Nicola Sturgeon: another voice raised for a (moderately) radical approach to our problems

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, speaking in London today, called for an end to austerity policies and described their continuation as “morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable.”

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP:
A radicalism so mild it's barely radical. But it's still refreshing to hear

Consensus is attractive when the alternative is conflict, but much less so when it just means conformity. Especially when what we’re conforming to is principally a matter of fashion.

It has been fashionable in the leading economies since the 1970s or 1980s, to proclaim belief in the working of free markets with minimal regulation. That view tended to come in tandem with faith in trickle-down economics: a free market will allow highly entrepreneurial individuals to make a great deal of money; when they spend it, the resultant wealth will trickle down to the rest of society.

Many of the measures that had been put in place to control, in particular, the financial sector were dropped during the time of Thatcher and Reagan. Unleashed, the banks took increasing risks in order to amass unprecedented fortunes, until they took a risk too many and came unstuck in 2008. At which point, people who had spent decades decrying state intervention, turned to the state – more precisely to all taxpayers, including the poorest – to rescue them from the disaster they’d brought down on themselves.

Unfortunately, holding out their hands to the state didn’t mean that these leaders of economic thinking were prepared to dump the ideology which, particularly in its trickle down aspect, had made them inconceivably rich over a generation.

The success of trickle-down was measured by their wealth; its failure by the impoverishment of everyone else. As Will Hutton argues in his insightful piece in today’s Guardian, “wages have fallen, in real terms, by the greatest degree in more than half a century, inequality of income and wealth have risen to desperately high levels that may soon metastasise into a serious economic and social cancer.”

Sadly, in Europe we’ve been driven since the 2008 crash by such carcinogenic thinking. The consensus claims that austerity is the only way out of this crisis: reduce government deficits and debt by slashing public spending, and we shall cure our problems. As Hutton points out, all this is achieving is to create a society in which “millions of workers struggle in a harsh demimonde of temporary jobs and zero-hour contracts.”

And yet these ideas, the new fashion, merely replaced economic thinking which could really explain our problems. The theories of John Maynard Keynes showed that it isn’t by reducing expenditure that a government gets out of economic difficulty, but by making investments. That provides employment which increases the tax take from workers, and it stimulates the economy to grow by increasing demand – which also increases the tax take. So paradoxically, the government may well get its deficit down more quickly by spending more, not less.

But we’ve been living the Reagan-Thatcher consensus. Keynes is out. Austerity and trickle-down are in. And, sadly, conformity to that credo has extended way beyond the traditional conservative parties. Many in the Labour Party, not least Tony Blair and his one-time voice piece Peter Mandelson, who famously – infamously – once declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Well, I’d be relaxed about it too, if getting filthy rich didn’t always happen on the backs of a lot of poor people getting a great deal poorer.

To stand for a different set of ideas, for Keynesian ideas, is regarded by the proponents of austerity as a dangerous reversion to old-style, wildly left-wing socialism. Which is odd, since whatever Keynes was, he wasn’t a socialist. He wanted capitalism better managed, as does Hutton.

Calling for better management of our capitalist economy is dangerously radical? 

Seriously?

Keynes: hardly a left-wing firebrand
But we need his approach back, and that has to come from the Left

Fortunately the conformity to this dire consensus hasn’t been total. Every now and then a voice speaks out against these failed and failing views. And, recently, sometimes those voices have been heard.

I spoke yesterday about Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Succeed or fail, at least he’s trying a different approach in a country driven to despair by the previous policy of austerity.

Now Nicola Sturgeon has also spoken out. She, like many of us, feels there’s nothing tremendously inspiring about a Labour Party promising to do the same as the Tories, but a bit less, and a bit less fast.

And yet what she’s proposing isn’t that radical: an increase in spending of £180bn over five years of a parliament. That represents less than two years of running the English NHS, spread over five. Not exactly revolutionary: like Hutton, like Keynes, she just wants capitalism to behave more fairly.

But compared to everyone else calling for more cuts, isn’t it refreshing?

How sad that it has to come from a party whose main aim is the independence of Scotland. That the great party of the left in England, the Labour Party, didn’t beat her to it.

Ed Milliband, Ed Balls: come on, if Sturgeon can do it, surely you too can speak out for a real alternative to the failed policies of the Tories?

Time for the left to raise its game

Striking words, I felt, at the weekend from Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian:

Labour… [looks]… like a team facing an open goal and poised to miss. They need to raise their game – and fast.

Yes, I thought. We had Ed Miliband at the latest Labour Conference, insisting on proving the quality of his memory by delivering his key speech without notes, and then suffering a total memory failure and forgetting to talk about the economy (not the least significant of issues, one feels). And last week we had his Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer incapable of naming a single Labour donor, except for “Bill… Bill somebody…”

Ed Miliband: it's time to set the electorate alight

They seem to be taking aim at the government, but hitting their own foot.

Five years of shambolic government has hugely increased national debt while imposing austerity to reduce it. Austerity that has only left us with healthcare in crisis, education near bankruptcy and a police force unable to deal with crime. That sounds like an open goal. But Labour seem unable to get the ball into the net, with the opinion polls showing the two main parties level pegging.

What is it about this leadership that seems to leave it as though frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car? Why can’t it find a note that inspires the electors? The message that persuades the swing voters we so badly need, that it deserves the chance to form a government?

