Dear Cameron: Here is our Ultimatum. No Wages or Welfare State? No Labour or Taxes.

[ttosca]

Dear David Cameron,

If you continue to withdraw our wages and our welfare state, then we will withdraw our labour and our taxes. This is the very simple, and fair, message that needs to be communicated to the Cameron and his crony coalition.

For the sake of fairness, the message should be copied to the entire political class. Because what we are witnessing here is the end game of a neoliberal consensus that has gripped our political, academic and media institutions – and has even crept into our courts. This has been the work of every government since at least Margaret Thatcher from 1979, to the present day.

In the dying embers of World War II, a new social contract was drawn up in Britain. Freedom from poverty was made a right – a condition of citizenship. A person paid their national insurance and their taxes, and was safe in the knowledge that that they would not be made destitute by the vicissitudes of this so-called ‘market’. Furthermore, a person who was physically or mentally unable to participate in the jobs market, would not be abandoned to the mercy of philanthropy, but the responsibility of all.

It was never a pay as you go system on a transaction by transaction basis – I pay this, I get this. Instead, taxes and national insurance for all who could pay, was the price of living in a country where the gap between rich and poor was narrowed, where all children received a free and decent education, where every person had a safe and decent home, where any person was entitled to the best healthcare available when they were sick, regardless of their ability to pay, where you could expect a swift and just response from the police if you were the victim of crime, and a fair trial whether plaintiff or defendant, where roads, buses, trains and other forms of public transport were cost effective, safe and reliable. In short, the price of living in a civil society.

It was also understood that the natural ambitions of corporations to reduce costs and increase profits, versus the worker’s requirement to be fairly compensated for their work – meant an arbiter was needed to balance these conflicting needs. It was agreed that a working person living in poverty and destitution, was unacceptable in our society.

This was our social contract. But while the overwhelming majority of people are still honouring their side of the bargain – the political and corporate class (increasingly, actually the same people), are not.

Just days ago, 48 year old Terry McGarvey was rushed to hospital and died, after dragging himself to an Atos ‘work capability assessment’, through fear he would lose his benefits if he failed to attend. He joins 32 sick and disabled people who are dying each week, under these conditions.

The Justice Minister Chris Grayling, has slashed the Legal Aid budget which guaranteed an equal access justice system. That promise is over. On top of this, Grayling is planning on charging those convicted of a crime £600 for the court costs. The costs payable by a person convicted of a crime should be set by the judge and the legal system, not a politician. With the criminalisation of homelessness, the increase in poverty related crime and the rise of the workfare prison (where prisoners work a 40 hour week for as little as £11) – the coalition is creating conditions of poverty, and then creating ways to profit from it.

The NHS is being carved up into McDonald’s style franchises between the likes of Circle, Serco, Virgin Health and other private providers. Plans are in place for citizens to have the number of GP visits they make each year capped, and to pay £10 per visit. Crippled by the rising price of private loans, profiteering and privatisation – the NHS is buckling under the pressure. And wherever the cracks show, it is the service (the nurses and doctors attempting to keep people well and save lives amidst all this corruption) and not the vultures scoffing at its carcass that gets the blame.

Michael Gove is busy ripping apart the fabric of the national education system, promising greater localism and autonomy while moving powers from Local Education Authorities across the country, to his own office in Westminster.

Young people who leaving school are now faced with an average student debt of £63,000 to attend University, or a jobs market containing zero hours contracts, the fastest falling wages in the western world, a million young people out of work, and workfare.

There is a housing crisis, the result of the abandonment of the social housing policy of the post war period, which sees private landlords charging such exorbitant rents that only 1 in 8 Housing benefit claimants are unemployed. Nowhere is this more painful than the capital, with London rents now consuming more than 50% of people’s income.

I could go on. But I shouldn’t really need to. You know this is happening. It’s happening so quickly, that you can actually watch the pillars of your civil society being knocked down, one after the other. But we cannot simply stand here, mouths agape in horror. We cannot allow ourselves to be torn apart by age group, race, gender or whether we were born here or arrived here. We cannot keep our heads down and hope for ‘better one day’. This is not some sort of storm you can ride out. It is a war that you either join and fight, or acquiesce to, accepting the ever worsening conditions placed upon you by the victors. No. If the political class is no longer honouring the social contract, neither should we. It is time to withdraw the lifelines to this bloated, corrupt and cruel class – a class including men like Iain Duncan Smith; a man who refuses to spend £53 of public money on a person’s Job Seeker’s Allowance, while blowing £39 of public money on his own breakfast.

