Memoirs of a 'decent' man

Sir Kier Starmer resigned the way he assumed power in the first place. By revealing a relationship with truth so estranged it would make Josef Stalin blush.

“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” Starmer told the country outside Downing Street.

It is necessary to deal with each of these claims in turn by virtue of the fact that unless challenged, recent history becomes ossified into a straitjacket of received wisdom that fatally conditions what can be thought possible in the future.

Politically Bankrupt

In 2019, Labour under Corbyn, as Starmer and his acolytes never tired of saying, achieved the party’s worst showing since 1935, winning just 202 seats. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives  won 365 seats, their best performance since Thatcher’s victory coronation of 1987.

Apart from memory-holing the election just two years before in which Labour had somehow secured the largest increase in its vote since 1945, this warped interpretation conveniently ignores how 2019 was uniquely about one issue, Brexit. And Corbyn’s Labour, faced with a core support overwhelming backing Remain and 2/3rds of the actual constituencies it was defending having voted Leave, was trying to pull off the most delicate of balancing acts.

Its 2017 result partly stemmed from a promise to respect the result of the referendum. But this stance was made all but impossible by then shadow Brexit spokesman – Sir Kier Starmer himself – deliberately violating the agreed party policy and telling the 2018 Labour conference that he wanted a second referendum “and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option”. This led to the perception that Labour was a part of a ‘Remain alliance’ and doomed it in the eyes of many voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, and elsewhere.

Starmer also torpedoed cross-party negotiations with the May government in 2018 over getting a Brexit deal through the Commons, even ruling out his own party policy on a customs union. Thus, he ensured that the hardest of all Brexit deals would be the one to succeed.

But as soon as he became Labour leader in 2020, the ‘King of Remainia’ went through a strange metamorphosis and declared that “Britain’s future is outside the EU” and all arguments about the issue belonged to the past. Clearly his previous stance was very principled, though, and not all an amoral strategy to displace Corbyn at all costs.

Notwithstanding Starmer’s antics, the 2019 election would still have been closer had not Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ (actually a company, not a political party) chosen not to stand in 317 Conservative-held seats. This had the result of artificially inflating the Conservative vote share and probably their number of seats.

Curiously, the Conservatives, who must have received – according to Starmer’s interpretation – such a resounding mandate in 2019 (in contrast to Corbyn’s Labour), have since shrunk to a rump of 121 seats. Why they have plunged into such an ‘existential crisis’ in such a short space of time is something of a mystery, unless of course the issue of Brexit artificially hid their real popularity just as it artificially magnified Labour’s divisions.

Financially bankrupt

This is especially ridiculous. Labour in 2019 were flush with cash, on the back of surging membership numbers which peaked at 600,000. Starmer’s unique talent was to reverse this process by telling hundreds of thousands of people to leave (“the door is open”), or simply expelling them.

He then partially plugged this gap by suddenly becoming immensely appealing to very rich people (many of whom formerly donated to the Tories) and corporations. For example, Labour’s 2024 election campaign was bankrolled by a huge £4 million donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, the largest single donation the party had ever received. But because of when it was received – in the week after Sunak called the election but before the “pre-poll reporting period” – Labour didn’t have to publicly declare it during the campaign. And our fearless media didn’t bother to enlighten anyone.

Morally Bankrupt

Now we come to the crux of Sir Kier’s appeal to posterity. He was a ‘decent’ man, fighting against the odds to rescue the party he loved from the cesspit of antisemitism into which it had fallen under Jeremy Corbyn.

The truth is rather different. Starmer, as the public face of the right-wing ‘Labour Together’ faction, cynically used antisemitism allegations to purge thousands of left-wingers from the party whose only crime was to criticise Israel, a country which would go on to refute these criticisms by committing a genocide in Gaza.

Of course, Sir Kier was on hand to support what was happening, lay on surveillance flights over Gaza, and increase arms sales at the height of the killing.

The Starmer purge extended to Corbyn, forced out of the party for observing, correctly – even mildly – that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

Under Starmer the totalitarian mentality so gathered pace that even suggesting that Labour wasn’t riddled to the core with antisemites was an offence punishable with expulsion. Victims of this witch hunt included a Jewish professor, hauled up charges of simply repeating a pun by another Jewish member of the Labour party (Jo Bird’s ‘Jew process’) and an elderly Jewish woman accused of, among other things, “demonising Israel by inaccurately [sic] describing it as an apartheid state”.

