Taxpayer as Shareholder

A guest post from Gerald Hartley, local green activist in Stroud and south-west regional elections co-ordinator

The British tax payer is a ‘shareholder’ in the state enterprise in all its many forms.  Over the decades this ‘enterprise’ accumulated assets worth billions of pounds. Coal mines, railway stations lines and rolling stock, power stations, steel works, canals, bus companies, lorry fleets, a national grid of gas pipelines and electricity lines, telephone lines, water mains and sewage pipes, pumping stations and treatment plants, council houses, hospitals, health centres and clinics, town halls, fire and police stations, roads and bridges, libraries, schools and colleges, elderly persons and children’s homes.  Why did it do so?  Because the private sector failed to provide all the things needed for the common good.

The Thatcher era began and governments ever since have continued, to sell those assets cheaply to the private sector and use the cash to make their financial performance look better than it was.  But now it is also a cover for the lack of revenue caused by the financial crash brought about by the very people that fund and support the Tory party.

Where asset sales cannot be justified, such as schools, pseudo-private organisations are constructed to eliminate democratic input and maximise elite structures. This is the very serious underlying aim of the Tory party – an elite society with everything owned and run by their friends and supporters to protect their common interests, untroubled by the rest of us.  They can see that financial crisis may come and go, but privatisation only gets reversed in a revolution.

So we the tax-paying shareholders in the UK state, have lost most of our assets, suffer reduced services, but pay the same tax and receive no dividends.  When the Tories crow that they have kept the council tax at the same level for 3 years, do you laugh or cry?  But it’s the kind of propaganda that keeps them at the helm.

In the 18th Century, there was little that the peasants could do to oppose the Enclosures of common land.  This saying, from that time, seems strangely apt all this time later.

‘The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose’ 

Geese are not very bright.  So maybe it’s time for the ‘have nots’ to demonstrate that they are brighter than that and stop blaming Europe, immigrants or anything else handy and take the trouble to understand just how the globalised financial system is designed to benefit a tiny minority at the expense of the planet and every species living on it.

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Olympicopoly

In many ways the economic organisation of the Olympics can read read as symbolic of the organisation of late capitalism as an economic system. London has been hollowed out as its wary residents leave town to holiday in the country, or leave their own country altogether. The city that they call home, and whose riches they generate, has become the playground of an international elite. Those attending the games are profligate financially and in carbon terms, jetting around the world for hedonistic pleasure.

There will be spectators, but in global terms all will be rich, since no tickets are available within the price-range of the average global worker. Londoners have lost their city, their roads, their buses, their tube stations - even, as pointed out in an earlier post, their language. Rather than an economic opportunity, white-collar workers have been encouraged to 'get ahead of the games', which without further advice than walking to walk is surely encouragement to skiving on a massive scale. Small-scale entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are excluded from economic opportunities by the mother of all restrictive practices that the Olympic contract itself embodies.

At this stage in the games, the costs are guesses and probably deceptions. The 'round number' for the cost of the games is £9bn. Contributions from sponsors is known but secret: the Guardian has produced its best estimates as to how the suggested £1bn. total breaks down. What is clear is that, although most of the economic value arising from the games will be enclosed and extracted by the corporate sponsors, it is the people of the UK who will pay the majority of the cost. So just as we subsidise the roads that enable Tesco and their ilk to drive their goods from underpaid producers to overfed consumers, so we pay for global marketing opportunities that are then exploited by a narrow range of global corporations.

While such a message could hardly for the basis for a national pageant, the economistic approach to life was wonderfully subverted by the opening festivities. We, the citizens of the world, have utterly lost control of the economic sphere, and yet without our culture and creativity life would be meaningless even for the elites who extract the value of our work and control increasingly more aspects of our lives. This was the hugely powerful message of the opening ceremony, because it is surely the political message of both Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry. They read our history, as I do, as a history of struggle and the triumph of humanity over economic oppression.

They had skilfully included the aspects of British culture that truly make us proud, particularly our self-deprecating humour and our favourite national institution the NHS. Before the TV transmission began, Boyle had dedicated the performance to the volunteers who made it possible, the people who worked without being paid, who he called 'the best of us'. In a games that seems more obviously controlled by corporate interests than any before, that is the message we must hold on to.
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Enclosure 3.0

The role of McKinsey, the US-based management consultants, in spreading the new gospel of corporate capitalism around the world has been widely noted. A new report now makes clear how the creation of the concept of 'ecosystem services' was always, as some of us have long believed, a step towards the commodification and sale of life itself. In spite of the clear evidence that globalisation has resulted in rising rates of inequality and ecological destruction, the report, called Resource Revolution, argues that what the world needs is more capitalism, not less.

Green economists have long been arguing that the two centuries of focus on labour and capital and the sidelining of land has been a mistake. McKinsey have now caught up, concluding that:

'In the 20th century, governments and businesses didn’t have to worry about resource productivity; they could focus on capital and labor. Over the next 20 years, resources must be at the heart of public policy and business strategy.'

The report provides a range of scarey statistics about rising population and increasing demand for resources, but then reassures readers that these offer tremendous opportunities. Unsurprisingly given its source, the opportunities are for businesses to take control of global assets and then organise their distribution. This is justified by the claim that the McKinsey model can offer the necessary increase in resource productivity.

Although couched in 21st century language, this is precisely the same argument made by the 18th-century improvers, who provided the intellectual justification for the theft of land during the Enclosures. Then, as now, the role of politicians was limited to freeing up the market ('unwinding subsidies'), making capital available, guaranteeing property rights. Oh yes, and providing safety-nets for those 'very poor people' who may lose out to deal with change. Perhaps we could ask McKinsey to hold a public meeting to discuss their findings - I'd like to suggest we book the Speenhamland Village Hall.
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