Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else

Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else Read Online Free PDF
Author: James Meek
1945, even if privatisation had never happened, socialism would have struggled with the move from a world of unsatisfied needs to a more complex world of unsatisfied wants. Socialism can’t uninvent artificial hips in order to recreate the benison of going from a world without hip replacements to a world with. It’s the same with postwar council housing. Having provided all less well-off Britons with central heating and indoor bathrooms, socialists can’t repeat the feat by reinstalling coal fires and back yard privies and replacing them again. Council housing went from something that was much better than tenants expected to something much worse than they hoped. The heirs of Adam Smith, writes Bell,
    assumed that the market was a sufficient arbiter of the public weal; there, the differential utilities of individuals and the scarcity of different goods would come to an equilibrium that harmonised the intensity of desires and the willingness to pay the asking price. Classical Marxism had an entirely different answer to the problem of relative justice in society. It assumed that competition, envy, and evil all resulted from scarcity, and that the abundance of goods would make such conflicts unnecessary. But what we have come to realise is that we will never overcome scarcity. In the post-industrial society … there would be new scarcities which nineteenth-century utopians could never envision.
    The selling off of Britain’s municipal housing without replacing it, which I write about in the last section of this book, was supposed to be a triumphant coming together of the individual and free market principles. It actually ended up as one of the most glaring examples of market failure in postwar history. It wasn’t like the other privatisations; its justification as anything other than an electoral bribe to its relatively well-off beneficiaries always rang false. It certainly did to Thatcher in the beginning. She was, she wrote,
    wary of alienating the already hard-pressed families who had scrimped to buy a house on one of the new private estates at the market price … They would, I feared, strongly object to council house tenants who had made none of their sacrifices suddenly receiving what was in effect a large capital sum from the Government.
    In the end, she came round, and made the policy her own. But the gap where the economic rationale for privatising council houses should be becomes a window through which it becomes possible to see beyond the individual privatisations to the meta-privatisation, and its one indisputable success: that it put more money into the hands of a small number of the very wealthiest people, at the expense of the elderly, the sick, the jobless and the working poor.
    What do we think we know about taxes since the Thatcher revolution? Government spending has been cut, we know that. Income tax is lower than it used to be, we know that. And we might remember that the one time Margaret Thatcher tried to change the principle of progressive taxation, where the amount of tax you pay depends on your income, to a flat fee, where everyone pays the same – when the Conservatives tried to introduce the infamous ‘poll tax’ on council services – it was the catalyst for her downfall. Low tax was her mantra. Her core political message was this, in her own words: ‘I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax. That we should back the workers and not the shirkers: that it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts.’
    What we think we know is wrong. Yes, government spending was cut, and, as I write, it is being cut again, by Thatcher’s Coalition successors. When the Conservatives came to power in 1979 the top rate of tax was 83 per cent, the basic rate 33. The top rate is now 40 per cent and the basic rate 20 per cent. The message seems clear enough. The Conservatives cut public
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Forfeit

Ridgwell Cullum

Poached

Stuart Gibbs

Hell

Hilary Norman

Remembering Babylon

David Malouf

Clandestine

Nichole van