The system rests on our labour, our taxes and our consent. It is time to withdraw all three. It is time to force the political crisis that already exists into the sunlight. It is time.

Don’t get angry, get involved

Occupy London – get involved with direct action campaigns.

People’s Assembly – join the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and get involved in activism, discussion, education and political action.

None of the Above – join the campaign to vote None of the Above in 2015.

Wave of Action – join the Wave of Action

Do anything, but do something.

www.scriptonitedaily.com/2014/02/24/dear-cameron-here-is-our-ultimatum-no-wages-or-welfare-state-no-labour-or-taxes/

“The case against state-enforced equality is not that a narrowing of the wealth gap is in itself a bad thing; it’s that it carries a disproportionate cost in terms of lost prosperity and lost freedom.

Moronic. Wealth inequality, in fact, carries a disproportionate cost on society - even on purely so-called 'free market' terms of social mobility.

Envy is an ugly and debilitating condition

It's not 'envy' to demand what is rightfully yours in the first place. 85 people didn't produce or earn 50% of the world's wealth. They obtained the wealth through violence, exploitation, inheritance, bribery, and generally the hard work of the majority of the population.

ok ttosca what do you do then?

You know something's deeply wrong when even the CBI Chief is telling businesses to pay better wages:

Pay workers more, CBI chief tells thriving firms

John Cridland accuses employers of keeping too many people in minimum wage jobs and failing to pass on prosperity

www.theguardian.com/money/2013/dec/30/pay-workers-more-cbi-firms

"Thriving firms"...that cuts it down quite a bit.

"It's not 'envy' to demand what is rightfully yours in the first place."

So everyone has a 'right' to others wealth, no matter what effort they have put in to take FULL advantage of a well funded State education and are offered (but do not take) less glamourous jobs that pay a similar weekly wage to benefits etc?

The reality is if 99.9% of people can use Trigger's broom and 1% do highly specialized jobs, so pay rates between those two careers (and other steps in the skills ladder) , will reflect that.

If the broom pushers get anywhere near what the specialists get, EVERYONE will aspire to the easier life of 'just' pushing the brooms, so who then creates the real wealth/revenues to pay for it all?

Where is their incentive if their pay does not reflect further education/higher skill sets and/or an incompetent state happy to pay apparatchiks in a 'non job' a six figure salary, wants to take more of their salary than they take home?

So everyone has a 'right' to others wealth,

No, I'm saying precisely the opposite. The minority don't have the right to everybody else's wealth.

The reality is if 99.9% of people can use Trigger's broom and 1% do highly specialized jobs, so pay rates between those two careers (and other steps in the skills ladder) , will reflect that.

This is another free-market myth- the idea that what people are paid is based on how skilled they are. If you think about it for about a half second, you can come up with many counter examples of people who are extremely incompetent being paid ludicrous sums (see bankers bonuses for failing banks) or highly skilled, highly educated people who are paid comparatively little (see University lecturers).

Furthermore, apart from people not being paid in proportion to their skill, what they are paid is determined by political, social, and economic context: including supply/demand, workers rights, union membership (union members are consistently paid higher wages), reputation of both the company and the person being hired, etc. etc.

If the broom pushers get anywhere near what the specialists get, EVERYONE will aspire to the easier life of 'just' pushing the brooms, so who then creates the real wealth/revenues to pay for it all?

Calm down. Whilst I'm not going to go in to the complexities of communism for you, I'm sure the majority of Mumsnet readers would simply be happy with people being paid a 'fair' (and living) wage and a more equitable wage spread. 85 people owning 50% of the wealth in unacceptable, and it cannot last.

Where is their incentive if their pay does not reflect further education/higher skill sets and/or an incompetent state happy to pay apparatchiks in a 'non job' a six figure salary, wants to take more of their salary than they take home?

Their pay doesn't necessarily reflect their education or skills, that is precisely the problem. The private sector isn't any better at this than the public sector.

For example, some private banks hire management for millions, who then fail the company or make huge losses. These consultants and then rewarded with millions in bonuses regardless of performance. In the cases where the bank goes under, the public purse bails out the bank.

In short, we don't live in a meritocracy. And the people who are having their wealth stolen are the public by the rich, not the other way around.

Hope this helps.

ttosca…..you are wrong on several key points of yours, that I guess you thought was a ‘slam-dunk’ for your own opinion.

Firstly on government’s inability to fathom that taxes are not there for their ideological beliefs, there is something perverse on building a big honking quangocracy we didn’t seem to totally need in 1997, paying someone £60 to £200k a year WITH taxes that have partially come from the poor – and that ‘non job’ pays for junior to go through private education and has better chances in life, than those paying for it.

