I didn't mean to write this thread this afternoon, but I have just published it on Twitter. Once I'd written the first tweet, which was meant to be a singular thought, the rest just seemed to follow:
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The NHS pay settlements Sunak spoke about this morning barely broke even, or were below inflation.
I wish Kuenssberg had asked Sunak how he justified allowing the real income of our most necessary and hard working NHS, to decline year on year.
It would expose the real divide between his party and a real opposition. As it is …. the division is not that apparent.
Most of thoe settlements have not been agreed as yet, either
There is no real opposition and Sunak knows that.
Evident in Labour’s missions. Kier Starmer has a bunch of ambitions but 0 policy on how to do it. All their concrete promises are further austerity.
If they follow the Resolution Foundations insanity, we’re even further screwed.
In fact the “opposition” is largely responsible for there being no politicians who favour the sort of policies Professor Murphy describes: Labour has kicked the ones who did out of the Party and ensured they are not replaced by like minded people as Parliamentary candidates.
I’ve seen figures estimating the cost of settling junior doctors’ pay demands, in full, at ~ £1.2Bn for the year. I also read a Guardian article estimating the cost, to NHS England, at ~ £800M to £1Bn to cover for strike action (over a similar, if not exactly corresponding period). Once you factor the 30% they’d claw back in tax (because all of the pay award would be beyond the personal allowance threshold) and NI contributions; is it not unreasonable to conclude that the Tories are happy to funnel public money to private agencies, thus benefitting shareholders and senior management of those organisations?
Why else would they not settle up and begin to tackle waiting lists?
Your figures are about right -but one year only
I appreciate that it is an ongoing cost, I hinted it; but a year ago Sunak promised to tackle NHSE waiting lists, as one of his 5 pledges, there could’ve been progress on that for a similar cost over the past year.
Its not as if junior doctors are asking the earth; they are looking to have their earnings restored to 2010 equivalent. They’re on about £15 an hour, once you factor in student loans repayments (of which they have a heavier burden than some), they’re little better off than unskilled workers on minimum wage.
What is worse is that the appeal to individualism only really works for the most financially comfortable in our society.
These benefits of policies promoting individual returns have only really benefited the rich at any real scale and have been literally superimposed upon society as ‘society’s needs’ and it has to be said that ‘they’ have been very successful.
I’m also struck how influenced we are by perceptions of wealth.
Most discussions at family get togethers are with members of the family who are quite wealthy compared to me and my family.
When you sit there trying to talk MMT, sovereign currency, the injustice of the CBRA etc., I know these people are thinking ‘Where’s his properties abroad? How comes he lives in an ex-Council house? How come he drives an old Mondeo? What has he got to show for himself?’.
And ultimately, ‘Why should I listen to him; he’s not as well off as me so he can’t know that much?’. My net-worth is lower, therefore I have less credibility.
Money-wealth has become a unit of measure/a supposed signifier for intelligence, drive and ambition.
And yet, I have one profound observation about the HNWI’s (high net worth individuals) I come up against: how un-curious they are about the world. (My brother in law is one of them and he left us a cycling magazine to read after he visited us at New Year and everything this mag had in it was way too expensive for me – we are talking high-end bike lights and stuff like that – £150 for a front bike light, bikes for staring at £2,700 – I ask you. The mag was more like a lifestyle magazine than a cycling periodical).
Why? Because they feel rewarded and safe. The ‘system’ has somehow worked for them (and luck BTW has no place in it, they’ve done it all by themselves apparently). All they are interested in is their next skiing trip or property acquisition and getting out of paying tax as much as possible.
Satyajit Das said as much during the 2008 crash and I agree with him, totally. As long as this system works for enough people, it will persist unfortunately which is why your recent posts about the ignorance about banking works seem to me to be a key intervention at the right time and needs to be repeated and circulated as much as possible.
Much to agree with
Our politicians too often play the game of reducing complex issues into simple binary choices, but in this instance what you say is true: previously, the choice has been between the party of capital and the party of labour; now, it’s between the politics of compassion and cooperation, and the politics of cynicism and cruelty.
Last October I resigned from the Labour Party after 42 years of membership, disgusted, not only at Starmer‘s appalling response to the Gaza crisis, but at the absence of outrage among shadow cabinet members and the wider PLP. It had also become apparent to me that the Party’s administrative apparatus is shambolic and its operatives, like the leadership, are bankrupt of ideas and lack any sense of purpose or direction.
The last positive step I took as a Labour Party member was in June, when I presented a motion to my CLP (Worcester) calling on the chair and secretary to write a letter to Starmer, Miliband and Reeves, calling on them to reaffirm unequivocally the party’s September 2021 commitment to a green new deal worth not less than £28 billion a year for the first 10 years of a Labour government. The motion was carried 14–4, with 2 abstentions. Not a word of reply came from any of Starmer, Reeves or Miliband. Instead, Reeves and Starmer have, with their fatuous cliches about fiscal rules, dissolved the policy to nothingness, while Miliband has sat quietly by and watched his personal fiefdom disappear under the waves.
