In Wednesday’s budget Philip Hammond announced a number of headline policies which aim to tackle the long-neglected housing crisis in the UK. The country faces acute shortages and a concomitant price bubble in the housing market. This article will look at how we ended up in this mess.
As with any such question, there are a myriad of interlocking social, economic and political factors at play. Therefore, the analysis cannot be exhaustive, but I will consider some of the more salient issues that arise.
As a result of the post-World War Two political settlement, a substantial programme of government housebuilding was undertaken. Inner-city slums were bulldozed and new social housing constructed in their place. Construction reached its height under Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the late-1960s, with local authority-built council houses accounting for up to half of the new homes constructed.
However, Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 and the social and economic changes that her Conservative government instituted in the 1980s marked a dramatic break with the policies of the preceding decades. Most pertinently, in 1980, the Right to Buy scheme was enshrined in law. Government owned housing stock, which had provided secure and affordable accommodation to those most in need, was sold off in large amounts. The result was a huge transfer of wealth from the state to private individuals.
To compound the issue this stock was not adequately replaced. As in many other areas, Thatcher placed faith in the private sector to build the homes the nation needed but, as is clear from the statistics, this faith was misplaced.
New council houses became a thing of the past as the ability of local authorities to build was constrained. The private sector had no incentive to make up the difference and keep prices stable. Therefore, affordable housing became increasingly scarce; in 2016, newly-completed affordable homes reached a 24-year low.
This decades-long failure to build the 300,000 new homes per year that are needed to keep up with demand, combined with the selling-off of government-owned housing stock, greatly contributed to the lack of supply that we see today and has been one of the long-term causes of the steep inflation in the cost of homes that is now pricing first-time buyers out of the market.
It is not just the very youngest who are affected, home ownership across the board is at its lowest level in 30 years. Every age group below the retirement age has seen a decline in levels of home ownership over the past 25 years.
As the value of their houses soared, the generation for whom home ownership became the norm made money in their sleep. To compound the problem, these homeowners are now contributing to the increase in buy-to-let transactions as they spend their accumulated wealth on second houses to rent out. This creates further demand for residential property and partially explains the increasing prevalence of people living in the insecurity of privately rented accommodation; nearly half of those aged 25-34 are renting privately.
Unlike in other nations, where there is often regulation such as rent caps, the private rented sector in this country is relatively unregulated. This has compounded the misery of the current generation who are not only unable to buy a house, but are now struggling to pay the rent. Millennials now spend over a third of their income on rent, compared with the 5-10% of income spent by their grandparents’ generation.
Understanding the reshaping of the global economy which occurred in the 1980s also provides further insight into why property prices in this country, especially in London and the South-East, have risen so precipitously in the past few decades. The increased levels of inequality and greater concentration of wealth towards the top portion of society has produced a mass of savings accrued by a small percentage of the global population. Much of this idle cash has been spent on fixed assets like desirable London property, further contributing to the housing bubble.
This type of demand also means we see more and more of the unaffordable high-end new-builds that are coming to dominate Central London and its skyline, often acting only as part-time homes for their wealthy owners. These apartments and penthouses encased in soullessly imposing glass and steel structures change the city’s character, kill off communities and squeeze those who can’t afford them out of the city.
Vauxhall, London
It is no surprise that of the top 50 homeless ‘hotspots’ in Britain, London accounted for 18 of them. As ever, there is no attention paid to generating positive social outcomes when government abandons its responsibilities to the private sector.
If the creeping inevitability of gentrification is allowed to continue, the vibrancy and culture that is brought to London by its mix of inhabitants, thus making it such a desirable place to live, will be slowly eroded. The end result in this scenario will be the death of the very things that gave those properties their value in the first place.
Ultimately, it has been the failures of successive governments to build enough homes over the past 30 years that has caused today’s housing crisis. Reliance on private housebuilders has failed to produce adequate numbers of affordable housing. Right to Buy helped to transfer wealth to one generation at the expense of the next. Under-regulation of the private rented sector causes further misery for those unable to join the housing ladder. And, in London, the city has become littered with generic glass towers; gleaming symbols of the perverse outcomes that deregulated capitalism generates.
The Tories produced a pretty shocking manifesto. They took the over-60s vote for granted by proposing the so-called ‘dementia tax’ and included absolutely no costings. Had Labour produced such a manifesto the right-wing press would have been besides themselves with fury. As it is, May could have announced that everyone’s grandma was to be burnt at the stake and the Daily Mail would have championed the policy as a much needed boost for firewood sellers.
