Vote for Change in the Green Party Leadership Contest

I joined the Green party in early 2006, a former Labour party voter and supporter, though never a member, disillusioned with the decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq, and much else that New Labour represented. I had also become increasingly alarmed by climate change, and had discovered ecosocialism, which I thought the Green party was best placed to promote. What I found was, although somewhat disorganised, a decent party, which genuinely seemed to want to do politics differently, ethically and democratically. A sharp contrast to Labour, for sure.

Over the years though the party has embarked on journey away from the principles that I found so attractive. It probably began with the move from principle speakers to leader (or co-leaders) in 2008. I voted against the move, but accepted the result, seeing that it might get us more media attention, which was largely how it was sold to the membership. But the party did seem to be heading off on a different trajectory though, from that point.

In more recent years I started to hear more and more disturbing stories about the inner workings at the top of the party. In 2016, reports emerged of local Green parties being leaned on by the leaders, Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley, at that stage, to stand down from a by-election in Richmond, in favour of the Lib Dem candidate. The chair of one of the local parties involved, Kingston, was forced to resign after he revealed details about a £250,000 donation made to the Green party on the condition they did not stand in Richmond. This was used to pile pressure on the local parties.

In 2018, a story was published on the Left Foot Forward website, accusing Shahrar Ali, a former co deputy leader of the party, and a candidate at the time for leader, of antisemitism. The piece was written by the new editor of the site, and recently resigned Green party member, Josiah Mortimer. It featured a selectively edited video of a speech made by Shahrar Ali, which was eventually restored to its full, complete length. Was this an attempt to smear Shahrar Ali? It certainly looked like it.

In 2019, I was shocked to hear that a senior member of the Green party, at the behest of the Campaign Against Antisemitism group, had used the party’s internal complaints procedure, against Shahrar Ali. The complaint was eventually dismissed, but why did this prominent member use the internal complaints system like this? A question unfortunately never answered by the member concerned.

I got to thinking that something wasn’t really right with what was going on and started to dig deeper into things as best I could. I found that people who knew about the machinations of the party’s leadership, were only willing to speak to me about it anonymously or privately. 

I contacted a former employee of the Green party, about the antisemitism complaint brought against Shahrar Ali. She did not want to go public with what she knew, but agreed with me privately when I suggested to her that ‘there is something rotten at the top of the party.’

Later in 2019, a member of one of the local parties involved in the disastrous Unite to Remain electoral pact with the Lib Dems (and Plaid Cymru) I was in touch with, told me that the national party had side-lined their party from the decision to not stand. The local party did not want to be associated by the Unite to Remain pact. Shades of the Richmond by-election.

I watched with dismay as Natalie Bennett in 2019, was given a peerage, as part of Theresa May’s resignation honours. The decision was made by the small group around leadership, with no say from the wider membership. If I’d had a vote, I probably would have voted for Natalie, but that is not point, this is all part of the undemocratic nature of the party’s hierarchy. 

London Green Left blog has also learned that Rashid Nix, the equalities and diversity co-ordinator on the Green party executive (GPex), is taking two senior London Green party members to an Employment Tribunal for racial discrimination. As well as an internal victimisation case. This after the two members concerned walked out of a judicial mediation meeting between both sides of the dispute.

Whilst waiting for the internal process to begin, a story was published on, yes you guessed it, Left Foot Forward, written by Joe Lo. Both Lo and Mortimer were writers for the Bright Green website prior to Left Foot Forward. The piece looks like a crude attempt to smear Nix’s name. A tactic we have seen before used against Shahrar Ali by the same website.

Finally, someone did go public. Dee Searle, a former GPex member, who has now left the party, wrote a piece for this blog which sheds a shocking light on what goes on at the top of the Green party. It says that a small clique around the leaders and Caroline Lucas’s office, take all the decisions, are democratically unaccountable and has ‘become more ruthless and less tolerant of genuine discussion.’ I urge you to read this post, and also the comments below it where others corroborate what Dee Searle has written from their own personal experiences.

It saddens me deeply, that this is what the party has come to, but members have perhaps one more opportunity to free the party from its controlling clique, and put the party back on a decent pathway. This year’s leadership and deputy leadership elections are that opportunity. Please use your vote wisely.

I will be first preferencing Shahrar Ali for leader, and Andrea Carey-Fuller for deputy leader, who I know to be decent people, and great campaigners, but whoever members decide to vote for, please do not vote for the incumbents. The Green party needs to change, and it is in your hands if we are to have a party we can be proud of, once again.  

Voting is from 3 to 31 August.

Ecological and social planning and transition

Written by Michael Löwy and first published at Life on the Left. Translated into English from the original French by Richard Fidler.

The need for economic planning in any serious and radical process of socio-ecological transition is winning greater acceptance, in contrast to the traditional positions of the Green parties, favorable to an ecological variant of “market economy,” that is, “green capitalism.”

In her latest book, Naomi Klein observes that any serious reaction to the climate threat “involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning.” This includes, in her view, industrial planning, land use planning, agricultural planning, employment planning for workers whose occupations are made obsolescent by the transition, etc. “This means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than profitability….”[1]

Democratic planning

The socio-ecological transition — towards an ecosocialist alternative — implies public control of the principal means of production and democratic planning. Decisions concerning investment and technological change must be taken away from the banks and capitalist businesses, if we want them to serve the common good of society and respect for the environment.

Who should make these decisions? Socialists often responded: “the workers.” In Volume III of Capital, Marx defines socialism as a society of “the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange (Stoffwechsel) with Nature.” However, in Volume I of Capital, we find a broader approach: socialism is conceived as “an association of free men, working with the means of production (gemeinschaftlichen) held in common.” This is a much more appropriate concept: production and consumption must be organized rationally not only by the “producers” but also by consumers and, in fact, the whole of society, the productive or “unproductive” population: students, youth, women (and men) homemakers, retired persons, etc.

In this sense, society as a whole will be free to democratically choose the productive lines to be promoted and the level of resources that should be invested in education, health or culture. The prices of goods themselves would no longer respond to the law of supply and demand, but would be determined as much as possible according to social, political and ecological criteria.

