September 6 2017
A commission, including none other than Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has concluded that the UK economic system is “broken” and in need of “fundamental reform”.
This commission report will not be headlined in the Daily Mail, the Sun, or any others of the purveyors of fake news, because it shows unmistakeably that the so-called ‘free-market’ offers nothing for the vast majority of the population. In its executive summary, the report concludes that the present economic system, is “no longer generating rising earnings for a majority of the population, and young people today are set to be poorer than their parents.” Although the authors do not explicitly say so, this statement alone is a damning indictment of British capitalism.
“Beneath its headlines figures”, the report goes on, “the economy is suffering from deep and longstanding weaknesses, which make it unfit to face the challenges of the 2020s.”
It points out that while GDP has risen by 12 per cent since 2010, average earnings per employee have fallen by 6 per cent. Since the 1970s, it explains, the share of national income going to wages has fallen from 80 per cent to 73 per cent.
The report concludes that “tinkering” with the system will not work and suggests instead that there need to be “fundamental reforms” on a scale similar to “the 1940s and 1980s”. But this is precisely why the report fails utterly. To put the genuine reforms of the 1945 Labour Government alongside the counter-reforms of Margaret Thatcher makes a complete mockery of the whole argument.
The post-war Labour Government introduced concrete and meaningful reforms for working class people, principally the NHS, for which it is quite rightly celebrated today, seventy years later. On the other hand, the Thatcher Government that ushered in a period of neo-liberal counter-reforms and these that have devastated whole industries and jobs, workers’ rights and standards of living. Thirty years later, there are still communities that suffer from the destruction of local mining, steel-making, engineering and ship-building industries, with nothing to replace them. It is the ‘radicalism’ of Thatcher that lingers today in the neo-liberal agenda of practically the whole of the Tory Party and a good part of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
It is true indeed that the system will not be corrected by tinkering. That is precisely why the founders of the Labour Party wrote socialist principles into its fundamental aims and constitution. The commission panel, including as it does, not only the good Archbishop, buy many luminaries of business, will not argue for socialist ideas, of course. But that is precisely what the Labour Party must do.
The opportunities for the Labour Party have not been better for generations. Recent polling undertaken by ComRes and UnHerd (Guardian September 6) point to an incredible 46-point lead for Labour among 18-24-year olds. On some specific policy areas, Labour support is massively ahead of the Tories. On education it has 5 times more support, on health, 9 times more, on housing, 10 times more.
Labour needs to take this platform and argue among voters, not for tinkering with a failed economic system, but for fundamental, transformational change. The emergency in welfare, health, housing, education and other issues needs to be met with emergency policies. Labour needs to argue for the public ownership of the banks, utilities and big companies that dominate the economy and the everyday lives of working people. A democratic plan of production, utilising all the vast resources and wealth of the country in the interests of its population – that is genuine radical change. And that is the only way to resolve the problems facing the working class and young people today.
The full report, from the Institute for Public Policy Research, can be found at:
https://www.ippr.org/files/2017-09/1504617046_cej-interim-report-summary-september2017.pdf
