This article traces the history of ‘crowding out’, and its use as a justification for austerity and state deflation from its origins in the 1920s to its latest post-2010 incarnation. It examines why governments have kept turning to austerity and continue to justify it on the grounds that public sector activity crowds out more productive private activity, despite the accumulated evidence that this traditional pro-market formulation has failed to deliver its stated goals. It examines three other embedded forms of crowding out that have been highly damaging—leading to weakened social resilience and more fragile economies—but which have been ignored by both governments and mainstream political economists.

THE IDEA OF ‘crowding out’ has long been one of the central canons of pro-market economic theory. The concept was first promoted at an international conference of officials in Brussels in 1920 to discuss ‘sound economic policy’ in the postwar years. Given limited capital, asked the British delegation, will ‘Governments or private industry’ use it more productively? ‘The answer is … private industry’.¹ This argument was then placed at the heart of a strategy of state-imposed austerity through cuts in public spending and wages applied in Britain and other nations in the early 1920s.

Following the short-lived boom at the end of the 1914–18 war, Britain, along with much of Europe, faced growing economic turbulence and surging dole queues, along with high levels of public debt from funding the war. With heightened public expectations of social reform, the coalition government Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, initially promised social reconstruction through higher state spending, especially on homes and schooling. Simultaneously, the Prime Minister faced demands from the owners of capital for a return to the pre-war status quo.

During the war, large chunks of the economy had been taken under state control, with the subordination of private profit to steer resources to the war effort. While the public was calling for a better society in return for the sacrifices of war, business leaders were demanding the dismantling of the heightened state intervention of the war years, lower rather than higher public spending, and the reversal of the strengthened bargaining power labour had enjoyed during the war years. Political and industrial clashes were the inevitable outcome.

Deepening recession and the fear of mounting unrest, fuelled by the shadow of Bolshevism, induced panic among the ruling political and corporate classes. In response, the government dropped its commitment to social renewal in favour of a programme of austerity, or state induced deflation. This involved severe cuts in public spending, including reductions in pay for police, teachers and other public servants—cuts dubbed the ‘Geddes axe’ on the advice of a committee chaired by Sir Eric Geddes, the Minister of Transport.

Economic revival, it was argued, depended on lower spending by the state, lower wages and a return to a balanced budget, with state spending matched by tax revenue. If the state had borrowed more to meet its high-profile postwar pledges on housing and education, it was argued, more efficient and more pro-value private activity would have been ‘crowded out’. The measures, based on the idea of an automatic trade-off between state and private activity, were, it was asserted, simply sound economics based on fundamental laws—and not to be tinkered with—of how the economy worked. These ‘laws’ drew on the doctrines of the early classical economists that free markets and minimal state intervention would bring equilibrium, stability, and optimal growth.

Austerity Britain

Since the 1920s, governments have repeated this strategy of austerity—based on the doctrine of crowding out—on several occasions. These include the early 1930s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the post-2010 decade. Despite the time gaps, these episodes have been marked by almost identical justifications and remarkably similar impacts.

One of the constant themes has been a replay of the balanced budget theory of the 1920s and 1930s. Another has been that public spending cuts and lower wages would release scarce resources for the private sector. In 1975, two Oxford economists, Roger Bacon and Walter Eltis, argued in Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers that Britain’s economic plight stemmed from too many social workers, teachers and civil servants and not enough workers in industry and commerce. Buying into this argument, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, told the House of Commons in 1979, ‘[we need to] roll back the boundaries of the public sector’ in order ‘to leave room for commerce and industry to prosper’.2 In June 2010, launching another rolling programme of spending cuts in his first budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, repeated this claim that public spending ‘crowds out’ private endeavour.

Again, the presumption was that a more robust economy requires more private and less state activity, along with the counter-intuitive idea that austerity was the route to growth and enterprise. The somewhat crude ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ mantra was widely echoed. ‘The next government is going to have many challenges’, wrote the Times in 2010, ‘but tackling a public sector that has become obese … is going to have to be a priority’.³ Channel 4 went a step further with a programme describing state spending as a ‘Trillion pound horror story’, while The Spectator magazine called it ‘the most important programme to appear on British television this year’.⁴

So, does the austerity/crowding out theory stand up? And if not, why has it been so widely applied? The accumulated evidence shows that it is at best a significant oversimplification of the way economies work. Crowding out of private by too much public sector activity might apply when an economy is operating at full capacity and employment, but the doctrine has only been applied in situations of economic crisis, high unemployment and inadequate demand. Even at full capacity, there is still a choice to be made about the appropriate balance between public and private activity.

Heterodox economists, such as John Hobson in the early twentieth century, had offered an alternative route to growth and out of crisis. His work, which had an important influence on J. M. Keynes, showed that recessions were the product of a shortfall of demand stemming from ‘under-consumption’ and ‘over-production’ triggered in large part by a lack of purchasing power among low- and middle-income households arising from extreme levels of wealth and income inequality.⁵

In the 1920s and early 1930s, slamming on the public spending brakes proved counter-productive. It cut demand and slowed recovery, with private as well as public activity ‘crowded out’. The strategy had minimal effect on improving the state of the public finances, but led to a retreat on social programmes, while unemployment never fell below one million in the inter-war years.

A hundred years on, the Osborne cuts have had a very similar, and predictable impact. They also came with a new label: ‘expansionary austerity’, but an identical message—that a smaller state would generate greater stability via lower interest rates, greater confidence and faster growth. In the event, the strategy turned out to be an additional assault on an already weakened economy, with the cuts in public spending having little or no impact on expanding private activity, while damaging the quality of Britain’s social infrastructure and weakening its system of social support.⁶ One critic, David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, concluded that, by destroying productive capacity and making households worse off, the austerity programme simply ‘crushed the fragile recovery’.⁷ In one estimate, rolling cuts in public spending were said to have shrunk the economy by £100 billion by the end of the decade.⁸ Another study showed that if real-terms growth in public spending at the 3 per cent level inherited in 2010 from the previous Labour government had been maintained and paid for by matching tax rises, Britain’s government debt burden would still have been lowered by 2019.⁹

None of this means that crowding out never occurs. It just takes very different forms from the process advanced in neoliberal thinking. There are three alternative and distinct types of crowding out at work that have consistently had a malign effect on both the economy and wider society, yet have not been systematically addressed in the mainstream economic literature or by relevant government departments.¹⁰ First, the idea that markets know best in nearly all circumstances has shifted the balance between private and public activity too far in favour of the former, thus crowding out the latter. Second, an increasing share of private activity has been geared less to its primary function—to building economic strength and creating new wealth—than to boosting personal corporate rewards in a way which fuels inequality, weakens economies and crowds out economic and social progress. Third, there is the way the return of the ‘luxury capitalism’ of the nineteenth century (triggered by the application of pro-inequality neoliberal policies) has come at the expense of the meeting of essential material and social needs.

The balance between private and public activity

The simple notion—private good, public bad—has long been overplayed by neoliberal theorists. Both have a role to play and the real issue is getting the right balance between the two. State spending plays a crucial role not just in meeting wider social goals, but in supporting economic dynamism and stability. Private corporations do not operate in a vacuum. The profits they make, the dividends they pay and the rewards received by executives stem from a too-often unacknowledged interdependence with wider society, including the state. Business provides jobs and livelihoods, while responding to consumer demand. Society provides the workforce, education, transport, multiple forms of inherited infrastructure and often substantial state subsidies.

History shows that while bad decisions are too common, carefully constructed and evidence-based state intervention can have a highly positive impact. Government responsibility lies in helping to shape markets, prevent market abuse, support innovation, share the burden of risk-taking in the development of new technologies, promote public and private wealth creation and protect citizens. It is now time to ask if these functions—from market regulation to citizen protection—have been underplayed.

Britain is a heavily privatised and weakly regulated economy. Among affluent nations, it has a comparatively low level of public spending, including social spending and public investment in infrastructure, relative to the size of the economy.¹¹ A relatively low portion of the economy is publicly owned.¹² With the cut-price sell-off of state assets, from land to state-owned enterprises, the share of the national wealth pool held in common has fallen sharply from a third in the 1970s to less than a tenth today. This ongoing privatisation process has also greatly weakened the public finances. Britain is one of only a handful of rich nations with a deficit on their public finance balance sheet, with net public wealth—public assets minus debt—now at minus 20 per cent of the economy. The balance stood at plus 40 per cent in 1970. This shift has greatly weakened the state’s capacity to handle issues like inequality, social reconstruction and the climate crisis.¹³

The emphasis on private capital as the primary engine of the economy has failed to deliver the gains promised by its advocates. Since the counter-revolution against postwar social democracy from the early 1980s, and especially since 2010, levels of private investment, research and development, and productivity—key determinants of economic strength—have been low both historically and compared with other rich countries. Several factors account for Britain’s relative private ‘investment deficit’. They include Britain’s low wage history, with abundant cheap labour dulling the incentive to invest, and the perverse system of financial incentives that makes it more attractive for executives to line their pockets than build for the future. There is also the preference given to capital owners—an increasingly narrow group—in the distribution of the gains from corporate activity. In the four years from 2014, FTSE 100 companies generated net profits of £551 billion and returned £442 billion of this to shareholders in share buy-backs and dividends, leaving only a small portion of these gains to be used for private investment and improved wages that support economic strength.¹⁴ With UK corporations increasingly owned by overseas institutional investors, such as US asset management firms, little of this profit flow has ended up in UK pension and insurance funds and back into the domestic economy.