Far from being “despotic” in itself, democratic planning is the exercise of the free decision-making of the whole of society — a necessary exercise to free ourselves from the alienating and reified “economic laws” and “iron cages” within capitalist and bureaucratic structures. Democratic planning associated with a reduction of working time would be a considerable step forward by humanity towards what Marx called “the realm of freedom”: the increase in free time is in fact a condition for the participation of workers in democratic discussion and management of the economy and society.

Advocates of the free market tirelessly use the failure of Soviet planning to justify their categorical opposition to any form of organized economy. We know, without getting into a discussion on the successes and failures of the Soviet experience, that it was obviously a form of “dictatorship over needs,” to quote the expression used by György Markus and his colleagues from the Budapest School: an undemocratic and authoritarian system which gave a monopoly over decisions to a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats.

It was not planning that led to the dictatorship. It was the growing limitation of democracy within the Soviet state and the establishment of totalitarian bureaucratic power after Lenin’s death that gave rise to an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic planning system. If socialism is to be defined as control of production processes by workers and the general population, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors fell far short of this definition.

The failure of the USSR illustrates the limits and contradictions of bureaucratic planning with its flagrant ineffectiveness and arbitrariness: it cannot serve as an argument against the application of genuinely democratic planning. The socialist conception of planning is nothing other than the radical democratization of the economy: if political decisions should not be made by a small elite of leaders, why not apply the same principle to economic decisions?

The question of the balance between market and planning mechanisms is undoubtedly a complex issue: during the first phases of the new society, markets will certainly still occupy a significant place, but as the transition to socialism progresses, planning will become increasingly important.

In the capitalist system use value is only a means — and often a device — subordinated to exchange value and profitability (this in fact explains why there are so many products in our society without any utility). In a planned socialist economy, the production of goods and services responds only to the criterion of use value, which entails spectacular economic, social and ecological consequences.

Of course, democratic planning concerns the major economic choices and not the administration of local restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, small shops, craft businesses or services. Likewise, it is important to emphasize that planning does not contradict the self-management of workers in their production units. Whereas the decision to convert, for example, an automobile factory to bus or rail vehicle production would be up to society as a whole; the internal organization and operation of the factory would be managed democratically by the workers themselves.

There has been much debate over the “centralized” or “decentralized” nature of planning, but the important thing remains democratic control of the plan at all levels — local, regional, national, continental and, hopefully, global — since ecological issues such as climate warming are global and can only be addressed at that level. This proposal could be called “comprehensive democratic planning.” Even at this level, it is planning which contrasts with what is often described as “central planning” because economic and social decisions are not taken by any “center” but democratically determined by the populations concerned.

There would, of course, be tensions and contradictions between self-governing institutions and local democratic administrations and other larger social groups. Negotiating mechanisms can help resolve many such conflicts, but in the final analysis, it will be up to the larger groups involved, and only if they are in the majority, to exercise their right to impose their opinions.

To give an example: a self-managed factory decides to dump its toxic waste in a river. The population of an entire region is threatened by this pollution. It may then, following a democratic debate, decide that the production of this unit must be stopped until a satisfactory solution to control its waste is found. Ideally, in an ecosocialist society, the factory workers themselves will have sufficient ecological awareness to avoid making decisions that are dangerous for the environment and the health of the local population.

However, the fact of introducing methods to guarantee the decision-making power of the population to defend the most general interests, as in the previous example, does not mean that questions concerning internal management should not be submitted to the citizens at the level of the factory, school, neighborhood, hospital or village.

Ecosocialist planning must be based on a democratic and pluralist debate, at each level of decision. Organized in the form of parties, platforms or any other political movement, the delegates of the planning bodies are elected and the various proposals are presented to everyone they concern. In other words, representative democracy must be enriched — and improved — by direct democracy which allows people to choose directly — locally, nationally and, ultimately, internationally — between different proposals.

The whole population would then make decisions on free public transit, on a special tax paid by car owners to subsidize public transport, on the subsidization of solar energy to make it competitive with fossil energy, on the reduction of the hours of work to 30, 25 hours a week or less, even if this entails a reduction in production.

The democratic nature of planning does not make it incompatible with the participation of experts whose role is not to decide, but to present their arguments — often different, even opposed — during the democratic decision-making process. As Ernest Mandel said:

“Governments, parties, planning boards, scientists, technocrats or whoever can make suggestions, put forward proposals, try to influence people. To prevent them from doing so would be to restrict political freedom. But under a multi-party system, such proposals will never be unanimous: people will have the choice between coherent alternatives. And the right and power to decide should be in the hands of the majority of producers / consumers / citizens, not of anybody else. What is paternalist or despotic about that?”[2]

A question arises: what guarantee do we have that people will make the right choices, those that protect the environment, even if the price to pay is to change part of their consumption habits? There is no such “guarantee,” only the reasonable prospect that the rationality of democratic decisions will triumph once the fetishism of consumer goods has been abolished. People will of course make mistakes by making bad choices, but don’t the experts make mistakes themselves? It is impossible to imagine the construction of a new society without the majority of the people having reached a great socialist and ecological awareness thanks to their struggles, their self-education and their social experience.

So, it is reasonable to believe that serious errors — including decisions inconsistent with environmental needs — will be corrected. In any case, one wonders if the alternatives — the ruthless market, an ecological dictatorship of “experts” — are not much more dangerous than the democratic process, with all its limits.

Admittedly, for planning to work, there must be executive and technical bodies capable of implementing decisions, but their authority would be limited by the permanent and democratic control exercised by the lower levels, where workers’ self-management takes place in the process of democratic administration. It cannot be expected, of course, that the majority of the population will spend all of their free time in self-management or participatory meetings. As Ernest Mandel remarked: “Self-administration does not entail the disappearance of delegation. It combines decision-making by the citizens with stricter control of delegates by their respective electorate.”[3]

A long process not free from contradictions

The transition from the “destructive progress” of the capitalist system to ecosocialism is a historic process, a revolutionary and constant transformation of society, culture and mentalities — and politics in the broad sense, as defined above, is undeniably at the heart of this process. It is important to specify that such an evolution cannot be initiated without a revolutionary change in the social and political structures and without the active support to the ecosocialist program by a large majority of the population.

