“Never forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature”.
Global Boiling – Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay
Many of us have grown up with the story of an arrogant ruler King Cnut, who placed his throne on the banks of the Thames, waiting for the tide to come in. As it did so he held out his hand and demanded that it recede. Predictably, it didn’t. What most of us don’t know, however, is rather than telling of a King’s hubris, it celebrates something quite different. An acknowledgement from Cnut that ‘All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial’. Whilst Cnut recognises a holy power, we might in these very different times acknowledge that far from humans controlling their environment, as we have the arrogance to imagine, it is instead the power of nature that dictates responses to our behaviour.
This arrogance is displayed daily by our politicians who seem to think they can put off action on climate change, citing economic credibility over scientific facts or putting the profits of the oil and gas producers above those of the health of the planet.
On the one hand, we have Sunak granting permits for more oil and gas drilling (whilst the industry continues to rake in huge profits), on the crazy basis that home-grown is better for the environment, which actually is not the case, as discussed in this Channel 4 Fact Check.
And on the other, Keir Starmer, fixated on household budget economics, reportedly thinks that ‘the hard grind of rebuilding economic credibility must come first, as opposed to Labour spending “vast sums of money”’. ‘Growth, investment and wealth creation will be, he said ‘the only show in town’ if Labour is to build a prosperous country with strong public services for the long term.”
At the same time, Rachel Reeves has postponed Labour’s green plan, and a few weeks ago also rejected the call to ditch the Tory imposed two-child benefit cap because, apparently, the ‘dire public finances’ means there will not be enough money to go around. Not only is the shadow chancellor intent on denying some of the poorest in our society the means to live decent lives, but also putting on hold urgent action on climate change. Here we have yet again, the eternal circus of blame which politicians indulge in (remember Liam Byrne) but which has nothing to do with monetary reality.
This is a neoliberal, monetarist pile of crock at a time of existential climate crisis and societal decay. Both the consequences of a destructive economic system which treats people and the planet as objects to exploit for profit.
We have a party opposition leader (and his shadow chancellor) dedicated not only to further economic decline, decay of public infrastructure and harm to citizens, who clearly thinks he can hold back the tide of ecological overshoot and climate change until the public finances are in good order.
Predictably King Cnut failed to hold back the tide, and now our own politicians seem to think that they can put off action because heaven forbid that we interfere with the profit streams of polluting industries or the god-like market. They talk about the economy as if it were separate from the sphere of people’s existence or the planet’s ability to sustain human activity. And with astonishing arrogance imagine that the great arrow of human progress will provide the solutions in the form of technology that is scarcely off the drawing board, or growing millions of trees (important though that is) and will save the day at some unspecified time in the future. Both questionable propositions and time is not on our side.
It surely is disturbing to be a witness to the fact that the emperor has no clothes and yet the entire political establishment fauns daily over a toxic economic system which has created vast poverty and inequity across the planet and is bringing an end to the world as we know it, to keep the consumption truck running and the profits flowing.
Then, at the same time as the media reports on the scientific evidence for climate change, and as we are witnessing the increasing incidence of damaging weather events from heat domes to drought, fire and floods which affect humans, destroy vital natural habitats and impact on food production, in the next breath is allowing politicians, government institutions, think tanks and its own journalists to reinforce the household budget narratives of how government spends.
We need a frank, public conversation about the future. As an article published in The Conversation makes clear, ‘The only way to keep humanity safe is immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse emissions in a socially just way.’ The last part is key, not just from a domestic point of view but also how we address the vast western created inequity that exists in the Global South, and the ecological destruction and pillage of real resources that has occurred to serve Western consumption and reinforce the power politics of empire.
As it also points out, ‘Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business not the climate’. In those few words, today’s reality is confirmed through government’s political priorities. It is time to see through the game and challenge those ideologically driven preferences.
As Jason Hickel, author of ‘The Divide; A Brief Guide to Inequality and its Solutions’ tweeted recently, ‘As climate-related damages hit, remember that this crisis is not due to generic “human activity”. Excess emissions are due overwhelmingly to the core states of the global North, and the ruling classes that control the systems of production, energy and national legislation.’