Some forms of financial and business activity have played a destructive role. In a remarkable parallel with the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crash and the financial crisis that followed were classic examples of the impact of uncontrolled market failure. They were the product of tepid regulation of the financial system that turned a blind eye to a lethal cocktail of excessive profiteering and reckless gambling by global finance. It was only public intervention on a mass scale to bail out the banks—and many of the architects of the crash—that prevented an even greater crisis.

Claims about the overriding benefits of the outsourcing of public services to private companies have been exposed by a succession of scandals involving large British companies like G4S and Serco and by damning reports of the consequences of outsourcing in the NHS, the probation service and army recruitment.¹⁵ Such claims were also undermined by the collapse of two giant multi-billion-pound behemoths—the UK construction company Carillion and the public service supplier Interserve (which employed 45,000 people in areas from hospital cleaning to school meals). In the ten years to 2016, Carillion, sunk by self-serving executive behaviour and mismanagement, liked to boast about another malign form of crowding out—of how it raised dividend payments to shareholders every year, with such payments absorbing most of the annual cash generation, rather than building resilience.

Extraction

A second form of crowding out stems from the return of a range of extractive business mechanisms aimed at capturing a disproportionate share of the gains from economic activity. While some of today’s towering personal fortunes are a reward for value-creating activity that brings wider benefits for society as a whole, many are the product of a carefully manipulated, and largely covert, transfer of existing (and some new) wealth upwards. Early economists, such as the influential Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, warned—in 1896—of the distinction between ‘the production or transformation of economic goods’ and ‘the appropriation of goods produced by others.’¹⁶ Such ‘appropriation’ or ‘extraction’ benefits capital owners and managers—those who ‘have’ rather than ‘do’—and crowds out activity that could yield more productive and social value. It delivers excessive rewards to owners and executives at the expense of others, from ordinary workers and local communities to small businesses and taxpayers.¹⁷

Extraction has been a key driver of Britain’s low wage, low productivity and growth sapping economy. Many large companies have been turned into cash cows for executives and shareholders. A key source of this process has been the return of anti-competitive devices described as ‘market sabotage’ by the American heterodox economist Thorstein Veblen over a century ago’.¹⁸ In contrast to the claims of pro-market thinkers, corporate attempts to undermine competitive forces have been an enduring feature in capitalism’s history, contributing to erratic business performance and economic turbulence.

Far from the competitive market models of economic textbooks, the British—and global—economy is dominated by giant, supranational companies. Key markets—from supermarkets, energy supply and housebuilding, to banking, accountancy and pharmaceuticals—are controlled by a handful of ‘too big to fail’ firms. The oligopolistic economies created in recent decades are, despite the claims of neoliberal theorists, a certain route, as predicted by many distinguished economists, from the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, to the Cambridge theorist, Joan Robinson, to weakened competition, extraction and abnormally high profit. This new monopoly power, according to one study of the US economy, has been a key determinant of ‘the declining labor share; rising profit share; rising income and wealth inequalities; and rising household sector leverage, and associated financial instability.’¹⁹

Although they helped pioneer popular and important innovations, the founders of today’s monolithic technology companies have turned themselves from original ‘makers’ into ‘takers’ and ‘predators’. Companies like Google and Amazon have entrenched their market power by destroying rivals and hoovering up smaller competitors, a form of private-on-private crowding out of small by more powerful firms. Multi-billionaires in large part because of immense global monopoly power, the Google, Amazon and Facebook founders can be seen as the modern day equivalents of the American monopolies created by the ‘robber barons’ such as J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould through the crushing of competitors at the end of the nineteenth century.

The House of Have and the House of Want

The third type of crowding out follows from the way the growth of extreme opulence for the few has too often been bought, in effect, at the expense of wider wellbeing and access to basic essentials for the many. Today’s tearaway fortunes are less the product of an historic leap in entrepreneurialism and new wealth creation than of the accretion of economic power and elite control over scarce resources. It is a paradox of contemporary capitalism that as societies get more prosperous, many fail to ensure the most basic of needs are fully met.

In Britain, elements of the social progress of the past are, for a growing proportion of society, being reversed. Compared with the 1970s, a decade when inequality and poverty levels were at an historic low, poverty rates have more or less doubled, while both income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated at the top. Housing opportunities for many have shrunk and life expectancy rates have been falling for those in the most deprived areas. Mass, but hit and miss, charitable help has stepped in to help fill a small part of the growing gaps in the state’s social responsibilities. While Britain’s poorest families have faced static or sinking living standards, the limits to the lifestyle choices of the rich are constantly being raised. The private jet, the luxury yacht, the staff, even the private island, are today the norm for the modern tycoon.

In heavily marketised economies with high levels of income and wealth concentration, the demands of the wealthy will outbid the needs of those on lower incomes. More than one hundred years ago, the Italian-born radical journalist and future British MP, Leo Chiozza Money, had warned, in his influential book, Riches and Poverty, that ‘ill-distribution’ encourages ‘non-productive occupations and trades of luxury, with a marked effect upon national productive powers.’²⁰ The ‘great widening’ of the last four decades has, as in the nineteenth century, turned Britain (and other high inequality nations such as the US) into a nation of ‘luxury capitalism’. The pattern of economic activity has been skewed by a super-rich class with resources deflected to meeting their heightened demands.

While Britain’s poorest families lack the income necessary to pay for the most basic of living standards, demand for superyachts continues to rise. The UK is one of the highest users of private jets, contributing a fifth of related emissions across Europe. The French luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH—Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy—is the first European mega-company to be worth more than $500 billion. Resources are also increasingly directed into often highly lucrative economic activity that protects and secures the assets of the mega-rich. Examples include the hiring of ‘reputation professionals’ paid to protect the errant rich and famous, the use of over-restrictive copyright laws, new ways of overseeing and micromanaging workers, as well as a massive corporate lobbying machine.

The distributional consequences of an over-emphasis on market transactions is starkly illustrated in the case of the market for housing. Here, a toxic mix of extreme wealth and an overwhelmingly private market has brought outsized profits for developers and housebuilders at the cost of a decline in the level of home ownership, a lack of social housing and unaffordable private rents. The pattern of housebuilding is now determined by the power of the industry and the preferences of the most affluent and rich. Following the steady withdrawal of state intervention in housing from the 1980s—with local councils instructed by ministers to stop building homes—housebuilders and developers have sat on landbanks and consistently failed to meet the social housing targets laid down in planning permission. Instead of boosting the supply of affordable social housing, scarce land and building resources have been steered to multi-million-pound super-luxury flats, town houses and mansions. In London, Manchester and Birmingham, giant cranes deliver top end sky-high residential blocks, mostly bought by speculative overseas buyers and left empty. The richest crowd out the poorest, or as Leonard Cohen put it, ‘The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes, everybody knows.’