Furthermore, in creating a quangocracy within 1 million new State workers from 1997 to 2010, if inequality of those with qualification was so important, with all that taxpayers money burning a hole in their pocket, why wasn’t that opportunity taken to IMPROVE the ‘front line’ e.g nurses pay, before the Labour apparatchiks that I believe headed around 77% of quangos over that period?

So on the newsflash that the Public Sector IS fundamentally different to the Private Sector in that !00% of the salaries and Final Salary linked pension plans are met 100% by the taxpayer, many that cannot afford it, let us now look at the ‘obvious’ private sector example you used, Investment Banking, where the salaries (and bonuses) are 100% met by the bank, so the taxes paid to pay for the Public Sector are not coming from the taxpayer.

Intellectually there can be NO ARGUMENT that Investment Banking (as opposed to Commercial or High Street Banking) has done more to lift countries and their people out of poverty than any other profession for over 30-years – and they have been paying bonuses (and taxes on them) for those three decades.

When the World Bank or Asian Development Bank for emerging or troubled nations have needed to borrow billions of U.S. dollars (or other country equivalent) in one go, it is done without a sweat, with Investment Banks underwriting the bond issues and placing the bonds with global institutional investors.

When countries frequently borrow via the government bond markets and their issues denominated in other currencies, sometimes targets to those other foreign investors e.g a UK government guaranteed bond denominated in Yen, for Japanese investors, again no problem and facilitates governments (like the UK) keeping the national lights on and bill paid.

The same goes for every major corporate/employer in the world, looking for investment capital to build new factories/employ people - again all done via the capital markets, currently ANNUALLY launching around $2 trillion worth of bonds. Launching equity issues for start up companies to grow, is also fairly routine.

Where many go wrong is regarding the pay of Directors, usually in charge of large banks combining a retail and investment banking division, the ones below top management getting bonuses are investment bankers that have contributed in several ways to bring in revenue many, many times than what they’re being paid as a bonus – hence they can justify those bonuses, otherwise good revenue earning employees leave, like in RBS when from 2008 many of their best people left, and investment banking profits have steadily fallen.

So apart from a few Bank Directors who generally have some loss making, some profit making divisions, the vast majority of bonuses are paid for SUCCESS, within the mother of tax paying meritocracies, you have chosen as a bad example.

No highly paid directors of any companies can guarantee that they can bring success, especially those in banking who experience a once in 80-years financial ‘event’ – and generally speaking far from “stealing” the wealth from others, they are creating it via the core investment banking model - AND was paying £60 to £90 billion of taxes, direct and via support businesses to the UK Exchequer to help subsidize an incompetence government’s taxpayers profligacy.

We were having an argument over wealth inequality and a lack of meritocracy, and you thought it so important to vomit a large post to defend bankers and finance banking?

Errrr…..YOU brought investment banking and their remunerator up as an example of ’The Dark Side’, of both meritocracy and uselessness to society as a whole, I just pointed out where you went wrong, 30-years of history as proof wrong.

As it happens it also shows how that not only is their business rates, taxes and employment compensating for past government profligacy, but whatever is being generated now is also vital now to keep the lights on here – but also financing the world out of the Great Recession.

Just some facts on points YOU raised, please don’t shoot the messenger.

P.S. but you get the difference to the taxpayer between a wasted public sector six figure quangocrat salary paying tax, and a highly paid private sector worker, funded by the private sector, and where THEIR tax goes?

Errrr…..YOU brought investment banking and their remunerator up as an example of ’The Dark Side’, of both meritocracy and uselessness to society as a whole, I just pointed out where you went wrong, 30-years of history as proof wrong.

Errr... actually, you're quite wrong. The World Bank / IMF programs have consistently been a disaster for countries which have taken on loans from them on the condition of neo-liberal economic policies:

"The IMF, which is sort of an off-shoot of the US Treasury Department, has had a shattering effect in Latin America. Its programs have been followed more rigorously in Latin America than any other part of the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and they’ve been a disaster. So take say Bolivia. They’ve been following IMF policies for 25 years, and at the end per-capita income is lower than it was in the beginning. Argentina was the poster-child of the IMF. It was marvelous, it was doing all the things right, they were urging everyone else to follow the same policies, same for the World Bank and the US Treasury Department. Well what happened is it led to a total economic catastrophe. " - Noam Chomsky

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Structural Adjustment—a Major Cause of Poverty

Many developing nations are in debt and poverty partly due to the policies of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Their programs have been heavily criticized for many years for resulting in poverty. In addition, for developing or third world countries, there has been an increased dependency on the richer nations. This is despite the IMF and World Bank’s claim that they will reduce poverty.

