My Reaction to the Budget: 8th May 2015

There is a mixture of good and bad in Osborne's first post election budget. Mostly bad. However in the interests of balance I'll start with the good:

THE GOOD:

New national living wage will be introduced for all workers aged over 25, starting at £7.20 an hour from April 2016 and set to reach £9 by 2020 - giving an estimated 2.5 million people an average £5,000 rise over five years.

Fine. A step in the right direction. However many would now question whether £7.20 an hour really is a living wage when rents are rising and in-work benefits cut.

Personal allowance, at which people start paying tax, to rise to £11,000 next year. The government says the personal allowance will rise to £12,500 by 2020, so that people working 30 hours a week on the minimum wage do not pay income tax.

Again fine.

Tax credits and Universal Credit to be restricted to two children, affecting those born after April 2017.

Yes. This needs doing. We must stop paying people to have children. However it should not affect people who already have more than two children. Also it doesn't go far enough. Wealthy people who have more than two children should face tax increases.

Permanent non-dom status to be abolished - from April 2017, anyone who has lived in the UK for 15 of the past 20 years will pay same level of tax as other UK citizens, raising an estimated £1.5bn.

A good idea.

NOW FOR THE BAD.......

There are so many that I will just highlight the main ones:

Working-age benefits to be frozen for four years - including tax credits and local housing allowance, but maternity pay and disability benefits exempted.

The annual household benefit cap will be reduced to £23,000 in London and to £20,000 in the rest of Britain.

Basically an all round attack on the poor. Most people who claim benefits are in work.

18-21-year-olds will not be entitled to claim housing benefit automatically, with a new "earn to learn" obligation.

Or in other words, the under 21s will be prevented from getting Housing Benefits via the introduction of a load of hoops to jump through. More young homeless on the streets.

Student maintenance grants to be replaced with loans from 2016-17, to be paid back once people earn more than £21,000 a year.
Driving students into more and more debt. A stealth tax on those who work hard at school and try to get on while those with rich parents get hand-outs from mummy and daddy.

A consultation will take place on changing Sunday trading laws.

Thus damaging family life, creating a 7 day working week and eroding the rights of people to leisure time.

£7.2bn to be raised from clampdown on tax avoidance and tax evasion with HMRC budget increased by £750m.
WHAT? When there is an estimated £120 billion lost in tax evasion and tax avoidance? Nowhere near enough.

Rents in social housing sector will be reduced by 1% a year for the next four years.

Good grief, WHAT ABOUT THOSE IN PRIVATE RENTAL ACCOMODATION!

Inheritance tax threshold to increase to £1m, phased in from 2017, underpinned by a new £325,000 family home allowance.

And they say its a time of austerity. That we are all in it together. A massive tax break for the wealthy.


    

Green Party Open Meeting : Inequality : Monday April 13th

The next open meeting of Colchester Green Party is tomorrow (Monday April 13th) and the topic is 'Inequality'. There will be a presentation by Colchester Green Party Political Education Officer Howard Metler, followed by a discussion. All welcome. The time is 7.30pm - 9pm and the venue is the New Inn pub, Chapel Street South.

Vote Green For Jobs and Our Countryside

Vote Green for jobs. The Green Party aims to create up to a million new jobs in climate change related initiatives. This includes specific plans for £45bn investment in home insulation, creating around 100,000 jobs, and £25bn in renewable energy.

Vote Green for our countryside. I keep being asked where the Green Party would build the 500,000 new council homes which we aim to provide. The answer is on brownfield sites. There are over 66,000 hectares of brownfield sites in England alone and the government itself estimates that this could provide room for 1.5 million new homes. Within central London the figures are even higher. The point is clear, we do not need to concrete over the countryside to address the need for more social housing.

