“When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.”
Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
Over the last 11 years, this government has presided over a train crash of unnecessary austerity and cuts to public sector spending, justified on the spurious claim that they were not affordable due to the previous government spending beyond its means. The public were told that recovery could only be achieved if people pulled in their belts and made a sacrifice to get the public accounts back into order. Bankruptcy was just around the corner if we failed to do so. The public, none the wiser, accepted the household budget wisdom without question, it has been ingrained in the public consciousness since Margaret Thatcher. Since that time, every part of our public and social infrastructure has experienced the consequences of those public sector spending cuts, from the NHS to adult and children’s social care, along with local government and other public institutions whose budgets have been slashed to accommodate the scam narrative of financial affordability.
We have, over the last year, witnessed as never before the grinding reality of austerity and its consequences on the public domain.
A couple of weeks ago, a research economist at the IFS reported that more than four million people had been on an NHS waiting list before the pandemic and that Covid-19 had increased the pressures on the NHS. He warned that unless the NHS could find effective ways to ‘boost its capacity’, then longer waiting lists would be inevitable. No mention here of the fact that the government has starved the NHS of adequate funding, allowed vast sums of public money to pour into private profit, and is currently overseeing the end of the NHS, as we know it, through its US-style integrated care plans. The suggestion that the NHS is to blame and not the government is just a part of the trickery used by such institutions to shift public focus away from government spending decisions and policies. The reality is that you can’t run a public service on empty for too long before the cracks appear, and Covid-19 has split them wide. But still, the public are led by the nose to accept the notion of public sector culpability, rather than manoeuvring by the government to deliver political agendas.
Recently, the President of the Association of Director’s of Children’s Services, Charlotte Ramsden, asked ‘Where is the national plan for children?’ Yes, indeed where is it? The problem goes beyond the chaos of austerity within local authorities whose budgets have been slashed, forcing tough decisions about how limited funding can be allocated fairly across the competing needs of our communities. It also reflects the increasing pressures caused by rising poverty and families trying to survive on low incomes and being obliged to seek help at the growing number of food banks across the country. Tackling poverty should surely be part of the holistic vision for children’s social service provision, given that they are often dealing with the crises brought about by government austerity in the first place. It is shameful that this government has committed to removing the Universal Credit Uplift which has seen so many people through these challenging times.
While Rishi Sunak counts the beans, children count the real cost of successive Chancellors, more concerned with balanced budgets and their political reputation for fiscal discipline. As the Guardian put it succinctly in an editorial this week:
‘Reform is required as well as money. The children’s home sector requires rebuilding with children’s needs – and not financial incentives – centre-stage. Above all, poverty must be reduced. Its corrosive effects on family life, including poor mental health, addiction, homelessness, and hunger, are well known. To deny or ignore the impact of these on children is not only self-defeating, since the costs of treating the symptoms are so often higher than tackling the cause. It is also cruel.’
Also this week, a study published by the Sutton Trust and the Sylvia Charitable Trust noted that inequality in early years education wasn’t offering a fair start to children. Commenting on the government’s policy of funding only 15 hours of weekly childcare or nursery for three- and four-year-olds from low-income families, compared to 30 hours for children whose parents were in work, was deepening inequalities. Apart from the injustice of unequal access to child-care which favours the wealthier, it is short-sighted. Children who benefit from early years education and opportunities to socialise with their peers take those advantages with them throughout their lives. All children deserve a fair start. They benefit, and society benefits.
We should be looking at the roots of the additional pressures on public sector services, not just the services themselves. We should be examining them in the context of the social determinants of child health and security. Determinants such as poverty, the creation of low wages, precarious employment and involuntary unemployment, as well as inadequate, unfit for purpose housing, along with high rents and a crumbling public infrastructure. All these things create stresses in family life and give rise to the problems struggling people face. In turn, they affect the good functioning of society as a whole.
Over the past few decades, we have also seen increasing privatisation of both adult and children’s social care services. It has been based on two lies: that government has a finite pot of money; and that the private sector can deliver public services more efficiently and therefore more cheaply. For decades we have accepted the narrative of a competitive, for-profit model of social care provision, but its promises have fallen far short of the expectations in terms of delivery of efficient, high-quality services, and have impacted on those employed to deliver them in terms of low wages and poor terms and conditions of employment.