There is a definite ‘pattern of behaviour’ here. In fact, as leader, Starmer expelled more Jews from the Labour party than all previous Labour leaders combined. As Andrew Feinstein (Starmer’s opponent in Holborn & St Pancras in 2024) pointed out, that is like expelling people of colour to combat racism.

In truth, the one decent thing that Sir Kier Starmer did was resign. Everything else was appalling.

Starmer’s handmaidens

But it would be wrong to see Starmer’s momentary ascendancy as being solely down to the man himself, once generously described as “a piece of hotel art made man”. Nor was his brief reign merely the responsibility of his sponsors in the shadowy Labour Together group, likened in their amorality to the denizens of Richard Nixon’s White House.

There had to be other powerful forces behind the strange phenomenon of Sir Kier Starmer and there were – the British media and important parts of the British state.

At every stage of his political career, the media had Starmer’s back, because, in essence, he had a job to – to destroy Corbynism at its roots. For example, every national media organisation (barring the Morning Star) enthusiastically backed Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour party for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report.

The EHRC report was itself a sham, though. It deliberately refused to hear evidence contradicting its interpretation, erroneously described those guilty of ‘antisemitism’ as being ‘agents’ of the party, and accused the Corbyn leadership of acting unlawfully by riding roughshod over ‘established procedures’ to intervene in individual cases, when the party’s rule book explicitly allowed it to.

When the circumstances cried out for investigative journalism, all you got was consecration. And a herd of braying donkeys.

Conversely, when Starmer did subsequently furiously intervene in antisemitism cases to expel the (left-wing) perpetrators forthwith – something the EHRC (wrongly) said the Labour leadership was not allowed to do – there was complete media silence.

And when Starmer jerked Labour massively to the Right, after being elected as Labour leader by promising to continue with Corbyn’s policies, the media response was largely to commend him for practising clever politics.

Sometimes the cognitive dissonance was breathtaking. One of Starmer’s pledges  to members when he was campaigning to be elected Labour leader was to “end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”. In reality when he got into government, not only did he fail to do this, he actually made it worse, increasing sanctions to their highest ever level in January 2026. According to an Amnesty spokesperson, “I’ve worked to highlight human rights violations for more than two decades and witnessed many awful situations. But never have I encountered such raw and widespread distress from people sharing their experiences in the UK.”

But, to the British media, this world, which affects millions of people, simply doesn’t exist.

And the media omertà about Starmer spread its tattered net far wider. The successful campaign by Starmer backers Labour Together to hamstring left-wing media organisations like The Canary after 2017 by getting advertisers to withdraw on the laughable basis of not supporting ‘fake news’ happened, at the time, completely in the shadows. Anti-Corbyn Labour bureaucrats’ scheme to funnel money to right-wing MPs in 2017 at the expense of the official campaign barely registered. And Starmer’s predilection for money and freebies from high-net-worth individuals and corporations to fill the financial void left by members deserting in droves was, almost without exception, left to the alternative media, who had a far smaller reach, to expose.

The 40-watt searchlights of the mainstream media continued their feeble glare after 2024. Starmer Labour’s 2025 deal with pharmaceutical corporations, which will double the amount the NHS pays for drugs, trampled all over the independence of NICE, the body that decides whether drugs are cost-effective and should be paid for by the NHS. But the deal was presented in entirely vanilla terms by the media, thus concealing what it was really about.

Our strange form of democracy – really oligarchy accompanied by ratification by universal suffrage – has left us in a paradoxical situation. Powerful and wealthy vested interests decide who can, and cannot, have political power (not Corbyn for example) but voters then cast their judgement on them. The result has been seven Prime Ministers in the last decade.

The fact that no-one of influence can see the problem is why they inflicted Sir Kier on us and expected it to work.

Zero points, shit in rivers, and weeping at Margaret's grave

I got an uncanny feeling of déjà vu when watching the recent Channel 4 drama about water company pollution, Dirty Business

A teacher, Reuben, gets an infection when surfing in sewage encrusted waters. Periodic attacks involving writhing on the floor and vomiting mean he has to give up his job. He applies for disability benefits but gets zero points because, as the assessor keeps repeating, when he is not having an attack, he functions normally (3^rd episode, 20.43).

You can see the tired resignation creep across Reuben’s face, as he realises that the fact he does have regular attacks which make him unemployable is completely irrelevant to the assessment.

This is so evocative of the hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people deemed fit for work points in the roll-out of the Work Capability Assessment under the Con-Lib Dem coalition. They got zero points too because although they couldn’t do any job that existed in the real world, by reaching above their head or into their top pocket once, they revealed that they could do an entirely abstract form of work.

