In Defence of Universal Basic Income

Written by Anne Gray 

As a member of the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) Working Group on Universal Basic Income (UBI), I take issue with Huseyin Kishi’s post on this blog. It seems he fundamentally misunderstands the GPEW’s proposals and the relationship of UBI to free public services:- 

* UBI is not an alternative to free collective public services that Greens defend and expand, like the NHS, social care, education, public transport and free childcare. Both are affordable – it’s a question of fiscal policy and the will to implement it. 

* Kishi’s cost figure of £331bn is hugely exaggerated; it was the GROSS cost, of the GPEW 2016 scheme, not the NET cost which is close to zero after Exchequer savings from abolishing many existing  benefits and tax concessions. Similarly, NET costs of the 2019 scheme were under £1bn. 

* With the addition of the carbon dividend (explained below), the GPEW rates were considerably higher in the 2019 proposal than in the 2016 one Malcolm Torry criticised in the Guardian. But in both years, illustrative calculations for household types comprising over 95% of households showed no losses compared to the Universal Credit (UC) system. Kishi mentions the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) argument that poverty would worsen if a UBI was introduced without also keeping means tested benefits. 

What JRF criticised were the schemes Compass rejected in a 2016 report[i] that JRF co-funded. Compass concluded, either keep existing benefits or fund a higher UBI by using  a wealth tax or higher corporation tax – and modelled some alternatives to illustrate that. The GPEW’s 2019 proposal has higher UBIs and lower income tax  than any of Compass’s  schemes. 

It introduces a carbon tax, which funds a ‘carbon dividend’ as part of the UBI, and abolishes some tax concessions the Compass report didn’t. However, in case of unusual needs, the GPEW proposal had about £1bn in a discretionary fund for special cases – perhaps a 12-child family, or a complex household with two Carer’s Allowances. 

* Kishi argues correctly that housing benefit has become a handout for landlords. The Green Party would address this through rent controls. For simplicity, most UBI proposals treat housing cost and disability support – which also needs to be substantially increased – as a separate issue.

The New Economics Foundation argument about UBI versus free public services assumes we cannot afford both. 

Surely we can? 

Drawing on corporate and private wealth to augment public spending is vital to reverse austerity in public services. Fiscal sources need to evolve gradually in the context of moving towards more public ownership, less inequality and a greener economy - probably towards more wealth taxes and land taxes. 

Compass (2016 report, pp 19-20) points out that reversing the 2015/6 cuts in corporation tax and fuel duties would raise around £19.5bn, and that taxes on wealth fell considerably in recent years. Since buildings cannot move overseas, the Green Party advocates a land value tax in the  long-term, to enhance redistribution and public spending. One could add; cancel Trident and cut subsidies on fossil fuels amongst other useful savings. 

Compass suggests replacing means tested benefits gradually, moving from an unconditional  supplement to existing benefits to a larger UBI. With reason, the GPEW says introduction of a UBI needs longer than one Parliament. The March 2019 Compass scheme[ii] envisaged long-term expansion of UBI  based on a ‘national wealth fund’ – income-earning public sector assets plus levies on corporate and private wealth. This would be a useful successor to a carbon tax, which if successful in reducing emissions would yield less over time.

UBI would be massively popular for two reasons: ending the ‘poverty trap’  and its abolition of benefit sanctions and means tests. Freed from the huge ‘marginal tax rates’ caused by benefit withdrawal at 63p of UC for each £1 earned, more people would take work even if casual or insecure.  

Claimants suffer untold stress from means-testing and conditions about work search and job-centre requirements, plus the five week wait for UC, threatening letters demanding repayments if the Department for Work and Pensions gets its sums wrong, and criminalisation of people who don’t report changes of circumstances when earnings vary from week to week.

The JRF critique of  Compass’s ‘full UBI’ proposals - the ones Compass rejected because they increased poverty – argues that the current benefit system achieves better targeting of monies at the most needy. Mainly because abolishing the personal tax allowance – a major funding source for UBI - makes the lowest incomes very sensitive to the new income tax rate. 

The rejected Compass schemes had a 30% standard rate plus national insurance at 12% on all income above the exemption band; GPEW 2019 has 32% ‘all in’ with no extra National Insurance. Compass’s latest (2019) proposal had standard  income tax at 23%, but  only 15% for the first £11,850 earned. The GPEW had instead a tax-free earnings band of at least £1000 at the bottom of the scale, partly to save people with tiny earnings from doing tax returns.