Socialist and ecological awareness is a process whose decisive factors are the collective experience and struggles of the population, which, starting from partial confrontations at the local level, progress towards the prospect of a radical change in society. This transition would lead not only to a new mode of production and a democratic and egalitarian society but also to an alternative way of life, a truly ecosocialist civilization beyond the imperium of money with its consumption patterns artificially induced by advertising and its limitless production of useless and/or environmentally harmful goods.

Some environmentalists believe that the only alternative to productivism is to stop growth as a whole, or to replace it with negative growth — called in France “degrowth.” To do this, it is necessary to drastically reduce the excessive level of consumption of the population and to give up individual houses, central heating and washing machines, among other things, in order to reduce energy consumption by half.

As these and other similarly draconian austerity measures may be very unpopular, some advocates of degrowth play with the idea of a kind of “ecological dictatorship.”[4] Against such pessimistic points of view, some socialists display an optimism which leads them to think that technical progress and the use of renewable energy sources will allow unlimited growth and prosperity so that everyone receives “according to their needs.”

It seems to me that these two schools share a purely quantitative conception of “growth” — positive or negative — and of the development of the productive forces. I think there is a third posture that seems more appropriate to me: a real qualitative transformation of development. This implies putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources caused by capitalism, which is based on the large-scale production of useless and/or harmful products. The arms industry is a good example, as are all these “products” manufactured in the capitalist system — with their planned obsolescence — which have no other purpose than to create profits for big companies.

The question is not “excessive consumption” in the abstract, but rather the dominant type of consumption whose main characteristics are: ostensible property, massive waste, obsessive accumulation of goods and the compulsive acquisition of pseudo-novelties imposed by “fashion.” A new society would orient production towards meeting authentic needs, starting with what could be described as “biblical” — water, food, clothing and housing — but including essential services: health, education, culture and transportation.

It is obvious that the countries where these needs are far from being met, that is to say the countries of the southern hemisphere, will have to “develop” much more — build railways, hospitals, sewers and other infrastructures — than industrialized countries, but this should be compatible with a production system based on renewable energy and therefore not harmful to the environment.

These countries will need to produce large quantities of food for their populations already hit by famine, but — as the farmers’ movements organized at an international level by the Via Campesina network have argued for years — this is an objective much easier to reach through organic peasant farming organized by family units, cooperatives or collective farms, than by the destructive and antisocial methods of industrial agrobusiness with its intensive use of pesticides, chemical substances and GMOs.

The present system of odious debt and imperialist exploitation of the resources of the South by the capitalist and industrialized countries would give way to a surge of technical and economic support from the North to the South. There would be no need — as some Puritan and ascetic ecologists seem to believe — to reduce, in absolute terms, the standard of living of the European or North American populations. These populations should simply get rid of useless products, those which do not meet any real need and whose obsessive consumption is upheld by the capitalist system. While reducing their consumption, they would redefine the concept of standard of living to make way for a lifestyle that is actually richer.

How to distinguish authentic needs from artificial, false or simulated needs? The advertising industry — which exerts its influence on needs through mental manipulation — has penetrated into all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies. Everything is shaped according to its rules, not only food and clothing, but also areas as diverse as sport, culture, religion and politics. Advertising has invaded our streets, our mailboxes, our television screens, our newspapers and our landscapes in an insidious, permanent and aggressive manner.

This sector contributes directly to conspicuous and compulsive consumption habits. In addition, it leads to a phenomenal waste of oil, electricity, labour time, paper and chemical substances, among other raw materials — all paid for by consumers. It is a branch of “production” which is not only useless from the human point of view, but which is also at odds with real social needs. While advertising is an indispensable dimension in a capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism. It would be replaced by information on the products and services provided by consumer associations.

The criterion for distinguishing an authentic need from an artificial need would be its permanence after the removal of advertising. It is clear that for some time the past habits of consumption will persist because no one has the right to tell people what they need. The change in consumption models is an historical process and an educational challenge.

Certain products, such as the private car, raise more complex problems. Passenger cars are a public nuisance. Globally, they kill or maim hundreds of thousands of people each year. They pollute the air in big cities — with harmful consequences for the health of children and the elderly — and they contribute considerably to climate change. However, the car satisfies real needs under the current conditions of capitalism.

In European cities where the authorities are concerned about the environment, some local experiments — approved by the majority of the population — show that it is possible to gradually limit the place of the private car in favour of buses and trams. In a process of transition to ecosocialism, public transit would be widespread and free — on land as well as underground — while paths would be protected for pedestrians and cyclists.

Consequently, the private car would play a much less important role than in bourgeois society where the car has become a fetish product promoted by insistent and aggressive advertising. The car is a symbol of prestige, a sign of identity (in the United States, the driver’s license is the recognized identity card). It is at the heart of personal, social and erotic life. In this transition to a new society, it will be much easier to drastically reduce over-the-road transportation of commodities — a source of tragic accidents and excessive pollution — and to replace it with rail or container transport. Only the absurd logic of capitalist “competitiveness” explains the present development of truck transportation.

To these proposals, the pessimists will answer: yes, but individuals are motivated by infinite aspirations and desires which must be controlled, analyzed, suppressed and even repressed if necessary. Democracy could then be subject to certain restrictions. Yet ecosocialism is based on a reasonable assumption, previously advanced by Marx: the predominance of “being” over “having” in a non-capitalist society, that is to say the primacy of free time over the desire to own countless objects: personal achievement through real activities, cultural, sports, recreational, scientific, erotic, artistic and political.

The fetishism of the commodity encourages compulsive buying through the ideology and advertising specific to the capitalist system. There is no evidence that this is part of “eternal human nature.” Ernest Mandel pointed out:

“The continual accumulation of more and more goods (with declining ‘marginal utility’) is by no means a universal or even predominant feature of human behaviour. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations as a prerequisite of mental stability and happiness — all these become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied.”[5]

As we mentioned above, this does not mean, especially during the transition period, that conflicts will be non-existent: between environmental protection needs and social needs, between ecological obligations and the need to develop basic infrastructures, especially in poor countries, between popular consumption habits and lack of resources.

A society without social classes is not a society without contradictions or conflicts. These are inevitable: it will be the role of democratic planning, from an ecosocialist perspective freed from the constraints of capital and profit, to resolve them through open and pluralistic discussions leading society itself to take decisions. Such a democracy, common and participative, is the only way, not to avoid making errors, but to correct them through the social collectivity itself.