At the time, there were futile calls for a real-world test to take account of what jobs actually demanded people could do repeatedly (as jobs tend to). But these were slammed down by the government in the shape of employment minister Chris Grayling who declared himself “absolutely, unreservedly and implacably” opposed to such a real-world test.

Current Labour DWP enforcer Pat McFadden doesn’t need to signal his opposition to a real-world test – it’s taken as read that it’s a total non-starter. The unbending focus now is on reducing the numbers of people qualifying for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) (which is what the teacher in Dirty Business applies for) despite the fact that 300,000 claims a year are rejected.

Labour did want to make the PIP criteria much tougher, something even Iain Duncan Smith found too much to stomach, but plans were put on hold as a result of an unexpected rebellion of backbench drones. But they will undoubtedly be repackaged as a result of the Timms Review now out for consultation.

Nothing better illustrates the duopoly afflicting the allegedly adversarial British political system than the treatment of sick and disabled people. The default consensus that they are ‘taking the mickey’ and deserve to be punished for having the temerity to have something wrong with them, which is probably half in the mind anyway.

The attitude, as John Pring shows in The Department, can be traced back to the dog days of the Thatcher administration, when health minister and “Mr Privatisation” John Moore wrote to chief secretary to the Treasury John Major, saying rising spending on sickness benefits needed to be tackled, with ‘no choice’ but to make ‘long-term savings’.

In the old system, i.e. invalidity benefit which existed before the testing regime began in the early ’90s, the ‘overriding consideration’ had been one of reasonableness, with the claimants’ ability to work measured against jobs which existed in the real world.  But that is a bygone era in British history. Hence the assessor’s monolithic insistence that when the ex-teacher in Dirty Business was not having a debilitating attack, he was perfectly able to do a job. The fact that vanishingly few employers would want to employ someone who involuntarily squirmed around on the floor every week, being sick everywhere, is not the state’s problem.

Have a nice day.

As of the beginning of this month, new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity Group of the Health element of Universal Credit (formerly Employment and Support Allowance) will have to survive on £50 a week, a nearly 50% cut from the £97 they previously received. This is so the ‘perverse incentive’ to apply for sickness benefit is removed. Actually, there is now a ‘perverse incentive’ to say there is nothing wrong with you even though there is, to ensure against the possibility that you will be judged unfit for work and placed in the LCRWA group.

This, in case you needed any reminder, is being carried through by a ‘Labour’ government. I remember being told in 2020 – by some young careerist working his way up the greasy pole at a meeting to choose the Labour leadership candidate which the CLP I was in would support – to “think of the most vulnerable person” I knew and then cast my vote for Sir Kier Starmer.

What he forgot to say was that if I harboured some sadistic desire to make them suffer even more, I should vote for Starmer.

As Dirty Business makes clear, there is a unity of purpose between the ‘Labour’ party and the Conservatives, which was briefly under threat in the four years before 2020 (which now resemble some strange hallucination). And the wretched consensus is not merely about how to treat the chronically ill.

As the programme recalls, David Cameron promised to tear up 3,000 pieces of needless regulation in order, he claimed, to release the growth potential of the British economy. Over a decade later, Starmer wrote to all 17 regulators in the UK telling them to relax rules for companies. This has resulted in a steep decline in enforcement actions, as they obediently scrabble to fall into line with the government’s so-called growth agenda.

And where has this deregulatory mania got us (aside from turds in rivers that is)? In the 18 years after the Financial Crisis of 2008, the economy has grown by 22% (an average rate of under 1%), while in the 18 years prior to 2008 it grew by 53% – more than twice as fast (and that record was terrible compared to the social democratic post-war years). But do carry on, won’t you.

We are in the grip of necrophile Thatcherism and it’s killing us. Some more than others, admittedly.

Devil's Pact or Doom Loop. Do we need economic growth?

To misappropriate an early song-title by a semi-famous Scottish indie band, everything flows – from economics.

What may seem on the surface a dry and technical subject actually reveals the beating heart of the political philosophy behind it.

The economics behind Starmerism consists of massively increasing spending on weapons, to be paid for by renewed austerity, and propelling the most vulnerable in society further into destitution and misery.

While, at the same time, asset-stripping the rest of the economy by selling it off to American vulture capitalists.

