6th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

The New ‘Levellers’

          For many years I would have described myself, if asked, as a democratic socialist.  In today’s market-based society, everything, and everybody, is deemed to have a price.  It’s a society in which it is assumed that everyone’s ambition is the acquisition of greater personal wealth; in which everyone grabs as much as he can for as little as he (or she) can get away with.

            I have learned to survive, even to prosper, in this society.  I didn’t and don’t like it.  I hoped that democratic socialism could develop, if not into an earthly paradise, at least into a fairer and happier society than the one in which we live today.   However reading of the researches of two Quakers, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book ‘The Spirit Level’ published in 2009, convinced me that, although public ownership could be one way of producing a fairer society, there are other ways – the co-operative movement could be one, as could employer/employee partnerships like the John Lewis business group.

            Richard and Kate discovered and demonstrated that our society’s greatest evil was the ever-widening gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest members of our society.  Furthermore they discovered that levelling off incomes didn’t just benefit the poor (though they are the immediate and obvious beneficiaries) but the whole of society – rich, poor, and the great majority of us who are neither the one nor the other.   More equal societies, Denmark, Sweden and Norway for instance, are happier, less crime-ridden, have fewer teenage pregnancies, and are more peaceful and healthier societies.

            The United Kingdom has the most unequal society in Europe and one of the most unequal in the whole of the developed world.  The gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in the United Kingdom steadily gets wider.  The Labour Party was created to provide a political voice for working people and the poor.   It is to the party’s shame that during ten years of New Labour government, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest widened!

            In 2009, in the wake of the publication of The Spirit Level the Equality Trust was formed to draw attention to our unequal society; to promote policies that work towards greater equality and oppose those that widen the gap.  All over the country there are groups working towards those ends.  A newsletter is sent regularly to supporters and below is an extract from the latest newsletter:

February has been a successful if troubling month for exposing some of the forces behind our extreme inequality. Revelations on HSBC’s role in tax avoidance saw the media focus on the incredible schemes used by the very rich to shield their wealth. With impeccable timing it was also revealed than banks themselves have done pretty well over the last few years. The Robin Hood Tax campaign found bonuses paid out by banks and insurers since the start of the financial crisis are set to top £100bn this year.

It didn’t end there either, as a sting operation led to claims that MPs Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind were involved in a ‘cash for access’ scandal.  We calculated that Rifkind and Straw command rates of around £2,290 and £500 per hour for some of their consulting work. That’s 197 and 43 times the average wage rate respectively. Once again the question is asked as to how, and how much, our politicians are paid.

If you’d like to know more about the Equality Trust and its work, the address is 18 Victoria Park Square, London, E2 9PF.   Its email address is info@equalitytrust.org.uk and its web site is www.equalitytrust.org.uk

The major parties are setting out their policies in attempts to persuade us to vote for their candidate in the General Election which is now only weeks away.  It seems to me that the only Party attempting anything more than a slight nudging in one direction or the other of the present grossly unfair economic and political system is the Green Party. I was surprised and heartened to learn that the Greens now have more members that the much more publicised Ukippers. Green policies are not all that different from those of the Party for which I voted and which won the election in 1945 at the end of World War II.  They do promise the hope of a fairer, more equal society.  The Green Party candidate will get my vote.

That General Election in 1945, held just after I had returned to England at the end of World War II in Europe, was the first opportunity I had ever had to vote. I voted I thought, for a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world. The vote that I hope to cast in May this year will almost certainly be my last opportunity to vote in a general election. I shall cast it with exactly the same hope of a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world, not for myself this time (I certainly won’t see any sign of it in my lifetime!) but for my grandchildren.

There’s no place like home……..

……….and no vote-winner like ‘homes for all’ or, as far as the Tories are concerned ‘Home ownership for all’.  At least that’s what all the Party leaders think, because they’re competing with each other to promise 100,000 200,000 (why stop there – the sky’s the limit as far as promises are concerned) new homes if only they’re elected in May.   To hear them talk you’d think they were going to don the overalls and hard hats they wear for ‘photo opportunities at the workplace’ and go out and build those houses themselves.  A blog reader and regular correspondent, who has expert knowledge and experience in the field of housing explains the rationale of David Cameron’s promise of 200,000 cut-price homes.

He is promising to build 200,000 new homes and sell them at a discount to first time buyers under 40 (a high age limit, but that’s how long it takes to save a deposit these days!)  He claims this “scheme” will cost nothing to the public purse. Developers are apparently very enthusiastic.

The London Evening Standard explains, as no other news medium  is doing, that these homes are to be built on “brown field” and ex-commercial sites, not normally available for housing.  When Local Authorities allow these sites to be built on for a major development (as Croydon Council is  doing right now), they normally get money from the developers for building infrastructure, of £45,000 per home. They also have a requirement that 20% will be “affordable homes” and are sold to a Housing Association. Both of these rules are being scrapped for this scheme, thus “allowing developers” to sell the homes at a 20% reduced price. Presumably, for the concession, they are forced to sell at this reduced price (but in a market economy this doesn’t make much sense). If the buyers sell within 5 years they have to return the subsidy (I don’t understand that, because it isn’t really a subsidy, just a concession, which cannot be reversed). I don’t know who they would return it to? The homeless families who are being short changed by this scheme?  It sounds like a good 5 year savings plan to me, to buy a 250K flat and get a 50K discount, wait 5 years while you live in it, then sell and get the 50K back, plus the value of house price inflation which probably means it would be worth 100K.

The reality is, that this is another calculated move to help core Tory voters – middle aged, middle class people aspiring to buy their first home – while robbing would-be Labour-Voting Social Housing Tenants of potential housing.  In the end, this isn’t reducing the cost of housing, but rather it is increasing it, by increasing the supply of inflated owner-occupied housing at the direct cost of the supply of the shrinking supply affordable rented housing.  However, it makes a good headline before an election; about as meaningless as many of the other promises being made right now.

It is worth remembering that much, if not all, of our country’s current housing problems date from the Thatcher years when ‘right to buy’ legislation compelled local authorities (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, houses and flats that had been provided by their predecessors to eliminate homelessness and overcrowding from their districts; ‘buying votes with other people’s money!’  Prior to the ‘avaricious eighties’ local authorities had a right and a duty to provide homes in their districts for letting and to allocate them to those with greatest need.

‘The Government giveth – and the Government taketh away!’

I recently commented in this blog on the Government’s proposal to hand over all health and welfare services in the Manchester area to the local authority for that area. That’s quite a responsibility!

Today I have just heard on ‘BBC Breakfast’ that, in connection with another public service,  the Government is interfering in the very minutia of local government administration.  Motorists nationwide parking their cars in municipal car-parks are to be allowed an extra ten minutes before any action is taken about their over-running the time for which they have paid.  Furthermore local authorities mustn’t use illegal parking fines as a source of revenue.

Goodness – local government can be trusted to run the health and welfare services of a large conurbation but  can’t be trusted to administer its own car-parks!   It couldn’t, I suppose, be anything to do with the fact that a great many supporters of the present Government are owner-drivers of cars – and that a general election is only a few weeks away?