By Bryn Glover
The Labour government has chosen to shackle its activities to what the Treasury’s ‘fiscal rules’ say can be afforded. It was Mrs Thatcher who first – incorrectly – used the metaphor of a housewife in charge of the family purse strings to explain the need for painful spending cuts to get the nation’s finances back in order. Under the fiscal rules the national ‘debt’ is not allowed to exceed approximately 90% of gross domestic product. In many other countries, however, the debt figure easily exceeds 100% – and, in 1946, immediately after the end of World War Two, the UK figure was actually 275%. Two years later, if the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton had invoked Treasury fiscal rules, it is hard to imagine there would ever have been an NHS.
In 2009, after the global financial crisis, the Bank of England introduced the concept of ‘quantitative easing’, which was simply a smart way of describing the government printing money to save the banks.
Globally, over half a trillion dollars was conjured out of the ether until a subsequent Chancellor, George Osborne at the time, decided that the government needed to repay the Bank of England (i.e. effectively itself) by imposing austerity on all our public services.
The working classes – not the banks – have been paying the price for it ever since.
Now many voices on the left are calling, in this age of multi-billionaires, for a tax on the rich not only for the mountains of cash it would free up but also in order to curtail the distortions caused to world trade and human need by the arbitrary decisions made by the hyper-wealthy.
The anthropologist Jason Hickel cites three intermediate objectives that will need to be realised if we are ever to balance the respective needs of humans and planet: de-commodification, de-accumulation and de-colonisation.
The second precondition, de-accumulation, is what has prompted this column. Because what is important is not the one-off cash injection that taxing the rich would deliver so much as curbing the irresponsible and unaccountable consumption of the Earth’s resources for projects that yield little or no benefit to the vast majority of humanity but only serve to increase the cash or prestige of their billionaire backers.
Bryn Glover is a member of the AGS national committee
Picture by Cash Macanaya/Unsplash
Alliance for Green Socialism 