We Must End Neo-Liberalism, Starting with the UK

According to Naomi Klein, Canadian journalist, activist and author of "The Shock Doctrine" and "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate" ( http://thischangeseverything.org/book/) :

“We are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” 
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

THE SCALE OF CLIMATE CHANGE WORLDWIDE

Obviously climate change is a global issue rather than a national one. However it is up to developed nations such as the UK to set precedents and advance the fight back. The current rate of global warming is extremely alarming. Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850. Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss. Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later. Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching, or die-off in response to stress, ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

As Naomi Klein shows in "This Changes Everything", Neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism are preventing initiatives to combat global warming rather than encouraging them.
In 2010, for example, the United States challenged one of China's wind power subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained protectionist supports for local industry. Ironically China filed a similar complaint in 2012 targeting various renewable energy programs in the EU, singling out Italy and Greece. Time after time neo-liberal trade agreements have encouraged more and more air travel, transporting of goods over ridiculous distances and challenged localised production on the grounds that it is protectionist. Secretive trade deals such as TTIP are the inevitable consequence the path we have been on since the late 1970s. As Klein puts it:

"You have been told that the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. Change requires breaking every rule in the 'free-market' playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies and reclaiming our democracies".

BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT : WHY MAGGIE WASN'T GREEN

I get annoyed when green campaigners use the term 'left-wing' to describe themselves. It is exclusive, limiting and associated with the politics of class conflict. Many 'left-wing' regimes have had terrible environmental impacts ( http://markgoachergreen.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/book-recommendation-stalins-legacy.html). Yet it is the case that the right has been so comprehensively hijacked by neo-liberalism since the late 1970s that we think in these terms. We need to be moving forward. Which means rejecting both neo-liberalism and the old anti-ecologist left. However eco-socialism is welcome.
Which brings me to Mrs Thatcher.......
For a time in the late 1980s Mrs T actually managed to convince some naive souls that she had 'gone green'. Tutored by Sir Crispin Tickell, British ambassador to the UN in New York, she made several dramatic environment speeches. The first, to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988, galvanised the emerging green debate in Britain by stating:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."
The second, to the UN general assembly, in November 1989 was aimed at the international community. Thatcher had by then understood the environment's political importance in a globalising world and was the first major politician to hold out the prospect of international legislation. But the real motivation was because the Green Party looked dangerous after securing 15% of the UK vote in the European elections only months before. Back when Sara Parkin and David Icke were the principal speakers. I remember this well as I was living in Leicester at the time and recall that anyone who was not going to vote Labour was undecided between Green or Conservative.

Now for the reality.......

Maggie was about as green as I am a freshly squeezed watermelon. Her enthusiasm for green issues soon evaporated. She opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research in 1990 but did not attend the Rio Earth summit, leaving her successor, John Major to formally sign up Britain to forest, climate and other agreements. In retirement she had nothing more to say about the environment until her 2002 memoirs, when she rejected Al Gore and what she called his "doomist" predictions about climate change.
The reason for this is that Mrs Thatcher was one of the chief architects of the rise of neo-liberal fundamentalism along with Sir Keith Joseph and economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. She was not only anti-green to the core but also a bad conservative as well. By a bad conservative I mean that she and her ilk desired to transform not to conserve and to create an economic model which would unleash unfettered destruction of the natural environment and the institutions of civil society.

THE WIENER THESIS

When Mrs Thatcher was plotting how to transform the economy in the early 1980s, she instructed her patron and close ally Sir Keith Joseph to give every member of her new cabinet a copy of  a 1981 book by Martin Wiener entitled "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980". They were ordered in no uncertain terms to read it. Wiener was an American academic whose book had ironically found favour with some of the dinosaurs on the academic Marxist left such as Eric Hobsbawm. This shallow, nasty little book's main contention was that English culture was holding back rampant capitalism and development because of its sympathy with the countryside and nature.It was a concerted attack on the British elite for its indifference to and wariness of industrialism and commercialism. Although the commercial and industrial revolutions originated in England, Wiener blamed a persistent strain in British culture, characterised by wariness of capitalist expansion and yearning for an Arcadian rural society, which had prevented England, and Britain as a whole, from fully exploiting the benefits of what it had created. Constable paintings of rural landscapes, William Blake's art and paintings, William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wordsworth's nature poetry and so on were all to blame. Wiener believed that any concern over pollution or the human cost of the industrial revolution was some foppish upper-class indulgence. His solution was to forget such 'sentimentalism', forget the countryside and concrete it over. Let loose rampant development!
The poisoned legacy of the Wiener Thesis lives on today in David Cameron and George Osborne. Freeing up the free market must come first. So the planning rules have been reformed to create a presumption in favour of development and remove environmental regulations. When Cameron talked of "dropping the green shit" you could almost see the ghosts of Mrs T and Sir Keith Joseph smiling down on him.