Today it got even better. Strong and stable May announced a screeching U-turn on the social care policy and then claimed that “nothing has changed”. She tells us there will be an “absolute limit” on the amount people have to pay for social care, but refuses to say what that limit might be. May seems to have taken herself completely by surprise when she announced the election – it’s been a shambles so far.
It got more surreal when she then accused Corbyn of playing politics in an election she called for short-term political gain based on the state of the polls. Corbyn was apparently making “fake claims” about her manifesto – a statement easily disproved. May is throwing her toys out the pram because it’s not been exactly how she imagined. It’s all very Trump-like.
Fake news
The day’s hypocrisy progressed apace as the Tories decided to just start lying about Labour’s manifesto promises. This tweet from the Tory press office declared that Corbyn was going to raise the basic rate of tax. Not true.
More fake news
They may want to try re-reading the Labour manifesto and double-check their own one given that they are the party that has failed to rule out income tax rises and extra National Insurance contributions. Although who knows what their manifesto says now. At one point today the Tories decided that their first effort wasn’t actually the real one. They were just testing us.
Wish the same applied to my dissertation
Today was her ninth U-turn in twelve months. Strong and stable May is going to need a new slogan.
One of the most important parts of the Labour Party manifesto, away from the screaming tabloid headlines about ‘Comrade Corbyn’, is their promise to create a National Investment Bank. The prevailing response to Labour’s manifesto is that the country cannot ‘afford’ it. Britain is the 5th richest nation on the planet. So, where’s all the money?
In 2008, the government bailed out the banks. This huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands in the form of the bailout came with no strings attached and caused Britain’s public debt to balloon. There was no requirement that the banks should productively invest the money to get the economy back on its feet. This added to the huge concentration of wealth at the top of society which had been increasing since the neo-liberal deregulation of the financial sector after 1980. We all recognise that there is a large amount of public debt but often fail to take note of its logical twin; the huge amount of private surplus.
In 2010, the supine Liberal Democrats jumped into bed with the Conservatives, giving us a government ideologically wedded to reducing the size of the state. The narrative was that we must be frugal and recognise the tough times we faced; we were spending beyond our means. The public would pay for private excesses. Public services started to be cut and we arrive at today’s position where the NHS is in constant crisis, per-pupil funding is falling in our schools, the prisons are in a mess, recorded crime is up and the Post Office is in private hands.
Austerity never has and never will work at the national level. For the state, total expenditure is equal to total income and so as the government increasingly cuts its expenditure, the economy is ever more constricted; growth is poor and real wages are lower than they were ten years ago. To attempt to continue along this path and somehow achieve a surplus via more cuts to public services in order to start paying down the debt is economic illiteracy. The state would be decimated and the debt to GDP ratio will rise as a result.
One of the Conservatives’ bright ideas is that instead of the state spending any money, the private sector should be the drivers of investment and growth. So, we come back to that big pile of private wealth which is malingering in the accounts of wealth savers and corporations. However, now that the economy is failing and the consumption that exists is mostly based on unsustainable credit, the wealthy do not fancy investing their money within this climate.
This means asset prices rise enormously (London house prices for example) as the wealthy cram all their money into fixed assets instead of into productive capital. As a result, wealthy individuals watch the price of their assets grow and extract ever increasing rents. Corporations, too, engage in measures focused on short-term profits such as share buybacks to boost the company’s value. When these activities show up in the GDP figures it gives the illusion of growth but no real value has been created, nothing productive has been done. However, private wealth continues to increase and become more concentrated; a great success for the rich donors on which the Conservative Party relies.
In the current situation, what we cannot afford is to have a government ideologically wedded to low public spending. As we have seen, the private sector will not invest, despite interest rates remaining at extremely low levels. It is the role of the government to drive investment into new innovative areas of the economy that will provide long-term productive growth and create new well-paid jobs.
The technological revolution of the twentieth century is one of the best examples of this. The early innovations were driven by the investment of (mainly) the US government. All the technologies in an iPhone, for example, can be traced to government funding, from transistors to touchscreens to Siri. The internet itself emerged from a project funded by the US government. Further examples can be found in countries like Germany and China, where their public investment banks do similar work.