To dream of a green socialism or even, in the words of some, of a solar communism, and to fight for this dream, does not mean that we are not trying to implement concrete and urgent reforms. While we should not have illusions about “clean capitalism,” we must nevertheless try to gain time and impose on the public authorities some elementary changes: a general moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, strict regulation of industrial fishing and the use of pesticides as chemical substances in agro-industrial production, a much greater development of public transit, the gradual replacement of trucks by trains.

These urgent eco-social demands can lead to a process of radicalization, provided that they are not adapted to the requirements of “competitiveness.” According to the logic of what Marxists call a “transitional program,” each small victory, each partial advance immediately leads to a greater demand, to a more radical objective. These struggles around concrete questions are important, not only because partial victories are useful in themselves, but also because they contribute to ecological and socialist awareness. Moreover, these victories promote activity and self-organization from below: these are two necessary and decisive pre-conditions for achieving a radical, that is to say revolutionary, transformation of the world.

There will be no radical transformation as long as the forces engaged in a radical, socialist and ecological program are not hegemonic, in the sense understood by Antonio Gramsci. In a sense, time is our ally, because we are working for the only change capable of solving environmental problems, which are only getting worse with threats — such as climate change — which are more and more close.

On the other hand, time is running out, and in a few years — no one can say how much — the damage could be irreversible. There is no reason for optimism: the power of the current elites at the head of the system is immense, and the forces of radical opposition are still modest. However, they are the only hope we have to put a brake on the “destructive progress” of capitalism.

[1] Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (Random House, 2019), pp. 95, 98.

[2] Ernest Mandel, Power and Money (Verso, London, 1992), p. 209.

[3] Mandel, ibid., p. 204.

[4] The German philosopher Hans Jonas (Le principe responsabilité, Éd. du Cerf, 1979) raised the possibility of a “benevolent tyranny” to save nature, and the Finnish ecofascist Pentti Linkola (Voisiko elämä voittaa, Helsinki, Tammi, 2004) advocated a dictatorship capable of preventing any economic growth.

[5] Mandel, ibid., p. 206.

Michael Löwy is a Franco-Brazilian philosopher and sociologist, and emeritus research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is the author of numerous books, including The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America and Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” He is also a leading member of the Global Ecosocialist Network.

Coronavirus pandemic: Eight theses on Covid-19

Written by Daniel Tanuro and first published at International Journal of Socialist Renewal

1. The fact that the economic slowdown preceded Covid-19 should not lead to denying either the economic impact of the epidemic (interruption of some production processes, disruption of supply chains, sectoral impacts on air transport and tourism, etc.) or the seriousness of the threat it poses as such. A disruptive phenomenon with exponential dynamics, this epidemic is a specific amplifier of the economic and social crisis. It also reveals the fragility of the capitalist system and the dangers it poses for the working classes, in particular through its congenital fossil-based productivism, the fundamental cause of the ecological and climate crisis.

2. Controlling the epidemic would have required prompt action and strict measures to monitor the health of travellers from contaminated areas, identify and isolate infected people, limit transport and strengthen health services. Stuck in the neoliberal policies with which they tried to counter the economic slowdown, the capitalist governments were slow to take these measures, then took them insufficiently, which forced them to then take more severe measures, while always chasing behind the spread of the virus. Zero stocks, cuts in the fields of health and research and flexiprecarity of work must be blamed in the crisis.

3. Scientists sounded the alarm during the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002. Basic research programmes were proposed in Europe and the USA which would have made it possible to better understand and prevent this category of virus reappearing in new forms. Governments refused to fund them. An absurd policy, but tailor-made for leaving research in these fields to the pharmaceutical industry, whose goal is not public health but profits from the sale of drugs on the market for solvent patients.

4. Like any disruptive phenomenon, the epidemic first elicits reactions of denial. These can then give way to panic and panic can be exploited by demagogues to play the game of authoritarian strategies of technological control of populations and limitation of democratic rights, as in China and Russia. There is also a serious risk that the Covid-19 will be used by the fascists as a pretext to justify and intensify the racist policies of refoulement of migrants.

5. The left cannot be content with reducing the exogenous factor of the health crisis to the endogenous capitalist economic crisis. It must take into account the health crisis as such and develop proposals to combat it in a social, democratic, anti-racist, feminist and internationalist way. Against individualism, it must also adopt for itself and advocate in social movements responsible collective behaviours from the point of view of non-propagation of the virus. 

Unlike the measures to limit car use taken by certain governments in response to the “oil shock”, for example, no one can avoid their responsibility for health: their own, that of their loved ones and public health, without forgetting responsibility for the global South. Either the social movements take this issue in their own hands, democratically and from the social realities of the dominated, or else the dominant ones will impose their liberticide solutions.

6. The major danger of the epidemic is the possible saturation of hospital systems. This would inevitably lead to a worsening of the price paid by the poorest and the weakest, in particular among the elderly, as well as a further shift of care tasks into the domestic sphere, that is to say generally onto women. The saturation threshold obviously depends on the countries, the health systems and the austerity policies that have been imposed there. It will be reached all the more quickly insofar as the governments are running behind the epidemic instead of preventing it. 

The fight against the epidemic therefore requires a break with austerity policies, a redistribution of wealth, refinancing and de-liberalization of the health sector, the suppression of patents in the medical field, North-South justice and a clear priority given to social needs. This implies in particular: banning dismissals of infected workers, the maintenance of wages in the event of partial unemployment, stopping checks, "activation" and sanctions against social security recipients, etc. It is mainly on these questions that we must intervene to counter irrational responses and their potential for racist-authoritarian slippage.

7. There are many commonalities between the Covid-19 crisis and the climate crisis. In both cases, the capitalist system’s logic of accumulation for profit makes it incapable of preventing a danger of which it is nevertheless aware. In both cases, governments oscillate between denial and the inadequacy of policies designed primarily according to the needs of capital, not the needs of populations. 

In both cases, the poorest, racialized and weakest, especially in the countries of the global south, are in sights, while the rich say that they will always get by. In both cases, governments are using the threat to advance toward a strong state while far-right forces are trying to take advantage of fear to out forward foul Malthusian and racist responses. In both cases, finally, the social law of capitalist value comes into direct contradiction with laws of nature with exponential dynamics (the multiplication of viral infections in one case, warming and its positive feedbacks in the other).