There has been no lack of warnings of the negative economic and social impact of economies heavily geared to luxury consumption, most of them ignored. Examples include the risk of the coexistence of stark poverty and extreme wealth: of what the radical Liberal MP, Charles Masterman, called, in 1913 ‘public penury and private ostentation’, and what the American radical political economist Henry George had earlier called ‘The House of Have and the House of Want’.²¹ Then there was the influential 1950s’ warning from the American economist, J. K. Galbraith, of ‘private affluence and public squalor’.²² ‘So long as material privation is widespread’, wrote the economist, Fred Hirsch, in the 1970s, ‘the conquest of material scarcity is the dominant concern.’²³

For much of the last century, policy makers have seen wealth and poverty as separate, independent conditions. But that view has always been a convenient political mistruth. If poverty has nothing to do with what is happening at the top, the issue of inequality can be quietly ignored. Yet, the scale of the social divide and the life chances of large sections of society are ultimately the outcome of the conflict over the spoils of economic activity and of the interplay between governments, societal pressure and how rich elites—from land, property and private equity tycoons to city financiers, oil barons and monopolists—exercise their power. In recent decades, the outcome of these forces has favoured the already wealthy, with the shrinking of the economic pie secured by the poorest. As the eminent historian and Christian Socialist, R. H. Tawney, declared in 1913, ‘What thoughtful people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice, a problem of riches.²⁴

Conclusion

These three alternative forms of crowding out have imposed sustained harm on social and economic resilience. Despite this, governments have continued to apply a long-discredited austerity-based theory of crowding out, while ignoring other, arguably more damaging forms of the phenomena. The latest application of the original theory since 2010 has inflicted ‘vast damage on public services and the public sector workforce’, without delivering the declared goal of ‘crowding in’ through faster recovery and growth, or improved public finances.²⁵

Britain is currently being subjected to yet another wave of austerity, with the 2022 Autumn Statement announcing a new package of projected public spending plans, higher taxes and lower public sector real wages, again in the name of fixing the public finances and boosting growth.²⁶ It’s the same short-term, narrowly focussed strategy that, by digging the economy into a deeper hole and cutting public investment, has failed time and again over the last 100 years.

Meanwhile, other damaging forms of the crowding out of key public services, value-adding economic activity and the meeting of vital needs, driven by over-reliance on markets, excess inequality and dubious private-on-private activity, are simply ignored or dismissed.

Notes

¹ C. E. Mattei, The Capital Order, Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 156. ² House of Commons, Hansard, 12 June 1979, col 246. ³ J. Tomlinson, ‘Crowding out’, History and Policy, 5 December, 2010; https://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/crowding-out⁴ J. Delingploe, ‘Britain’s trillion pound horror story’, The Spectator, 13 November, 2010. ⁵ J. A. Hobson, The Industrial System, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. ⁶ C. Breuer, ‘Expansionary austerity and reverse causality: a critique of the conventional approach’, New York, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper no. 98, July 2019. ⁷ D. Blanchflower, Not Working, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 172. ⁸ A. Stirling, ‘Austerity is subduing UK economy by more than £3,600 per household this year’, New Economics Foundation, 2019; https://neweconomics.org/2019/02/austerity-is-subduing-uk-economy-by-more-than-3-600-per-household-this-year⁹ R. C. Jump, J. Michell, J. Meadway and N. Nascimento, The Macroeconomics of Austerity, Progressive Economy Forum, March 2023; https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/pef_23_macroeconomics_of_austerity.pdf¹⁰ See S. Lansley, The Richer, The Poorer, How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, Bristol, Policy Press, 2022. ¹¹ K. Buchholtz, Where Social Spending is Highest and Lowest, Statistica, 28 January, 2021; https://www.statista.com/chart/24050/social-spending-by-country/¹² OECD, The Covid-19 Crisis and State Ownership in the Economy, Paris, OECD, 2021; https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-covid-19-crisis-and-state-ownership-in-the-economy-issues-and-policy-considerations-ce417c46/¹³ L. Chancel, World Inequality Report, World Inequality Database, 2021. ¹⁴ High Pay Centre/TUC, How the Shareholder-first Model Contributes to Poverty, Inequality and Climate Change, TUC, 2019. ¹⁵ National Audit Office, ‘Transforming Rehabilitation: Progress Review’, National Audit Office, 1 March 2019; https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/transforming-rehabilitation-progress-review/¹⁶ V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, New York, Augustus M. Kelley, 1896. ¹⁷ Lansley, The Richer, The Poorer. ¹⁸ T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisured Classes, New York, The Modern Library, 1899; T. Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System, New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1921. ¹⁹ I. Cairo and J. Sim, Market Power, Inequality and Financial Instability, Washington DC, Federal Reserve, 2020. ²⁰ L. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty, London, Methuen, 1905, pp. 41–3. ²¹ C. Masterman, The Condition of England, Madrid, Hardpress Publishing, 2013; H. George, Progress and Poverty, New York, Cosimo Inc., 2006, p. 12. ²² J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958, ch. 23. ²³ F. Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, Abingdon, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 190. ²⁴ R. H. Tawney, ‘Poverty as an industrial problem’, inaugural lecture at the LSE, reproduced in Memoranda on the Problems of Poverty, London, William Morris Press, 1913. ²⁵ V. Chick, A. Pettifor and G. Tily, The Economic Consequences of Mr Osborne: Fiscal Consolidation: Lessons from a Century of UK Macroeconomic Statistics, London, Prime, 2016; G. Tily, ‘From the doom loop to an economy for work not wealth’, TUC, February, 2023; https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/doom-loop-economy-work-not-wealth²⁶ Chancellor of the Exchequer, Autumn Statement, 2022, Gov.uk, 17 November, 2022; https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/autumn-statement-2022

This article was first published in The Political Quarterly 

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Biography

• Stewart Lansley is the author of The Richer, The Poorer: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, a 200-year History, 2021. He is a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol and an Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

picture credit flickr

The post Rethinking ‘Crowding Out’ and the Return of ‘Private Affluence and Public Squalor’ appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Guy Standing

If there is one area where the Labour Party should come together it is in the strategy to revive the economy of the sea. Under common law, going way back, the sea, the seashore, the seabed and all in the sea belonging to the country are part of the commons, that is, the property that belongs to everybody, equally. Yet the sea has been subject to a greater ‘enclosure’ than land, and has been subject to a process of privatisation and financialisation that nobody who calls themselves a progressive should accept. This will become even more important since the sea is projected to double its contribution to global GDP to over 10%.

Consider a few facts. Since 1982, the UK owns four million square miles of sea under what is called its Exclusive Economic Zone. That part adjoining Britain is three times its total land area. But successive governments have overseen the privatisation of the blue economy and given vast subsidies to corporations, costing taxpayers billions of pounds and enhancing the profits of foreign capital and financial firms.

Take the seabed. It has always been accepted as a commons, with the government and monarchy required to act as the Steward, expected to respect what is known as the Public Trust Doctrine, that is, to act in such ways as to ensure the commons is kept intact and in good condition. So, why has the left kept quiet while the Crown Estate has been auctioning off thousands of square miles of our seabed, earning an income flow estimated to be £9 billion, while selling rights to multinational capital? More auctions are planned. Details are given in my book, The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea. Labour should make it clear that it will block further privatisation of our seabed.

Then there is fishing. Starting in 1967, the government operates a complex system by which it hands over what are private property rights as ‘fish quota’ to selected fishing companies. A trick played was that the amount of quota given to companies was based on recorded past catches. Until quite recently, small-scale fishers were not required to keep records of how much they caught.

So, when the current system came into effect, they were excluded from the main ‘pool’ of quota. A result is that today just 25 firms own over two-thirds of all the quota, and five families, all on the Sunday Times Rich List, own 29%. They are given virtual ownership of the fish, denying all small-scale fishermen the right to catch much at all. This was not the fault of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy; the Leave Campaign lied that it was.

Making the situation worse, the government hands out £120 million a year in subsidies, most going to the corporates. And they have treated the law with contempt. Thirteen of the top 25 firms were caught clandestinely breaking the quota rules, catching 170,000 tonnes of illegal excess fish worth £63 million. They received fines but nobody was imprisoned because under British law it is merely a civil offence, not criminal. And they were allowed to keep their quota. The book gives later cases.

The government slashed the budget of the Marine Management Organisation, the body responsible for policing what happens at sea. And there are just 12 coastguard vessels to monitor 773,000 square kilometres – one for every 64,000. This is de facto deregulation. It should be seen in the context of one fact. Because economic growth has been given precedence over preservation of the commons, subsidies have helped fisheries become more ‘efficient’, meaning more fish are taken than is sustainable. As a result, the hourly catch today is just 6% of what it was a century ago. At current rates, our children will have no British sea fish to eat.             

Then there is aquaculture. Over half the seafood we eat today comes from onshore and offshore fish farming. This is another sphere where foreign capital has come to dominate. It is a form of enclosure. Giant fish farms are doing ecological damage, and big companies, most notably the Norwegian Mowi, only bear half the production costs. In Norway, the government is imposing a 40% levy on the cash-flow of such firms. Labour should match that.  

Then there are our ports and harbours. Thatcher privatised all ports, and most have fallen into the hands of foreign capital, much of it Chinese and much controlled by private equity, a form of finance notorious for seeking short-term profit maximisation, asset stripping and ecological disdain. At the time of writing, there is a scandal in the Teeside, where local fishermen have had their livelihoods destroyed by the port owners dredging and dumping 250,000 tonnes of sediment in the sea, killing off crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans. The port and the river authority are run by the subsidiary of a Canadian private equity company. All ports should be nationalised or at least mutualised.   