Wavy
There are lessons to learn too. The US government now receives very little return for its investment, given companies like Apple and Microsoft, who built their fortunes on the back of public investment, pay almost no corporation tax. In the 1980s, when these technologies became small and cheap enough to be marketable, the US government should have formed a closer partnership with these companies in order that the public was fairly paid back for the billions of dollars that were spent in the early, financially high-risk stages of development. The government could, for example, have retained the intellectual property rights or obtained shares in the companies. As with the bailouts, the public took on the risks and the private sector reaped the rewards.
In today’s world, the technological revolution of the twenty-first century must be in green energy and biotechnology. It is a necessity we cannot ignore.
Here we see a stark division between Labour and the Tories. The Conservatives have just this month sold off the publicly-owned Green Investment Bank to Macquarie, a bank known for its asset stripping (as evidenced by the state of Thames Water after a decade in their hands). Labour, on the other hand, have promised to create a National Investment Bank aimed at providing exactly the type of long-term productive investment we need. A national bank, because it is backed by the government, is able to borrow at extremely low rates and so returns on investment can be hugely beneficial for the public in the long-run.
Of course, as the economy starts to grow, and the new innovations become commercially viable for private companies, we will see that huge pile of private surplus emerge from the shadows – investment in the real, productive economy will increase. Consequently, that private wealth will be put to mutually beneficial use; better jobs are created and wages rise, thus government receipts rise and so the level of public debt also starts to fall. Prosperity is shared.
This is not utopian, pie-in-the-sky stuff. The fastest growing, most innovative economies have always had forms of government intervention and investment to provide the framework for further private innovation.
To say we cannot afford a Labour government is not true. On the contrary, we cannot afford another five years of stale Tory economics, not just for the health of the economy and a more equitable society, but also for the health of the planet.
At the end of the 1970s things changed. It started in the economic sphere. By now the disease that was unleashed has seeped into almost every corner of our lives. A way of doing things was abandoned and a new way was forged by new types of people, with new ideas about the way our lives should work. About the forces that should govern your life. About the values that whole societies should hold.
There had been a different way. Between the end of the Second World War and the late 1970s it was different. The values that were held and the way things were run was different.
Why? Because the people that created it were scarred. Scarred by the events of the early 20th Century. Scarred by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, which left millions unemployed. Millions homeless. Scarred by a war which lay waste to several continents. A war which in many ways was born in 1929, out of the misery and desperation that was spread around the world when unrestrained finance got it wrong. Those who lived through that period never forgot what caused nearly two decades of global chaos. And they so they changed the rules. They changed the systems and the values and the ways in which we thought about the world. Somewhere along the line we forgot.
In the latter part of the 1970s, a system, the one which had caused ruination, was being repackaged and reborn. Influential books were being published. Those with large amounts of money – those who such a system benefits – were setting up organisations and think tanks, and funding newspapers. A gradual infiltration was occurring.
When the time came, they pounced. First Thatcher in 1979, then Reagan in 1981. These two events were partly driven by, and partly accelerated, the collapse of the system which was put in place after the end of the Second World War. That system wasn’t foolproof and cannot be exonerated of partial responsibility for its own collapse. It was a first attempt. Something that had never been done before. There were bound to be chinks in the armour. It was new territory. Those who it didn’t benefit, the powerful vested interests – the top one percent, were waiting.
They sold a new exciting way of doing things. In fact, the same old way. But we had forgotten. And so, these two dogmatic believers, Thatcher and Reagan, sold dreams to their great nations. A dream called neoliberalism.
It was founded on a simple belief: That the individual was all powerful and that humans are inherently motivated by private gain. In an economy, each individual and corporation knew their position best and so, it therefore follows, that they alone can make the best decisions to improve their lives. How could anything run well or successfully if there was no money to be made? It created a world which fetishizes the pursuit of material self-interest, in which material gain absolves individuals and corporations of social responsibility.
Neoliberals argued that government was intrusive and always got things wrong. How can they know what’s best for you? And so how can they know what’s best for the country? In this way, there is no place for social projects, co-operative movements, or public services. They have no profit motive so cannot be successful.
A huge project of privatisation and deregulation was undertaken. The rules that had governed society were removed and so the values that underpinned those rules were undermined. Finance was released. All of a sudden, the restrictions on big banks had vanished. Public housing ceased to be built. Unions were crushed and along with it basic workers’ rights.
In Britain, Thatcher shut coal mines and steel factories. Entire communities that had been built around industries were decimated. Millions were unemployed. Yet the social safety net that would have caught them and provided a second chance was also being whipped away by cuts in government spending. The workers weren’t re-skilled and their jobs were not replaced. The pride and self-worth that these solid jobs had given millions was destroyed. But the message was simple. If you work hard enough you will succeed. Everyone can make it. Just look at the fortunes that had begun to amass at the top.