The time is now to deal with ecological overshoot and climate change in a socially just way. As GIMMS emphasises endlessly, the only way we can do that is to reject an economic system built on growth and endless consumption which benefits fewer and fewer people and destroys life, not to mention being at the heart of exceeding the planet’s ecological boundaries.
While politicians continue to count the pennies as in Labour’s abandonment of its commitment to a timeframe for spending the promised £28bn on a green transition, citing as it does the worsening financial situation, we are closing our eyes to the urgent nature of the challenge.
The question is not how we pay for it. The real challenge is to decide what our priorities are, draw up a strategic plan for achieving them and using the dual supports of legislation and tax policy to free up the real resources it will need to carry out those plans. Money in itself is never the consideration but politicians on both sides want us to believe it is. Truth is that we pay for it by spending the money. The only constraints to spending are real resources and decisions about how and to whom they are distributed.
The flat earthers need a lesson in monetary reality, to stop putting people’s lives on the line for a lie. In short, the government is the currency issuer. It spends the money into existence first, then taxes and plays the smoke and mirrors game it calls ‘borrowing’. Up until now, it has been the failsafe mechanism to keep the troops compliant and under control.
Whatever the future holds, it should be about our values which include respect for a life-giving planet and its inhabitants. Instead, and in reality, we have psychopaths in charge, prosecuting endless wars, advocating growth at any cost and, at the same time, proposing austerity (but not for the richest).
What we need now in these uncertain and unstable times is global cooperation, not a myopic focus on keeping the status quo in place for a lie, or to maintain the reins of global power.
Whilst what we face is a global challenge, we also can’t ignore what is happening at home to our own citizens as a result of short-sighted, market-driven solutions and the household budget economics that drives spending and policy.
Two articles in the Guardian in recent months report on the shocking exploitation of foreign care workers brought to the UK to plug the gaps caused by decades of government neglect, outsourcing and privatisation, and austerity in the form of public sector spending cuts. Shockingly, in the past year, the number of modern slavery cases reported within the UK care industry had more than doubled. Failures in duty of care has facilitated organised crime to exploit unfortunate victims who were desperate to find a better life but instead found slave-like conditions, long hours and below subsistence wages.
The solution is not to steal the valuable resources of poorer countries, but to bring social care back into public hands, invest more in social care provision and training, along with secure employment rights and fair terms and conditions and wages. The solution is for the nation to decide what its priorities are – more of the same contempt for citizens by its leaders, or something better.
Here, predictably we see again an economic ideology that puts private over public provision, all justified by the claim that we can’t afford better public services, or quality care for those who need it. An economic system which has taken precedence and is not fit for purpose, unless we mean the enrichment of those who benefit from government spending policy. All the government is actually doing is papering over the cracks it has caused, and the victims are both those using social care services and those persuaded that the good life awaits if they sign on the dotted line.
Again, the only constraints faced by government are related to how real resources are distributed and who benefits from that distribution. A stable and healthy society relies on government laying the foundations. However, successive governments have abdicated their responsibility and have increasingly shifted it to the corporate estate, along with public money. Whether it is the NHS, social care or indeed the many other vital public services which support citizens, all have been subjected to this false belief that there is no money, and that the private sector is more efficient.
Last week, the health minister Maria Caulfield defended Steven Barclay’s plans to use the private healthcare sector to deal with the long post-covid waiting lists, on the basis that it would provide good value for money for the taxpayer. If there are long waiting lists, this is not a new phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic in February 2020, there were 4.43 million people on a waiting list for care. The latest figures for May 2023 show that around 7.47 million people were waiting for treatment.
The fact is that the private sector is already operating in the NHS, taking public money to run health services with profit in mind. We now have a fragmented service where the word national is in name only and the NHS logo hides a myriad of private healthcare companies. From a publicly paid-for, managed, and delivered service to one that is now serving the needs of the corporate estate, where publicly paid-for means corporate welfare. If the NHS is broken, it broke as a result of the decades of reshaping it through the pursuit of an ideology that serves the neoliberal tenets of faith in markets and privatisation. When Blair said last month that ‘there should be complete cooperation between the public and private sector’, and Starmer in the Observer that we need to prioritise ‘radical reform of public services over reckless spending promises,’ the only thing to note is that they are all in it together. Blair and Thatcher’s legacy lives on.