Perfect targeting at the poorest is impossible without high withdrawal rates of benefit on low incomes.[iii] UBI evens out marginal tax/withdrawal rates on income (counting the benefit taper rate for UC as a kind of tax). They fall for people dependent on state support, rise for those whose earnings help finance UBI. That fall in the effective ‘tax’ on the unwaged is crucial to fairer taxation and to ending the poverty trap. 

UBI is ever more needed in the post-pandemic period – to deal with mass unemployment and job insecurity, plus providing part of a fiscal stimulus. Its unconditional  nature is crucial. There are many UBI schemes and many ways to fund them. The JRF’s critique didn’t prevent Compass from initiating a major campaign for UBI to alleviate COVID-engendered poverty.[iv] It’s high time to join it and campaign for better public services as well. 

Notes

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[i] Universal Basic Income; An idea whose time has come, May 2016, https://www.compassonline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/UniversalBasicIncomeByCompass-Spreads.pdf.

The GPEW 2016 proposal had much lower income tax than in the ‘full BI’schemes that this Compass report rejected. 

[ii] https://www.compassonline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Compass_BasicIncomeForAll_2019.pdf  ( March 2019). 

[iii] Kishi confuses this process with a means test taper – Natalie Bennett meant the tax take-back. 

[iv] https://www.basicincomeconversation.org/ 

Anne Gray is a member of Haringey Green Party and a supporter of Green Left

Universal Basic Income: Time for a rethink

Written by Huseyin Kishi

Senior Green Party Politicians proposal would increase poverty according to modelling.

Since 1983 the then Ecology Party, which was to be renamed the Green Party of England and Wales have argued for a National Income Scheme, later renamed the Citizen’s Income in 1990s and more recently known in the 2000s as the Universal Basic Income.[1] [2]In 2020 Jonathan Bartley in Bright Green heralded it as “...only universal and unconditional protection ensures that nobody is left behind.”[3]. Sian Berry opined “Universal basic income has been Green policy since long before I joined the party, and is exactly what it sounds like: a guaranteed income for everyone, replacing benefits in an unconditional way, which is ready and able to take care of your basic needs if a personal crisis hits.”[4]

For Greens it wasn’t a widely discussed policy until 2015, in which it was declared by the Guardian as “...The renewed focus on the cost and feasibility of a citizen’s income, including the way in which it would differ from the government scheme to integrate universal credit, demonstrates the extent to which Green policy is now being taken seriously. “

Baroness Bennett, who recently said in an interview with Green World “A universal basic income, to meet its proper definition, ensures that you can meet all of your basic needs with an income that comes to you simply for being a member of a society – unconditionally.” [5]

An idea whose time has come

For its proponents, it seems as clear as day for its implementation. A radical shift for welfare and the alleviation of poverty and unemployment. They then point to a Finish trial but a press release that was published in 2019 said “The positive evaluation may not relate to basic income as such but to public debate around basic income and to the fact that people were members of a selected group” adding “The Finnish experiment was about partial basic income targeting able-bodied people without work, it was not about universal basic income.” [6]

It did not do anything near what its proponents had argued – despite the positive headline in the New Scientist.[7] For the Green Party, in their 2015 manifesto they state “Scrap most of the existing benefits apart from disability benefits and Housing Benefit. Abolish the income tax personal allowance. Then pay every woman, man and child legally resident in the UK a guaranteed, non-means-tested income, sufficient to cover basic needs – a Basic Income”. [8] They followed this up in their 2019 manifesto by stating that it would be funded by a Carbon tax and additional payments would be made to those with children or were disabled. [9]

Impact

Molly Scott Cato said in her article for the Ecologist “...But a basic income would only provide fundamental security and would leave most people on lower incomes than they enjoyed before the crisis.”[10]

Moreover, Caroline Lucas in 2016, though in support of the policy, noted “A universal payment for all must not undermine additional help for those who need it most.” [11]  The party’s own consultation paper in 2015 stated “It includes abolishing most existing benefits, abolishing income tax allowances, changing employees’ National Insurance, reducing tax concessions on private pension contributions, and replacing the current contribution-based basic State Pension (for existing pensioners) and the new single-tier flat-rate Pension (for new pensioners) with a non-contributory Citizen’s Pension.” It would still pay housing and disability as additional payments and the total estimated cost was £331 billion.[12]