During the austerity years, as cuts to public spending increasingly fed through to local government and service providers, the crisis continued to intensify. The consequences of market-led provision, driven by competition, have progressively undermined the quality of care, and the last year has revealed the widening cracks; the result of a decade of government policy and spending decisions. Ironically, the assumed beneficiaries of this profit-led system of social care have suffered as cuts kicked in, leaving profit margins slimmer and companies considering exiting the care market. That is the prerogative of private companies whose rationale is making profit.
The virtues of the free market have been peddled for decades by governments serving the corporate estate and neglecting their responsibilities as elected bodies to serve the nation’s interests. Over the past year, it has been exposed for the con trick it is. This is exactly why we need to bring social care services back under the public sector umbrella of a publicly, paid for, managed, and delivered, accountable service.
As for paying for it (which is usually the next question) it is only the government that has the monetary and legislative capacity to address poverty and inequality and invest in public and social infrastructure to create a stable foundation for a successful and fairer economy. Whilst the government prevaricates, and discussion takes place about how social care can be funded, those needing support continue to be abandoned to fate. Last month, Boris Johnson, in the tradition of sweeping important decisions into the long grass (at least until the autumn) put on hold plans for a tax rise to fix the disintegrating care system, while further discussion continues.
With some MPs unhappy at the prospect of funding it through increases to National Insurance, a regressive tax which hits the poorest hardest, and others being concerned about what they see as intergenerational unfairness, they either lack the fundamental knowledge about monetary reality, or choose to ignore it. The facts would allow them to focus, not on how to pay for it, but on understanding the real issues that revolve around the real resources that will be needed to deliver a social care system that can function effectively, using the tools government has at its disposal, to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth and resources. An increase in National Insurance does not take into consideration the consequences of taxing people more during a period of economic uncertainty. Again, the principle of one person’s spending equals another’s income kicks in here.
No matter how much money you throw at it, if you have no strategy for ensuring that there is a functioning infrastructure for social care, with sufficient well-paid staff on good terms and conditions to deliver those services, you will fail. The question of how to fund it is a redundant one because the government is the currency issuer. But as it is also the political decision-maker, it can target its taxation policy to ensure it releases the labour and other real resources it needs to deliver a functioning social care system.
All talk about levelling up, or investing in public services cannot happen while we have a Chancellor dedicated to market solutions and fiscal discipline, and while politicians talk in terms of taxing to spend.
Last week, GIMMS reported on the IPCC’s report which put humanity on code red. As the droughts, wildfires and floods continue to be chronicled in the media, the UK government, as a host of this November’s COP26, persists with its rhetoric claiming that the UK is a climate world leader and that it has reduced its CO₂ emissions by 44% since 1990. This week the climate activist Greta Thunberg called out their lies and also suggested that global leaders were still treating the climate emergency as a ‘faraway, distant problem.’ She made those comments at a briefing, launching a UNICEF report, ‘Children’s Climate Risk Index’, which found that ‘approximately 1 billion children – nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children – live in one of the 33 countries classified as ‘extremely high risk’. These children face a deadly combination of exposure to multiple climate and environmental shocks with a high vulnerability due to inadequate essential services such as water and sanitation, healthcare, and education. The findings reflect the number of children impacted today, – figures likely to get worse as the impacts of climate change accelerate.’
While politicians, and the governments they represent, continue with their gilded climate rhetoric, in the same week, it was announced that the oil giant Exxon is expecting to produce 800,000 barrels of oil a day by 2025 in Guyana, which would exceed the estimates for its entire oil and natural gas production in the south-western US Permian basin by 100,000 barrels, that same year. It would represent ‘Exxon’s largest single source of fossil production anywhere in the world.’ Not only do experts believe that the company’s safety plans are ‘inadequate and dangerous’, but a top engineer has also said that worker’s lives, public health and Guyana’s oceans and fisheries, which indigenous locals rely on for a living, are all at stake particularly in the event of a spill. Vincent Adams, an environment chief said, ‘when they make all their billions, and they are ready to pack up and they’re gone, we’ve got to deal with the mess.’
