Our Mission

 

Keir Starmer's policy statement for a future Labour government, in this week's New Statesman, outlines the five 'missions', which I won't go into detail over; go read 'em yourself. Briefly, the bullet-point headers are: 1) Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7; 2) Make Britain a clean energy superpower; 3) Build an NHS fit for the future; 4) Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage; 5) Make Britain's streets safe. I think missions two, three, four and five rather go without saying and need little comment. But Mission One is the biggie, from which the other four flow. And here lies the rub: by which economic theory are we to define growth? And what are the mechanisms through which are we to achieve growth?

Thus far, in the last forty-five years of my life, we have seen economic 'growth' ebb and flow from one crisis to the next, at the behest of the masters of the economic universe: the investment brokers and bankers, whose shenanigans in any other walk of life would rightly be characterized as Del Boy-like: wide-boys and chancers, gambling other peoples pension funds on complex financial derivatives and other such drivel, with the sole aim of securing short-term profit for a few 'blessed' individuals. We witnessed 'growth' in the eighties, which amounted to no more than the smoke and mirrors of the social engineering of 'right to buy'; working-class City brokers earning stupid money, de-nationalisation of publicly-owned assets and the totally fictitious guff of Thatcherism: 'we are the party of business' - which still prevails to date - which amounted and still amounts to, 'we are the party that supports financiers, rentiers and asset-strippers'. 

When we first moved to North Wales in 1980, the corrosion of neoliberal capitalism and the lies of the Thatcher government were still in their infancy: we had thriving High Streets, with bakeries, butchers, many pubs, small news vendors, and so on: not an empty property in sight and choice in abundance, and pretty much full employment. Since the 1990s - and early on, at that - we've witnessed a decline in our High Streets so marked as to be utterly tragic: even pawn and charity shops are closing now, to be followed soon by River Island and even bloody Iceland, for Christ's sake. In the centre of the City of Bangor, we now have the second shopping centre - on the same site - in those forty-some years to fall practically empty (actually never fully populated from day one of its hubristic existence), due mostly to the kind of 'economic growth' promulgated by the fuckwit proponents of neoliberal capitalist realism.

This is the reality we have been brought to: small business? Fucked. The NHS? Fucked. Social care? Fucked. Pretty much everything? Fucked. This, people, is the sum total of the Conservative idea of growth: fuck everything over, so long as there is personal profit to be had. Note to the so-called party of business: this is not business, this is economic rape. If the Labour Party - and I'm still a committed member, so I'll use the collective 'we' - if we seek to introduce true growth back into the economy, we need to foster small and medium-sized business, and bring back small traders into the deserts that our High Streets currently have become. We need to support growth at its most fundamental level, and not fall into the Blairite trap of courting the enemy, only to be beguiled by them into joining the club. Please, can we get it right this time? We almost certainly won't get a better chance...