At the time the Independent noted “The Greens have since admitted that it “would not be practical or right to carry out that change within a single parliament.”[13] Sky News declared “The party says this is a long term ambition rather than concrete policy going into the 2015 election - but the thought of giving millionaires more money is likely to be a voter turn-off.” [14]

Individualism over the collective

There is an established example of an income-subsidy, though means-tested, that provides some economic support. It is called housing benefit and has been place since the 1980s. Sir George Young, the then Minister of State for Housing and Planning, remarked in 1991 that: 

“Housing benefit will underpin market rents-- we have made that absolutely clear. If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.” [15]

Housing benefit now costs £22 billion a year and does not lessen the risk of eviction, improve the quality housing, nor the energy, utility and tax costs either. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes: 

“...for most working-age people it covers a lower proportion of their actual rent than was the case in the past.”[16]

Housing benefit – far from merely taking the strain when it was believed that the market would later expand for all income-bands – continues to grow and has now become a private landlord subsidy. An aversion to capital spending in housing and the shift to income-subsidy has not resulted in a housing market that competes on price, quality and amenities. More concerning, due to changes in housing benefit from 2011, rather than payment going directly to the landlord payments were paid instead to the tenant, this resulted in landlord arrears.[17]  Rather than benefiting the poorest, over the last three decades it has increased the property portfolios of private landlords according to Shelter.

Returning to universal basic income, In 2015 Baroness Bennett stated in the Guardian that a citizen’s income would be withdrawn when a citizen’s income reached an unspecified level.[18] Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, also agreed with the Green Party in their 2015 and 2019 manifesto, and instead proposed a negative income tax in his book  “Capitalism and Freedom.” Rather than benefits: 

“...he wanted to give poor people cash rather than an array of welfare benefits. People could then use the money as they saw fit”[19]

Likewise, in 2018, the Adam Smith institute proposed “Basic Income would ensure that ‘capitalism and efficient redistribution can be vindicated in equal measure”[20]

Assets over income-subsidy

Senior Greens often refer to UBI as increasing security and choice – but in effect – as was seen with housing benefit; this isn’t guaranteed. In fact, when Joseph Rowntree Foundation undertook modelling of it. They found that

“Those wholly dependent on state support would be neither better nor worse off if a UBI were introduced at the level of the current safety net. Those with modest earnings would benefit most from having the new non-means-tested payment. “ adding that “...it is not possible to raise the revenue needed to support them from taxation ­– even by increasing the basic rate to 30% from 20%. The UBI schemes also INCREASE poverty for children, working-age adults and pensioners compared to the current tax-benefit system: child poverty rises by over 60%. [21]“.

Similarly, the New Economics Foundation found “making cash payments to individuals to increase their purchasing power in a market economy is not a viable route to solving problems caused by neoliberal market economics” they also note that  “If cash payments are allowed to take precedence, there’s a serious risk of crowding out efforts to build collaborative, sustainable services and infrastructure”[22]

Senior Greens have stated we need a radical shift in thinking about welfare – but it is clear that universal basic income does not serve progressive ends and in that regard shares more in common with conservative thinkers and supporters of neoliberalism. They should instead look to take a leaf out of Karl Polanyi’s work – who observed that markets are planned as the economy is embedded into society and thus shaped by the state – but there has been previous resistance towards this – with the exclusion of market forces in welfare and housing in the 1940s.[23]

In order to provide unconditional protection while accommodating the most vulnerable. We should move away from the individualist universal basic income and its substantive costs. Instead we should look at the long-term collective and public ownership of universal basic services. Assets such as housing, information and transport would benefit us all.  

More information can be found here: universal_basic_services_-_the_institute_for_global_prosperity_.pdf (ucl.ac.uk) 

Huseyin Kishi is a writer and photographer based in London. He is a member of Sutton & Croydon Green Party

Notes

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[1]          https://green-history.uk/library/doc-archive/category/28-ep-manifestos

[2]          The Green Party | Social Welfare

[3]          Labour's failure to embrace UBI shows they haven't grasped the scale of the crisis | Jonathan Bartley (bright-green.org)

[4]          Sian Berry: This is the time to bring in universal basic income | Hampstead Highgate Express (hamhigh.co.uk)

[5]          The decade of universal basic income | Green World

[6]          https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/nordic-welfare-news/heikki-hiilamo-disappointing-results-from-the-finnish-basic-income-experiment

