulation to ensure a thriving and sustainable economy.
As it stands, we have government colluding with big business through its employment policies which include the encouragement to volunteer via a cynical appeal to their better nature which keeps working people suppressed and capital in charge and profitable.
Why not think beyond the neoliberal narrative which abandons people and the planet to its fate? Let’s work towards a fairer and more inclusive economic model which puts the planet and people at its heart. It’s time.
Upcoming events:
GIMMS Labour Fringe Event
Dorset Gardens Methodist Church, Dorset Gardens
Brighton, BN2 1RL
September 23 @ 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm – book your free ticket here
Bill Mitchell – Training the Trainers
Springer Nature – Stables Building, Trematon Walk, Kings Cross
London, N1 9FB
September 24 @ 6:30 pm – 21:00 pm – book your free ticket here
GIMMS Talk and Social – Leeds
Headingley Enterprise & Arts Centre, Bennett Road
Leeds, LS6 3HN
September 28 @ 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm – book your free ticket here