Except of course it was a fallacy. Those who were benefitting were those who could afford to make big investments in new financial markets. Those who could take advantage of government selling off its assets at low prices. Those who already had enough, but wanted more.
After the war, full employment had been the aim on both sides of the Atlantic. The destruction that joblessness could bring had been realised in the 1930s. But this didn’t suit those at the top who sought profit. How could they exploit well-paid workers in a functioning economy that employed almost all its people?
Well, as we’ve seen, they destroyed working class jobs and created a pool of long-term unemployed workers. How handy. A pool of poor people desperate for work. People that could be at once employed and discarded at a moment’s notice. No unions to protect them. Employment laws that prevented exploitative firing of workers were removed. If you didn’t like your wage or your working conditions there was always another person waiting in the pile, ready to accept the conditions that you didn’t, however meagre the wage. Profits skyrocketed and so did executive pay.
A narrative was spun. Poor people are to blame for their own position. People who relied on government support were a drain on society.
No matter that schools and public healthcare were poorly funded. That well-paying jobs had been snatched from the working class. Big business had had enough of paying people properly. It wanted ever increasing profits at the expense of all else.
Throughout the following decades, corporations and high net-worth individuals made a killing. At the same time, taxes on the rich and corporations were lowered. These were the ‘wealth creators’. Another handy new term. Trickle-down economics would ensure that the extra value these ‘wealth creators’ generated would filter through the economy and benefit everyone. It never worked. It has never been proven to work.
And so, with less regulation, more speculation and greater hubris among those at the top, economic crises became ever more frequent: The Third World debt crisis in 1982, Black Monday in 1987, the 1995 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 Asian crisis, the 1998 Russian crisis and the Dot-com bubble which burst in 2001. In each instance, the economic actors with so-called ‘perfect information’ were found to have little idea about what they were doing. A scapegoat was found. It was never their fault.
With globalisation, unrestrained capital was able to chase short-term profits around the world. Shifting from one country to the next for a quick buck. Long-term investments dwindled. Instead of investing in new technologies, new worker training, new infrastructure projects, we clung onto old, failing industries.
Our GDPs grew, but based on ever-more complex finance that was essentially worthless. Little of actual value was being created. More and more money was being ploughed into ever more complex ways of betting on financial outcomes. We fooled ourselves that it was all ok. Even though private debt soared. Banks were lending almost without restriction. People ran up huge debts and were given the illusion of increasing wealth as the value of their properties rose. But there was little underlying substance. Jobs were of poor quality and offered little stability.
Everyone swallowed the lie. In Britain, Labour became ‘New Labour’ and bought into the system. In America, it was the Democrats under Bill Clinton. They performed a most destructive act in 1999, when they abrogated the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. An act introduced after the Great Depression which separated commercial and investment banking. All of a sudden, that wall was torn down. More hell broke loose.
And so, we sleepwalked towards disaster. A disaster that no one foresaw (save a few outside voices). Everyone was too pleased with themselves. Clever economists and politicians thought they had tamed the economy. Hubris reigned supreme.
2008 brought the world to its knees. Now the bankers lost their jobs too. But spare the tears. They had sold unrestricted credit to vulnerable and unsuspecting people. Loans secured by the value of people’s houses were handed out with little or no means testing. You could be jobless and homeless but a bank would give you some money. It was mass exploitation and it all came crashing down.
Financial instruments that not even their creators understood were allowing investors and bankers to place huge bets on the outcomes of these mortgages. At any one time the size of the market betting on the outcomes of mortgages was up to 20 times the value of the actual mortgages themselves. When this bubble burst, it burst spectacularly. Governments were forced to bail-out the major banks – all paid for with taxpayers’ money. At the same time millions were made homeless and unemployed
But the powerful, vested interests still lurked. A new narrative was spun: Excessive government spending was to blame, poor people who leeched off government were a burden, immigrants were stealing jobs and draining public services. The state must be cut back further. The answer was less regulation not more.
The vested interests had become so powerful, and the line between government and regulation, and banking and business had become so blurred that no one was held to account. One banker went to jail for fraud. Millions went homeless. The government bail-outs imposed no conditions on the loans. They were told to lend to small businesses to power a recovery and increase aggregate demand. They didn’t. The bankers paid themselves huge bonuses and set about restoring their industry.
