Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.
Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom
If you can’t work out whether you are living through a tragedy or a farce, you are not alone. The daily images and stories of people’s lives in this time of Covid, with all that has meant in terms of economic uncertainty and personal losses for so many, is combined with the sham of government which has shown its contempt for citizens, disregarded the consequences of its policies and spending decisions, and overseen, as a result, an on-going decay of the country’s public and social infrastructure.
Public trust is at an all-time low for an institution that is rotten to the core. An institution that has demonstrated clearly in whose interests it operates, and accordingly has used both its spending and legislative powers to serve them through the power of the public purse, whilst at the same time, claiming state penury when it comes to public services and people’s lives.
When you think it can’t get any worse, it invariably does. This week, Boris Johnson, when speaking to the UN General Assembly in New York said that COP 26 must be a ‘turning point for humanity’, and that it was ‘time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists.’ Johnson does a good line in dressed up rhetoric of any sort, but the government still has no real plans to address the climate crisis bearing down upon us, with only 40 days to go before the climate summit in Glasgow. The same government whose climate action never seems to go full circle, whether it’s the botched home insulation scheme which formed part of Johnson’s pledge to ‘build back greener’, which collapsed after six months, or his undertaking to ‘power past coal’, whilst at the same time, considering giving approval for a new coal mine in Cumbria, oil extraction off the coast of Shetland, and continuing to provide $15bn in funding for liquid gas drilling in Mozambique.
It makes the commitment to reaching net-zero by 2050 (even if as indicated in last week’s blog this is far too late) seem a joke in very poor taste. If your eyeballs are not yet standing out on stalks at the effrontery of Boris Johnson’s speech, they should be. But then, when you are the host of yet another climate talking shop, it is less about action and more about self-aggrandisement, at a time when we are becoming a laughingstock in the global arena of climate action.
While the climate continues to play second fiddle to economic recovery and growth at any cost, our public and social infrastructure is under increasing pressure, and every week the media brings further indication of the dire situation for many of our public services. According to an article in the Independent, staff shortages have forced one of England’s largest NHS trusts to start rationing chemotherapy to some of its cancer patients. Dr Lucy Gossage, an oncologist noted that ‘right now we don’t have the staffing capacity to deliver chemotherapy to all our patients and so, for the first time, the prioritisation list has come into force. That, means that, currently we are unable to offer chemotherapy that aims to prolong life, or palliate symptoms for many people with advanced cancer. We hope this is very temporary, but it’s indicative of a system on its last legs.’ One doctor described it as being a wider ‘broken system’ in the NHS.
So just where does the buck stop for this ‘broken system?’ Sick people are paying a heavy price for a government’s lack of strategic planning, along with the funding cuts which were affecting every aspect of healthcare provision, long before the pandemic arrived on our shores. Not enough nurses, doctors, other health professionals, treatment facilities, equipment, or beds. It starts and ends with the government and their spending and legislative choices. It starts and ends with a government that has failed to understand what the real constraints to its spending are. And to be clear, they are not financial.
Sick people who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect are dying for an ideology and a false narrative of how the government spends, meaning that these are the direct consequences of the emphasis by successive Chancellors on fiscal discipline, getting the public finances in order and back into balance. Clearly, even after a year of huge public spending to prop up the economy, people still matter less than the fiscal reputation of political parties and their Chancellors.
We are living in a time of great social and environmental upheaval, and the uncertainty that that brings with it. The post-Covid world has still to materialise, and the tentative opening up of the economy has brought with it labour shortages and rising prices of food and energy, which are starting to impact on people’s lives. The global rise in gas prices and its consequences on families, businesses and public service provision has featured heavily in the media this week. For those on low incomes, in insecure employment or unemployed, it will mean cruel choices as winter approaches and the Universal Credit uplift disappears, and families will be faced with the choice of eating or heating or joining the long queues of those visiting food banks, if they are not already doing so.
It will be a double whammy for private care homes already struggling to run their businesses, as a result of a shortage of care workers who are voting with their feet for better wages. And it will add to the burdens created by reduced central government funding, which has impacted on local government budgets, and in turn, care homes themselves. One small care homeowner said this week that unless public funding for care home beds was not increased, as a matter of urgency, care providers would have no choice but to ‘close their doors’. This is a vicious circle arising out of a toxic market-driven economic system predicated on the primacy of the market, and the lie of monetary scarcity. Our society is paying the price and teetering on the edge as a result of that lie. It has taken an unusual event like Covid to reveal the cracks in the system, and without action by the government, we will see further decay of public and social infrastructure.
