Monday 6 April 2015

Who Governs Britain?

Owen Jones writes:

Who should run Britain? A shamelessly entitled, grasping, booming elite who believe paying taxes or their workers a wage they can live on is beneath them?

Or the voters who, in a democracy, supposedly call the shots?

Big business has an answer, of course.

The Tory party co-chairman, Andrew Feldman, is said to have helped compile the now notorious list attacking the Labour party, ringing round Tory donors (who make up a third of the list) and business figures given honours (who make up one in five).

Tax-dodgers and poverty-paying bosses among them, they made a canny choice about who would best safeguard – and indeed increase – their bank balances.

And then Auntie Beeb – who supplied David Cameron with his head of communications– spent two days portraying this Tory press operation as a damning indictment of the Labour party. Job done.

This is what it all boils down to.

Big businesses – like those on the Tory list – are drunk on triumphalism. For the last generation, they have become accustomed to politics serving their interests and public policy heading relentlessly in their direction.

Successive governments cut their taxes. Once mighty trade unions were permanently hobbled, and workers left bereft of basic rights and security.

Economic strategy under both New Labour and the Tories was servile to the interests of the City. Public utilities and services were privatised.

Even in boomtime as corporate profits thrived, workers’ pay packets were stagnating or falling, but businesses were quite content to let the government subsidise poverty wages through in-work benefits, or stand back while workers became dependent on personal debt to maintain their living standards.

While food banks have proliferated and wages have shrunk, the richest 1,000 Britons doubled their fortunes. In 1979, 6% of Britain’s income ended up in the bank accounts of the top 1%; today it has reached 15%.

The direction of travel has been very clear: policies promoting greater wealth and power for those at the top. Any deviation from this journey is seen as completely unacceptable, however modest.

And that is why a Labour victory is simply intolerable.

Labour is committed to increasing corporation tax from 20% to 21%, which would leave it the lowest of any G7 countries and 14 percentage points below that citadel of free-market economics, the United States.

Labour wishes to increase the top rate of tax to 50%, the same level as that well-known mecca of socialism, Japan.

It wants to increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020: well below a living wage, and derisory as far as many are concerned.

But all that is by the by. Big businesses are used to everything going their way, and even the tiniest challenge to this status quo must be stopped.

That’s why Labour’s response to this letter is canny.

By composing its own, which includes firefighters and supermarket shelf-stackers as signatories, it is making an important statement about democracy.

Why should we be dictated to by a corporate elite who shamelessly pretend that their economic self-interest and the wellbeing of the nation are one and the same?

What about working people – the real wealth-creators who keep Britain ticking day after day?

There will be much of this over the coming weeks.

The nation’s “free media”, run as it is by a tiny group of super-rich moguls, is largely desperate for the Tories to remain in office.

There is a rock-solid strategic alliance between these moguls, big business and a Tory party bankrolled by bankers, hedge fund managers, legal loan sharks and other economic titans.

The strategy will be threefold: portray anything that does not champion the interests of this tiny elite as a recipe for economic disaster; focus people’s anger on immigrants, benefit claimants and public sector workers; throw personal venom at Ed Miliband.

Will it work? Actually, it could.

And so here is a test for our democracy.

Will we be blackmailed and cajoled by a rapacious economic elite interested only in their bank balances?

Or will voters display courage and reject this campaign of shameless self-interest?

In five weeks, we will find out.

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