Then there are the giant cruise ships and container ships. They use the most polluting ‘bunker diesel’ and keep their engines going all the time they are in port. They cause more pollution than all the cars on our roads. Yet they are allowed to do it. A study showed that throat cancer and other ailments linked to their pollution mean that around Europe these boats are responsible for 50,000 premature deaths each year.

Then there are what will be two big ‘blue growth’ areas. Mining in the sea is very profitable and deep sea mining for minerals needed for electric batteries and much more is about to take off on a major scale in 2023, for reasons outlined in the book. Marine scientists are acutely concerned. But mining companies and big finance investing in them are lobbying effectively.

Here is a predicament Labour must address. Under the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, the International Seabed Authority was to draw up a Mining Code and regulate what happens in the Deep Sea. The ISA was set up in 1994, but after 28 years it still has not drawn up the Code. This is significant, because the Code is meant to ensure that income from the deep sea is shared by all humanity, so that capital is not the sole beneficiary. Powerful interests have ensured the Code does not exist. Labour should demand it be drawn up without further delay.

Perhaps above all, the development of intellectual property rights in the sea should cause all of us alarm, as it relates to what will become a huge part of the global economy. There are already 13,000 patents in ‘marine genetic resources’, vital for future medicines among others, guaranteeing their owners monopoly profits for 20 years. Over 47% of the patents are possessed by one corporation, the German chemical giant BASF; 76% are possessed by three countries, Germany, the USA and Japan. Britain is nowhere. Labour must have a policy to redress that.

Finally, Labour should develop a strategy that combines revival of the blue commons with a shift to what could be called eco-fiscal policy, by raising revenue from levies on profits from activities that use and deplete common resources. The proceeds should be channelled into a Blue Commons Capital Fund, along lines of what has been done in Norway. From the Fund, Common Dividends could be paid out, as a form of common property right, a basic income by another name. It can be done.      

picture credit : Ed Dunens flickr      

Guy Standing is Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS University of London and a Council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. He is author of various books, including The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers thrive and Work does not pay.

The post Labour must Revive the Blue Commons appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Ten Years and Counting…

In 2009, we wrote The Spirit Level, based on our work as epidemiologists researching the social determinants of health and wellbeing. We showed, emphatically, that greater equality – a smaller gap between rich and poor – is the fundamental basis of a better society. The more equal of the rich, developed countries have resoundingly better physical and mental health, which is part of the reason why they weathered the storm of Covid-19 better than more unequal countries.

But economic inequality, and its intersection with inequalities related to ethnicity, gender, disability, language, religion and more, is not just a health issue. In The Spirit Level we showed that all the problems that are more common at the bottom of society, that have a social gradient, get worse with greater inequality. And that body of evidence has continued to grow in the years since, based on our own research and the work of many others across the world. In addition to shorter life expectancy, higher death rates and levels of chronic disease, increased obesity, mental illness and poor child wellbeing, more unequal societies suffer from more violence, including homicides, domestic violence, child maltreatment and bullying. Children and young people do less well in school and have lower chances of social mobility and higher rates of dropping out and teenage births. Drug and alcohol abuse, problem gambling, status consumption and consumerism also rise with inequality, while levels of trust and solidarity, and civic and cultural participation decline.

Countries that tend to do well on any one of these measures tend to do well on all of them, and the ones that perform badly do badly on most or all of them. And not only is the impact of inequality wide-ranging, differences between countries are large; and although the poor are worst affected, inequality affects almost everybody.

And that means that the UK is trailing behind the countries to which we usually compare ourselves, on that long list of problems, and that all of us – young or old, male or female, in the North or the South, rich or poor – ALL OF US, are damaged. We are each at higher individual risk, and our whole society is ground down and trapped by inequality: we, and it, fail to thrive.

We’ve used a robust framework analysis to show that this is a causal problem and we’ve done a lot of work to understand the pathways through which inequality does the damage.³ We know that tackling inequality is the central task in responding to the multiple crises we face: the climate crisis, the cost of living crisis, the North-South divide, food insecurity, the gig economy, threats to our democracy.  Inequality is at the heart of it all.

The lost decade

When The Spirit Level was published we were at first heartened by the political response to the research. Politicians across the political spectrum seemed to understand the evidence and inequality seemed to take its rightful place on the political agenda.

But what has happened in the UK since then – a decade of austerity, followed by a global pandemic, and now a cost of living crisis, means we’re just as unequal now as we were then. And every crisis that comes along seems to be another engine of increasing inequality. 

Who suffered from the Global Financial Crisis? Average real incomes declined, and that was particularly true for the youngest and lowest paid workers.  Who were most likely to be exposed to Covid, to be infected, to be really sick, to die? Death rates were twice as high in the most deprived areas of the UK as in the most affluent. And we know who is already suffering most from rising prices, rising interest rates in the cost of living crisis – those on low incomes, on benefits, families with children, especially lone parents and everyone living outside of London and the south east.

And in all three of these crises, it hasn’t simply been a matter of the poor getting poorer.  In these big existential crises, the rich have got richer, a lot richer.  In the years following the Global Financial Crisis, the world’s richest 1% increased their wealth until they owned more than the bottom half of the world’s entire population. Top investors made billions by buying up shares in failing banks, betting against housing markets that were foreclosing on the mortgages of the poor, basically “buying when there’s blood in the streets” to realize massive gains during recovery. The pay of the FTSE 100 chief executives has sky rocketed, unlike that of their workers. During the pandemic, the rich accumulated wealth, including from government procurement under emergency regulations with lowered scrutiny for corruption. Oil and gas companies have made huge profits since the energy crisis began, and their chief executives continue to be paid millions, some of them many millions.- Huge pay and benefits packages and dividends have enriched the chief executives and shareholders of the UK’s water companies despite their abysmal record on tackling leaks, pollution and investment in new reservoirs.

We need the right (left) kind of active government

The Coalition and Conservative governments have certainly been active since 2010. They have actively failed to tackle inequality; they have acted to benefit the rich and harm the rest of us. Their actions speak much louder than their hollow words on levelling up.

An Active Labour Government could do so much to transform our society from the failing, unproductive, harmful state it is in, to one that promotes and, crucially, achieves the welfare and wellbeing of all its citizens. An active government that puts wellbeing first through tackling inequality would see spin-off benefits and savings across health, education, social care, law enforcement and more.

The courage to change

Labour should take heart from the progressive preferences of British citizens. When polled, the large majority of the public are in favour of progressive policies that are too often dismissed as radical, utopian, or unfeasible by the press or the Westminster bubble.

Close to 80% of the British public believe that the gap between those on high and low incomes is “too large” and this has been a consistent trend (varying between 72-85%) over the four decades that the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey has been running. In 2018, the BSA concluded that “the public are likely to have more of an appetite for policies aimed at addressing poverty and inequality than they did a decade ago.”

The majority of the British public want water, energy, rail, buses, Royal Mail and the NHS to be run in the public sector, and that includes the majority of Conservatives.

Recent academic research on public opinion research in “red wall” constituencies found consistently high levels of support for Universal Basic Income, even when the policy was presented to voters in terms used by its opponents. There is little evidence that voters with conservative social values – those in left behind communities in Labour’s former heartlands – won’t actually support radical social policy.

The vast majority of the public support action on climate change and they are much more worried about the costs of doing nothing than they are about the cost of tackling the problem.

The triple-win manifesto

So what should the Labour Party do?  We are not politicians, or even political scientists or policy experts.  But we do know that Labour needs a bold and compelling vision that brings people onside by painting a picture of a society that can respond to the climate emergency while at the same time transforming people’s lives for the better and creating sustainable  growth.

What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but six triple-win active policy options include:

• Joining WEGo, the Wellbeing Economy Governments (currently Canada, Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Wales and Finland), a collaboration of national and regional governments promoting sharing of expertise and transferrable policy practices for building wellbeing economies.  It is growth in wellbeing that we need, not growth in GDP.
• Committing to actually tackling inequality by taxing wealth, top incomes and financial transactions
• Giving people resilience and stability through a universal basic income and a proper living wage.
• Enacting the Socioeconomic Duty of the 2010 Equality Act
• Promoting fair work and economic democracy within a Green New Deal
• Putting children and young people at the centre of policy: recommit the country to ending child poverty; end selective education and remove charitable status from private schools; properly fund the comprehensive education system; enshrine in law universal free school meals and free holiday meals for families on benefits; and close the digital divide

Labour needs to act fast and boldly, with energising urgency, to make sure that the policies needed to tackle the climate emergency are politically acceptable to the public because they can see that they are part of a transformation to a fairer, better society in which they and their children and grandchildren can flourish.

