TWO stories by the Morning Star today illustrate the need for a planned economy.
Two days ago Chancellor Rishi Sunak came up with a surprise scheme to tax energy monopoly profits along with subsidies for domestic consumers.
At the first and, for the moment, the most important level this satisfies, just partially, the real need for consumers to find some way to mitigate the shock of the coming tsunami of bills.
It isn’t enough and it is probable that in the autumn further measures will be needed to stave off both consumer revolt and electoral oblivion for the ruling party.
Now the Chancellor is under pressure to devise a longer-term plan to insulate homes.
The point, however, is not that this need to insulate is suddenly foisted on us by the energy price hike. The poor quality of new housing in Britain is a well-established fact.
New homes, even those idiotically designated as “executive homes,” sometimes barely match the space and construction standards of high-quality post-war housing built for families.
If insulation standards in new homes are improved, albeit insufficiently, the failure to make the installation of renewable energy features compulsory is a scandal.
That subversive citadel of revolutionary rhetoric, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, points out that the impact of a one-off series of measures is limited.
Precisely. It reached this conclusion as MPs warn that there is no evidence that government spending on major projects is having the desired effect.
Even panic measures taken for narrowly partisan reasons at the last moment have some effect. But the rational development of the economy; the rational allocation of resources for construction; investment in infrastructure, schools and hospitals; the location of centres for industrial production and commercial activities; the allocation of resources to develop small-scale services and retail, hospitality, sports and amusement facilities cannot be left to either panicked ministers or the initiative of profit-seekers.
Tory ideology makes a great play of the entrepreneurial spirit. The hidden hand of the market is supposed to guide the rational allocation of resources that result in a harmonious resolution of supply and demand.
But no start-up capitalist adventurer of their own volition is going to build a railway, construct a hospital or develop a housing estate at affordable rents unless they are incentivised by profit.
Public investment is cheaper precisely because investment is for use not profit. When Gordon Brown took up the Tory PFI scheme he saddled us with a 30-year time bomb of catastrophic costs.
If the Tory fairy tale came true we would not have a catastrophic housing shortage. No community would struggle to find an affordable NHS dentist. Our children would not be doubled up in classrooms as schools face a teacher shortage. Our health service would not be entirely dependent on the mass immigration of trained personnel from countries who need their medical specialists no less than we do.
Of course, when faced with an existential challenge, such as a Nazi assault on Britain’s economy and empire in WWII, our ruling class did what was necessary.
It controlled capital, regulated profits, directed investment, planned the allocation of labour, rationed food when necessary to ensure adequate nutrition for the whole population. It even embraced co-operation with the working class.
In Britain, in order to increase war production and in alliance with the working class where it held state power, in the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis.
We can see the contours of a new capitalist crisis emerging in this energy meltdown. It is the very inability of capitalism to solve the problems of its own making that makes the need for a rational, planned socialist system clear.