THIS NEO-LIBERAL MADNESS MUST END, STARTING WITH THE UK

Since the UK was at the forefront of the neo-liberal revolution, it should be at the forefront of its demise. Currently free-market fundamentalism dominates the thinking of all the grey parties as well as the governments and functionaries who shape the policy of the EU. It dominates culture in the UK in ways that Wiener would be proud of. The answer lies in a return to protectionism. We must adopt a new approach which I would term the ten heresies.

THE TEN HERESIES:

1) Protect small localised producers from competition from international corporate interests via tariffs and preferential trade agreements.

2) Regulate all economic activity to serve ecological goals.

3) Preferably use our influence to reform the EU away from neo-liberalism and use its institutions to achieve heresies 1 & 2. If this is not possible pull out of  the EU.

4) Raise income tax in order to expand and subsidise renewable energy at the expense of fossil fuels.

5) End all road building schemes, impose high taxes on air travel and reduce airport capacity.

6) Weave ecology into the curricula of all schools. Put as much emphasis on encouraging children to become young naturalists as it put on IT skills.

7) Impose tariffs on imported milk and food to protect small local farmers.

8) Create public works programs, paid for via general taxation and selling government bonds, in conservation, renewable energy such as wind farms, planting new forests and other key areas of the green economy.

9) Ban all development in the countryside

10) Reduce the working week, expand leisure time and set a target of zero unemployment.

Ending the Growth Obsession

"What becomes a man if the process of production takes away from work any hint of humanity, making of it merely mechanical activity. The worker himself is turned into a perversion of a free being." E. F. Schumacher "Small is Beautiful".

The current left-wing/right-wing consensus in politics is that the more 'things' we make and the more 'things' we sell, the more people are employed and the better off everyone will be. So expand the production of goods and services, get people to buy them and all will be well because of the resulting economic growth. This growth is measured in terms of the Gross National Product, meaning a measure of the amount of money that has changed hands for goods and services in the economy. Not who spends it or what on; not how the money was made; not on the environmental and human costs of making and spending that money and not on the loss of finite resources involved.

So now for the reality.....

1) The Bluntness of the Measure

The GNP measure boils everything down to cold statistics with no ethical dimension. For example, if an oil tanker went aground off the UK coast and its cargo spilled out it would devastate bird and marine life. Yet at the same time, if you apply the GNP measure, it could cause economic growth. The money paid to the tanker company for the original journey, the money paid in insurance for the loss of the ship, the money paid to the salvage company and the money paid to the helicopter company to fly the injured to hospital... it would all add up. The system turns an environmental disaster into a national growth success. Every time we take finite resources from the earth, it adds to economic growth.
Of course this goes beyond environmental concerns. The GNP measure does not care what the money is spent on. Online gambling addiction for example can blight lives and destroy families. However access to all forms of gambling temptation has hugely increased over the last 25 years, a result of successive governments seeing it as contributing to growth. Some readers of this blog may be thinking that its not the job of governments to tell people not to spend their money on gambling or indeed on anything as it is a matter of personal choice. However this viewpoint is misleading as very few people would be free-market zealots enough to say that we should liberalise the selling of cigarettes to children and sell guns in supermarkets. The debate is not whether to interfere with what people spend their money on but where to draw the line. Growth for growth's sake as an absolute does not take into account the human cost at all and so the figure that the grey parties worship is meaningless.

2) Quantity or Quality?

