Polly Toynbee picked up on my ideas published at the weekend on a strategy for the left, saying in her column in the Guardian this morning:
Where the market fails, the state has to step in. Jettison Treasury rules defining capital spending as only on bricks and mortar, and invest in human capital. Why is further education funding so low and apprenticeships falling, while universities cut places? To shoot through a decade of moribund productivity takes a burst of investment daring, imagination and determination. The only hope is renewable energy, insulation, housebuilding, and research and development to match more successful countries with highly trained and educated people. Borrowing confidently to invest wisely and optimistically shores up a country's credibility against a threatened slide in sterling's value.
Beyond fossilised Treasury thinking, better ideas abound. Take this one from the economist Richard Murphy: the £70bn a year invested in tax-free ISAs should only earn that tax relief by investing in productivity-boosting green government bonds, securely backed, paying a decent return.
It's a useful start.
Now, will Labour pick this up and run with it?
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“will Labour pick this up and run with it” – no.
They worry about being triangulated by the tory-s along the lines of “but how will you pay for it?”. Yes I know – the question is tangential to the point under discussion, but that will not stop tory imbeciles raising it and using it.
Starmer and the B.Liar acolytes that surround him are too worried about saying something that will cause their ratings to drop. But the other side of the coin is, no policies means people have no idea what Liebore stands for. There is also an element of cowardice – Starmer did not team up with other parties to complain to the Speaker about Mendacious Fatberg’s lying – which seems very odd (unless of course Starmer has something to worry about on that score – lying).
Moving back to the points made by Toynbee – there is something perverse (obscene?) in having so many people in poverty (relative or absolute) when there is also, at the same time, a significant skills shortage in the areas related to energy. This is a total & complete failure of government, it is almost as if the tories are happy to see people poor…???????
They are
All we need to counter ‘how do we pay for it’ is for someone who understands what it means to use a sovereign fiat currency to have the courage to voice it loud and strongly on the mass media. Using a fiat currency means there is NO shortage for the government to spend and it doesn’t have to be acquired first through taxation as the government is the monopoly creator of our currency and has the ability to create as much as it needs.
First you have to be invited onto that media to say it
“with money” is the correct answer. It always is.
Anything we can actually do, we can afford.
After that, it becomes a question of allocation and distribution.
Correct
We see market failure all the time in local authority housing so this is not a figment of Richard’s imagination.
Our housing standards teams are constantly chasing rogue and nonviable landlords about the state of disrepair of their lettings to the point of issuing compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) so that the LA can get their hands on the homes and fix them (the landlords wait until the last minute to do something to avoid the CPO). Some of these landlords have destroyed some of the nicest streets in the city where I work which have now become synonymous with slum landlord-ism, dragging down the area with them – a lot of this has to do with poor regulation meant to encourage providers into the market instead of building more affordable homes.
Many people who take out right to buy (RTB) end up not having enough money to maintain the condition of the house (in an increasing low wage economy) and I have lost count of how many are offered back to the LA for purchase in very poor condition because people have not had the income to maintain their ‘asset’. So the LA ends up as the owner of last resort, does the house up, lets it and then a RTB is put in again by a new tenant and the house disappears into the market again and the process starts all over again in some cases.
It is great to see you get a mention in the Guardian Richard.
Thanks
There is zero chance Labour will run with this. It’s too authoritarian. Feels like Stalin.
Stalinist? Saying how tax reliefs might be used? Don’t be stupid
But savings are peoples savings..they are not for the State to spend which is your mentality. Also pensions are taxed just at the back end.
I am not in any way suggesting how people save
I am saying how they can save with tax relief
No one has to have tax relief to save
It is a bonus with conditions attached
What is your problem with that?
No future for Remainers, no Single Market, no Customs Union: we are offered a minor finesse on veterinary procedures as the Big Idea. This is grotesque.
How do you tell the difference between Conservative and Labour? You don’t. You can’t. From a Scottish perspective the Westminster Parliament is a complete and utter waste of time. It doesn’t represent the interests, ambitions, needs or wants of the Scottish people: that is bleakly obvious to everyone in Scotland, save a desperate and declining fringe of increasingly paranoid Unionists.
Westminster is a madhouse, full of people ill fitted to represent anyone; and the reason for that is the electorate can only vote for people pre-selected for them by political Parties that are all subject to entryism, to powerful vested interests, and by their essential nature and purpose unfit to make the selection.
John, I suspect you are right about how ‘well’ Westminster represent Scotland, but it doesn’t represent the “interests, ambitions, needs or wants” of the English or Welsh either. As Oborne pointed out, the only group this government represents is that of the very rich. And, as Oborne also pointed out, it has never been so explicit in such maneuverings before. either they are incompetent, even at this, or they don’t give a damn. I don’t deny it could be both.
Oborne was right, and an effective critic of Conservatism; the killer argument was the Sun letter. Nevertheless, Oborne is a Romantic, with a sentimental attachment to a form of Conservatism that is mythic; the post-war ‘Wets’ of the MacMillan, Gilmour (“In the Conservative view, economic liberalism à la Professor Hayek, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it” – from a Gilmour speech), and Carrington (who fell on his sword for Thatcher’s blunder) kind. The Conservative Party has been endlessly Protean and capable of endless, devious plasticity; since Bolingbroke.
Simon Mc Donald, Peer and ex-FCO senior civil servant, Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/SimonMcDonaldUK/status/1544206976820854784
And there you are. Westminster has become a values sewer. Do not just blame Johnson. Who put him there? Who keeps him there? Who sat on their hands? Who did nothing? Who said nothing? The Conservative Party.
Who has failed to galvanise the public sufficently to drive him out? The Labour Party: busy making itself unelectable, the straw man beaten up by the Conservative media day and daily; now a broken husk.
Listening to the World at One on radio 4, I got the impression Tory MPs are telling the reporters that they have had enough of Johnson’s Premiership. It is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
I live in hope