Skip to main content

Editorial: Without a political alternative, we face a historic downgrade to living standards

THOUSANDS more families go into the weekend facing real anxiety over how they will keep their heads above water over the winter with news of Sir Philip Green’s retail empire Arcadia’s impending collapse. 

It’s a grim end to a week in which Chancellor Rishi Sunak predicted surging unemployment until mid-2021.

Retail union Usdaw expects 150,000 jobs in the sector to go by the end of the year. And it is not the only sector experiencing mass job losses.

Mass unemployment also means downward pressure on wages. Sunak claimed while announcing a real-terms pay cut for millions of public-sector workers this week that this was justified because of falling pay in the private sector.

Actually the attacks on public-sector pay are an attack on wages generally. Lower public-sector pay weakens pressure on private business to raise wages.

Workers with less money in their pockets will also spend less, further damaging private-sector business, leading to more job losses and further downward pressure on pay.

We face a historic downgrading of living standards, with the Resolution Foundation predicting this week a cut in average pay packets of £1,200 a year by 2025.

All this is avoidable. The Conservatives will do their best to claim mass unemployment and growing poverty are inevitable consequences to the shrinking economy.

But that shrinking economy is their fault. Britain faces the biggest economic downturn in Europe. 

Even now, when the rapid economic recovery of countries that have effectively suppressed the virus such as China and New Zealand is plain, ministers will not adopt a zero-Covid strategy. 

Their half-measures, including a “lockdown” that has been nothing of the sort because the sector recording the highest numbers of new infections — schools — was not included, have merely prolonged the pain, raising the prospect of yet more “waves” of infections and future lockdowns.

Covid could have been a game-changer in a different sense. The huge sums spent on propping up the private sector could have come with conditions. Stricken industries could have been nationalised and reshaped. 

Schools could have been made safe for socially distanced learning by the expropriation of unused property and a mass recruitment drive that could have led to permanently smaller class sizes. 

The significant shift to home working could, if accompanied by the right government policies and incentives, help revive high streets outside major urban centres as millions of workers save time on the morning and evening commute.

It could breathe life into towns and villages that have suffered from the concentration of jobs and investment in London and a handful of other major urban centres.

Instead everything we have seen from ministers — and for that matter from the Labour front bench — is fixated on propping up a broken system.

As Usdaw points out, the crisis on our high streets predates Covid. The long squeeze on incomes has lasted since the bankers’ crash of 2008.

Giant firms, from Carillion to BHS, were being hollowed out and dumped to make fortunes for a handful of spivs long before 2020’s lockdowns.

Unless serious pressure is built up behind an alternative, the next decade will be a sorrier sequel to the last. Collapses like Arcadia’s will merely accelerate the growth of precarious, poverty-pay work, even when we have all just witnessed the dangerous public health consequences. 

The first building block of the alternative is the fight to defend jobs. 

This requires a national, co-ordinated effort from trade unions — the TUC’s New Deal for Workers campaign is well placed to lead those discussions — community-based campaigns such as local People’s Assembly groups and networks of influence in local and regional government, such as the Alliance for Full Employment. 

The Tories will say unemployment is an inevitable feature of a depressed market. We must make it a political issue ministers cannot dodge — indeed, the overriding political issue facing the country.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today