They should have been forced to invest in the economy to create real jobs and real wealth that could drive a recovery. Government finances were now too weak to do so. But we swallowed more lies.
In America, the Democrats were elected and investments were made that improved the job market and offered a semi-respectable recovery. But we shouldn’t be fooled. Obama is still part of the same system and so only offered a very slight alternative. This was no seismic shift and it showed. It was just a slightly watered-down version of the same old nonsense.
In Britain, the Conservatives went into government and austerity was practiced as an economic policy. It failed and hit the poorest hardest. Slow growth, high inequality and high job insecurity continued.
Those at the bottom are still blamed for their own situation, when social mobility is being decimated. The UK government’s social mobility commission of 2016 found that:
Millions of hard-working families have experienced a 5% real terms average fall in wages since 2008
Young workers have seen a 15% decline in hourly pay.
Only one in ten low-paid workers – who are mainly women – escape low pay
Only 4 per cent of doctors, 6 per cent of barristers and 11 per cent of journalists are from working-class origins
High house prices mean homes are beyond the reach of almost all average earners.
In 2014-15, only 5% of children who received free school meals gained five A*-A GCSEs
It is harder than ever to move up the scale. We may soon see the first generation who fail to achieve higher standards of living than their parents.
It is little wonder, when considering the effects of neoliberalism, that, especially over the past year, our societies have become increasingly divided. We’ve witnessed Brexit, the rise of the alt-right, the discord in the British Labour Party and the success of Marine Le Pen in France.
And then, at the end of the year, we ended up with Trump. People became so disenfranchised with the way neoliberalism had treated them that any change was considered good change. It’s tragically ironic, that Trump is perhaps the embodiment of all the worst outcomes that neoliberalism gave us. He amassed great personal wealth exploiting workers and profiting from the government sell-off of public land. He brags that avoiding taxes makes him “smart” and has little problem with vilifying minorities to direct public anger away from those who really deserve it: The group of people of which he very much belongs to. Just look at the cabinet he is assembling – it is the wealthiest in history.
We’ve become so conditioned to accept mass amounts of concentrated wealth and so desensitised to the exploitation that this requires, to the extent that Trump is idolised by those who voted for him. Despite being born into grandeur and having a litany of lawsuits brought against him by those he has exploited along the way, his supporters envisage him as some sort of self-made man. He pledges to ‘drain the swamp’, but he himself lurks deep within the swamp.
Tiny hands
Those who have opposed such political earthquakes – like Brexit and Trump – need to recognise their own downfalls too. Do not sneer at those disenfranchised working-class voters who have hit out at the status quo which has been consistently shafting them for the past three decades. It is a shared cause, but we need different solutions. What must be done is to defeat the rise of the far-right who seek to take advantage and push us further into the abyss.
The only beneficiaries from our increasingly divided societies are those who created these conditions. The more polarised we are the easier it is to continue along the same path. It is classic divide and rule. We are constantly pitted against one another, constantly urged to sneer at benefit scroungers or immigrants for draining the system, while the real villains of the piece accumulate ever-increasing wealth at the very top end of society.
It is not the purpose of this article to also examine the alternative economic models in detail. There are many different types of capitalism, and many of them are practiced in other parts of the world. The neoliberal nightmare we have ended up with channels vast amounts of wealth to the top one percent, while being extremely damaging to the majority of society.
We need a model which revitalises our public services. A model which invests in the real economy because those so-called ‘wealth creators’ aren’t doing it – they’re hoarding their money or sticking it in hedge funds which continue to place bets out the outcomes of your mortgages. Finance needs regulating.
New jobs in emerging industries and technologies need to be created. We need a total restructuring of the labour market so that people can have stable well-paid jobs and alongside that workers’ rights and unions need to be strengthened.
There needs to be progressive taxation and higher corporation tax. Those at the top of society will always benefit from the combined labour of the working class, they should be obligated to contribute greatly. After all, it is surely in their interest that society, at a minimum, can access good healthcare, are well-educated and have access to good infrastructure because all these things boost productivity – which we, in the UK, are woefully lacking. A good quality of life should be available to all.
But, those who benefit from neoliberalism will tell you that taxes and regulations will damage our economy. It will scare off those famed ‘wealth creators’. It isn’t true. In South Korea, for example, in the decades up to 1990, they required up to 299 permits from up to 199 agencies just for a factory to be opened. Yet the country experienced growth of 6 percent in per capita terms during the previous three decades – a figure which the UK and US haven’t come close to matching. A similar situation also existed in Japan and Taiwan during their ‘miracle’ growth decades.