We are not just talking about growth but growth on top of growth. If you start with one and have 3% growth rate in the first year then in the second year, if you have 3% growth again, that is not 3% on top of the starting figure of one. It is 3% on top of last year's 3%. In two years you are producing and consuming 6% more than when you started. By this measure, to maintain a 3% growth rate every year we have to double what we produce and consume in 25 years. A 3% growth rate over 200 years means that in 200 years time we will need to produce and consume more in a day than we currently do in a year. Also the pressure is on to expand the western standard of consumption all over the world to reach 8 billion people.
The system takes no account of the quality of what is consumed as it is fixated on the quantity. Indeed it is better for growth if your laptop becomes outdated in a year, your fridge goes wrong in six months, your tv conks out after a month and so on as you have to keep consuming. The pressure is on to either sell shoddy rubbish or keep upgrading. The pressure is also on to pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of taste. We are trapped in a system where advertising manipulates us into buying mountains of poor quality stuff which we mostly don't need.

3) The Poverty of Growth

Left-wing commentators tend to see growth as a means to end poverty just as much as free-market zealots. Yet the journey ends at the same station. As the saying goes, 'When you have cut down the last tree or polluted the last river, you will know that you cannot eat money'. As far as the right-wing, free-market model goes, it positively needs poverty to survive and certainly does not aim to end it, despite the guff you read from CBI spokespeople and so on. Firstly it needs poverty to justify further expansion. Ending poverty is used to justify everything from GM crops to building warehouses over ancient woodland. Of course if you were to actually end poverty then this argument would be rendered obsolete. So the supporters of the system make sure that the problem persists while at the same time using the problem as an excuse for more growth. In addition it needs poverty to provide cheap labour for employers. This is achieved by either keeping some of your own population so poor (by cutting benefits) that they will work for low wages or outsourcing production/services to parts of the world that are even poorer. Alternatively you import a new labour force from a poorer country than the UK in order to keep wages down. Whatever approach is used, it still boils down to the system positively needing poverty.
It is why any attempt to genuinely solve poverty, for example via a guaranteed citizens' income, is blasted as 'uneconomic' by the grey parties and business interests. Those with vested interests have predicted economic disaster with every attempt to put some humanity into the system, be it the abolition of slavery or the ban on children going down the mines.

4) The Blind Faith in Technology

The Green movement is not anti-technology. Technology has been a force for good in many respects. It is the ability to network and spread ideas on the internet. It is also kidney machines, premature baby units and umpteen labour saving devices which give us more free time to enjoy our lives. However the problem is that technology is also nuclear weapons, pesticides and soulless production lines. Technology can be either a force for good or a force for bad. It is how we use it that counts. The growth system takes no account of this and sees technology as good if it leads to growth, end of. Moreover it has blind faith in technological progress being able to solve the environmental problems which growth produces. Hence GM crops will allow us to build over the countryside and still grow enough food, so we are told. Nuclear energy will allow us to keep producing electricity while dispensing with fossil fuels, so we are told. The list goes on. It amounts to gambling with our future as an alternative to challenging the growth obsession.
The key word with technology should be appropriate. Appropriate technology should be decided by the effect on people in the widest sense rather than just increasing economic growth and profits. Polluting crops with carcinogenic pesticides would clearly fail this test but medical technology which helps the disabled to walk again would clearly pass.

5) The Great God 'Work'.

The grey parties like to justify everything and anything via the argument that it is 'creating jobs'. Build an industrial estate over an ancient woodland and you are creating jobs so its ok. More and more fast food restaurants selling saturated fat riddled burgers to children is fine as it is creating jobs. So our lives are about spending most of our waking hours looking at the clock praying for the hands to move a bit quicker because we hate what we do or we see the damage that it is causing? Or we are here in order to spend 40 hours a week turning out fizzy drinks to damage children's' health, chemicals which damage the ozone layer or umpteen mind-numbing plastic nick-nacks which some ambitious up-their-own-backside character, like you see on the BBC show 'The Apprentice', can persuade the public it is trendy to possess?
We need to establish the difference between work which develops human talents and does not threaten the planet and that which is merely a job which we are forced to do by the system to serve the system.
We also need to get away from a work ethic which sees work as a good thing regardless of its nature and as an end in itself. We need to create jobs but to create them in beneficial areas such as recycling, renewable energy and conservation. If the hours are not as long and there is more leisure time then we need to get out of the strange way of thinking that this is somehow a bad thing.