| From Unity, 13 March 2010 |
Devolution needs alternative economic visionby John MalloyTwelve years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement the devolution of policing and justice powers was agreed after a cross-community vote—with a total of 88 MLAs supporting the move and 17 against (yet more doomed opportunism from the Ulster Unionists). The date for this devolution is set for the 12th of April 2010. Notwithstanding our knowledge of how such local “control” will still leave the spooks, whose war never ends, unexamined and unrestrained, the symbolic importance of this event should not be underestimated. The CPI welcomes this, albeit belated, move towards the full implementation of the template established by the GFA.The fact, however, that more than a decade on we are still talking about the agreement’s potential shows the distance we have still to travel. This is especially the case in terms of the economy, where local politicians need to be challenged when they stress the importance of local hands on the levers of power and then act merely as an echo chamber for the Treasury orthodoxy that we’ve now “all got to make sacrifices.” The mass of the population, already experiencing, and warned of a further, onslaught might be wondering if they themselves slept through the "boom" when they benefited from all this exorbitant public spending and the unsustainable deficit that underwrote it. Workers, holding down one precarious and under-rewarded job, are placed in the surreal and nauseating position of taking lectures from the double and triple-jobbing expenses-laden political class that they have had it too good for too long. The hypocrisy of such lectures is not limited to the local arena, however. The latest example is the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft, who, despite a personal fortune of £1,100 million, has not paid UK tax on this wealth for the last decade. Some of the amount (£127 million) this has saved him has been used to bankroll the Tory campaign in marginal seats to mend (I believe his ‘lordship’ invokes tears by taking an onion from his ermine robe at this point) “broken Britain.” Not so much “broken,” of course, more smashed to pieces, as every collective aspect of it that Ashcroft and Cameron’s heroine, and her successors, could manage to, was broken up and sold off. Ashcroft, his equivalent (including the non-dom parasites that fund New Labour) and the poisonous Murdoch empire (News Corporation hasn’t paid any net taxes in Britain for over a decade) buy such influence to ensure that the “lightly regulated” financial system from which they are enriched remains unchallenged. If, locally, the “unstable institutions” become less of a story, the severity of the economic solutions on offer from within them can become the real area for political focus. The huge challenge this presents to progressives is: to offer a different vision; to build opposition to cuts around an alternative economic and social strategy and challenge the orthodoxy that insists that working people pay for the deficit created by servicing the deflationary needs of the City of London. |
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