Sad, sorry, frightened Britain

Here’s one of the big ideas we need to fight the power of the elite.

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Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. 

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Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. 

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This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. 

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Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

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“With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness”. 

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This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite, and punishes them accordingly. 

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Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. 

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Many thousands will be driven from their homes, many more pushed towards destitution. 

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Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. 

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Yet, at the end of this week, those taking more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.

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Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. 

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A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. 

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What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.

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So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? 

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Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. 

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As John Harris explains in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. 

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Despite everything that has happened over the past two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord 

Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. 

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Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. 

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Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

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But I’ve come to believe that there’s also something deeper at work: that most of the world’s people live with the legacy of slavery. 

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Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. 

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They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted: passed down across the five or six generations that separate us, and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.

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Any movement which seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. 

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And the answer seems inescapable: hope. 

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Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.

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A century and more ago the idea was communism.
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Even in the form in which Marx and Engels presented it, its problems are evident: the simplistic binary system into which they tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic (“social scum”, “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue”); their reinvention of Plato’s guardian-philosophers, who would “represent and take care of the future” of the proletariat; the unprecedented power over human life they granted to the state; the millenarian myth of a final resolution to the struggle for power. 

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But their promise of another world electrified people who had, until then, believed that there was no alternative.

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Seventy years ago, in the United Kingdom, the transformative idea was freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service. 

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It swept a Labour government to power which was able, despite far tougher economic circumstances than today’s, to create a fair society from a smashed, divided nation. 

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This is the achievement which – through a series of sudden, spectacular and unmandated strikes – Cameron’s government is now demolishing.

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So where do we look for the idea that can make hope more powerful than fear? 

Not to the Labour party. 

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Ed Miliband cannot bring himself even to oppose a bill which retrospectively denies compensation to cheated jobseekers, the most we can expect from him is a low-alcohol conservatism of the kind that doused all aspiration under Tony Blair.

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Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. 

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The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. 

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As it happens, both are championed by the Green Party. 

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On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour’s.

I discussed land value taxation in a recent column. 

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A basic income (also known as a citizen’s income) gives everyone, rich and poor, without means testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week. 

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It replaces some but not all benefits (there would, for example, be extra payments for pensioners and people with disabilities). 

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It banishes the fear and insecurity now stalking the poorer half of the population. 

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Economic survival becomes a right, not a privilege.

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A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap: because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job: all the money you earn is extra income. 

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The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. 

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It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. 

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It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. 

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It would be financed by progressive taxation: in fact it meshes well with land value tax.

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These ideas require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate. 

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But without proposals on this scale, progressive politics is dead. 

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They strike that precious spark, so seldom kindled in this age of triangulation and timidity: the spark of hope.

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George Monbiot