What inspired progressive political change in the past was a vision of socialism, embodying the belief that a better society is possible for all of us.  The loss of that ideal has meant political hope has dwindled for so many.  Labour must build a new vision, firmly built on the foundations of an egalitarian and sustainable society.

Kate Pickett is a social epidemiologist, co-author of ‘The Spirit Level’ and ‘The Inner Level’ and co-founder of The Equality Trust.

Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York.

This article is published with permission from Labour Tribune MPs. It first appeared in a collection of essays published by Labour Tribune MPs in 2022 entitled “THE CHANGE WE NEED : How a Starmer Government can Transform Britain”

Further Reading

Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin; 2010.

Pickett KE, Wilkinson RG. Income inequality and health: a causal review. Social Science & Medicine 2015;128:316-26

Wilkinson R, Pickett K. The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everybody’s wellbeing. London: Allen Lane; 2018.

Greater Manchester Independent Inequalities Commission. The Next Level: Good Lives for All in Greater Manchester, 2020: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/4337/gmca_independent-inequalities-commission_v15.pdf

Pickett K, Wilkinson R. Post-pandemic health and wellbeing: putting equality at the heart of recovery. In: Allen P, Konzelmann SJ, Toporowski J. The Return of the State: Restructuring Britain for the Common Good. London: Agenda Publishing, 2021.

Wilkinson R. If it doesn’t work for people, it won’t work for the planet. Club of Rome, 2021: https://www.clubofrome.org/blog-post/wilkinson-inequality-sustainability/

Reed H, Lansley S, Johnson M, Johnson E & Pickett KE. Tackling Poverty: the power of a universal basic income, London: Compass, 2022. Available at: https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/tackling-poverty-the-power-of-a-universal-basic-income/

Johnson M, Nettle D, Johnson E, Reed H & Pickett KE. Winning the vote with a universal basic income: Evidence from the ‘red wall’. London, Compass, 2022.

Picture credit: flickr

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LONDON – Amid all the talk of when and how to end or reverse quantitative easing (QE), one question is almost never discussed: Why have central banks’ massive doses of bond purchases in Europe and the United States since 2009 had so little effect on the general price level?0

Between 2009 and 2019, the Bank of England injected £425 billion ($588 billion) – about 22.5% of the United Kingdom’s 2012 GDP – into the UK economy. This was aimed at pushing up inflation to the BOE’s mandated medium-term target of 2%, from a low of just 1.1% in 2009. But after ten years of QE, inflation was below its 2009 level, despite the fact that house and stock-market prices were booming, and GDP growth had not recovered to its pre-crisis trend rate.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the BOE has bought an additional £450 billion worth of UK government bonds, bringing the total to £875 billion, or 40% of current GDP. The effects on inflation and output of this second round of QE are yet to be felt, but asset prices have again increased markedly.

A plausible generalization is that increasing the quantity of money through QE gives a big temporary boost to the prices of housing and financial securities, thus greatly benefiting the holders of these assets. A small proportion of this increased wealth trickles through to the real economy, but most of it simply circulates within the financial system.

The standard Keynesian argument, derived from John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory, is that any economic collapse, whatever its cause, leads to a large increase in cash hoarding. Money flows into reserves, and saving goes up, while spending goes down. This is why Keynes argued that economic stimulus following a collapse should be carried out by fiscal rather than monetary policy. Government has to be the “spender of last resort” to ensure that new money is used on production instead of being hoarded.

But in his Treatise on Money, Keynes provided a more realistic account based on the “speculative demand for money.” During a sharp economic downturn, he argued, money is not necessarily hoarded, but flows from “industrial” to “financial” circulation. Money in industrial circulation supports the normal processes of producing output, but in financial circulation it is used for “the business of holding and exchanging existing titles to wealth, including stock exchange and money market transactions.” A depression is marked by a transfer of money from industrial to financial circulation – from investment to speculation.

So, the reason why QE has had hardly any effect on the general price level may be that a large part of the new money has fueled asset speculation, thus creating financial bubbles, while prices and output as a whole remained stable.

One implication of this is that QE generates its own boom-and-bust cycles. Unlike orthodox Keynesians, who believed that crises were brought on by some external shock, the economist Hyman Minsky thought that the economic system could generate shocks through its own internal dynamics. Bank lending, Minsky argued, goes through three degenerative stages, which he dubbed hedge, speculation, and Ponzi. At first, the borrower’s income needs to be sufficient to repay both the principal and interest on a loan. Then, it needs to be high enough to meet only the interest payments. And in the final stage, finance simply becomes a gamble that asset prices will rise enough to cover the lending. When the inevitable reversal of asset prices produces a crash, the increase in paper wealth vanishes, dragging down the real economy in its wake.

Minsky would thus view QE as an example of state-created financial instability. Today, there are already clear signs of mortgage-market excesses. UK house prices increased by 10.2% in the year to March 2021, the highest rate of growth since August 2007, while indices of overvaluation in the US housing market are “flashing bright red.” And an econometric study (so far unpublished) by Sandhya Krishnan of the Desai Academy of Economics in Mumbai shows no relationship between asset prices and goods prices in the UK and the US between 2000 and 2016.

So, it is hardly surprising that, in its February 2021 forecast, the BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee estimated that there was a one-third chance of UK inflation falling below 0% or rising above 4% in the next few years. This relatively wide range partly reflects uncertainty about the future course of the pandemic, but also a more basic uncertainty about the effects of QE itself.

In Margaret Atwood’s futuristic 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, HelthWyzer, a drug development center that manufactures premium-brand vitamin pills, inserts a virus randomly into its pills, hoping to profit from the sale of both the pills and the antidote it has developed for the virus. The best type of diseases “from a business point of view,” explains Crake, a mad scientist, “would be those that cause lingering illness […] the patient would either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation.”

With QE, we have invented a wonder drug that cures the macroeconomic diseases it causes. That is why questions about the timing of its withdrawal are such “fine calculations.”

But the antidote is staring us in the face. First, governments must abandon the fiction that central banks create money independently from government. Second, they must themselves spend the money created at their behest. For example, governments should not hoard the furlough funds that are set to be withdrawn as economic activity picks up, but instead use them to create public-sector jobs.

Doing this will bring about a recovery without creating financial instability. It is the only way to wean ourselves off our decade-long addiction to QE.

Robert Skidelsky

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PEF Council members recently discussed, via email, the government’s plans for social care and its financing. We were unanimous in agreeing on the bad design of the scheme, on the absence of real funding and reform for social care. And we also agreed on the need for a significant shift in the balance of taxation towards wealth. The points of contention are around how the latter should take place and a macroeconomics that might help explain why.

Stewart Lansley

The case for financing social care through wealth is overwhelming. There are two broad options: first, the 2010 Burnham Plan, which means all those needing care would keep their home and a charge made at death. Alternatively, an annual property charge of say 1% pa up to say a maximum of 5%. Both of these could be paid into a social care fund, as argued in Remodelling Capitalism.

The last two decades have seen a great surge in asset values and unearned wealth (what John Stuart Mill called “getting rich in your sleep”), notably in property. The total value of personal wealth in the UK in 2018 was £14.6 tr of which property is £5tr and financial wealth £2.2tr – so a hypothetical one per cent tax on all property and financial wealth would yield £70bn a year, and just on property would be £50bn per year. Any such tax should be charged on assets above a certain level, which would then yield less than the estimates given here.

Yet the tax take from wealth is tiny, with the UK tax system disproportionately dependent on taxing income. In 2015/6, the combined revenue from existing capital taxes – stamp duty on property transactions and shares, capital gains and inheritance tax but excluding council tax – raised about £27bn a year, some 3.9% of all tax revenue.  This accounts for less than one per cent of total private asset holdings.

The case for higher taxation on personal and corporate wealth is being widely recognized. Before the 2017 November budget, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research proposed an annual tax on net wealth (assets minus liabilities) above £700,000 (including residential property) to replace three existing capital taxes on inheritance tax, capital gains and dividends. A tax set at 2 per cent would raise £72 billion (gross).

The scheme would may have been unpopular in 2010, but might be much more popular now given that the public accept that we need to find a way of paying for social care and are unconvinced by Johnson’s plan. This is surely an area where KS should be out with all guns blazing!

Danny Dorling

I was one of the people earlier suggesting taxing wealth would be difficult. I don’t think I explained myself well. It is not the taxing of wealth that is difficult, that is easy. Ireland showed how it could be done on property with a progressive property tax where the percentage taken rose according to the value of property. They did it in an extremely short amount of time when forced to by the Troika in the Eurozone crisis at the start of the last decade. When that process began, they had no “gazetteer” – no universal register of properties – let alone any decent sets of valuations.