I keep watching Greece. I know that Alexis Tsipras may fall flat on his face and Syriza may find itself incapable of getting the nation’s creditors to ease their draconian debt conditions. But right now, at least he’s inspiring, he’s taking bold action, re-employing people thrown onto the jobless queue without hope of a job, raising the minimum wage to help alleviate the pain of utter, jaw-breaking poverty.

He’s telling the international financial community that he values their ability to make huge sums rather less than the ability of those who are suffering the worst hardship to feed and heat themselves.

Why can’t the British Labour Party strike that kind of note? Instead it seems exclusively concerned with convincing the business community that it can do just as well under Labour as under the Tories. And yet we all know that the business community will vote massively for the Conservatives whatever Labour leaders say?

Today, to add insult to injury, we had Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, generally far closer to the Tories than to Labour, saying that contacts he’d had with some Labour backbenchers suggested they’d rather a coalition with his party than with the Scottish SNP. Even though the SNP is firmly anchored on the left. Dodds may be making this all up, of course, but in my bones I fear he isn’t.

Britain’s not in as dire a state as Greece. We don’t need to be as radical as Tsipras. But some radicalism, surely, we can dig out of somewhere? Something that distinguishes us from the Conservatives? Something our supporters can rally round?

I have to confess that I wasn’t being entirely honest in quoting Freedland. He wasn’t talking about Britain, but about Israel. Where another right-wing government has left an open goal for Labour to shoot at – and finds Labour unable to take the shot.

Now I live in Britain and I’m a member of the British Labour Party. So my main priority is to see the Cameron government go and Labour back in office. But I have to admit if there’s a nation in even greater need of ridding itself of a dire government, it has to be Israel – and it would do the entire world a huge favour by dumping Netanyahu.

But, hey, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get rid of our mini-Netanyahus over here too. That needs a Labour leadership that gets some fire in its belly and inspires the electorate. As Freedland puts it: that needs to raise its game – and fast.

Should we fear Tsipras bearing gifts?

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, the old saying has it. Though what Virgil actually wrote – timeo Danaos et dona ferentes – translates more closely as “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.”

The Greeks brought us a gift on Sunday, and it’s certainly dangerous. Will Alexis Tsipras, the new Prime Minister, succeed in his bid to free his compatriots of the scourge of austerity while staying in the EU and even the Eurozone? Or will he throw the whole continent into instability and further crisis?

Tsipras of Syriza: bearing a gift, to be feared – or welcomed?

We simply don’t know. But one thing we learned from the weekend election is that if you create sufficient despair in a people, with a prospect only of more suffering ahead, they will ultimately vote for a change whatever the risks may be. Again and again, I’ve heard Greek voters telling journalists, “in winter, I can’t afford to heat.” 

Why would anyone put up with that indefinitely?

And it would indeed be indefinite. There’s no prospect of Greek recovery yet. The economy has shrunk by a quarter since the international financial collapse of 2008. It is growing now if you ignore the burden of debt repayment, but in the case of Greece, that’s not something you can ignore. The austerity Greeks have suffered for five years has only led to a crippling debt mountain which is beginning to fall due for payment, promising only more dreary pain ahead.

The answer proposed by the EU and the previous Greek government is more austerity. More, in other words, of precisely the same remedy that has failed so far and led to the despair so many feel. More of a remedy which we’ve known, since Keynes, isn’t going to work.

He called it the paradox of thrift. When in debt, the standard reasoning goes, you need to save money to pay off what you owe. That works fine at the level of the individual. But at the level of a nation, it’s a disaster. If we’re all spending less, the economy contracts. People lose their jobs. They stop paying taxes. Government revenues fall. Debts climb.

That’s what’s happened in Greece. It’s happened in Britain too. We’ve had five years of austerity policies. The health service is screaming in pain. Social care has been cut massively at a time when people hope it might take some of the strain off the NHS. Libraries are closing. The education service, for which the government likes to claim all sorts of success, is failing to turn out skilled labour so that the building industry isn’t able to gear up to the challenges ahead – and the housing crisis intensifies.

Meanwhile, the poor are being put to the rack like their Greek counterparts. The unemployed and sick, naturally, but even the working poor whose praises the government likes to sing: tax credits for low earners have been eliminated, assistance for young children gone, assistance from local authorities cut back as those authorities are starved of funding.

Meanwhile, as Polly Toynbee points out, at the opposite end of scale, the top 1% of earners, have done well from austerity – just like their counterparts in Greece. In the run up to the election on 7 May, the Conservative Party is explicitly promising more of the same: cuts that will take state spending down to the level of the 1930s, but £7 billion of tax cuts for the wealthiest.

So what gift have the Greeks given us? A model. An example we might care to follow. An illustration of the fact that one can say no, demand that the wealthy nations help the poorer with a more open hand, and that even within a nation, the rich can shoulder more of the burden to free the poor from some of the suffering.

But we’re told to fear the Greeks with their gifts. Certainly, there’s no guarantee Tsipras will be able to pull off his trick. And if the move to question the received wisdom of the self-serving Right is limited to the south of the continent – perhaps Spain and Portugal alongside Greece – while the wealthier North holds firm, there’s little likelihood that the movement will lead on to success.

But if the rest of us also learn to say no, and if we find leaders prepared to say no with us, the election of Tsipras may turn into a turning point that can transform our lives throughout Europe.

In which case we should all welcome the gifts the Greeks are bearing. Even if they are a little fearsome.