RHUN AP IORWERTH outlines Plaid Cymru’s immediate and medium-term policy goals
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Debt, a core tool of capitalism
Far from being opposed to it, capitalism depends on debt as a way of enforcing loyalty to the profit system from those that have the least to gain from it, explains JOHN GREEN
The debt phenomenon is not just found in the housing market and the student loan business, but everywhere you look. Capitalists depend on selling ever more products; if they can’t sell, they make no profit. That is why we are urged to buy ever more consumer items by slick advertising and seductive publicity.
A row over Trotskyist factions exposes competing visions of organisation inside Your Party and the wider left, argues NICK WRIGHT
A growing coalition, Cymru Together, is challenging traditional politics – calling for practical plans that connect climate action with economic justice, writes BETHAN SAYED
ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT delve into the strange, active – and sometimes predatory – world of plants
While politicians fixate on defence budgets, the real answers lie in peace-building and economic justice, says ALAN SIMPSON
ANDREA BRADLEY highlights how a City of Glasgow College health and safety dispute is the subject of an STUC Congress emergency motion
BEING in debt and being unable to pay it off is one of the recurring nightmares for so many people and it has been the basis for many tragic lives in novels — most famously in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.
In David Copperfield, the clerk Wilkins Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison after failing to meet his creditors’ demands. His long-suffering wife Emma stood by him, despite his financial exigencies that forced her to pawn all her family’s possessions.
Micawber’s name has become synonymous with someone who lives in hopeful expectation but is always financially on the edge. This has formed the basis for the Micawber Principle: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
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CAROL WILCOX argues for the proper implementation of the land value tax, which could see unused plots sold off and landlords priced out of landlordism, potentially resolving the housing and planning crises
DAVID MATTHEWS looks at what a collective future for welfare might have in store for us
Our housing crisis isn’t an accident – it’s class war, trapping millions in poverty while landlords and billionaires profit. To solve it, we need comprehensive transformation, not mere tokenistic reform, writes BECK ROBERTSON