Where Does It End?

George Osbourne's announcement about the 2012 budget must surely blow a final, fatal hole in the notion that 'we are all in this together'. In the same breath as cutting the 50p tax rate so that those who incomes are already excessively high can keep yet more of their undeservedly vast wage, he has torpedoed public sector workers in low-income areas of the country by announcing that he intends to do away with the national pay structure.

If you are Welsh, or living in counties more northerly than Oxfordshire, this is a grim two-pronged attack on your way of life. Not only are you as a public sector worker going to see your pay reduced to bring it in line with an amount that a millionaire in a distant city-state deems appropriate, those same social workers, doctors, nurses and so on will reflect that they can earn more in London, so you will gradually see your services disappearing. Nick Clegg must be looking at his Sheffield constituency and reflecting that it was nice while it lasted.

One of the most significant aspects of this government is the way in which they are using a stick at a time of hardship to force the hand of workers. The disabled have been forced to work, even when they are not capable of doing so. Public sector workers have been forced onto the dole despite having skills and being willing to work, vastly increasing the national benefit bill (and in turn, the debt.) Those living in London in houses partly funded by council tax benefit have been told that they are no longer welcome and should live elsewhere.

Every day I reflect upon the government's public-sector blitzkrieg and look at the society that will result. Some services may improve, but the overwhelming majority of those will only be accessible to the wealthy. Private sector companies will become far more involved in healthcare (for comparison's sake, under Gordon Brown's government, it was capped at 2%, while under this government it could rise as high as 49%) and hence the costs of administering these systems could increase to twenty-five times as much as they are at present. This is millions that could be spent on healthcare and will instead be paid to - you guessed it - private sector admin companies, who are vastly inefficient, but don't really care as long as the profits come in. (For an example of this sort of company, type 'Capita failure' into Google and have a look through the first dozen or so of the 20,000,000 results.)

So in the not too distant future, if you want efficient or emergency healthcare, it's likely that you will have to pay a premium for it. We can expect see a move away from free healthcare and a move towards a system like the US one, which is inefficient, wasteful and vastly expensive, without actually generating better outcomes. What it does do is generate vast incomes for those shareholders in the House of Lords and the House of Commons - the same masters that we appoint to rule us.

There are some distinct inequalities in the way that this government treats people. The notion that 'entrepreneurs' (fast becoming a euphemism for anyone who earns a high sum, regardless of whether they are active investors or not) need to have tax cuts and more money so that they can create jobs for the rest of us is a fallacy that needs to be shot out of the water sooner rather than later. The profits made by businesses in Britain are vast, and the only ones whose profits have fallen during the financial crisis are the ones that are inefficient and treat their staff badly. Business has plenty of money to invest - it is about time they started to do so.

The continual pressure on public sector pay means that if current trends continue, it will not be longer before public sector workers are on minimum wage. Then, logical continuation suggests that we will see a gradual reduction or even abolition of that minimum wage, and that will be the coup de grace that sees a return to the days of workhouses and cap doffing. Perhaps we'll even do away with the word 'chav' and start using the word 'serf' again.

The message from this government of bankers and millionaires is clear. Move to London, get a job as one of us, and you'll be well looked after. Choose to live elsewhere, or try to get a job that actually improves society rather than creating wealth for its own sake, and you truly are on your own.

Why Capitalism Has To Step Up

Ring the bell, call off the dogs...the time has come to admit it. Our green and pleasant land (though not perhaps as Green as it could be, if campaigning groups are to be believed) in is more than just a bit of a pickle.

George Osborne's Autumn Statement reflected a government that knew full well that it has no answers for the current economic crisis. But then, we live in unprecedented times, so who does? When your opposition are offering nothing more creative than the same slash-and-burn policy that you are offering yourself - albeit with a caveat that it should be somehow slower and more touchy-feely - where is the impetus to deliver an alternative option? What is certain without a shadow of a doubt is that if we follow the current economic plan, we stand to see a decade of misery that will have a social impact on the lowest paid that goes beyond the understanding of the middle earners, who will be too distracted by their own financial concerns to realise how this is all interconnected.