The only response I can give to your plea is to say that I will be campaigning actively for the Greens in the coming general election, not because they have all the answers – they don’t – but because they are the only political party with substantial representation in England that seems approximately to represent the type of politics you advocate. Even among the Greens, however, there is a paucity of ambition, their efforts seemingly directed to only three or four target seats. Worcester is not one of them, even though they are the second largest party on our city council (Labour 13, Green 10, Tories 7, Lib Dems 2). With that base of support in a working, moderately prosperous city, they should be coming out fighting and aiming to hit Labour where it hurts.
A progressive green manifesto needs to be blasted across the airwaves and cyberspace over the next few months, calling for social and economic policies that will enable complete reconstruction and decarbonisation of public services and infrastructure, across the board; constitutional reform, including PR, an elected second chamber and the scaling back of the monarchy, Scandinavian-style; an ethical foreign policy and the taming of the arms industry; and the dismantling of the monopolies and oligarchies that currently own and control so much of what should be our shared common wealth. I’ll be making a first bash here where I live, and I encourage your other readers to do likewise.
Thanks
While I agree that the Greens should be the real party of opposition and standing in every seat, how can they possibly afford that? They don’t have the financial resources to meet the cost and they don’t have the membership levels to get out and canvass.
makes me wonder how Tice’s ‘Reform Party’ can afford to stand in every seat. Or where their candidates will come from?
I suspect Manbiot’s ‘dark money’ thesis applies here.
The Greens have put up candidates in almost every Westminster constituency over the past few GEs, so funding the deposits doesn’t seem to be an issue. I’m arguing for their directing extra resources to a larger clutch of targeted seats – up to 20 – where there is latent support to build on, and fighting to win with a radical, credible and popular manifesto.
Sadly you’re right about the Greens’ lack of resources, both people and donations; which is reflected even at local government campaign level… and despite the massive disillusionment amongst long-term Labour members and supporters.
Doubly sad, because the uneducated general voting (or nonvoting?) public will be (mis)led into the arms of Reform or whoever, having failed to grasp any real world economics or any of the core ethical and social values that Richard writes about in the original tweet.
It would not surprise me if that all the best administrators in the Labour party were too Left to be in it!
The party is now full of neo-liberal individualists who are good at only one thing – managing their own careers and wealth acquisition.
I see this too in the public sector and its disgraceful.
It could be said that Thatcherism has come home to roost but the malaise in British society goes back a long time you only have to read the history of its money grubbing monarchs! Try reading Marc Morris’s book “King John: Treachery, Tyranny And The Road To The Magna Carta” for a taste of this.
The meme we should consider is not that the Tories are finished, but that Tory economics are finished. Begun by Margaret Thatcher (“There is no such thing as society”), and ended with Rishi Sunak via Liz Truss (crashed the economy) and David Cameron (responsible for the Brexit debacle).
Most commentators think that the Tories will lose the next election, and I think it is because their policies come across as non-caring, even though there are many Tories who are caring.
This brings us to neoliberal, with the general idea that governments (and organisations) are bad, and individual “freedom” enables economies to flourish. While these ideas are a lot more nuanced than this, unfortunately, there are enough people in positions of influence who either did not understand the nuances, or were happy to ignore them.
So we saw Thatcher attack the unions, local government, the NHS, sold on the idea that the individual should be able to choose their destiny. This was further dressed up as “freedoms” to choose, and competition and the “invisible hand” of the market would work for all.
Unfortunately social capitalism has transformed into predatory capitalism, and ℎ is not as rational as the models suggest (just think of mass purchasing and hording of toilet paper).
As anarchist Peter Kropotkin noticed: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization”.
This does not imply that it should be only the individual or society. A good society enables the individual to be the best that they can. A good society ensures that no-one goes hungry or without basic needs. I don’t see neoliberalism helping people, only exploiting them. That may not have been the intention, but that is what it’s become.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Once individuals in society have their basic needs, trade can compete for their business as much as they want.
It’s all about tribes – our upper class are in effect the ruling tribe, and the unions represented potentially competing tribes, so Thatcher was used to negate them.
‘Where did the politics of care, compassion, concern and consideration go?’
For a large part of the answer to your question refer to this article by George Monbiot: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/06/rishi-sunak-javier-milei-donald-trump-atlas-network
Right wing ‘junk tanks’ and the dark money that funds them have been relentless in the promotion of policies that have destroyed the politics that you lament and thus the emergence of the cruel neoliberal world in which most of us now live, and the rise of nasty, self interested politicians (e.g. Sunak, Truss, Johnson, et al). Sadly, the world will only get crueler as long as the money of the rich, and the acolytes that serve and enable them, control our politics.
Indeed….
