There has long been talk – justified in every aspect – that the Labour Party lacks a clear vision of how it envisages British society to claw itself back from the cliff edge of decline; how to reset the country, providing hope as well as clear direction. Last week, Rachel Reeves tried and, for some commentators, produced just such a picture. To me, however, the dread words she uttered were not her economic tinkering (because that’s what it amounted to) but her plea to the international finance mafia to trust her because ‘I’m an economist’.
I’ve written this before, quoting an academic, who looked into what economists forecast over the past century, and what actually happened. Not once – read those two words carefully and swallow hard – did they come close to getting it right. If science was run this way, we’d have long ago died out, victims to one madcap experiment or another. The so-called dismal science: well, dismal is spot on. It’s also an insult to real science to have the word linked to a guessing game ‘discipline’ like economics, as unruly as a gaggle of toddlers let loose with automatic rifles.
Economists love pithy Latin apothegms, it makes them sound as if they have the faintest idea of what they claim to be able to direct. My favourite of their many loaded sayings is ceteris paribus, roughly ‘if other things remain the same’ except, doh, they never, ever do. Thus: inflation will continue to come down as the Government has planned (whispering ceteris paribus, sotto voce, like an incantation from the Hogwarts School of Magic – and Economics).
So, trying to play the economics card as a winner for the Labour Party is like the wishful thinking that a one-legged man will win an arse-kicking contest, as the pithy Scouse saying goes. The entire Capitalist world is ranged against anything other than technocratic fiddling at the corners, knocking off a bit of VAT here, collecting a tad more tax from PAYE-paying suckers there. Meanwhile, the only game in town is played on City screens, only it’s not really there, it’s offshore, maybe Jersey, maybe the Caymans. Whatever, it’s not where civilians can ever find it to take part, including an ingénue chancellor – the first woman, if Labour manage not to lose, which speaks volumes in itself – with her shiny Economics degree framed on the wall of the Treasury.
Opinion polls of the better kind (PLUs – Polls Like Us) all point to a longing among the voters for something truly radical, a vision to which we may all aspire, hope to achieve; or at least for our children and grandchildren to look forward to. Hope is what’s missing from our politics, something to set against the utter despair of the past 14 misruled years by Tory chancers, wide-boys and, in one notable case, a lettuce.
In the darkest moments of the Second World War came such a vision of hope. It was the Beveridge Report, commissioned by a Government of National Unity, offering a bomb-scarred war-torn nation, with its back against the wall, the chance for a totally different future to the Hungry Thirties. If we hypothesise the Covid pandemic as our equivalent to a war, we might lift ourselves up by seeking a similar message of hope, a new vision.
An incoming Labour Government should immediately cancel the Covid Inquiry (we know what happened; it was a monumental cock-up) and divert the money instead to a Royal Commission (royal only because such a title gives the inquiry huge legal power) which, in effect, would be Beveridge 2.0, a blueprint for the 21st century. Its remit would be to seek ways to redistribute wealth to pay for a reformed NHS, integrate it with social care, more broadly how to ensure a much more equitable society, undoing the damage done in the past 14 years.
It’s often overlooked that William Beveridge, a Liberal, was aided enormously by his mistress at the time, Jessy Philip, a mathematician at the LSE. They identified five giants that a future government had to slay: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. They are, shamefully, all back with us today, made worse by the sustained attack on the Welfare State which the Labour Government of 1945 set up, a direct result of the Beveridge Report.
Beveridge 2.0 would be tasked, inter alia, with how to wipe out the toxic virus of neo-liberalism, which has infected public and private life, creating anomie and reification. It would re-assert the State’s critical role in economic planning (but not forecasting, just as useful as casting spells for fine weather); in running for the public benefit all the utilities; providing a devolved (to properly funded local authorities) financial settlement for health, social care, education and leisure facilities, the latter crucial to public well-being. It would reform the NHS, root and branch, ending the outmoded, historic form of general practice, replacing it with polyclinics, while giving people direct access to hospital treatment, cutting out the bureaucratic idiocy of having to be referred by a GP.