What flows from this will not be pleasant. It involves entrenching the rule of profit-extracting corporations while impoverishing swathes of the population. Though it will go by a far more benevolent name, this – necessarily buttressed by authoritarian means – amounts to corporate fascism. This kind of fascism will likely creep up on us gradually rather being proclaimed by a march on the capital, an Act of Parliament, or even a general election result.

In such circumstances, the Left doesn’t merely need to get its shit together politically but also economically.

In fact, economics, traditionally the weak point of a Left more concerned with the equities of distribution than the production of wealth, can actually become its strength. This is because though the Starmer government is rhetorically obsessed with achieving economic growth, it is very bad at actually achieving it.

The Doom Loop

Growth expectations from the Office of National Statistics are terrible, and as socialist economist Michael Burke says, without higher growth, living standards will not rise.

Sustainable growth, he says “is an appropriate aim for all economic policy”. The problem for Starmer is that his avowed method – austerity and taxes rises on ordinary people in the context of ramped up state spending on weapons (military Keynesianism) – is, in reality, anti-growth.

The British economy, says Burke, is trapped in a “doom loop” of deteriorating public services, rising government debt ‘necessitating’ more spending cuts which depresses the economy even more. We need to break out of this ruinous cycle and actually achieve growth rather than merely talking it up.

The fundamental question is whether pursing growth by other means is possible, and if it is possible, whether it is desirable.

The economics of the socialist case rest on first of all not massively hiking spending in a drive to war. Money, buttressed by a wealth tax on billionaires, will instead be diverted to public investment in areas like public transport, council housing, infrastructure. At present, under the ‘Labour’ government’s Spending Review, non-defence public investment is set to fall in real terms over the coming years.

But ironically for a political ideology invariably condemned for being ‘anti-business’, socialists aim to reverse the pervasive, and long-term, weak growth of the economy. This will be attempted through methods like the above-mentioned public investment but also through ‘innovations’ like a national investment bank.  The aim here is to revive private investment which is at anaemic levels, and has been for a long time. RMT trade union leader Eddie Dempsey recently told the TUC conference: “Corbyn had the right idea — we need a public investment bank funded by seed capital that can drive strategic investment in parts of the economy, where we will build proper unionised jobs, good work that will take the country forward instead of leaving us at the mercy of the money markets”.

Socialist Pro-Capitalism

If it is accurate to estimate, as is frequently done, that capitalists need annual economic growth of 3 per cent to make a decent profit, then ‘socialism’, in attempting to resuscitate growth in the economy, is not anti-capitalist at all, rather the opposite. But I don’t expect enlightened self-interest to become the fashion any time soon.

However, merely correctly understanding the aspiration is no guarantee it will be successful. Many other countries and blocs have public investment banks, but their recent growth record is nothing to write home about. In fact, the Eurozone boasts a worse growth performance than Britain despite the existence of the European Investment Bank.

Even where a public investment bank does have a tangible impact, as seems the case with Brazil’s BNDES, the remaining commercial banks are left free to concentrate on speculation and mortgage lending, which is extremely profitable but merely exacerbates the inherent flaws of the extractive economy where small minorities make huge profits but many people struggle to make ends meet.

That is why some Marxists advocate taking control, as the British Labour party once aspired to do, of the “commanding heights” of the economy which includes nationalising the big, private banks (properly nationalising not merely assuming ‘hands-off’ ownership as the government did with RBS after the financial crisis). This will direct private, now public, investment into desirable areas.

Should we aim for growth?

But we are still left with the basic assumption that economic growth is a good and necessary thing – “an appropriate aim for all economic policy” – even if, in an historical irony, only the Left or radical Left seem serious about attaining it.

However, is growth the goal we should be striving towards? Growth, as the word implies means getting bigger, over time much bigger. Economic growth of 3 per cent a year, a sweet spot for corporate profits, government finances, and personal livelihoods, means the economy doubles in size every 24 years. A little over a decade ago geographer, and Marxist, David Harvey wrote that compound growth means the result will be even more extreme.

Imagined physically, the enormous expansions in physical infrastructures, in urbanisation, in workforces, in consumption and in production capacities that have occurred since the 1970s until now will have to be dwarfed into insignificance over the coming generation if the compound rate of capital accumulation is to be maintained. Take a look at a map of the city nearest you in 1970 and contrast it with today and then imagine what it will look like when quadrupled in size and density over the next twenty years.