The best systems of wealth taxation make paying the tax annually part of the way you claim and maintain a record of your ownership of property. You can chose not to pay the wealth tax if you wish to gift that wealth to the state. You can also argue that your property is worth less than the valuation of the state. However, when you then come to sell that property, you may find that buyers don’t wish to pay more than you have said it is worth. Wealth taxes should also decrease the value of property which would not be a bad thing. So my concern is not with the idea of wealth taxes.

My concern is with suggesting it – and suggesting introducing a wealth tax to pay for the NHS/Social Care, without suggesting all the other mitigations you would do at the very same time that would make it appear plausible to many people.

But so many mitigations are needed that you end up needing a whole manifesto to explain them. I’ll give just one example. A large group of people in their 40s and 50s who have managed to get a mortgage now talk of their home as their pension. Their various precarious jobs have meant they have no decent pension, and although they may now be being auto enrolled into a pension. It is not one where they can envisage a future of being able to “keep the thermostat on 17 in their old age” as it was recently put to me by one home owner (still paying off their mortgage, and with the annual average income of the UK). What they plan to do is sell their home when they retire, downsize and use part of the savings to (among other things) pay the gas bill in winter.

If we suggest a wealth tax, taxing away a slice of what they see as their savings every year without also suggesting how pensions will be improved, then in the mind of someone in that position your policy will condemn them to an old age of being cold. Gas and electric bills have just risen very quickly so these bills are on peoples’ minds at the moment. In effect, for them a wealth tax is an annual tax on their future pension. And quite a low pension at that.

I think this is one of the dangers of talking about raising a new tax to pay for one thing, when all the others things are not considered.

My preference is to keep taxing and spending separate, not hypothecated. So talk about rebalancing the tax system to make it fairer – with the emphasis always on fairness. And I would bring the overall level up to what is normal in Germany (almost identical to what Labour promised in their 2019 manifesto). Talk about bringing in taxes on wealth solely for the purpose of increasing fairness, not to pay for a particular policy, but also partly to allow other less fair taxes to be reduced, and partly to allow overall public spending to be at normal European levels.

On spending, we shouldn’t talk too much about the amounts of money in each sector, but much more about what it is you actually want to see. Something that is very good need not be very expensive. The Finns spend less as a share of GDP on their school than we do on ours, but their schools are much better. In contrast, we spend an enormous amount on our now almost entirely privatised universities, but we don’t see that as a tax. In the USA, they have the highest spending on health care in the world – and in general poor health.

I’ll stop there, but hope it helps explain my worry about suggestions of introducing a wealth tax to pay for health and social care.

Josh Ryan-Collins

I agree governments should not hypothecate (and I’m amazed HMT broke its own golden rule on that in this case) both because it can lead to less politically popular services getting neglected but also because it embeds the idea that we can’t pay for stuff unless we raise the money first which is simply not the case in sovereign currency issuing nations.

Having said this, the Tories have hypothecated and they have just implemented the biggest tax rise in living memory indicating (perhaps) a seismic shift towards the centre on economic policy. This threatens Labour in quite a serious way if they can’t differentiate themselves effectively.  The way to differentiate is to focus less on the amount of tax needed and for what (as you say Danny and Sue) but on how that tax should be raised and from whom in a way that is both socially just and economically sensible.

It is not sensible to be withdrawing purchasing power from workers and businesses when the economy remains fragile. But the even bigger issue is that tax needs to be seen as a key tool via which issues like inequality and falling productivity can be addressed via pushing against economic rents and favouring investment and wages.  This NIC tax hike broadly does the opposite. If you make your money from rental income, interest fees or capital gains, don’t pay a penny more, in contrast to workers and firms. The chart below from Resolution Foundation shows how crazy the situation is:

Will Hutton

I am all for taxing capital and am in violent agreement that too much capital taxation has been allowed to atrophy: no revaluation of residential property since 1991 so that council tax yields a fraction of the old rates, de facto semi-voluntary inheritance tax, too low capital gains tax, etc. During the 1945-50 Labour government tax on estates ran at 10 per cent of all tax revenues. There is huge scope to increase capital taxes, and as Josh has argued, property is immovable.

Stephany Griffith-Jones

I agree with Will on practically all points – including the extraordinary absence of  a revaluation of residential property since 1991, which includes periods when Labour was in power! An effective and fairly high inheritance tax is very desirable, as one of the structural problems is perpetuation of wealth concentration via inheritance.

Stewart Lansley

Just on Danny’s points:

1. ONS wealth figures are net wealth and any wealth tax on residential property would be net of mortgage debt, so Danny’s examples would not be affected. 

2. Yes, we must do more to make the existing taxation of income fairer, for example by reform of National Insurance system, but this would not be enough on its own to create a more equal society. 

3. As I argued in Return of the State, we are close to the limits of income taxation, So if we want to raise funds for improving social provision we need to turn to  asset-redistribution, though this would require taking public with us. Wealth is much more unequally distributed than income –  Top fifth hold 64 % of personal net wealth and 80% of financial wealth – and unless we tackle that we will not be able to reduce inequality and poverty on a sustainable basis.  It’s perfectly possible to design a wealth tax system that is concentrated on top wealth holders. 

Geoff Tily 

The TUC have argued that reforming Capital Gains Tax is a much fairer way to fund social care than hiking workers’ and businesses’ national insurance contributions.  But like President Biden’s notion of “work not wealth”, I want to make a broader macro argument that the interests of wealth and of labour are fundamentally opposed.  

My Keynes Betrayed was concerned with restoring Keynes’s conclusion that the long-term rate of interest must be set permanently low. Since I have been at the TUC, it occurs to me that this rate should interpreted more broadly as the return to capital/wealth and should be compared with the return to labour. Keynes’s conclusion that “we must avoid [dear money] … as we would hell-fire” (Collected Works XXI, p. 389) then means that we orient the system to the interests of wealth at our peril.    

The below chart shows a measure of the real (inflation-adjusted) long-term interest on US corporate debt, going beyond the normal comparisons of rates on government bonds. Even this doesn’t capture well the experience since the global financial crisis, but plainly we know full well what has happened to the broader return to wealth versus the return to labour over the past decade. (I suspect US investment grade corporate debt has simply become increasingly regarded as retreating from risk – and this goes right back to dot.com bubble.) “Dear money” can be seen coming in rapidly from 1979 (in parallel to the ‘Volcker shock’), and interest rates were sustained some way above the post-war levels (and back to the 1920s).  

US real interest rate

Josh’s chart from the Resolution Foundation is a nice one, not least because the timing of the key dislocation matches well the restoration of dear money on the above. Above all, this rise in returns to assets is a consequence, not a cause, of dear money.

Previously I had argued (following the General Theory chapter 22) that macroeconomic disarray comes in through overinvestment, but now I like a broader over-production/under-consumption (or rather, under-compensation) approach (it’s trade union friendly, has recently been revived by Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis [though Stuart Lansley had done so nearly a decade sooner], and is likely to be more correct!). Rather than spending to compensate for the underspending of labour, the wealthy speculate and so exacerbate over-production. This leads to unsustainable private debt, and ultimately meltdown; the fear here is Quantitative Easing has simply kicked the can down the road, with the risk of meltdown appearing later.    

Tax on the wealthy can be part of the solution (as in the opening of the final chapter of General Theory), but to restore the balance to labour requires wholesale macroeconomic change that operates on a global basis. Hence my recent argument that ‘internationalism begins at home’.  

We were convened in the first instance as a group inspired by Keynes, so I hope colleagues engage with this argument. On my view, it’s how Attlee, Dalton, Gaitskell, Bevin, Blum and FDR understood the world, helped them successfully to win office, and to begin to make real change.    

Jan Toporowski

The real con trick in the government’s proposals is the claim that this is a solution to the social care crisis, when the funding for that is being explicitly postponed until the difficulties in the NHS have been overcome. So the social care funding is conditional on that same funding being enough to overcome NHS difficulties, a most unlikely prospect. The electoral con is the message that the residual of working people on proper contracts will get in their payslips that their money is going to be spent by the government not once but twice to solve both health crises.

Guy Standing

One cannot sensibly discuss how to pay for social care without a systematic view of what care entails, which encompasses its messy definition, who should receive it, who should receive money being spent on it, how they should receive it, and so on. Once one opens the Pandora’s box one should realise that any hypothecated approach, as implied in what the Tories are doing, makes no sense whatsoever. Hypothecated taxation opens the door to the worst features of utilitarianism, 

The Government’s tax and NI rise is doubly regressive, since it lowers the earning of most paid carers at a time when their income and morale are abysmally low. If a government does not alter the structure of the so-called ‘social care industry’, the primary beneficiaries of pouring more money into it will be the private equity interests (mostly foreign capital) which are plundering money being spent on social care. Removing private equity should be a top priority. And any funding scheme that relies on means-testing will accentuate what is a highly regressive scheme, not reduce it.