The Welfare State was founded on a principle of State intervention in many aspects of peoples’ lives. Long ago, just before he died in 1982, I interviewed Rab Butler, a serious Tory grandee of the old school (he’d been born in 1902) and architect of the secondary school system which benefitted me and countless others. He epitomised part of that long-lived cross-party consensus who knew how important the right kind of State intervention is.
Today, we are less willing to accept the State knows best – it palpably does not, yet have lost sight of the fact it may still act in our best interests. We’ve been taken to a point where we don’t trust politicians, maybe not even democracy. It’s a dangerous place to be standing; another kind of cliff edge. The Labour Party has a chance to redress both the absolute need to believe in, and work for, democracy and to recreate the hope that enabled millions of people to believe the sacrifice of total war was worth the promise of a fairer, more equitable society.
We’ve been at war in another one way for the past fourteen long years: at war with the very people we ought to have trusted: our Government, in this case all Tory-led, one after largely unelected another. They have – look around you – laid waste, like a conquering army, to the entire country, broken its public services, wrecked its economy through Brexit, robbed us of millions to hand to their sickeningly rich pals, some of whom are funding, via the world’s largest money laundering market, the City of London, an illegal war in Ukraine.
So, go tell Keir and Rachel: here’s your chance to make a difference. Try not to blow it on trivial pursuits. By the way, I’m still betting on a late spring election.
For more information on Labour’s economic plans: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/24/for-the-birds-rachel-reeves-has-outlined-a-plan-to-give-britain-liftoff
Netanyahu is committing genocide by starvation
Wiping out entire populations who you don’t like, for a variety of reasons – land that they have and you want is abundantly evident here – has been going on for a very long time. One way of checking that depressing fact is to read the Old Testament, although as an historical record it lacks any credibility. Except in its oft expressed intent: my chosen people (so, said to emanate from a deity, thus justifying any level of atrocity) and all that bollocks. Everyone else is, according to this belief, already as good as dead. So, why not kill them sooner rather than later?
Ironically, the UN’s Genocide Convention was conceived largely in response to World War Two which saw atrocities such as the Nazi’s sustained efforts to eradicate largely Jews that lacked an adequate description or legal definition. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the term genocide in 1944 to describe Nazi policies in occupied Europe, as well as the Armenian genocide, campaigned for its recognition as a crime under international law. This culminated in 1946 in a landmark resolution by the General Assembly that recognized genocide as an international crime and called for the creation of a binding treaty to prevent and punish its perpetration.
The Convention defines genocide as any of five ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, [my emphasis] preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
By refusing access to food, water, medical supplies and the means to make shelter, the Israeli Government under Netanyahu is pursuing a policy of genocide and in plain sight. All but one of the land crossings in and out of Gaza go through Israel. Only one of those is currently open There is another from Egypt but the IDF effectively control it because it first goes through Israel (the road starts in Jordan).
From 500-600 trucks a day before last October, now only one fifth of that number get through. The much-publicised air drops from the USAAF and the RAF are grandstanding side shows, killing people on the ground (one tonne pallets hit the ground, wherever the wind takes them, at roughly five metres per second – try jumping off your roof to get an idea of the impact).
There is a growing movement inside Israel to get rid of their prime minister, as monstrous as Putin and just as dangerous (they’ve both got their hands on nuclear weapons; neither would hesitate to use them, if cornered). We can only hope the effort to eject a man under investigation for fraud succeeds. Meanwhile, we should all lobby to end military supplies from the UK to Israel. The EU already has done just that; better late than never.
For further discussion of this issue go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/25/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-israel-aid
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/26/israel-unrwa-palestine
This week: Tim watched Kate Garraway: Derek’s Story on ITVX. In the final analysis, and through the tears (yours, unless you’re from another planet) it’s painfully, brutally and tenderly, all about love. Why we seek it, to the very end, why it matters, why we are made human through it. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn: just to love, and be loved in return. But there is an underlying message in this compelling, brilliant, sad and lovely programme: our social care system is utterly broken (see above for a remedy).