So misery there is, and misery there will be. And what of solutions? I am minded of the young Occupy campaigner, who when asked for a solution to the current economic crisis, replied, 'a kind of system that works both like capitalism and like communism.' I scoffed. And I remind you, I am pro-Occupy and left-wing by birthright. But then, I got thinking. We have all worked for capitalism. And as it failed us so badly when it was circumvented to allow a safety net for banks who could have been allowed to fail (an ultimate lesson that may have proved more painful than the bailout that was agreed), it is time to make capitalism into a tool that works for us, rather than a giant rolling ball that crushes us all on route.

So as the public sector realises it can no longer cling onto the terms and conditions that insulate them from the real world, so the private sector must realise that they can no longer claim vast wages and put the needs of the shareholders above the needs of the societies in which they operate. I realise that in both instances, this represents a paradigm shift to how each sector operates, but greater clarity of understanding is required if social unrest and bitter rivalry are not to bring the country to its knees.

In times of crisis, a government faced with falling living standards has a responsibility to arrest this decline by operating in a role that redistributes wealth. Much has been made of George Osbourne's pledge to reduce tax rates for the highest paid to encourage entrepreneurism. Well, rather than waiting for this to happen of its own accord, why not legislate for it? For example, you could try increasing the tax rate for individuals above a certain level, and investing the monies received in a growth and job creation fund. And yes, I realise that this takes money away from servicing the UK's vast debts, but as we have discussed in previous posts, we have to think about growth rather than just debt. To use an analogy employed by a friend of mine, when you buy a house, you don't starve your family so you can pay off the debt in a year.

The scariest of notions, and the one that all of our political parties have yet to face because the public itself remains in denial, is that we are now playing a different game to any that we have played before. Our ideologies of individual responsibility and free-market determination will not save us, and as things become increasingly fraught in the decade to come, we will need fresh ideas and a different model for how to run a society. And to prove how innovative we can be, we will need to completely remodel capitalism and make it work for us.

Our new capitalism must lead by promoting social interest. It must espouse the virtues of investment and innovation above all else. It must encourage us to ask ourselves what has happened to our manufacturing industries and to ask ourselves why our high streets have become clones of one another, supporting only the interests of giant chains who do so little to meet their social obligations to the rest of us. We must ask what our high earners do that makes them worth their high salaries. And when we think we have answers to these questions, we must have the courage to act on the answers that we have, rather than allowing political inclination or fear to temper our response.

The shame of India's lost girls

Continuing with the pro-feminist agenda of some of my more recent posts and taking the chance to visit some of the international roots at the heart of my interests, I have discovered that the BBC is currently running a number of magazine articles about the Indian census. The results suggest an alarming decline in the number of girls under seven years of age.

The pressure on women to bear male children is intensified by the social pressure upon Indian families to provide dowries - payments of money, goods or land - to a husband's family when their daughters are married. India outlawed dowries in 1961 but the custom is still widespread and the same escalating wages and inequality that we have seen beginning to cause havoc in the Western world are starting to take hold in Asia too, with devastating effects upon the abortion rates.

Another factor in the decreasing number of female births is the increasing availability of sex-determination tests for pregnant women. There are estimated to be in excess of 40,000 clinics providing this service in India today and many of them circumvent the law by failing to register themselves with the government.


In Haryana, the worst affected region of India, there are now less than 830 girls born for every 1000 boys and incredibly, in that region, this represents a significant improvement on the figures from ten years ago. However, in many areas, the number of girls being born is falling steadily and this brings with it massive potential for social problems.

Men in Haryana are now struggling to find suitable brides and have taken to 'importing' them from other states. However, this is not a practise without pitfalls as religious and cultural norms vary tremendously between states and often the brides feel left adrift, unable to cope with different food, weather, attitudes to their presence and even language barriers.

It will take the best efforts of cultural, social and religious leaders to stem the tide of female foeticide. The Indian government is now weighing in with measures to assist the process, giving monetary support to parents who have female children and investing money on the parents' behalf so that those girls may have an acceptable dowry or a college education.

Governments though, can only do so much - and by alleviating the symptoms, they do nothing to tackle the underlying social barriers for women in what is still a largely male-dominated and feudal society. It is only in changing the mindset of the population and doing all that is legally necessary to secure protection for girls before they are born that the worrying trends shown in the 2011 census can be reversed.