[7]          Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being | New Scientist

[8]          Green.pdf (lancs.ac.uk)

[9]          Green Party Manifesto 2019.pdf

[10]          Coronavirus and the Universal Basic Income (theecologist.org)

[11]          The case for a Basic Income is growing | Caroline Lucas

[12]          Basic Income: a detailed proposal (greenparty.org.uk)

[13]          https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/general-election-2015-green-party-has-failed-make-its-mark-10196826.html

[14]          How Will Green Party's Medicine Go Down? | Politics News | Sky News 

[15]          House of Commons Hansard Debates for 30 Jan 1991 (parliament.uk)

[16]          Doubling of the housing benefit bill is sign of something deeply wrong - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS 

[17]          The impact of the direct payment of housing benefit: evidence from Great Britain (shu.ac.uk) 

[18]          Green party outlines plan for basic citizen’s income for all adults | Politics | The Guardian 

[19]          Negative income tax, explained | MIT Sloan

[20          Rising evidence for universal basic income — Adam Smith Institute 

[21]          Universal Basic Income - not the answer to poverty | JRF

[22]          Universal basic income: new study finds little evidence that it can live up to its promise | New Economics Foundation

[23]          https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders

More than half of European Corporations have No CO2 Reduction Plans

A report based on a survey of European corporations (including UK ones) by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), reveals that 53% do not have targets for reducing their CO2 emissions, even though 80% say that they are aware of the risk to their businesses from climate change that this poses. 

More than a quarter of the surveyed companies were UK based. Of those who do, only one in three have targets that extend beyond 2025. Short termism runs through all corporate strategies. This despite reported board-level oversight from 95% of companies, from those returning surveys. 

Even so, 58% of these companies reported a reduction in emissions in 2018, which was in the main achieved through conservation measures, like installing LED lighting, which uses less electricity and so saves money. 

But a third also reported that they had increased emissions from 2017 to 2018. CDP received 849 responses from European companies in 23 countries. These companies account for 2.3 billion tons of CO2 emissions. The businesses include 82 large private companies, with combined revenues in excess of €614 billion.

Increased operating costs associated with policy and legal changes was the most commonly reported risk, with almost half (46%) of companies highlighting this. 86% of surveyed companies were also positive about the potential business opportunities from providing the solutions to climate change. 

Almost half (46%) of respondents report opportunities to drive revenue through demand for lower emissions products and services, with a quarter (26%) seeing these opportunities either currently or in the short term future.

The survey also asked about other environmental issues such as deforestation and water security risks, which produced similar findings to that for climate change from respondents.

All a bit of a mixed bag of results, but there is no sense of urgency from businesses, considering the increasingly shortening of time left to avoid catastrophic climate damage which scientists are finding. 

It should come as no surprise that businesses are only acting in a positive manner when reducing their bottom line or seeing expanding into new markets to generate more profit, other than being required to comply with legal and regularly requirements as set by governments.

This is the logic of the capitalist system, and why governments’ have so much difficulty in getting corporations to reduce their emissions. If regulation is strong enough to get serious reductions, business will lobby, and they are a powerful lobby, to water down commitments. Unless there is money to be saved or made by the corporations, and so increasing profits for shareholders, they have no incentive to act in the interests of the environment.

This will not change, despite many corporations having public relations induced ‘corporate responsibility’ schemes, which again have the primary purpose of making more money. 

Corporations know that at least some of the public are concerned by climate issues, and may choose corporations over others, on the basis of this greenwash, so promote this to increase market share. A good example of this in BP (British Petroleum), some years back changing their corporate logo to a flower, pictured above. BP is one of the worst offenders when it comes to climate change.

Even in corporations with well-meaning CEOs and boards, it would not be rational for them to put environmental matters above business as usual, and they would likely lose their jobs if they did. It is not the purpose of corporations to do anything that does not prioritise increasing profits, and this is how they are judged by their shareholders.

All of which rather calls into question the role that CDP is actually playing here. Their website explains that their strategy is:

‘We want to see a thriving economy that works for people and planet in the long term. To do this we focus investors, companies and cities on taking urgent action to build a truly sustainable economy by measuring and understanding their environmental impact.’

But this is futile as a means of achieving positive changes in behaviour from businesses beyond saving money and perhaps seeing opportunities to make money in new markets, as we have noted. Under the capitalist system, an ‘economy that works for people and planet’ is completely incompatible with corporate behaviour on a fundamental level. Only a change in the economic system will lead to a different approach.