In the rich capitalist countries, after the Second World War, progressive taxation and welfare spending was instituted. The subsequent period between 1950 and 1973 saw the highest ever growth rates in these countries – the period known as the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’.
We also need to recognise that humans are driven by countless different motives and create a system which harnesses the best of those drivers. It is not a utopian idea to suggest that it is possible to do this.
This is not a call for a return to the 20th Century, we need a solution fit for the 21st. This is an explanation that it has been different, it can be different and it should be different.
Britain has voted for Brexit. The political world is moving quickly and those who voted Remain, including myself, need to move with it. Those of us on the left who voted to remain, especially the young, have to make the best of what, for us, is a bad situation. The EU had many benefits, but it is also deeply flawed. There is still plenty to be positive about and we must look forward.
Young people, who at the moment are all over social media complaining, need to seize the moment. More of us need to get engaged in the democratic process for the reasons that this referendum has plainly highlighted – it is our future and we need to be the ones to shape it. Voter turnout was lowest in areas with a higher proportion of young people and that needs to change. There is no use signing petitions or complaining about old people, the grieving has to go. Our anger has to be directed in a positive way at forces we can control through the democratic process, and it is the Tory party that should receive most of it. Cameron and Osborne have bungled the whole process from start to finish.
They elevated an internal dispute in their party into a national issue when there was simply no need to (they had already created a ‘referendum lock’ in 2011 that enshrined in law the need to hold a referendum on any future EU treaty changes involving transfers of power to Brussels). However, their hubris, further boosted by winning a majority in 2015 despite being elected by less than 25% of eligible voters, led them to believe they could win anything. They created the conditions whereby millions of Brexit voters expressed anger at their current situation by voting leave. Although the process was started by Thatcher’s decimation of the UK’s industrial heartlands and was then not properly dealt with by subsequent governments, Osborne’s economic policies have made it drastically worse in the last six years.
Bungled budget after bungled budget, Osborne has championed his so-called economic recovery, but it has been hopelessly unbalanced. It is the wealthy, based mostly in London and the South East who have benefited. In the rest of the country the situation is bleak. Real wages fell every year between 2009 and 2014, the longest decline since the mid-1800s. In 2014 median pay was 10% below its 2008 high. A million good quality public sector jobs were replaced with unskilled, low paid and insecure jobs. Labour has become de-unionised and immigration has further supressed wages as employers used the freedom of movement area in the EU, which became far too large, to bring in cheap labour to undercut UK workers. Globalisation has left many people behind and it is no good for metropolitan elites from either side of the political spectrum to characterise the legitimate anger that this creates among ordinary working class voters as racist. If anyone is to blame it is our political leaders for creating such conditions and then believing that people would vote to retain a status quo that has made them worse off.
The task now is for the left to get their act together. People have rejected the established neoliberal order of the past 30 years and we cannot allow the far right to exploit this. A coherent message needs to be advanced that the way forward now is investment in public services and new technologies to replace the secure jobs that were lost long ago in the former industrial heartlands. We need to reject the failed ideas of trickle-down economics and restore workers’ and unions’ rights to create prosperity and boost our ailing economy. We need to bring the excessive pay of those at the top-level back under control so they are not earning wages hundreds of times greater than that of their workers and reject the Tory tax cuts that benefited the richest in society. We have the opportunity to create a new reality in the UK, moving away from Thatcherite deregulation and neoliberal ideas that the EU cemented across Europe. A campaign for proportional representation in parliament would also go a long way to correcting many of the flaws of, and people’s frustrations with, the current system.
This is where our generation has to come to the fore. We missed an opportunity in the referendum with not enough of us engaged in politics and voting to sway the outcome in our favour (64% of 18-24 year olds voted to Remain). Most of the arguments I have seen put forward by those of us under 25 who voted Remain were based on social values. Now the anger of having our future decided by others needs to be harnessed and transformed into political participation to advance those same values in our own country.
2008 brought the world to its knees. Now the bankers lost their jobs too. But spare the tears. They had sold unrestricted credit to vulnerable and unsuspecting people. Loans secured by the value of people’s houses were handed out with little or no means testing. You could be jobless and homeless but a bank would give you some money. It was mass exploitation and it all came crashing down.
harryclark2016 