More generally, there must be a huge shift in taxation from earned incomes to wealth of all kinds and to incursions into the commons, which means much increased eco-taxation. Ironically, incomes are nowadays the least taxable, with the UK being a rank outlier in the very high extent of tax evasion by high-income earners. But changing the incidence of taxation should be the secondary concern to the need to restructure the care sector. The social care crisis is a structural one, not primarily a fiscal one. Perhaps a Royal Commission should be set up to devise a proper plan for an integrated, universally-based system.

Sue Himmelweit

I agree strongly with Danny about not muddling up comments on taxing and with those on spending. But I don’t think that means that Labour should comment soley on alternative forms of taxation.

The first thing that has to be said about the so-called plan for social care is that it isn’t one, that it won’t be doing anything to improve provision nor even get back to the already failing system that we had in 2010. As the party that stands for protecting the vulnerable by collective provision this must be Labour’s first call. If they are commenting on a policy on social care, their first comment should be on social care and the need for it to be adequately funded (in the sense of enough spent on it), not on different forms of taxation. This should be true of PEF too!

Labour should also make clear that we could benefit from an overhaul of the tax system, so that it taxes, at the very least, gains in wealth. Reforming CGT so that is charged at the same rates as income tax with no specific tax allowance (except to exempt gains too small to count) would be a first step. And I would also like to see inheritance tax replaced by a receipts tax covering all ways of receiving wealth, also taxed at income tax rates (with some allowance for spreading a windfall over a few years). This way all ways of gaining wealth would be taxed at a reasonably high rate. This to me seems easier and more logical than taxing wealth itself at a low rate.

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I’ve written elsewhere on what a poor way the National Insurance Contribution (NICs) rise would be to fund the contribution cap, amounting to a perverse redistribution from mainly younger and poorer workers to at least some better off elderly. Almost any tax alternative currently on the table – from increasing income taxes, with its broader base, to Capital Gains Tax increases, to introducing a proper, progressive wealth tax – would be fairer and preferable.

That the NICs rise currently polls ahead of other options is a tribute to the framing of NICs (and the polling question asked!) more than anything else: it isn’t called a tax, and there’s still a firmly held belief that NICs payments go into a grand national pot that people can draw from later. This was the original intention of the system, dating back to the 1944 Beveridge Report and beyond, in which “national insurance” would act as a genuine, contributory insurance system, providing for those who had paid in during times of need. It has never really functioned like that: the Treasury, as its wont, has always treated NICs payments as just another flow of tax payments (with some slight complications).

But the seeming popularity of NICs rises is likely to prove fragile if the case against them is made, and – crucially – if the case for an alternative is clearly presented. Labour have now indicated that they will oppose the hike, but to clinch the argument they will need to present an alternative. Otherwise, it really will look like the party is just moaning about the world: you can’t look like an alternative government if you don’t have alternative policies. And if they can bite the bullet on wealth taxes for social care – in whatever form here – it can force open the argument about wealth and taxation more generally: a must if the party is to go into the next election with something approaching a serious, long-term programme to solve Britain’s chronic economic problems. And wealth taxes, as the polling evidence keeps showing us, are popular. (Unsurprisingly: by definition, almost none of us are in the top 1%…)

Party Conference

Labour Party Conference, returning to Brighton at the end of the month after a two-year covid-induced pause, will be the biggest opportunity the party and its new leadership has had to date to present its case. You don’t often get a free hit at the following day’s front page headlines as the Opposition, but that’s what Conference can offer, Keir Starmer has offered some rather broad hints about his own speech, and of course it’s the leader’s closing address that gets the bulk of the media attention. But Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ own speech is going to be worth keeping an eye on. She has already marked out a few key commitments, including a strikingly anti-neoliberal Mariana Mazzucato-style policy to support domestic supply chains and jobs. This was particularly noteworthy: the first time that I can recall Labour offering a genuinely post-Brexit policy under Starmer’s leadership. Now that we have left the EU, there is a seam there to be mined – with a bit of policy imagination.

But the challenge for Reeves and her team in three weeks’ time will be to not only throw in some headline-grabbing policy announcements – essential for the front pages – but to start to create a convincing story about what sort of economy the next Labour government wants to shape. Credibility doesn’t come from parroting the economically illiterate nonsense that clutters Westminster political reporting; it’ll come from having a clear, simple story that potentially millions of people can grasp and understand. The Tories’ NICs hike has given Labour a free gift, the chance to show they are the party that will look after your pay packet. Tax the wealthy, not the workers has a certain ring to it.

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Robert Skidelsky

Will Hutton

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No economist should have been remotely surprised by the announcement of the European Super League. Its ignominious collapse could mark the beginning of a long-needed onslaught on the economic model on which it was based.

Today’s economic system is extreme rentier capitalism, where four secular trends have come together – commodification, financialisation, neo-colonialisation and rule by the plutocracy. The political left should develop a strategy for dismantling rentier capitalism, and football might just be the place to start.

Rentier capitalism is the end-game of the neo-liberal economic project that began in the 1980s, led by the zealots of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Chicago school of law-and-economics, under the political tutelage of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It began with financial market liberalisation, by which gradually financial capital came to dominate productive capital. Financial conglomeration, with huge asset managers, hedge funds, private equity and venture capital, has created a stranglehold on the real economy. In the UK, the value (sic) of financial assets now exceeds 1000% of GDP, as documented in the new edition of my book, The Corruption of Capitalism.

As the power and reach of global finance have grown, much of our commons – including iconic football clubs – have been privatised and commodified, in being bought and sold like lemons. This has been accelerated and deepened in every economic crisis, particularly in the austerity era since 2010. And it will be accelerated again by the Covid pandemic slump.

Worst of all, out of rentier capitalism emerged a new class structure, as more and more income and wealth flowed to the rentiers and less and less to those performing or trying to perform labour. It is not just the very top who have done well out of rentierism, but the rent-seeking winners – often indulging in what should be called the crimogenic character of a system based on rentier income – have expanded the plutocracy of multi-billionaires, ideally placed to buy and sell corporations in alliance with private equity.

And so we have what all of us know all too well – football clubs, long regarded as iconic social commons, becoming glamorous symbols of financial control. The tragedy is that this was so predictable, and yet the political left has not only not done anything when in office but has also failed to articulate a strategy for dismantling rentier capitalism. On the contrary, they have aided and abetted financialisation and increased or sustained vast subsidies, obsequiously encouraging plutocrats to come and stay, allowing private equity to buy and control our commons, pursuing low corporate tax rates, and so on.

The tragic neo-colonisation of British and European football clubs is now so extensive that dragging it all back into a commons will be incredibly difficult. But at the very least we should be saying that is the direction in which we wish to go. At least have the courage to stand up; you might find that would be very popular.

The starting point is the reality that most of our leading clubs, and a surprising number of smaller clubs, are wholly or partially owned by Russian oligarchs, middle-eastern Sheikhs, Chinese or other Asian billionaires, and increasingly – and perhaps most threateningly – US private equity capital.

The six super clubs in the Premier League that flirted with the ESL are actually on a financial knife-edge. In the past year, in aggregate they paid no tax, although Chelsea paid about 8% of gross profits and Liverpool 21%, both because they had not burdened their operating company with debt. Tottenham made a gross loss before tax of £68 million and Arsenal made a loss of £54 million. The clubs are wholly dependent on commodities, mainly on selling their matches to streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime and DAZN, bypassing the less lucrative broadcasting contracts, and by transferring ‘players’, many of whom have been loaned out to smaller clubs to enhance their exchange value, or who hardly play a game while being paid about £80,000 a week. They are commodifiable property, rent-paying assets, securitisable. ‘We own super-star XX, and so you can lend us or sell us something or invest in us or, above all, advertise through us.’     

Among the worst aspects is the trend to leveraged buyouts, as in the case of the infamous buyout of Manchester United in 2005 by the American Glazer family. The most recent case is Burnley FC, acquired by the US private equity firm, ALK Capital, which used the club as collateral to secure a loan to buy the club. As a result, Burnley FC is now mortgaged and has debts of over £60 million, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. As an element in a wider strategy to dismantle rentier capitalism this leveraging should be banned.

Burnley was formed in May 1882, as a bunch of amateurs from around the Lancashire mill town community. Like Liverpool FC, founded in 1892, it was a social commons, nurtured by townspeople over the years. They should be restored as that. A first step would be for the government to insist that all clubs should have at least 10% of the board members elected by the fans, as in Spain. Perhaps too they should consider moving towards the German system, in which 51% of a club must be owned by fans. Moving in that direction would take time and would have to be done in steps.

