GIMMS welcomes Carlos García Hernández as he introduces his new interview with Chris Williamson.
“As long as the issue of any matter fraught with peril is still in doubt, and there is yet some possibility left that all may come right, no one should ever tremble or think of anything but resistance — just as a man should not despair of the weather if he can see a bit of blue sky anywhere. Let our attitude be such that we should not quake even if the world fell in ruins about us.”
Whenever I think of Chris Williamson, this passage from Schopenhauer on courage comes to mind. Today I am pleased to share an interview with Chris Williamson to discuss his new political project called Resist. In it he presents his proposal for the UK, after he was expelled from the Labour Party despite having been a prominent Member of Parliament alongside Jeremy Corbyn.
As it appears on its website, the party is based on a 10-point program:
- Health and social care: Publicly owned health and social care service, free at the point of delivery, including free dental and ophthalmic treatment.
- Public services: Reverse all previous privatisations of public services, including health, education services, prisons and utilities, to ensure they are properly resourced.
- Education: Provide free cradle to grave access to education and write off outstanding student debts.
- Housing: Build and acquire new council housing to address shortages and homelessness, applying stringent eco and space standards; regulate private sector housing; expand cooperative housing for sale and rent.
- Economy: Utilise powers available to a currency-issuing nation to create a strong economy that works in the interests of the many, not the few; introduce a genuinely progressive tax system; introduce a job guarantee scheme; Standardise a four-day working week; raise the minimum wage to a genuine living wage; make trade union representation a right in all workplaces and repeal anti-trade union laws.
- Access to justice: Overhaul the Justice system to ensure legal equality through access to legal aid for all; focus on community rather than custodial sentences and prioritise rehabilitation rather than punishment; decriminalise substance misuse and treat it as a public health not a criminal justice issue.
- Comprehensive Green New Deal: Invest in renewable technologies; insulate all residential and commercial premises to reduce the carbon footprint and end fuel poverty; introduce a climate change adaptation programme, including reforesting the uplands; end factory farming and increase sustainable arable food production.
- National security programme for a safer and peaceful world: Scrap Trident programme; withdraw from NATO; use position as a permanent member of UN Security Council to promote peace and disarmament; demand a democratic UN; diversify arms industries into socially useful eco production.
- Social security: Reduce state retirement age for men and women to 60; re-establish universal principle for social security entitlements; extend paid parental leave to 18 months.
- Constitution: Replace the Monarchy with a democratically elected head of state; scrap the House of Lords and remove all feudal privileges; decentralise power to local regions; ban paid lobbying; make elected representatives accountable through participatory democracy.
In these 10 points are the reasons why Williamson was expelled from the Labour Party. Williamson was expelled because he is a socialist. What the Labour Party did not know is that they were not dealing with an ordinary leader, but with a person immune to fear and with immense resilience and courage.
In the interview below, Williamson sets out the two methods Resist will follow in trying to carry out the 10 points of his program. At the macroeconomic policy level, Resist relies on modern monetary theory. At the microeconomic policy level, Resist relies on innovative pragmatism (a term coined by Williamson himself in the 1990s).
I must confess that when I learned of Chris Williamson’s interest in my proposal for fiat socialism, I was flattered. Now that interest has come to fruition and Resist will turn to modern monetary theory to achieve its socialist goals. With this, the need to disconnect tax collection and public spending by the central government is finally being launched into public opinion by an organized party. Resist proposes a macroeconomic policy based on permanent full employment through job guarantee schemes and on a level of public spending whose objective is not deficit reduction but general welfare and price stability. At the local and municipal level, where the spending capacity of municipalities and councils is indeed constrained by tax collection, Williamson draws on his more than 30 years of political experience and proposes to recover what he called innovative pragmatism from Derby City Council. According to this idea, knowledge of fiscal policies at the local level makes it possible to carry out social programs that complement central government spending policies. The result is a highly flexible economic program, based on the search for solutions at both the national and local levels, that places Resist at the forefront of the struggle for socialism.
Its leaders may not know it yet, but the Labour Party is lost. Its collapse is a matter of time. The electoral disaster of the last election is only the beginning of its collapse. The future belongs to the brave socialists. The future of the British left is Resist.
The Resist Movement:
Web: https://resistmovement.org.uk/
Twitter: @MFApeoplesparty
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MFApeoplesparty/
Email: email hidden; JavaScript is required
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/resistance-tv/id1556536341
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ResistMovement