A hands-off approach to government lies at the heart of these failures, and the Just-in-Time society is creaking at the seams. This week we learned that, despite knowing for several years, compared to other countries the UK had insufficient gas storage facilities, and the government had failed to act to ensure the security of supplies and the safety of the nation. This is not a new phenomenon. Government has a track record in such failure as we discovered last year when the shortage of PPE, ventilators and Intensive Care facilities put lives at risk, and indeed was responsible for many deaths. The Cygnus 2016 pandemic simulation revealed the lack of preparedness for such a crisis, and yet the government did nothing, with devastating consequences. And again, this week government failed to recognise the potential threat to vital CO2 supplies. In this case, a US fertiliser company that makes CO2 as a by-product of its production process, closed as a result of the increases in gas prices, and only last-minute talks with the government have put the threat on hold for the time being.
To put the icing on the cake, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has suggested that, as a result, taxpayers may have to foot the bill of ensuring the continuing production of those vital CO2 supplies which keep our food industry rolling, amongst other things. Yet again, we have a government minister spouting the usual Thatcherite nonsense that taxes fund spending. Once again, we can safely say that no taxpayer will be ‘paying for it’, they will suffer instead the practical and harmful consequences of the government’s hands-off approach to government, and its reliance on markets to deliver. What people should know is that politicians have chosen to put citizens at risk on the back of economic ideology, and the false household budget comparison, designed to keep them accepting the mantra of, ‘there is no alternative’.
And, if our readers are still unclear about how the government really spends, it will quite simply authorise its central bank to make the transfer of ‘money’ to the US company in question, in this case, simple digits on a screen, created out of nothing at a keystroke, and taxpayers will not be needed to bear the cost. Phew, that should be a relief.
Perhaps the more pertinent question here is, when the government has no problem finding public money to bail out failing companies, or support those affected by extraordinary events, how will it justify any further cuts to spending on public services that might be in the offing at the next Spending Review, or indeed the cut to the Universal Credit uplift which comes into effect next week? The magic money tree is selective.
We have had a hard lesson in what happens when governments wash their hands of their responsibilities and shift them to businesses, whose objective is profit, not public safety or economic wellbeing. What happened to the strategic planning to identify threats to national security and public safety, such as we have seen in recent months, from the lack of HGV drivers to insufficient workers to harvest fruit and veg, or indeed pandemic planning and gas storage? We are experiencing the limitations of markets in the most destructive way. So, Mr Kwarteng, markets don’t do it better. Markets are the creation of government, not its master.
Yet again, this week, those words ‘levelling up’ featured in the media as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England was appointed as the head of the government’s Levelling Up Taskforce. Clearly, the imperative is to get Johnson’s flagship policy further than a vague idea in his head, and which he has dined off for too long without a clear idea of what is needed. But what should we expect? That is already shaping up in the words Haldane spoke on his appointment when he said he was ‘looking forward to working with the private and voluntary sectors to design and deliver an economy that works for every part of the UK’ to address ‘regional disparities.’
In those few words, he reveals the real plan. Let’s start by saying that these regional ‘disparities’ didn’t just happen, they are the creation of government policies and spending decisions, and it is not the role of the private or charitable voluntary sector to deliver an economy that works for everyone, that is the government’s job. When the government spends and legislates, assuming public purpose lie at their heart, the outcomes of those actions flow down through society and create the levelling up that Haldane seems so ‘passionate’ about. Furthermore, charities mitigate for the failure of the government to act in the interests of those in need, and ironically even that sector is struggling as both central government funding and donations have dried up. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ dreams never got further than the drawing board.
Haldane has clearly failed to note that the levelling up would not be needed had the government not done its utmost to tear up our public and social infrastructure, including the welfare state, on the contrived basis of the lie that its affordability was in question, and that it relies on a healthy economy from which tax revenue derives to pay for it. He surely cannot have failed to note the existence of food banks or other voluntary organisations trying to stem the tide of poverty. The existence of the need for these is an indictment of government, not something to laud as commendable in the fashion of ‘the poor will always be with you’ and note our good works.
Furthermore, the role of the private or charitable sectors is not public provision. For the former, it is making money and profit, and if it does good works, it does so as a public relations exercise. In the event of an economic crisis, such expenditure is likely to be the first casualty.
So, what do we have, yet again? A government that is shifting responsibility into the wider society, and Haldane is colluding in that objective. Certainly, it will fit in very nicely with his charity Pro Bono Economics for which he made a speech entitled, ‘The Power of Charity’, in which he praised the work of the voluntary sector and the contribution it makes to the economy.
The charitable and voluntary sector may have a role to play, but certainly not in picking up the pieces of the catastrophic consequences of government spending decisions and policymaking over the last 10 years and more. What we are seeing is a deliberately constructed lie that the government has no money of its own, promoting the objective of shifting State responsibility for the welfare of its citizens to the voluntary sector, while at the same time, pouring public money into the coffers of corporations.
Levelling up can only take place in the context of government spending and policy decisions. It starts with a Job Guarantee, a real living wage, employment legislation that protects working people from being exploited by the profit-hungry, and the provision of vital public and social infrastructure which supports the economy. But no, instead, we have a government appointing yet another ‘Czar’ and in doing so abdicating its responsibilities for the people’s economic well-being.
