Saturday, June 8, 2013

Ed Milband’s austerity-lite is already out of date | John McDonnell


In his social security speech on Thursday, Ed Miliband supported several of the key demands of the left over the last decade: a council house-building programme, a living wage and even reform of work capability tests. So why aren't the left celebrating?

It's because time has moved on and the measures that he is at last backing are now simply inadequate to put right a society in which parents are missing meals so that their children can eat, families are living in bed and breakfasts or appallingly overcrowded conditions and people are working long hours in insecure employment for little pay. Or if you are young you have no prospect of a job at all.

A massive council house-building programme is desperately needed but will take time to implement. In the meantime, housing benefit will still be poured into the pockets of landlords, and housing shortages mean that landlords will still have the whip hand in rent negotiations. That is why we need rent controls to establish fair rents, and for councils to be able to go out and buy properties based upon a system of fair prices to house the families in need of a roof over their heads.

The concept of a living wage is promoted by the use of tax incentives but, like tax credits, these are just another way of subsidising bad employers. To be effective in tackling poverty wages, a living wage has to be mandatory and basic trade union rights should be restored so workers can protect themselves from exploitative employers.

Tackling the Atos disability tests will be seen as little more than a sop if Liam Byrne's promotion of the contributory principle is simply a device used to avoid confronting the Tories' use of welfare to divide our society and reinforces the striver/skiver ethos. Many in our society, especially those with disabilities, will never be able to match the contributions of others and a large number of people with caring responsibilities do not have their contributions recognised. The emphasis on contributions means that they will always be classed as second-class citizens.

The introduction of Labour's own welfare spending cap must have been seen as an ingenious card to trump the Tories' benefit cap. A word of caution: devices that appear clever now may lay the seeds of conflict later. It is difficult already to see how many families survive on the low level of benefits that they receive and it is children that are suffering the most. If policies to cut overall expenditure do not deliver in the timescale expected, then it must not be the poor, the disabled and pensioners who will have to pay with benefit cuts to meet the spending cap target. This is the sort of potential conflict that would split and undermine any future Labour government.

The worrying context of Miliband's speech is the acceptance of the austerity paradigm – as in Ed Balls's speech earlier this week. Again, time has moved on. In 2010 Labour gave the intellectual space to the Tories to allow them to define the cause of the economic crisis and it is now failing to appreciate the world is rapidly moving on from austerity solutions.

Increasingly, people are angry at the cesspit of corruption that our corporate sphere has become. The lingering disgust at bankers' bonuses is daily reinforced by new revelations about corporate tax scams and the price-fixing of our energy bills, while privatised former public services are used as the vehicles for large-scale profiteering. Labour's politics of austerity-lite look like irrelevant party political triangulation when more radical systemic change is coming on to the agenda.

Guardian