The main use for us of CDP’s work is to show us the scale of the problem, not to provide a remedy to the climate crisis, that these same companies have been instrumental in causing.   

Emmanuel Macron & the Yellow Vests Protests: A Lesson in How Not to Mitigate Climate Change

Written by Andreas Malm and first published at Europe Solidaires Sans Frontieres

Capitalist climate governance has always relied on pseudo-reforms that leave the richest free to accumulate capital, while dumping taxes on working people to nudge them in the ’right direction’. But as the protests of the gilets jaunes show, many working people no longer accept the moralising terms of capitalist approaches to climate change. In this article, Andreas Malm argues that if we really want to save this Planet, we must pursue a different kind of climate politics, one that could learn a great deal from the methods and tactics of the gilets jaunes.

If anyone needed another lesson in how not to mitigate climate change, they can thank Emmanuel Macron. Scrap taxes on the richest, then slap higher taxes on fuels: one more way of shooting oneself in the foot while claiming to be walking into a greener future. Capitalist climate governance has, of course, excelled in this kind of half-illusory, half-destructive pseudo-reforms for the past two decades.

Somehow, it always makes sure any actual burdens end up on the shoulders of the poor: convert agricultural land to biofuels and drive up food prices; offset luxury emissions by growing forests in Uganda, or some other far-off place, where the farmers must first be evicted; tell ordinary consumers in Western countries that they bear the responsibility for the excess of CO2 and have to choose better (usually more expensive) alternatives; or, as the last magic bullet, plan for geoengineering schemes destined to lay millions of already vulnerable lives to waste while saving business-as-usual for some time more.

Now Macron is the last hero of capitalist climate governance. Self-styled guardian of the Paris agreement, he has cultivated an aura as the one remaining world leader who keeps his eye on the prize of lower emissions. But he is coming too late, for the kind of governance he so loves proved itself bankrupt long ago. It took the gilets jaunes to shake him out of the illusion (at least for now): one cannot combat climate change by leaving the richest even freer to accumulate capital and then dump a tax on working people to nudge them, of all classes, in the right direction. That has never worked. It never will.

Unfortunately, the illusion is still alive in the bourgeois mainstream of the environmental movement: green lobbyists assembled at COP24 greeted Macron’s decision to suspend the fuel tax with ‘dismay’. ‘If France is putting a brake on the carbon tax, it puts a brake on energy transition and sends a very bad signal’, said Pierre Cannet, head of climate and energy policy at WWF France (although it seems the organisation – mimicking Macron, as it were – later realised its mistake and sent out a press release taking a distance from the tax).

But as Maxime Combes of Attac France explains in a splendid piece [1], the tax would never have precipitated something like an ‘energy transition’. It would not have converted the French car fleet to cloudlessness. Its only real effect would have been felt in the wallets of the most cash-strapped consumers who cannot afford to ditch their old cars.

Nonetheless, cars must indeed urgently be taken off our roads – so how do we make sure that happens? Through, for a start, massive expansion of public transportation in urban as well as rural areas, mass diffusion of alternative modes of transportation (electrical bicycles, car pools with electrified vehicles), prohibition of fossil-fuelled private cars in cities, re-zoning of economic activities to put an end to sprawl, swift electrification of residual necessary automobility – in short: public investment and public planning on the scale and at the intensity commensurate to the climate emergency. It would help if the car industry, in France as elsewhere, were ordered to shift production to the stuff needed in this transition, much like American auto plants were converted to the churning out of tanks in World War II.

All of this would have to demand the sacrifice of neither the jobs nor the living standards of working people, but could improve both, while most certainly clipping the wings of the ultra-rich. Now Macron doesn’t exactly look like the leader who contemplates such a package when going to bed at night.

The president of the rich would rather compensate for their sins by having others carry the cross until they stumble. But the time has passed when measures of this sort could even be imagined to make a difference for the climate: the time is over when the capitalist class can be left in peace. Any progress towards the goal of averting utter climate breakdown now rather requires that its palaces be overrun and stormed.

And here is a second, more productive lesson of the past weeks: this is how we can fight. Any progress on the climate front will happen through struggle, as in blocking traffic, walking out of schools, seizing central streets, attacking the most environmentally damaging of all forms of consumption – the conspicuous luxury orgies of the rich – and why not: burning cars. Since neither Macron nor any other leader of a capitalist state is prepared to do what has to be done, those states will have to be forced to do it, by precisely the kind of bottom-up power the yellow vests have so effectively paraded.