Wherever you care to look, the problems we face are always couched in the financial terms of affordability, or the risks that inflation might pose to the public finances at some time in the future. Rishi Sunak, like his predecessors, knows how to keep the public on-side with his household budget narratives of how the government spends, and the need for future ‘hard choices’ to keep the public finances on track, and to take steps to keep debt under control. However, Sunak’s ‘debt burden’ is illusory, and fixing the debt is irrelevant to how the government spends, or the future economic health of the UK. His call for a balanced day-to-day budget on the false basis that it would give him fiscal space for infrastructure development is just part of the same fiscal illusion. If we are to worry about anything, it is how the government will source and manage the real resources to deliver a just green transition.
While the bean counters continue to count their beans, the planet is still on fire. While we face the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, Sunak remains exercised or feigning pretence for the need for fiscal discipline, and doubt is placed in people’s minds by politicians, journalists and economists by endless repetition of false household accounting narratives.
Whilst we have a Chancellor actively envisioning more austerity and more pain to keep the Tory reputation for fiscal credibility intact, we can make no progress. And with the opposition also glued to the fiscal headlights, as was made clear in Keir Starmer’s 11,500-word essay in which he suggested that ‘the government should treat taxpayer money as if it were its own’, the narrative is reinforced and will remain ingrained in the public consciousness.
Yes, we need government spending choices to be accountable to the people who elect them. However, couching these choices in terms of reliance on tax curtails a discussion about the real constraints to government spending, which are resource-based, and how people would like those real resources to be shared in society. Labour would do better to worry less about how it would fund its spending, and more about how it will fix the vast poverty and inequality that has arisen as a direct result of the dominant economic paradigm that it has been party to for decades, and also about addressing the climate emergency.
As the MMT activist Malcolm Reavell noted on social media this week, ‘Bogeyman terms and phrases are now used which we have been conditioned to instantly interpret as scary … these lies and myths and the carefully constructed web of deceit is hard to navigate’ and ‘prevents ordinary people from understanding the truth about economics.’ Mention of the deficit and debt, inflation, the evils of government spending too much, or the burden on future taxpayers, all serve to create compliance and acceptance of the market-driven status quo, which we have been led to believe is the wealth creator.
However, haven’t we had sufficient proof over the last few decades that markets and deregulation don’t do it better, and that wealth does not trickle down? It’s time for a challenge to the old economic order as it attempts to regroup, reinforce its power and morph into something more destructive. We are being groomed for a resurgence of a political discourse that puts global corporations above the state and is accountable to no one, except its growth and profit-hungry CEOs and their shareholders.
Over the last year, the power of the state to act has been recognised, however selective it was. That same power could now be used by a government so disposed to re-construct the public and social infrastructure that is withering away by government decree, act to address poverty and inequality and drive a just green transition. We had lost sight of that post-war power that built the welfare state, the NHS, and hundreds of thousands of council homes. We have now caught a glimpse of what the possibilities are for creating a better and fairer society. We have also witnessed the consequences of the State stepping back from its responsibilities and allowing a great free-for-all serving the interests of capital over labour. That it has become the bidding boy for big business. Perhaps we may even be seeing that democracy has become a sleight of hand dished up to create an illusion of people power.
In the light of that State power, we are now seeing calls, as an article in the Telegraph did last week, for the State to step back and give way to the restoration of the market-controlled status quo. It suggested that people ‘did not want patronising support in the form of dependency or handouts: they wanted to make their own way either through new employment possibilities or the chance to start and grow their own businesses.’ The suggestion that government has no role to play in creating an environment that allows people to make their own way is to ignore the reality of the capacity of government to improve their lives and address climate change.
Don’t let us get taken in by that siren call of ‘let’s leave it to the market’. The last 50 years are proof of what happens when short-termism dictates the pace, and the driver remains profit.
We’ve witnessed the rise of poverty and inequality as a result, and the consequences for those caught up in its individualistic promises which lead nowhere. We’ve seen it with polluting industries like oil and gas where business interests continue to push the problem down the road, as if there were plenty of time yet for the market and technology to present us with solutions. Or even the false promises that greenwashing offers to ensure we can continue as we are. As the engineer and MMT activist Mike Hall made it clear, in reality what we are facing is not a little tinkering around the edges but ‘a massive technical engineering challenge, [that will] ‘need a ‘war production’ mobilisation approach in terms of applying real resources to the task’
It is, in fact, the government that provides the frameworks for markets to exist. It is only the government through its spending, taxation and legislative powers that can address the coming climate firestorm and put the frameworks in place for a just transition towards a sustainable world. It is only the government that has the monetary firepower to create an equitable and sustainable economy. Whether we choose that route is something still to be decided.
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