 It is worth noting that, in Britain, the rate of capital accumulation has not been maintained – an economic malaise that has produced various maladies – but that cities and towns have nonetheless grown “in size and density”. In the context of the government’s huge housebuilding targets, totally reliant on the private sector, they are predicted to do so even more in the coming years. Many British urban areas are anticipated to have virtually whole new towns tacked onto them over the next decade, even if a sputtering housing market means that improbable government targets will not be met. Presumably had the ‘rate of capital accumulation’ been sustained, these urban conglomerations would have expanded even more.

Supporters of the idea that economic growth can be sustainable would counter that it can be directed by the state into beneficial and necessary things, such as public transport and public housing. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin who predicts the end of capitalism in a ‘zero marginal cost’ society where copies of products can be produced for virtually nothing, believes transitioning economies from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energy “will require millions of workers and spawn thousands of new businesses” (note however that that he thinks this will involve “one last surge” of wage labour and thus growth).

The Chinese Way

But it is stretching credulity to believe that all economic growth can be funnelled towards socially beneficial ends. China, the bête noire of America and the faltering West, presents an example. On the back of high public investment in infrastructure, China has achieved GDP growth rates the West can only dream about and lifted millions out of poverty. But, it was believed, this was bought at a price – exponential carbon emissions and falling life expectancy because of unbreathable air. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese authorities famously manipulated clouds to disperse smog, while life expectancy in northern China was five years below that of the south of the country because of air pollution.

Now, reportedly, such problems have been significantly assuaged because of the Chinese government’s war on pollution – pollution has declined by 42% in nine years, while air quality correspondingly enjoyed a massive improvement. In the face of climate change, China has also made huge investments in solar energy was a result of which the cost of generating electricity from solar has plummeted.

But pollution has not been vanquished. It is still six times higher than the World Health Organisation’s guidelines and in Beijing at about the level of Europe’s most polluted city Sarajevo. And air pollution-related deaths in China are projected to continue to rise despite the improvements.

China also features heavily in the UN’s Red List of endangered species, a fact clearly not unrelated to its high rate of economic growth.

Devil’s Pact

And in the West, where over two-thirds of economic growth can be attributed to consumption, the Left will face an additional problem. If it is to distinguish itself from the corporate automatons in government and opposition, it will not only want to encourage growth in some areas, but restrict it in others. A Left government, if it is worth its salt, will want, for example, to place restrictions on gambling or marketing to children.

It is unquestionable that the health of the UK economy has been significantly impaired by the fact that wages have been held down for years and incomes depleted. ‘Britain needs a pay rise’ as the slogan goes. But should it get one, part of that will inevitably go into becoming the willing prey of profit-driven market forces to an even greater extent. The exploitation of “culturally generated pseudo needs”, though clearly anti-social, has been a crucial element of the economic growth that has been achieved in the West (and elsewhere) in recent years, a chink of light, if you will, in an otherwise gloomy picture. Toxic consumption is a mainstay of the modern economy.

We face a quandary we seem only dimly aware of. In the corporate capitalist economy that we live in, if you don’t achieve economic growth – or only very anaemic growth – the result is misery, poverty, inequality, racism (probably in time fascism), rising public and private debt, and global conflict.

But if you do have growth, while, if it proceeds are equitably distributed, you relieve some of the pressure on individuals and government finances, you just accelerate global warming and environmental degradation, the relentless swallowing up of what’s left of the countryside, and acquiesce in the exploitation of our psychological vulnerabilities to the benefit of obscene corporate profits.

Eventually, actually probably quite soon, you hit a society that may be economically successful but that nobody wants to live in.

In the short-term this devil’s pact is, to varying degrees, in virtually everyone’s rational self-interest. But from a wider perspective it plainly isn’t in anyone’s, barring maybe that of a small, and insulted, ultra-rich elite.

Explaining Donald Trump

But then there is the problem of whether reviving economic growth is even possible – that the Left, if it by some miracle achieves power, will discredit itself in a futile drive to “save capitalism from itself”.

Looked at historically, the only time the capitalist system, in advanced countries, attained sustained healthy economic growth was in the period from 1950 until the mid-1970s – the so-called “thirty glorious years”.

In fact, according to a research group at the University of Manitoba in Canada, the reality may be even worse. Growth in Northern industrialised economies, they argue, has been falling, “with only brief and limited interruptions”, since the early 1960s.  If so, economic problems cannot be placed solely at the door of bad policy, such as neoliberalism, or economic trends, like financialisation. The findings, according to the report’s author, Alan Freeman, “shed light” on seismic political developments such as the rise of Donald Trump and the far-right, the implosion of the centre and centre-left, the growth of social unrest, and rising geo-political tensions across the world. But they also indicate that:

… limited measures, whether of a left character such as fiscal and monetary stimuli unaccompanied by state-led investment in new production, or of a right character, notably austerity, but also the free-market economic nationalism of Donald Trump and other such figures, are unlikely to resolve these problems.