While the company claims its climate goals are ‘some of the most aggressive’ in the industry, its oil operations in Guyana will flood the atmosphere with more than 2bn metric tons of CO₂. As environmental campaigners have suggested, ‘Exxon cannot reconcile the project with its public commitments to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions.’
Greenwashing on steroids!
Last week’s news that humanity may be on code red, will slowly but surely become tomorrow’s chip paper unless we take the warnings with the seriousness they deserve. The real commitment to radical change still remains on the drawing board with no clear direction or strategic plan, either domestically or globally, hinging as it does on the power of the global corporates to control the messages through lobbying and their financial firepower.
It is ironic that Alok Sharma points the finger of blame at the Chinese and suggests that we can only fight climate change if China does its part. Just another example of shifting the focus of blame; failing to acknowledge in the usual smoke and mirrors the connection between China’s exports and their destination.
Larry Elliott noted in the Guardian this week that China was responsible for 28% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with Britain, France, and Italy accounting for about 1%. However, he forgot to note at the same time that the consumables we all rely on in our homes, from electrical goods to computers, phones, and clothing, have been imported from China. As Sue Dalley in a letter to the paper said, ‘This suggests to me a rather different allocation of responsibility; it is time to engage in the urgent political review of just how we in the west must change our addiction to cheap mass consumption …’
It can be summed up by George Monbiot in an opinion piece in this week’s Guardian:
“The global emergency requires a new politics, but it is nowhere in sight. Governments still fear lobby groups more than they fear the collapse of our living systems. For tiny and temporary political gains, they commit us to vast and irreversible consequences. MPs with no discernible record of concern for poor people, and a long record of voting against them, suddenly claim that climate action must be stymied to protect them.
The Treasury refuses to commit to the spending needed to support even the government’s feeble programme. Johnson, charged with transforming the global response to climate breakdown at the November summit in Glasgow, blusters and dithers, seeming constitutionally incapable of making difficult decisions.
No government, even the most progressive, is yet prepared to contemplate the transformation we need: a global programme that places the survival of humanity and the rest of life on Earth above all other issues. We need not just new policy, but a new ethics. We need to close the gap between knowing and doing. But this conversation has scarcely begun.”
Whilst we as individuals can make our own personal choices, fundamentally it is only the government through its spending choices and policies that can take the radical action that needs to happen to ensure our children and their children have a future.
The government has many tools at its disposal to achieve its objectives, if it has any beyond ensuring the increasing disparities in wealth and allowing its corporate friends to continue to greenwash their way to continuing profits.
A mainstream newspaper this week ran an article about Green NS& I Bonds. Referring to the NS&I website which explained that all money invested in NS&I is passed onto HM Treasury and contributes towards government spending, it went on to indicate how that money would be used to fund green initiatives, from making transport cleaner, developing renewable energy, decarbonisation of public buildings such as schools, and investment in protecting the environment and the countryside.
Green Bonds could indeed play a significant role in a government’s climate agenda, but not in terms of funding such projects. That is just another example of the illusions which governments promote about how governments need to tax to spend, or to borrow by issuing bonds. The government has the capacity to fund green projects as the currency issuer. It doesn’t need to borrow from anyone or offer bonds to do so. The only benefit an investor might get apart from the interest at maturity is a nice warm glow thinking they’ve helped the government to achieve its green agenda, should it ever publish one.
However, as L Randall Wray noted in a recent MMT Podcast hosted by GIMMS Associate Members Christian Reilly and Patricia Pino, Green Bonds could play a valuable role as did the issuance of War Bonds during the second world war. Contrary to belief, they were not issued to pay for the war, they were issued to remove the purchasing power of citizens, to free up those real finite resources required to fight the war, and thus avoid the inflationary pressures which could have ensued. The same warm glow applied as people felt they were doing their bit to support the war effort, even if the reality was that the government did not need their savings to prosecute it.
That same principle could have the same applications in addressing a war of a quite different kind. The one concerned with human survival on a planet of finite resources. Only this time, we should understand the mechanics of Green Bonds, not as mechanisms to fund a green agenda but mechanisms to deliver a green agenda through re-allocation of resources.
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