I made my first speech of the week at the TUC conference today. I said, give or take (because I never keep to a text):
Thanks for the invitation to be here today
On Saturday night I watched the Last Night of the Proms when people sang Land of Hope and Glory.
And I thought “you’ve got that so wrong”.
The ConDems have made this a land of fear and shame — the fear of unemployment and shame at what our bankers did to us and the world.
Well I’m a chartered accountant. Perhaps the only member of the financial services sector who’ll come here this week and say that finance screwed us all — good and proper. Because it did.
And maybe it’s because I’m a chartered accountant that I can say more than that. Not just sorry for what my profession and others did — but that not only did it not need to happen but that we don’t need the cuts this government is promising to get over the crisis we face.
I promise you there can be hope.
And if I don’t promise glory then I do promise you there could be jobs — jobs for all who wanted them and all the services we need that go with a vibrant economy, offering full employment and prospects for all.
There are three ways to do that.
First we could spend. Even the IMF says we could increase our debt by another £700 billion and not face a government financing crisis. And I can assure you they’re right. We could spend now if we wanted.
But second, if we did the amazing thing is we wouldn’t have a crisis any more. Because if we spent wisely — on investing in the future we all want — building the infrastructure we all need — an infrastructure fee from the curse of PFI for our children to enjoy when they’re keeping all on the platform in our old age — then we’d be making jobs, creating real wealth, making our economy greener, making our transport systems more effective — and because we’d be paying taxes and saving benefits and boosting the private sector all at the same time we’d actually be paying off the deficit — I mean really paying off the deficit too.
And while we’re about it we could tackle the injustice in our society — by capping pay, by capping tax allowances for those earning more than £100,000 a year, by cutting the subsidies for the savings of the rich, by taking more of the poorest in our community out of tax, by closing the tax gap, by having more tax inspectors in tax offices preventing the recent mess ups we’ve seen, by having people collect the £26 billion or so of unpaid tax sitting out there right now we’re having to borrow and pay interest on instead, by making it clear that we believe that public ownership of public assets run by people motivated by public service to deliver services for the public good that the public have paid for out of the taxes we all pay are exactly what we want.
So third, we can make choices. The myth that TINA — the argument that There Is No Alternative - is back in town — that we have no alternative — is wrong. We laid her to rest with Thatcher, and we don’t want her back again. But Cameron, Osborne and Clegg — do.
And I think there’s a reason why they do. The TUC issued a great paper this morning — and I didn’t write it. It’s by Howard Reed and Tim Horton — guys I like and admire a lot. And they show — they don’t say — they show — that this government’s cuts are designed to make the wealthiest wealthier and the poorest poorer in our country — to increase the gap in other words.
I say that’s wrong.
I say that’s a choice.
I say that’s a choice the ConDems are enjoying making.
And I say it’s a choice we don’t need to accept.
Howard, Tim, I, my colleagues in the Green New Deal group and some others have shown we don’t need to go this way.
Even now this could be a land of hope. I know we could have this country at work. Rich and prosperous. And that’s what we have to demand.
That’s the job of this week.
That’s the job of this Congress.
That’s the job of your unions.
That’s the job for the Labour Party.
That’s what we have to deliver.
For this country. For every union member. For everyone who works in this country. And those who can’t work in this country. For all our children.
That’s what I’m dedicated to doing.
I hope you are too.
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*** sustained applause ***
Great speech Richard and many thanks for the name-check!
Stirring stuff. But can I say something controversial at this point?
“Even now this could be a land of hope. I know we could have this country at work. Rich and prosperous. And that’s what we have to demand.”
I think that is a sentiment that would be shared by most parties. OK, there may be huge disagreement about how it is achieved. Some might say the tories are more interested in debt or inflation than jobs, but everybody in the political world seems to buy into this “work is good” mantra.
The only problem is that I don’t think most people agree. I know Philip Larkin didn’t when he wrote “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life”. And he was a university librarian.
Most people I know share that sentiment and would happily pack in their job tomorrow. Should we not be challenging the assumption that we want a rich and prosperous society based upon work for all? Might it not be better to aim for a different type of society? Should we not examine why we are all working so hard, yet few of us are rich and even fewer are happy?
What does prosperous mean? Does it mean having access to the latest drugs and flat screen TVs or does it mean being in a society where your children are able to live close to you? It just feels at the moment that we should pause and question our most fundamental assumptions.
@mad foetus
I have always liked the Bhutanese concept of Gross National Happiness rather than GDP.
Obviously a more subjective indicator than cold, hard figures but if people want cold and hard then they are no doubt delighted by our neo-liberal Government!
“The TUC issued a great paper this morning — and I didn’t write it. It’s by Howard Reed and Tim Horton”
I don’t agree. The report is riddled with errors and statistical blunders and, frankly, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
First up, it’s sort of obvious that the welfare state, if targeted properly, should give more to the most needy and less to the better off. Therefore, any cuts to the welfare state – if they’re to raise any amount of money at all – are inevitably going to affect the poor more than the rich. That’s virtually axiomatic.
Secondly, the TUC report claims that “people do not have an awareness of the value of public services they receive in return for the taxes they pay 1.” However, due to the redistributionary nature of taxes, and the extensive welfare benefit system, many people do not pay taxes sufficient to fund the public services they receive. So we don’t have a system where people pay as they go; we have a system where some people pay more and a lot of people pay less in order that we can all enjoy public services, some of which are only available to those who haven’t paid for them. This is important, as the TUC is trying, erroneously, to equate paying tax with receiving services. Lots of people receive services without paying tax. This is why they get into a mess on page 12, where they are bewildered why there’s a “collapse” of the link between paying tax and receiving services. Of course there is – because some people pay so others can consume. Small wonder there’s a disconnect there.
Thirdly, on page 23, they state that the cash value of public services “show how much better off individuals are with the provision of publicly funded welfare services than they would be without them.” This is an appalling blunder. Because they’re comparing post-tax income with post-tax income plus public services. Duh, of course you’re better off after you’ve got some of your money back than you are beforehand. To really be able to make this case, they need to analyse post-tax income plus public services with pre-tax income. But that would undermine their argument that everyone benefits from public services. Some people – the net payers – are most definitely not, at least not on this analysis.
The pre-tax/post-tax error is throughout this document, and it makes a real mockery of their argument. As an example, their “Family 2”, a family with income of £78k a year, apparently receive “value” worth £24,503, of 45.8% of their net income. However, using the TUC’s figures, we can see that they pay tax of £24,732 per year, so are net losers on the deal.
It gets worse. Public services are costed at their tax-inclusive costs. So, the cost of education includes the pre-tax cost of teachers. So we’re comparing the costs of the public sector including tax to the incomes of families after they’ve paid tax. It’s no surprise that the ‘value’ of the public sector seem high compared to the incomes of the people who benefit from it.
The biggest howler of all, though, is saved for the end. The TUC report seeks to analyse who will lose from proposed spending cuts, showing that our Family 2 will “lose” £1,859 once those evil Tory cuts are imposed. Yet a large proportion of the cuts are allocated to lower education benefits received by their daughter. But, who actually believes she will receive a lower level of benefit? She’ll probably still go to college. She’ll probably still get a degree. The cuts won’t in fact be borne by her at all, but by lower salaries for teachers. That’s a different argument than the one the TUC is trying to make.
Similarly with housing benefit – the cuts won’t, in the main, be borne by benefit recipients but by landlords who will have to decide whether to accept lower rents with their existing tenants or risk long vacancies.
There’s not much of their argument left. In short, this is a shoddy, erroneous analysis which doesn’t deserve the coverage it has received in the national press.