8. The climatic danger is however infinitely more global and more serious than that of the virus. The same will obviously apply to its consequences if the exploited and the oppressed do not unite to bring down this absurd and criminal mode of production. The Covid-19 is yet another warning: capitalism, which leads humanity to barbarism, must be ended.

Daniel Tanuro is an ecosocialist writer from Belgium

After the Coronavirus Pandemic – What will our politics look like?

There is much speculation in political circles, especially on the left, about what effect the pandemic will have on our politics, once we get through the current crisis. Certainly, these are unprecedented times that we live it, which business as usual politics was unable to cope with, in any kind of civilised manner. It is at times like these that government comes into its own, laissez-faire, neo-liberal politics has been found wanting, and a collective politics has emerged as a much more suitable vehicle for this crisis, in the UK at least.

The do nothing strategy, if you can call it that, to contain the spread of the virus, has steadily been abandoned over the last fortnight, in favour of a collective appeal to help the NHS, by most people largely self isolating, and the closure of pubs, restaurants and live entertainment of all kinds. Gradually, the instructions from the government have become more draconian, with enforcement by the police of these measures.

The political left (and some on the right) has voiced concerns over this more authoritarian approach, whilst the political right worries over ‘big state’ actions and to some extent carries over its obsession with immigration from the Brexit debate. Ah, Brexit, it hardly gets a mention these days though, after almost four years of it dominating British political discourse. The main concern for the right appears to be the adoption, by a Conservative government, and a pretty right-wing one at that, of socialist policies.

The government has, in effect, nationalised the payroll, with measures to pay 80% of public and private sector wages for those laid off by the crisis and has produced a similar scheme for the self-employed. At the same time, a volunteer pool of people has been established to help the NHS and to take on other duties, like driving food delivery vans and doing shopping for elderly and vulnerable people.

Some of this was already happening in communities anyway, but the government is accelerating this, with a call for collectivism rather than the usual individualism, bugger everyone else, me, me, me, being replaced by a more sharing approach. 

Some businesses will go bankrupt, but many will survive, and some will even do very well out of this emergency, as Naomi Klein has documented in her book about disaster capitalism, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.

What we are witnessing here, is an attempt to save the capitalist system, rather than replace it, but for the neo-liberal Conservative party, this is indeed a big shift to the left, but of a Keynesian nature, rather than a truly socialist one, but even so this is very much out of character for the Tories.

This is an emergency though, so the attempt will be to move back to business as usual as soon as the crisis is under control. The Tories hope this will be greeted with relief by the public, after the lock-down has ended. The government are trying to conflate our freedoms with the normal state of economics and politics, hoping that people will be so relieved that they can go out and enjoy themselves, they will welcome the resumption of the ancient regime.

The government’s favoured analogy is that of fighting a war, when a national effort is needed to defeat the ‘enemy’, all pulling together (collectively) in this time of crisis. Indeed during in World War II, Britain came as close to socialism as it has ever done. And it was successful, but people tired of all the restrictions and particularly the rationing of food, once the war was over, and this is the feeling that the Tories will attempt to exploit.

And yet, Winston Churchill, the great wartime leader tried exactly the same tactic, but was unceremoniously booted out of office, and Labour had a landslide victory. People remembered what life was like before the war, and remembered Churchill’s politics from that time. He set the army against union members in the General Strike of 1926 and was no friend of the working classes.

The people wanted no more of that, and after all the sacrifice of the war years, wanted a decisive break with the pre-war days. I doubt the soldiers would have obeyed Churchill if he had tried to set them against the workers at that time.

The 1945 Labour government although it did great things like create the NHS and largely the welfare state, underestimated the public’s fatigue with wartime measures, and carried on rationing for too long after the war ended, which ultimately led to electoral defeat in 1951, and the return of a Tory government. Although, not of the pre-war type, as they outdid Labour on things like building council houses. The post-war politics remained in place under successive Tory and Labour governments until Margaret Thatcher destroyed it in the 1980s.

For the left, this lesson needs to be learnt, we should big up the achievements of the collective approach, and the improvements in the environment (far less pollution) but without keeping the most unpopular bits, like the draconian approach to people not being able to have fun. Once the coronavirus pandemic has passed, we should ask people if they really want to go back to austerity for most, and extreme wealth for a few? 

Everything will be in play once the crisis is over, there will be a new world to fight for.

Why Remainers Should Vote Green in the Local Elections

The local authority elections on 3 May, are the last full scale elections in England before our departure from the European Union in March 2019. Yes, it looks like we will get a transitional deal which will last for almost two further years, when to all intents and purposes nothing will change, but we will no longer be a member of the EU. So, this is the last chance to send a message to the Labour and Tory parties, whose leaderships are in favour leaving.

The Greens have consistently opposed leaving the EU, at the referendum itself and since the vote. The Greens want a referendum on the final terms negotiated by the government, before we leave the organisation. Given the lies about NHS spending, the probable breaching of spending rules during the campaign and the probable misuse of personal data now exposed, even some leave voters that I know are regretting their decision, and would like the opportunity to put it right.

The Greens recognise that environmental matters need to be dealt with internationally to be effective, and the EU has improved environmental conditions in the UK, like cleaning up coastal waters and beaches and forcing the UK government to improve air quality. The Greens also worry about the environmental effects of moving to trading with far flung countries in terms of increasing carbon emissions with long haul transportation. The Greens also have concerns over food standards and general democratic accountability that goes with all of the global trade deals in operation already. 

The Tory leadership is held hostage by probably about 70 or 80 hard line Brexiter MPs, easily enough to bring down the government in Parliament, so even if there was desire to reverse or soften the result, which I don’t think there is, the hard liners are calling the shots. Labour has generally fudged its position, but has softened its stance a little with the recent conversion to remaining in ‘a customs union’ with the EU, but wants to leave the single market, end the free movement of people, and won’t hold a referendum on the terms of exit.

Apart from the Greens the only other sizable national party in England to oppose Brexit, and want a referendum on the final terms of our leaving the EU, are the Lib Dems. But the Lib Dems are slippery in general, leaning to the right in Tory held areas and to the left in Labour held areas. You can’t really trust them to be principled about almost anything. Most of all they entered a coalition with the Tories at national level in 2010.