Then as the Prime Minister seeks to blame striking NHS staff for record-high long waiting lists, this must surely be the final insult to a workforce that has been unfairly treated as a result of government policy and like many, struggling to manage the cost-of-living crisis on top of previous public sector pay squeezes. One minute we are being exhorted to clap for our dedicated nurses and doctors, and the next, government ministers are demonising them.
Neither health nor social care should be viewed as a business, and it certainly doesn’t involve being good value for the taxpayer, since taxes do not fund government spending. Let’s instead put the blame where it really lies. At the government’s door, resulting from a decade of cuts in real terms to spending (austerity), failure to train sufficient healthcare professionals, private sector for-profit involvement (which predates the Tories), and closure of hospitals, beds and even treatment options, all of which has been justified on the false premise of public sector unaffordability, and to push an ideological preference for private sector involvement. We can translate this as absolutely nothing to do with the state of the public finances, but rather as a political choice. The false narrative of monetary affordability constantly trumps delivery of public purpose, and when it comes to ethics, as in stealing the resources of poorer countries, as long as things can be done on the cheap, then it’s acceptable.
If we want better public services, health, and social care, it can only come through government which holds the power of the public purse. This is what we could have in a sane world where people matter more than a cruel ideology and profit. Instead, what we have is a shameless manipulation of a hapless public to justify what will be in effect more austerity, more ‘difficult decisions’ that can only cause more human distress and hardship, damage the life chances of our youngest citizens, and cause further decay of our public infrastructure.
And then, while the life-giving planet overheats because of human activity and the distribution of wealth becomes ever more unequal, last month the number crunchers at the OBR were ‘preparing to sound the alarm’ over the impact of rising interest rates on the public finances which, according to the Guardian, would ‘deliver a serious blow to the government’s scope for pre-election tax cuts.’ In its ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability report,’ it set out the impact of higher interest rates for the public purse. This would, it suggested, make it less likely that [the Chancellor] would meet one of its five key pledges – tackling Britain’s public debt. And no doubt such thinking will drive more damaging austerity thinking on both sides of the political spectrum.
Let’s be clear first, interest rates don’t hurt the public finances. Government as the currency issuer can always meet its liabilities. There are, instead, winners and losers in the private, non-government sector. The winners are savers, banks and holders of Treasury gilts, while the losers are those who will suffer the economic effects of higher interest rates which can filter through in higher unemployment and cause more pain for people struggling to pay higher rates on debt and mortgages.
Then in the same household budget vein, Chancellor Hunt, after checking thoroughly down the back of the sofa for a few stray quid, ordered his ministers to find £2bn savings for public sector pay rises. Not content with the nonsense claim that there is a threat of public sector wage spirals driving inflation, he then acts as if the government is short of money and must rob Peter’s pot to pay Paul’s.
What a choice! Taking steps to mitigate the human-induced existential threat of climate change, ecological overshoot, and growing poverty and inequality, or balancing the public accounts. While they tell the public about the hard choices and sacrifices to be made, there has been no problem finding the money for military support in Ukraine, £2.3bn in 2022 and the same for 2023, totalling an eyewatering £4.6bn.
There is no money for serving public purpose, helping people through these difficult times, feeding children or rebuilding our ailing public infrastructure, but there is an inexhaustible amount for waging war and killing people, bailing out banks, or contracts for dodgy PPE. Surely these contradictions must be hitting home by now, and the extraordinary con that is being practiced on citizens of this country with huge social and environmental costs.
The key to better public services, infrastructure, social security provision and a green transition is not growth, contrary to what politicians on both sides of the political spectrum would have you believe. It is, rather, something much simpler and direct, a political choice to deliver them.
Aside from the fact that taxes do not fund government spending (implicit in the belief in growth as the solution), faith in growth as a tool is misplaced in an uncertain, unstable and changing world in which we are currently in uncharted territory. We need action now. While politicians clearly have all had the ‘public finances are like a household budget’ briefing, and all sing from the same cruel hymnbook without question, aside from the human misery this narrative causes, it makes no economic or environmental sense.
Author Jason Hickle asked in 2021, ‘If our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people’s basic needs, then what is actually the point?’
Time for the public to ask those same questions of the political class.
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