MORE than 40 per cent of Argentinians are in poverty; inflation runs at over 160 per cent.
And recently elected President Javier Milei’s answers? To abolish laws limiting price rises for essentials including food; to remove price caps from healthcare; to revoke rules guaranteeing pension increases.
This is provoking resistance, of course, so like neoliberals before him Milei combines aversion to state regulation of the economy with enthusiasm for state restrictions on individual and collective freedoms. The right to strike is to be severely curtailed; protest rights are under attack, with the president threatening to charge unions for the cost of policing the protests they staged this week.
Milei’s election can seem bizarre. His “solutions” so obviously worsen the cost-of-living crisis for ordinary Argentinians.
But while in Britain we do not have neoliberal zealots quite as flamboyant — Milei claims to take political advice from his dog’s ghost and tweeted a photo of himself wielding a baseball bat in a Christmas message warning citizens to “be careful not to be communists” — the political landscape is not totally dissimilar.
British citizens’ protest rights have been significantly dismantled by the current Tory regime. As arrests of people unloading placards from a van ahead of the coronation showed, our right to demonstrate is now almost entirely at the discretion of the police.
If you possess anything that might be tied to anything else, you can be hauled in for intent to “lock on.” If your protest might cause a “serious nuisance,” you could be banged up for years.
And, like Milei, the Tory view on how to deal with falling living standards, rising prices and underfunded services is to hold pay down while proposing more tax cuts for the richest.
Over Christmas the signature proposal is to abolish inheritance tax. Raising the threshold for paying the higher 40p rate of tax, which currently affects 11 per cent of adults, and reducing the 20p basic rate are other tax cuts being pitched to the Tory faithful.
The strategy seems bizarre. Surveys repeatedly show the public’s number one concern is the crisis in the NHS. After that, the cost-of-living crisis, with energy prices having doubled in a couple of years and food prices through the roof. And the Tories want tax cuts for the rich.
It should be electoral suicide, but the Milei case shows it isn’t necessarily. People who feel betrayed by the status quo vote to break with it.
That has been the lesson of the three most recent nationwide votes in this country: the 2016 referendum when a majority voted to Leave the European Union; the huge swing to Labour in 2017, when its vote jumped from 30 to 40 per cent in just two years when Jeremy Corbyn offered “a different kind of politics;” and the 2019 election, when Boris Johnson was able to paint Labour as the status quo option because it sought to stay in the EU.
If the left offers a convincing alternative to the way things are it can seize on popular discontent and win.
But candidates of the middle ground do not prosper when anger at the elite courses through the public’s veins. Milei beat a sitting government, but Johnson showed that a sitting government itself can pose as the change party with the right branding.
The Tories say an inheritance tax cut would sharply differentiate them from Labour. Perhaps — Labour have been so insistent on vowing to continue every Tory policy that we cannot rule out a race to the bottom on tax cuts.
More importantly, a failure to offer a decisive break to the left from the way Britain is run now is certain to benefit the far right, whether or not tax gimmicks save Rishi Sunak’s job. People understand that the system is the problem: they will support an alternative, one way or the other.