Another anti-rentier measure would be to declare that any corporate debt incurred in commercial transactions should not be liable for tax relief. Above all, all registered football clubs should be partially nationalised, through having a public share held by the local authority. If the Government means to give credence to its claims that Brexit was about restoring national sovereignty, it should show how it is going to give meaning to that with respect to what is often called the national game. If not, Labour should promise to do so.

There is a lovely anecdote about the formative years of Liverpool, Burnley, Manchester United and other founders of the football league. When a club was short of a player or two, they would go to a nearby mine and shout down for whoever was the best player to come up, only to be answered by a chorus, ‘For which position?’ We cannot go back to those days, but we should remember the roots and support reforms that move in the direction of reviving clubs as social commons.          

Guy Standing is a councillor of the Progressive Economy Forum, and a Professorial Research Associate of SOAS University of London.      

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Edited by PEF Chair Patrick Allen and council members Suzanne Konzelmann and Jan Toporowski

Publication Date 29th April 2021. Agenda Publishing

40 years of neoliberalism has failed to provide prosperity or stability to the UK economy. Instead it has led to low growth, turbulence, grotesque inequality , poverty and ill health for millions . This is the outcome of damaging economic polices driven by free market dogma, rentier capitalism and ideology. It’s time for a change.

This book contains 18 essays by PEF council members and academics who outline the essential features of a progressive economy dealing with the five massive challenges of our times to the economy – Covid-19, austerity, Brexit , inequality and climate change.

PEF calls for bold public intervention. Shrinking the state and weakening our public institutions has undermined social and community resilience and promoted an out-of-control, value-sapping and high-inequality model of capitalism. 

The authors say the resources of the state must build a fairer and more dynamic post-Covid society, using a mix of regional and industrial policy and investment to revolutionise our public health, housing and social services. A progressive new society should construct a new income floor and new measures to spread wealth and give everyone an equal stake in the economy. 

The financial crash of 2008 proved that only the state can rescue the economy when all else fails including the biggest banks. Covid has shown how only the state can rescue us from death and the collapse of the economy during a devastating pandemic. Only the state can steer the economy and deliver the investment needed to cope with climate change

The 2008 crash showed the breathtaking incompetence of the private financial sector. Now Covid has once again laid bare the myth than private is best – outsourcing to companies the job of track and trace at a cost of £37bn has so far failed to show any discernible benefit say the Public Accounts Committee.

By contrast, the selfless work of millions of NHS workers and volunteers has delivered one of the most outstanding vaccination programmes which has been the envy of the world. This has been done at modest cost and was only possible with a national health service drawing on the vocational drive of its workers for the common good.

The Biden adminstration is today showing the mighty power of the US State with Biden’s Covid and infrastructure bills. The results are expected to cut child poverty in half. The UK government should follow this lead and bring in new models of public intervention to deliver a pandemic-resistant, green economy which works for all citizens.

For an outline , list of chapters and authors and to order a copy go to this webpage

You can obtain a 25% discount on the cover price by entering code AGENDA25 on the Agenda page here

Launch event on Zoom – Wednesday 19th May 2021 at 11am . Joining details to follow.

The launch will be chaired Miatta Fahnbulleh , CEO of NEF and attended by Ed Miliband, Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy . Martin Sandbu of the FT will attend as commentator.

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It is all very well for the Opposition to look constructive and reasonable. But as with Labour’s lukewarm reaction to the initial phase of austerity a decade ago, there could be a long-term moral and political price to pay.

Elsewhere, I have explained why the flagship Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) is highly regressive, a contributory factor in the sharp drop in production and, as recently shown by research, subject to extensive fraud. Here I just want to highlight the regressive character of Sunak’s ‘plan for jobs’ announced this month in the Summer Statement.

In the Statement, the Chancellor confirmed that the CJRS would end in October, adding ‘Leaving the furlough scheme open forever gives people false hope that it will always be possible to return to the jobs they had before.’ Well, encouraging false hopes is what the scheme had been doing for months. He then added to the confusion by announcing a ‘job retention bonus’, giving firms a gift of £1,000 if they retained furloughed staff beyond October. He said this could cost the Treasury £9bn if every job furloughed was protected.

Since higher-income employees are the most likely to be retained after October, and thus gain £1,000 for their employers, this was another regressive measure, and encourages to employers to keep those they intended to retain anyhow doing nothing with their time during the summer months until the CJRS ends. Could anybody be in any doubt that fraudulent arrangements would be one outcome? Research had already shown     

Once lured into wage subsidies, new gimmicky versions usually proliferate. The Summer Statement included a slickly-named Kickstart Job Creation Scheme, promising to pay the wages of new employees under the age of 24 for six months. The initial £2bn put aside for this is intended to fund hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Chancellor said there would be no cap on the number of jobs to be funded in this way.

Among the questions such a scheme should prompt is whether the jobs so subsidised must persist beyond the six months. That was unclear. Either way, there were bound to be problems ahead. There is a long record of youth wage schemes, which should have been enough to dissuade any government from introducing another populist gesture.

What will happen is that many young workers who would have been hired anyhow will gain a nice subsidy for their employer. This is part of the deadweight effect. Probably worse is the substitution effect, whereby firms will take on somebody aged 23 to substitute for somebody aged 53 or even 25. The end result will be that few ‘extra jobs’ will be generated, even though the government will boast that 300,000 jobs were ‘created’ by the scheme. Enough commentators will want to show support for the government to go along with the claims. No proper evaluation will be done. But among the regressive effects will be that youths will be paid a low minimum wage and displace others paid somewhat more.    

Another ad hoc measure was a doubling of so-called ‘work coaches’ employed in Jobcentres, to 27,000. What are those coaches doing? What productive role do they fill? As research has shown rather conclusively, they have had no discernible positive effect on the probability of the unemployed obtaining jobs.

Their main function has been on forcing their so-called ‘clients’ to do a lot of job-like activity, spending 35 hours a week doing what they are told and, in the event of being deemed not up to the job, being sanctioned by losing benefits on which they depend. The coaches have a policing role. Doubling their number will not alter that. The measure will increase inequality, further depressing wages and conditions in the lower echelons of the labour market.  

The Statement’s Green Investment part sounds attractive, to cut carbon emissions by providing vouchers worth £5,000 for retrofitting homes with insulation, with up to £10,000 for lower-income households. It can be presumed that this will increase the capital value of properties. Insulating houses and other buildings is obviously desirable. But the measure will increase wealth inequality, and lower the cost of living of relatively high-earning households. The precariat do not own homes and thus cannot make use of the scheme.

To coin a phrase a ‘levelling-up’ progressive government would have offered some policy to compensate those being further disadvantaged. There was no such measure.

The same reservation applies to the substantial cut in Stamp Duty, in the form of raising the threshold for paying it from £125,000 to £500,000, to run until next March. As the precariat is not in the housing market, it will not gain anything from this. Only the relatively rich, able to buy and sell houses, will gain. It may be desirable to ‘re-invigorate the housing market’, but once again, the wealthy will gain while the precariat is left further behind.

Then we come to the obnoxiously populist measure, which regrettably will appeal to the think-tank crowd. This is the VAT cut on eating out, staying in hotels and going to ‘attractions’. Which groups in society have the lowest probability of being able to benefit from this largesse? It might lead to some more low-paid short-term jobs. But the precariat mostly cannot afford to go to restaurants or stay in fancy hotels. The affluent who tend to go to expensive restaurants and hotels will gain the most. Among them will be friends of members of the government.

The accompanying whizz of a scheme, Discounts on Eating Out, is clearly a brain wave of some over-heated brain of an adviser. The Chancellor said it is ‘an eat-out to help-out discount’. For the month of August, those eating in participating restaurants or cafés will gain a 50% discount up to £10 per head. The only disappointment for those taking advantage of the gift is that they will have to do so only on Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays. The form-filling and other bureaucratic costs will add to the cost of what is clearly a gimmick.

The edifice of measures introduced since March has been permeated by disregard for their regressive impact. What was needed initially and what is needed now more than ever is recognition that, as the pandemic and lockdown constituted a tremendous demand shock, the way to respond was to stimulate demand while providing economic resilience to everybody.

Schemes that wilfully increase the disadvantages and vulnerabilities of the disadvantaged and vulnerable will not only increase inequalities but will weaken their resilience and that of society as a whole in the likely scenario of a second wave of the pandemic or some other pandemic that will follow sooner rather than later. Labour should not be quiet.   

Photo credit: Flickr/UK Parliament

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