LAST week’s survey published by researchers at University College London is one that the incoming Labour government would do well to study.
It found that 74 per cent of those responding believed that our political system was ‘rigged to service the rich and influential.’ Ninety-six per cent believed more respect should be shown to “ordinary people.”
Well over half of respondents blamed Tory mismanagement for the crisis of the National Health Service and the collapse of other aspects of the welfare state.
On the face of it, there is no direct evidence of a swing to the populist right – even though Labour itself only secured a third of the vote in the election. Yet the danger signals are there. These are precisely the attitudes the populist right seeks to exploit.
It is why the Labour leadership needs to pay very careful attention to current demands to address inequality and poverty as a central part of any drive to secure economic growth.
As the director of the Institute for Fiscal Policy recently noted, the Labour manifesto contained only one reference to “inequality” and 49 to “growth.” Yet, as in 1945, the two are inseparable.
It is therefore welcome that the demand for an end to the two-child benefit cap is being taken up strongly within the Parliamentary Labour Party as well as the trade union movement. The cap is one of the meanest legacies of Tory rule and a major contributor to poverty.
No less central is the issue of housing. The finding by Citizens Advice that almost half of those living in private rented accommodation in England suffer damp all year round is just one symptom of the wider problems caused by housing privatisation and the run-down of direct works departments.
Shelter’s response to the King’s Speech is that 90,000 houses for social rent will be needed each year for 10 years to resolve the crisis.
The government’s promised Renters’ Rights Act is therefore welcome – as is the pledge to secure 1.5 million new homes.
Yet the building of them will, it seems, be through partnerships with the private sector – albeit, it is claimed, with stringent conditions. This itself raises serious concerns.
A report from the Competition and Markets Authority published earlier this month noted that just 11 companies dominate the industry. They extract, as the report politely puts it, “higher profits than would be expected in a well-functioning market” and, worse still, their deficient management of infrastructure leads to “significant public detriment.” These, presumably, are the companies on which they government will rely.
It also indicative of its more general approach to economic development – which the economist Mariana Mazzucato has recently described as “a handout machine for business.” It is one that is very different to that in 1945 which gave a key role to developing the public sector and achieved rates of growth that can now only be dreamed of.
Great British Energy will be a partnership with the multinational energy companies, almost all now externally owned, in which direct public ownership will be peripheral. While the public ownership of rails is welcome, it leaves out the most profitable part, the private provision of rolling stock. Other essential public utilities, water, communications, posts, are left in private hands. Social care and, in England, education, remain largely so.
There is therefore every need for the trade union movement to give support to those MPs who are ready to challenge those elements in the Labour programme which are part of a “hand-out machine” for big business. These policies do nothing to boost real growth or resolve the massive social problems we face. Anything else will indeed open the door to the populist right.