Following on from this quote from @Pilgrim Sight Return
‘….Satyajit Das said as much during the 2008 crash and I agree with him, totally. As long as this system works for enough people, it will persist unfortunately which is why your recent posts about the ignorance about banking works seem to me to be a key intervention at the right time and needs to be repeated and circulated as much as possible….’
My question might be what happens when the system stops working for enough people?
Civil unrest, social collapse and then a new dark age. We see the beginnings of this now in the increase in food thefts from supermarkets. These will no doubt escalate into open robbery from trucks transporting food on the highway. It will be difficult to be a courier when those days dawn, drivers will need protection provided by someone riding shotgun like in the old Westerns. I expect we’ll see that this year when the new import controls come in and food starts getting really scarce. The bright side of this is lots of us could stand to lose a few pounds. I expect fasting to soon become very popular. My advice; keep your salt levels up! It stops you feeling hungry for a lot of the time.
I may have got this wrong. To explain, some of the proposed Freeports are actually ports where I gather border security is being left up to the Freeports themselves (just read it in Private Eye) so black market meat in unknown quantities and of unknown provenance will be flooding in to make up the shortfall. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how dangerous that is…
This may be an issue
I stress, may be
The idea of a Well-being Economy, rather than one measured by GDP at the macro level and personal or household income, wealth and consumption at micro level:
Whatever else may be said about it (I’m in England and not competent to comment!) the SNP government has signed up to this, with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and WEGo.
But it seems nigh on impossible to get these ideas into regular discourse and mainstream media, with their continual obsession with measuring the wrong things and denying the way that we CAN afford the right, useful and shared things (and yet still retain much of the freedom trumpeted by the Right and not be mere passive recipients of some homogeneous state-controlled handouts). As Richard points out so clearly, it’s a political issue at the highest (or most profound) level: ethics, social relations, values, community… “Who are we and what are we actually here for?”
Keynes wrote of “the euthanasia of the rentier” (and we’ve got the opposite!) but we need the euthanasia of “homo economicus”.
All so true.
I saw a clip on TV last night of a grinning (yes, it was the grin that really took the biscuit) Sunak telling me that most sick people were “swinging the lead” and that he was going to squeeze them so that he could deliver me a tax cut.
It made me very cross.
Good governance is hard and becomes ever harder with each step forward that we take on the journey of developing society and changing the nature of human existence.
People are motivated by emotion and feeling far more than logic and critical analysis, again because the latter pair are hard. Consequently the sound bite trumps, no pun intended, sound policy all day long.
Voters crave simple solutions to increasingly complex problems and lean towards the offers that frighten them the least. Even if prepared to make the effort to test the offer before selection there is no guarantee that people will make a logical decision.
Although good governance is hard it remains blindingly obvious that opposition affords little opportunity to try and shape a country so it is unsurprising that the offer any opposition makes must pass the fear test, not the logic test.
A quick glance around the world suggests that resolving our dissatisfaction with the UK’s political arrangements offers little hope that it can be done with tweaks, small or large. The route to a fairer more honest system that focuses on people not capital is simply not clear, but in my view it cannot even be imagined without diminishing the power of the existing Labour and Conservative parties. The age of pantomime politics has to end.
Care, community, compassion? They aren’t making much of a fist of the Post Office scandal. Sunak today appears to be claiming he has been sorting it out; when it is blindingly obvious to the whole country Government and Parliament have irresponsibly left the Post Office to mark their own report card and fix the problem. All Sunak has achieved is to allow the delay and obfuscation to fester endlessly, with no end in sight. The giveaway line in his waffle is this: ‘we should do everything we can to make it right’. Sunak you and your government have had thirteen years to fix it; and you still haven’t.
You are part of the problem, Sunak.
Sunak is offering weasel words. Much huff and puff about quashing convictions for all, without ant promises; and I have not yet found any rush to pay the compensation. Oh, yes “value for money” in the Treasury is a Conservative phrase for a Government free lunch to sit on other people’s money, and delay paying compensation in the hope many will give up.
And Starmer now seems to be offering weasel words over quashing the convictions. He seems more concerned that a guilty individual may slip through the net after 20+ years of misery (how long should any sentence be?), than he is about the hundreds who have been badly mistreated or wrongly convicted and ruined. Asked repeatedly, he seems to rely on this line: “the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse”. How long does he propose that takes? Would he care too look at the typical timescales involved so far, with many still to be examined; and perhaps many victims yet to be discovered. Around sixty have died already. Many are elderly. Starmer seems to thin he can offer a glib, sound-bite, politicians meaningless answer, that on inspection he knows very well is the length of a piece of string. This is exactly the kind of politics that has to STOP – NOW.
There is an old principle of justice; better a guilty individual go free than an innocent victim is convicted and punished; but not for Starmer, whom we are perhaps finding, is an instinctive prosecutor.
A real prospect of an independent Scotland may act as a useful catalyst; a lot has to happen for that to be a possibility, but who knows…?