Why should this be so? Although, there is no consensus on what led to the post WW2 economic boom, part of the explanation must surely lie in the fact that it was preceded by the most destructive conflict in human history. The Second World War was not only physically devastating, it also vaporized capital value – the mass of money that can be deployed to build up infrastructure or enterprises. Society could, so to speak, begin again.

However, that option is no longer available. In subsequent decades, economic downturns were dissipated by the soothing balm of state intervention and subsidy because, quite rationally, nobody wanted a return to the miseries of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Meanwhile, in the West, the forces leading to war (and thus destruction of capital) were consciously repressed.  

As a result, the ‘wall of money’ (capital) seeking profitable outlets, steadily grew, reaching astronomical levels. The other option, war among advanced countries, will likely lead to the end of human civilisation and the death of millions, though, astoundingly, western elites seem willing to toy with this possibility.

Such are the choices that the capitalist system, at this stage in history, presents us with.

Facing the Truth

In this 1998 book The Trouble with Capitalism, economist Harry Shutt argued against forever taking refuge in “limited measures”, against the comforting notion that capitalism could always be ‘rewired’ to work in more equitable, ‘greener’, and less amoral ways:

The truth must at last be faced that there is no realistic hope of expanding demand (and hence aggregate global output) fast enough to 1) Absorb the ever-accumulating capital surpluses generated by the private sector 2) Contain, let alone reduce, the rising burden of public-sector deficits and debt under the existing pattern of income distribution and taxation 3) reduce the huge gap between the super-rich and most other people.

And, given by now obvious environmental limits which place necessary restrictions on the expansion of the economy, the “traditional policy of seeking indiscriminately to maximise GDP will have to be jettisoned”.

In other words, growth is neither possible nor desirable.

The consequences of not striving to maximise GDP are two-fold: 1) that government finances will no longer depend, as they do now, on how much tax revenue can be squeezed out of the economy. And 2) that people’s living standards will no longer hinge, as they do now, on what they can extract from the economy from wage-labour or, if they are fortunate, from the ownership of property.

This might seem a frightening, in fact, unthinkable prospect, such are these two notions seared into our consciousness as just the way things are and always will be. However, it is important also to appreciate how much of a liberation a post-capitalist society will be. Society will be freed from the necessity to find profitable outlets for the huge wall of money seeking. At present this pathology manifests in profoundly anti-social ways such as speculation in food prices, which causes hunger around the world based on artificial, not genuine, scarcity, the privatisation mania, the hunt for profitable companies and public services that can be taken over using borrowed money and milked for returns, the vast weapons and security industry, the compulsion to seek more and more debt as a means to dabble on the stock and bond market, and the corporate juggernaut that looks on our psychological make-up as something to be exploited for profit.

Individuals, too, will be relieved from the necessity to secure their livelihood in the market and to suffer if they fail to. This has to mean that, for the first time in history, a person’s income will be unconditionally guaranteed.

All this may seems like a pipedream that will never happen except that it flows from two inescapable facts about the modern world – in Harry Shutt’s phraseology the “decline in demand” for both capital and labour.

Nature of the Problem

In Britain, the latter problem may seem belied by the eclipsing of the 4 million strong dole queues of the 1980s by high rates of employment. But the solving of the unemployment problem is in many ways illusory in that it is based on zero hour contracts, the dramatic rise of the ‘solo self-employed’ and the stifling of the healthy wage growth of previous decades. Certainly, wresting some kind of income from the economy – mimicking the huge “informal sectors” of the Global South – is not the same as the secure, decently-paid, and full-time jobs of the past.

And that is not getting into the contention of the late David Graeber that many white-collar jobs, while decently paid, are not only socially useless but economically pointless too. They are a form of “pretend work”.

But certainly, with demand for capital “fixed investment” (big things like factories and offices) in decline, there is no hope of reviving the benign equilibrium – where capital outlay and effective demand existed in a kind of symbiosis – of the post-WW2 years. And this mismatch cannot be nullified by abolishing zero-hour contracts, reinstituting collective bargaining, and welcoming back trade unions into the fold.

But there is no hope of understanding the need for a solution unless, first, the problem is recognised.