If the Lib Dems hadn’t propped up the minority, austerity obsessed Tory government for five years, we probably wouldn’t have even had a referendum on EU membership in 2016. Although no longer in coalition since the Tories won a small overall majority in Parliament in 2015, I think it unlikely this would have happened if the Tories were forced to be a minority government in 2010, and probably would not have lasted a full five years. The Lib Dems bear responsibility for where we have ended up today, so they should not be rewarded by Remain voters.

The Greens and Lib Dems did not do well at last year’s general election, but my bet is that many Remain voters voted Labour because they saw it as the best way to shackle the Tories who were offering the hardest version of Brexit. I think people had tired of Tory austerity too, which the Lib Dems were party to, but with the First Past The Post electoral system, anything other than voting Labour was a risk in most places.

3 May has no such risk, because we are not electing a government, only local councils with very little power. Which is not to say that these elections are unimportant, because local councillors can make a positive difference to local government. Indeed elected Greens do this all the time. Greens have defended social housing for example, against attacks from councils controlled by Labour mainly. You can see what Green councillors have achieved in local government here.

But this is a golden opportunity for Remainers to send a message to the Tories and Labour, without having to sully themselves by endorsing the toxic Lib Dems. Vote Green on 3 May to proclaim you support staying in the EU.     

Bookmaker Makes it Odds On that Teresa May will be Deposed this Year

Betway have slashed their odds on Theresa May being deposed this year, from 5/4 to 4/5. Three other UK bookmakers are offering short odds or evens that Theresa May will be gone this year. Sky Bet is offering even money with William Hill offering odds of 11/10 and Corals 5/4, at time of writing. You can get more generous odds from Paddy Power who divide 2018 into four quarters, with quarter 1, the shortest odds at 5/1. But given that rumours are circulating that the local elections results in May will be so bad for the Tory party, that this will trigger a challenge to the prime minister, quarter 2 may be a better bet, at 6/1.

Discontent is growing with May, amongst the party’s MPs, with more of them publicly calling for her to up her game or go, although some have stuck to the line that now is not the time to change the prime minister. Rumours also suggest that close to the 48 MPs needed for a vote of confidence in May, have submitted letters to the 1922 committee chair. Patience appears to be running out with May over domestic policy drift and in-fighting over the exact terms of the UKs exit from the European Union (EU).

May has only survived as long as she has since last June’s disastrous general election, when she threw away a ruling majority, because Tory MPs couldn’t agree on a successor and they worried that a general election might follow, which they would lose to the Labour party. This calculation appears to be changing though, with the feeling spreading that nothing could be worse than May carrying on for much longer.

But something else has changed too. The most hard-line Brexit Tory MPs have been supportive of May, as she talked tough on the exit negotiations. But her concession just before Christmas of paying a £39 billion ‘divorce’ settlement to the EU, and caving in by agreeing to in effect staying in the European customs union (and possibly European single market), to get an agreement on the Irish border, has caused a re-think. Leading hard-line Brexiteer, Jacob Rees Mogg has said May’s plan would leave the UK as a ‘vassal state’ of the EU.

Theresa Villiers, a former minister and also from the party’s hard-line Brexit wing, said that the UK appears set to remain in the EU 'in all but name.' This was sparked by the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, speaking at the Davos conference last week, saying the UK’s trade relations with the EU would change only “very modestly” after Brexit. The hardliners are feeling betrayed, and now may be convinced that the only way to secure their demands of a hard Brexit, is to replace May with someone they view as ideologically sound on the matter.

This is certainly the most serious situation for May’s leadership that she has faced, and it is starting to look like the beginning of the end. May might conceivably survive a vote of no confidence, but even this may not be enough to save her. She might be so fatally damaged by the result that she is forced to resign.

In 1990, under different rules, then Tory prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, won the first round of a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, only to resign a few days later. The Tories can be pretty brutal with a failing leader, and May is definitely failing.

If a hard-line Brexiteer wins the Tory leadership this could throw the whole process of Brexit into even more disarray than it is. The minimal progress achieved so far in the negotiations might be reversed, which is an alarming prospect for anyone with the good of the country at heart. It would likely tear the Tory apart at the same time, but that is of scant concern.

If there is one thing that gets the Tories going it is Europe, and it looks like they are going to take a chance with our future by casting the country into chaos, over their ideological obsession.

Let’s hope that this also leads to an early general election, where the stable can be swept clean, and this most self-indulgent of parties are ejected from office, for the common good.

Universal Basic Income – too basic, not radical enough

Written by Michael Roberts and first published at The Next Recession

The idea of a basic income has gained much popularity recently and not just among leftists but also with right-wing pro-capital proponents.  Basic income boils down to making a monthly payment by a government to every citizen of an amount that meets ‘basic necessities’ whether that person is unemployed or not or whatever the circumstance.

As Daniel Raventós, defines it in his recent book: “Basic Income is an income paid by the state to each full member or accredited resident of a society, regardless of whether or not he or she wishes to engage in paid employment, or is rich or poor or, in other words, independently of any other sources of income that person might have, and irrespective of cohabitation arrangements in the domestic sphere” (Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom).

He lists various things in its favour: that it would abolish poverty, enable us to better balance our lives between voluntary, domestic and paid work, empower women, and “offer workers a resistance fund to maintain strikes that are presently difficult to sustain because of the salary cuts they involve”.

And recent books such as Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams and Postcapitalism by Paul Mason have also brought this issue to prominence. These writers reckon that the demand for a universal basic income by labour should be part of the struggle in a move to ‘post-capitalism’ and should be a key demand to protect workers from a capitalist world increasingly dominated by robots and automation where human beings will become mostly unemployed.

But ‘basic income’ is also popular among some right-wing economists and politicians.  Why? Because paying each person a ‘basic’ income rather than wages and social benefits is seen as a way of ‘saving money’, reducing the size of the state and public services – in other words lowering the value of labour power and raising the rate of surplus value (in Marxist terms).  It would be a ‘wage subsidy’ to employers with those workers who get no top-up in income from social benefits under pressure to accept wages no higher than the ‘basic income’ which would be much lower than their average salary.