Following an ideology known as neoliberalism, and spearheaded by these and other institutions known as the “Washington Consensus” (for being based in Washington D.C.), Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have been imposed to ensure debt repayment and economic restructuring. But the way it has happened has required poor countries to reduce spending on things like health, education and development, while debt repayment and other economic policies have been made the priority. In effect, the IMF and World Bank have demanded that poor nations lower the standard of living of their people.

www.globalissues.org/article/3/structural-adjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty

ttosca

Just look at the countries with the highest standard of living - they are genuine democracies with high levels of trade libralisation, low government interference, low levels of corruption. They are not perfect but much better than the poorer countries.
There are many reasons for poverty - very little to do with the IMF and nothing caused by trade liberalisation.

The World bank and IMF as institutions distributing the cash have nothing to do with the meritocracy and efficiency of the capital markets versus Public Sector you were comparing it with.

Whether emerging (and generally lesser non investment grade credit worthiness) countries and their companies gain funding via these supranational institutions over the past 30-years or directly, by gaining this funding it promoted economic growth.

leftunity.org/membership-form/

here's a new thing :)

Hi Julia! I'm already a paying member. :)

The World bank and IMF as institutions distributing the cash have nothing to do with the meritocracy and efficiency of the capital markets versus Public Sector you were comparing it with.

I was refuting your point about the greatness of the IMF and WB and how finance has generally been a force for good in poorer countries.

Finance can obviously pay a role in promoting growth under Capitalism by providing Capital investment where it is needed. However, banks often don't play a role where they are acting as social investors.

Sometimes they are used, as in the case of WB and IMF, as tools of economic imperialism. Financial speculation on food, for example, has been blamed for raising food prices and increasing global food poverty.

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It should be pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a minute and who isn't ideologically blinkered that we don't live in a meritocratic society, and pay/wealth isn't necessarily rewarded in proportion to either hard work or talent. The most significant indicator of pay reward is return on investment for Capitalists.

Just look at the countries with the highest standard of living - they are genuine democracies with high levels of trade libralisation, low government interference, low levels of corruption. They are not perfect but much better than the poorer countries.

The richest countries in the world became that way through:

a) A great deal of historical imperialism

b) Slavery

c) A great deal of state socialism and social investment

There are many reasons for poverty - very little to do with the IMF and nothing caused by trade liberalisation.

Please read the link I posted above about the IMF and WB 'structural adjustment' programs.

Read the link - but it is wrong/mis-informed
state socialism was what nearly destroyed this country
What works and has always done so, is free trade and limited (not none) regulation on markets - this benefits all, but admittedly not equally.

The question you must ask is do you want a large cake shared unfairly or a small vake shared more equally?

Oh, and I accept that a lot of the cake sharing is unfair, although we are generally a meritocracy. However, the merit we are measuring may not agree with your view of merit.
However, we are all better off in this society than pretty much anywhere else in the world

ttosca……while I find it rather amusing seeing the lengths that you are going to by getting into institutions the IMF and World bank, rather than admit the complete ‘pigs ear’ in taxpayer value an overly large Public Sector represents, FYI I never mentioned the IMF (within my quote below) as I don’t believe they tap the capital markets directly, I mentioned the Asian Development Bank who will depending on member country demand.

“When the World Bank or Asian Development Bank for emerging or troubled nations have needed to borrow billions of U.S. dollars (or other country equivalent) in one go, it is done without a sweat, with Investment Banks underwriting the bond issues and placing the bonds with global institutional investors.”

www.adb.org/about/main
“Since its founding in 1966, ADB has been driven by an inspiration and dedication to improving people’s lives in Asia and the Pacific. By targeting our investments wisely, in partnership with our developing member countries and other stakeholders, we can alleviate poverty and help create a world in which everyone can share in the benefits of sustained and inclusive growth.”

But whatever supranational organisations we do talk about, they are not ‘banks’ in the traditional sense, whether retail banks, or big bonus paying Investment Banks - that in a highly competitive market place take on the risks ON BEHALF OF THE BORROWER of underwriting/launching bond issues, placing those bonds with global institutional investors e.g. pension funds AND then providing relatively tight bid/offer prices in those bond issue for pension funds to get in and out of those investment when they want to.

Ttosca - the original quote is remarkably close to the free market, small state position that us evil capitalist types wholeheartedly support. Stop taxing and spending so much, let businesses and individuals support themselves as best they can and we'll all be better off and richer. For different reasons we find ourselves on the same side of the barricades!