Plan B

Here it is:

Recent economic figures have shown that the government urgently needs to adopt a Plan B for the economy. As economists and academics, we know the breakneck deficit-reduction plan, based largely on spending cuts, is self-defeating even on its own terms. It will probably not manage to close the deficit in the planned time frame and the government's strategy is likely to result in a lot more pain and a lot less gain.

We believe a more effective strategy for sustainable growth would be achieved:

• through a green new deal and a focus on targeted industrial policy.
• by clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion, as well as by raising taxes on those best able to pay
• through real financial reform, job creation, "unsqueezing" the incomes of the majority, the empowerment of workers and a better work-life balance.

These are the foundation of a real alternative and it is time the government adopted it.

The “green” bit wants watching. But apart from that it is most heartening to see someone standing up to the ridiculous notion that the way to restore prosperity is to make people too poor to buy anything, or to dismantle key infrastructure, as well as the equal absurdity that a deficit can be reduced by the transformation of purchasing, tax-paying people into benefit claimants.

Come to that, of course there is a deficit. There is a recession. Of course there is a huge deficit. There is a huge recession, the result of 30 years of the economic policies advocated by the likes of George Osborne and the Orange Book Lib Dems, including the supporters of Tony Blair and David Miliband. Complaining about a deficit during a recession, or about an enormous deficit during an enormous recession, is like complaining about the rain: it cannot be stopped, and its benefits will in any case become apparent in the fullness of time.

Now that the debate is open again after a generation and more, let it be joined in earnest.

A domestic manufacturing base, a largely domestic food supply, and ownership of our own industries and resources by our own citizens, are all integral to national sovereignty, including national security. Nothing has weakened the Union more than the dismantlement of the nationalised industries, which created communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, and many of which had the word “British” in their names.

Quite possibly the most important of all the State’s duties is to guarantee the economic basis of paternal authority. Few things, if any, did this better than the digging of coal to power a country largely standing on it. The same can be said of nuclear power.

Requiring a union card is no different from requiring a British passport or a work permit. It was as wrong to silence the voice of the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons as to silence the voice of organised labour by abolishing trade union barons. One way or another, both of those voices must be heard again, just as the economic safeguards of national sovereignty, of the Union and of paternal authority must be restored.

We cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

Climate change must not be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

If we believe in the social, cultural and political need for a large and thriving middle class, then we have to support and deliver the very extensive central and local government action without which such a class cannot exist.

There is no private sector, at least not as that term is ordinarily employed. Not in any advanced country, and not since the War at the latest. Take out bailouts or the permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts, take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what is there left? They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse or road sweeper. Everyone is.

And with public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met, accountability and responsibilities defined by classical, historic, mainstream Christianity as the basis of the British State and as the guiding inspiration of all three of this State’s authentic, indigenous, popular political traditions.

Privatisation, globalisation, deregulation and demutualisation have turned out, in the most spectacular fashion, to have been anything but fiscally responsible. The same is true of a generation of scorn for full employment, leading to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s and the institutionalisation of that mass indolence down to the present day.

The transfer of huge sums of public money to ostensibly private, but entirely risk-free, companies in order to run schools, hospitals, railways, rubbish collections, and so many other things: is that fiscally responsible? Bailing out the City at all, never mind so that it can carry on paying the same salaries and bonuses as before: is that fiscally responsible? Even leaving aside more rarefied academic pursuits, is it fiscally responsible to allow primary education, or healthcare, or public transport, or social housing to fall apart? Is that good for business? Are wars of aggression fiscally responsible? Are military-industrial complexes?

Will it be fiscally responsible to allow the private health insurance companies to charge the American taxpayer whatever they like, because the absence of a public option or a single-payer system was the price of the votes of Blue Dog Democrats who still voted against the Bill anyway and of wavering Republicans who turned out not to exist at all? Not by coincidence have those who have insisted on a Healthcare Bill without the public option also insisted on a Healthcare Bill with less protection for the child in the womb. In the same spirit did Margaret Thatcher give Britain abortion up to birth, entirely of a piece with the rest of her legacy, which is of unconservative irresponsibility, fiscal as much as every other kind.

Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.