And there are, of course, climate movements that act in this spirit, notably Ende Gelände, which in late October sent some 6,000 activists (including a good contingent of French) towards the railway tracks that carry lignite, or brown coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, from the mines to the power-plants in the heartland of German industry. Here, the chimneys produce both a perpetual cloud of CO2 and handsome profits to their private owners.

Not so much when the activists of Ende Gelände blocked the tracks and physically prevented the conveyance of the coal, to ratchet up the pressure on Angela Merkel – Macron’s predecessor as the guardian angel of capitalist climate governance – to close the mines once and for all. Self-organised, unlicensed by the police, dressed not in yellow but in white uniforms, Ende Gelände has not quite reached the mass depth or insurrectionary pitch of the gilets jaunes: all the more reason to learn.

Conversely, one of the slogans sprayed on the walls of central Paris last Saturday read ‘the climate crisis is a war against the poor.’ But one could wish for a more pervasive climate militancy among the yellow vests. This is precisely the kind of convergence des luttes that is needed, and that looks like it might be in the cards for the upcoming fourth act.

If the convergence materialises this Saturday or not, one lesson can already be inferred: if more people than the French had a culture of resistance and knew how to fight, we might have been somewhere else than on this terribly hot planet. 

Hammond Delivers Pothole Budget for the UK Economy

The £420 million for potholes that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, announced at yesterday’s budget, was his best gag in the whole 71 minute budget statement to Parliament. The real jokes, by contrast, were painfully lame. But the pothole money is a neat metaphor for the UK economy, in that it is a patch up of the nation’s economic policy, meant to see the country through until next year’s spending review.

A perfect example is the extra £650 million for social care, which is to fill in the hole in this funding for this issue for the next twelve months, until it is sorted out permanently at some stage in the future. The government has promised a Green Paper on funding social care but it has yet to materialise, with an expected date of launch before the end of this year. Last year’s hole filler was to raise council tax, but this can’t really be repeated year on year. Big decisions are being put off.

There was some welcome news in extra, mainly future, funding for the NHS and the ending of new Private Finance Initiative deals for public sector contracts, but that’s about it.

Other fiscal measures in the budget only undo the damage caused by the government’s austerity agenda, like the extra funding for Universal Credit, roughly the amount cut from the scheme by George Osborne when he was Chancellor. Many Tory MPs had pressed for this, so Hammond was keeping them happy, whilst having a dig at Osborne.  

An increase in income tax personal allowances, worth only about £130 per year to basic rate taxpayers, probably less than £10 per month once National Insurance contributions are factored in. Higher rate payers will gain around £860 per year, less National Insurance contributions. More money for those who don’t really need it, and less for those who do, it is typical of this Tory government.

In total, 84% of the income tax cuts announced on Monday will go to the top half of the income distribution next year, rising to 89% by the end of the parliament.

But what of the end of austerity, that the Prime Minister, Theresa May announced at Tory party conference? Well, the budget falls way short of this. Funding for government departments will at best flat line, outside of health, so cuts to public services will continue largely unabated throughout 2019-20.

What Hammond did say was that ‘the end of austerity is in sight,’ but only if you have a telescope, as he said this will not be until 2024. Not even a case of jam tomorrow, but jam in five years time, perhaps, if Brexit doesn’t cause the UK economy to go into recession. That would mean fourteen years of austerity inflicted by the Coalition and full blown Tory governments. By which time public services if they exists at all will be basic and geographically variable.

So, austerity is set to continue, with only a slight softening of the impacts generally. The Tories know that the public is getting very weary of the austerity agenda, so their rhetoric hints at ending it, but their actions say otherwise. This is because austerity always was an ideological choice for the Tories, to cut the public realm and reduce the size of state to only minimum proportions.

There will need to be tax raised in the future to pay for adult social care, one way or another with a rising ageing population, but outside of health and care, all other services will continue to be cut, including a further £1.3 billion from local authority funding. Public sector employees will continue to get below inflation pay rises whereas high earners will continue to reward themselves often for failure and pay less tax on their increased incomes.

Of course, we may well be shut of this government before 2024. There needs to be a general election by 2022 at the latest, and the way things are going it might come a good deal earlier than that. It can’t come soon enough.