As Raventos has noted, (in the American Journal of Economic Issues June 1996 with Catherine Kavanagh), “by partially separating income from work, the incentive of workers to fight against wage reductions is considerably reduced, thus making labour markets more flexible. This allows wages, and hence labor costs, to adjust more readily to changing economic conditions”.

Indeed, the danger is that the demand for a basic income would replace the demand for full employment or a job at a living wage.  For example, it has been worked out that, in the US, the current capitalist economy could afford only a national basic income of about $10,000 a year per adult. And that would replace everything else: the entire welfare state, including old age pensions disappears into that one $10,000 per adult payment.

The basic income demand is similar to the current idea among Keynesians and other leftist economists for increased public spending financed by ‘helicopter money’.  This policy means no fundamental reform of the economy but a just a cash handout to raise incomes and boost the capitalist economy.  Indeed, this is why the leftist Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has viewed favourably the basic income idea. 

A minimum equal income for everyone, Varoufakis tells us, is the most effective way to confront the deflationary trends that manifest capitalism’s inability to balance itself. Creating a minimum income that’s delinked from work, he argued, would increase effective demand without substantially increasing savings. The economy would grow again and would do so in a much more balanced way. The amount of the minimum income could become a simple, stand alone lever for the economic planners of the 21st century.

Here the basic income demand provides an answer to crises under capitalism without replacing the capitalist mode of production in the traditional Keynesian or post-Keynesian way, by ending ‘underconsumption’.  But what if underconsumption is not the cause of crises and there is a more fundamental contradiction within capitalism that a ‘basic income’ for all, gradually ratcheted up by government planners, cannot resolve?

Raventos retorts to this argument that “Some people complain that basic income won’t put an end to capitalism. Of course it won’t. Capitalism with a basic income would still be capitalism but a very different capitalism from the one we have now, just as the capitalism that came hot on the heels of the Second World War was substantially different from what came at the end of the seventies, the counter-reform we call neoliberalism. Capitalism is not one capitalism, just as “the market” is not just one market.” 

This answer opens up a whole bag of tricks by suggesting that we can have some form of non ‘neoliberal’, ‘fairer’ capitalism that would work for labour, as we apparently did for a brief decade or so after the second world war. But even if that were true, the ‘basic income’ demand stands little prospect of being adopted by pro-capitalist governments now in the middle of a Long Depression unless it actually reduced the value of labour power, not increased it.  

And if a socialist worker government were to come to power in any major capitalist economy would the policy then be necessary when common ownership and planned production would be the agenda?  As one writer put it: “The call for basic income in order to soften the effects of automation is hence not a call for greater economic justice. Our economy stays as it is; we simply extend the circle of those who are entitled to receive public benefits. If we want economic justice, then our starting point needs to be more radical.”

In his book, Why the Future is Workless, Tim Dunlop says that “the approach we should be taking is not to find ways that we can compete with machines – that is a losing battle – but to find ways in which wealth can be distributed other than through wages. This will almost certainly involve something like a universal basic income.” But is that the approach that we should take?  Is it to find ways to ‘redistribute’ wealth “other than through wages” or is it to control the production of that wealth so that it can be allocated towards social need not profit?

I have discussed in detail in previous posts what the impact of robots and AI would be for labour under capitalism. And from that, we can see an ambiguity in the basic income demand. It both aims to provide a demand for labour to fight for under capitalism to improve workers conditions as jobs disappear through automation and also wants basic income as a way of paying people in a ‘post-capitalist’ world of workless humans where all production is done by robots (but still with private owners of robots?).

And when we think of this ambiguity, we can see that the issue is really a question of ownership of the technology, not the level of incomes for workless humans.  With common ownership, the fruits of robot production can be democratically planned, including hours of work  for all. 

Also, under a planned economy with common ownership of the means of production (robots), it would be possible to extend free goods and services (like a national health service, education, transport and communications) to basic necessities and beyond. So people would work fewer hours and get more free goods and services, not just be compensated for the loss of work with a ‘basic income’.

In a post-capitalist world (what I prefer to call ‘socialism’ rather than mincing around with ‘post-capitalism’), the aim would be to remove (gradually or quickly) the law of value (prices and wages) and move to a world of abundance (free goods and services and low hours of toil).  Indeed, that is what robots and automation now offer as a technical possibility.

The basic income demand is just too basic. As a reform for labour, it is not as good as the demand for a job for all who need it at a living wage; or reducing the working week while maintaining wages; or providing decent pensions.  And under socialism, it would be redundant.

After the General Election – What Now for the Greens?

Apart from Green co-leader Caroline Lucas doubling her majority in Brighton Pavilion, last Thursday, the general election delivered a poor result for the Green Party. The national vote halved from 2015 and in Bristol West, where we started the campaign as favourites to win the seat, the Greens finished a distant third behind Labour. I got wind of this from local activists here in London who had visited Bristol to help out. The Labour surge swept the Greens away, in Bristol and across the country, with not even a second place finish anywhere.

We can perhaps claim that our very existence pulled Labour to the left, and so played a part in Labour’s success. One of the reasons Corbyn supporters cited for electing him leader, was to get votes back from the Greens.

For sure, by pursuing a ‘progressive alliance’ which in practice meant the Greens standing down in dozens of constituencies, in favour of Labour or the Lib Dems, our vote was bound to fall. And even where we did stand, the message either got through that we didn’t think we could win, or else people just threw their support behind Labour without giving us a thought. We did invite this with our strategy.

It is likely that even if we had stood everywhere the result would have been similar, I think, although our total would have improved a little. Something happened in the election campaign, a big shift in the mood of the electorate. All the various discontents of the voters coalesced into a surge in support for Labour. I can’t ever remember a late swing to Labour in a general election campaign before, but it happened this year.

Most Greens will be pleased that the Tories lost their majority in Parliament. I for one was jumping up and down, punching the air as the exit poll was revealed on TV at 10pm on Thursday. But now the dust has settled a little, we need to think through where we go from here. Off the top of my head, there are a couple options available.

Labour pretty much lifted their environment policies from the Greens, and may well drive this further home by appealing even more to Green voters, next time. Certainly, this is one of the recommendations from Paul Mason, economic journalist and Labour member, on how Labour should proceed. It doesn’t look as though returning to our old policy of standing everywhere in Parliamentary elections will be fruitful.     

