I spent almost all day yesterday in meetings and so had little time to comment or blog. As such I did not refer to Liam Byrne's announcement on benefits. I could do so now but Kevin Maguire did it so much better in the Mirror and so I'm going to quote him:
Here we go again with the Labour leadership in danger of doing the Tories' dirty work, undermining the welfare state.
Too few jobs are Britain's biggest problem, not a feckless minority when at least 10 are on jobless benefits for every vacancy.
The fiddled £1.2billion is dwarfed by £16billion means-tested help which Citizens Advice calculates the Government doesn't pay.
Or the £70billion crusading accountant Richard Murphy reckons is dodged in tax — with the filthy rich and corporations the worst offenders.
So Shadow Cabinet Minister Liam Byrne needs to balance his arguments instead of playing to the Right-whinge gallery.
I dream of the day when Labour's leading lights kick the tax-avoiding wealthy harder than the poor.
So do I.
I also share Kevin's view on Byrne's discussion of housing benefit:
Most tenants needing housing benefit are in work, low pay and high rents imposed by private landlords to blame.
The bill wouldn't be £20billion if the last Labour Government had built council houses.
Precisely.
And it's time Labour was addressing the real issues, such as a shortage of social housing, rather than bashing people who are out of work and on low pay through no fault of their own.
And it's also about time that Labour asked why it is so important that the state subsidise the lifestyle of so many people working for large companies who do not pay high enough wages, and have no intention of paying enough to ensue their employees have a hope of making ends meet. Because let's be clear what these benefits are - many of which go to those in work. What they actually represent are straightforward subsidies to the profit of companies who can underpay their staff as a result, and as such they're another shift from the poorest to the richest in society.
But Byrne didn't say that. And he should have done.
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But he won’t, and neither will Milliband, as their aims and interests are commercially and corporate oriented rather than social. They’re career politicians, not conviction polticians. There’s no party now representing the interests of the working poor.
I agree – conviction is not being conveyed right now
The Green Party’s policies do represent the interests of the working poor: Introduce a living wage, build new council houses, improve public transport.
It’s just the mainstream parties that have given up on all but the well off. We expect nothing less from the Tories but now Labour and the Lib Dems are as bad.
The political left right divide is an illusion to fool and divide people, Blair was Labour, they all follow the same policies. notice how the Liam Fox affair was covered up, A cabinet member had secret meetings with a foreign power to plan an attack on Iran.
“Government is the shadow cast over society by big business”
Noam Chomsky
Certainly the Labour Party is not representing the interests of the poor and it is not campaigning for social justice. These comments by Liam Byrne are a disgrace and if my memory serves me correct this is the former minister who was very particular about his coffee habits and probably made life miserable for his staff in the process. There has been plenty of evidence for some considerable time that the interests of the working poor have not been addressed (look at the work of Ruth Lister) but politicians have preferred to subsidise low wages through tax credits (a subsidy for the employer). I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we are living in ‘rip-off Britain’ and I am sure that other people share my views. How we can change this escapes me for the moment as it seems to be so entrenched.
Unless Labour turn away from all this nonsense then people who feel excluded and marginalised will turn to the far right and then all minorities will be under attack.
Neither the government nor the opposition have a policy on housing other than market forces. Neither the government nor the opposition have a clue why global housing bubbles took off simultaneously from c2000. Neither the government nor the opposition wish to ask themselves how housing bubbles come about.
For those interested in answering this problem, I can suggest no better starting point than Robert Shiller’s columns ‘The Great Real Estate Bust of 2008’ from December 2008, and his ‘Reinventing Economics’ from September 2009. They are to be found at Project Syndicate, where Shiller is oddly placed third section down on the left under ‘Davis and Shiller’. Why put him with Howard Davies I don’t know.
Robert Shiller is establishment.
Try the following
Dean Baker
Eric Janszen
Wynne Godley
Fred Harrison (UK)
Steve Keen (Australia)
Jakob Madsen & Jens Kjaer Sørensen (Denmark)
Ravi Batra
William Rees-Mogg (now Lord)
Jacob Rees-Mogg (a future true prime minister) Conservative Mp Somerset
So far as I have been able to ascertain Shiller’s tax solution is not in the same league as Fred Harrison’s.
Why anyone continues to see Labour as an alternative is a mystery to me. They are tories. The dispiriting diet of insult combined with continuting redistribution of wealth in the wrong direction is not going to change. They are as much puppets of the corporate and financial sectors as their opposition
Those who continue to hope for anything from labour remind me of football supporters who remain loyal to “local” teams which have long since abandoned that concept in favour of a business model which renders it too expensive for that support to actually go and see the team play: and sells replica strips at very high prices to besotted children. It is tribalism or it is sentiment: what it is not is support for a political party which represents the interests of the majority. I do accept it is (perhaps) a lesser evil: is that the best we can do?
Excellent question
I’d add, I’m not a member of any political party
Fiona reflects my own views very well indeed! The progressive ‘left’ really needs to wake up and find a voice.
I totally agree, and it reminds me of what Michael Moore described happening in America in the ’90s. Can’t remember which particular presidential election he was talking about, but he was lamenting how both main parties were locked into pursuing the same depressing agenda, just with different, but equally uninspiring, figureheads for the election posters. There was no imaginative or genuine intellectual thinking driving the political debate. A big dash for the middle ground. Rather than the lesser of two evils, he described the pitiful presidential choice on offer from the 2 parties as ‘the evil of two lessers’.
I’m obviously extremely naive, but on the question of rents – why can’t they be capped?
If what Byrne wrote in the Guardian represents Labour thinking/policy, Labour’s time is up as far as I’m concerned. To so corrupt Beveridge’s achievement was nothing short of a total betrayal of principle and the clearest possible indication that the established political order has failed us every bit as badly as the neo-liberal consensus that has so corrupted it.
When it will happen I don’t know but, if this is the best Labour can offer, significant social unrest cannot be far away. In Fraser’s words, “we’re doomed” unless Labour rediscovers its balls and starts radiating some passion. Oh for someone like Bevan now.
Labour – or anyone really – needs to discover some balls and take on the banks. Their monopoly on money creation means an unelected group of private companies are really in charge and have been for several centuries now. I’m encouraged to see more people these days complaining there’s no-one to vote for as I’ve felt that way my whole life and accordingly never have. However, as is becoming obvious I hope, voting either way in recent centuries hasn’t made that much difference as the economics have been dictated to us by this unelected group who have used their power of money creation to make themselves an elite. So, really, it hasn’t mattered who you voted for for quite some time as politicians were never really in charge of the important stuff.
Low pay does push up ‘state subsidies’ as you say, Richard. We’ve been here before. In the late 1700s and early 1800’s we had the Speenhamland system where the low wages of agricultural poor were ‘topped up’ to what was considered a living wage. It was paid for out of the rates. Honest farmers, in effect, paid twice -once by paying a fair wage, and secondly by higher rates to meet the poor law relief bill. Some farmers got away with paying low wages as other people were meeting their wages bill; at least in part.
William Cobett was one of the great critics of the time.
Speenhamland was abolished in the early 1830s-unfortunately by the introduction of the workhouse. Might be they reappear in the next Tory manifesto as say, ‘Workfare’ or ‘Employment Rehabilitation Institutions’?