Therefore, we could continue and extend the current strategy, that is defend Brighton Pavilion and stand in less seats elsewhere, at least saving some money. It could be that a few other target seats can be identified, but logically this will involve challenging in Tory held seats, perhaps where the Lib Dems are the main challengers, but Labour nowhere. I haven’t picked through the results of Thursday’s election in any great detail, but there may be some areas where this is feasible.

This might mean that we largely give up on Parliamentary elections, and become a party that exists mainly at local and regional government level, until such a time as support is solidified enough at local level in an area, before any attempt is made to stand in Westminster elections. We can continue to press for proportional voting, but I doubt Labour or the Tories will introduce such a system for Parliament, it is in their interest to continue to back the status quo.

The only other strategy that I can think of for the Greens, is to pursue an ecosocialist approach and to outflank Labour on their left. Not full blown ecosocialism of course, that would mean tearing the down the capitalist system entirely and starting again. Much as I might like this idea, I think the public is not ready for it yet. But there is still electoral space in being radical, which in all honesty the Labour manifesto was not. It has been likened to the Social Democrat Party manifesto from 1983, which at the time was considered tame by the left.

There are obvious areas for Greens to exploit. Labour are in favour of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, which is a subject that a sizable minority of people in the UK are opposed to. Labour will not change their approach to this, whatever Corbyn’s views are. These voters will be disenfranchised if the Greens do not stand.

Labour is pretty much committed to carrying on welfare benefit cuts, with no mention in their manifesto of reversing the Tory cuts of the last seven years. Anyone with a once of compassion for their fellow citizens cannot support such cruelty. Some in Labour are toying with the idea of a Citizens Income, but it will not be in their next election manifesto.

Labour is essentially a centralising force, with big government solutions to everything and a desire for control at the centre. It is part of Labour’s tradition to be like this, and I can’t see them changing this approach. Greens can champion a real kind of localism, as opposed to the Tories bastardisation of the term, by handing back real and substantial powers to local communities. No other party offers this.

We should tax wealthy individuals and corporations more than Labour is suggesting. Their policy on raising corporation tax would leave the level still 2% lower than it was in 2010, so this is an easy hit. We should also advocate a wealth tax on the richest individuals including any property owned. 

We should end the absurd notion of a monarchy and all the hangers on who go with it. We would make the country a republic, and not before time in the twentieth first century. Labour, much as some of them might like it, will not go near this type of policy.

Although, as I say, it is probably too soon to advocate full ecosocialism, we should not shy away from pinning the blame for our environmental ills where it firmly belongs, on the capitalist system, and say that we should be transitioning ourselves away from this damaging system, in the longer term.

Perhaps the dye is now cast, and there isn’t anything much we can do to improve our electoral prospects in the short term. The political wheel will no doubt turn again at some point, but we may have a very long wait indeed. Some may consider joining Labour and trying to Green them, but I don’t think I will be one of them. But whatever we do we should aim to be part of this movement for change, however we position ourselves electorally. 

There is a Magic Money Tree - It is called Fair Taxation

On last night’s BBC TV Question Time Leader’s Debate, between the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and Tory leader, Theresa May, the ‘there’s no magic money tree’ line was trotted out by May. It was rather condescending I thought, to answer the concerns of a nurse in the audience who asked about her pay and conditions of work. May was using the tried and tested, ‘we have to live within our means’ line, and that there is no real alternative to cutting public sector pay.

This line has been very effective in the past in dismissing anyone who suggests there is indeed an alternative to the Tories austerity measures dating back to 2010, as a fantasist, or at least not credible in economic prudence. The truth though, is that how we tax and spend the proceeds raised is entirely a matter of political choice. That the Tories slash public spending and decrease taxation on the wealthiest individuals and global corporations, is just one approach, and on the evidence of the last seven tears, is not even an effective let alone fair one.

If we look at the graph above, which shows UK GDP figures from 2007 to 2016, you will see that since the Tories came to power, in only one year, 2014, has GDP been better than in 2007, when the economy was beginning slow into recession from the third quarter onwards. So it is stretching it a bit to argue, as the Tories do, that they are somehow some kind of economic geniuses. By historical standards, their performance has been poor, much worse than Labour’s, until the 2008 global recession.

The more growth that is generated in the economy, the more the amount of tax revenue rises, regardless of actual tax rates. If you like, the pie gets bigger, and in theory all boats rise on the tide. Unless, the proceeds of growth are not shared around fairly, which is essentially what the Tories have done, by cutting taxes for the rich. The rich have gobbled up what little extra wealth the Tories have created, so they have failed on both counts. Low growth, unfairly distributed. 

Labour aims to increase economic growth by borrowing (at historically low interest rates) to introduce a National Transformation Fund that will invest £250 billion over ten years in upgrading our infrastructure and our economy. 

The chart below from the Equality Trust shows the spread of disposable incomes in the UK. Of course the richest 5% do considerably better than £100,000 per year. Such gross inequality, and then the poorest having the least disposable income, and expected to pay a higher marginal rate than the rich. 

All of this has happened at the same time as the UK national has more than doubled to 88% of GDP. This can hardly be sold as successful, but the Tories cling to their magic money tree mantra, and mouth it repeatedly. It is all nonsense, coming from serial failures at economic management.

There is another way, and Labour’s (and the Greens) manifesto sets this out. Labour proposes to increase income tax rates for the top 5% of earners, those who earn more than £80,000 per year. As the manifesto states:

‘Only the  top 5 per cent of earners will be asked to contribute more in tax to help fund our public services. We renew our pledge not to extend VAT to food, children’s clothes, books and newspapers, and public transport fares.’

Corporation tax, which is what companies pay on their profits, will be raised back to 26% from the 19% the Tories reduced it to last year. In 2010 corporation tax stood at 28%, so this is not an especially radical proposal, but is much needed to help fund public services properly, from which corporations do benefit from. It seems only fair to me that should pay their fair share.

Labour also promises to clamp down on tax avoidance, but all parties promise that, but it often turns out to be difficult to implement effectively. We shall see.

And there you have it, the magic money tree. Not so fantastical really is it? Don’t listen to the Tory lies, we can have a fair system of taxation, it is only a matter of having the political will to do so.

Kick the Tories out on 8 June.