individual can own. After all, how can we be on your side if we let some people amass
huge wealth to the exclusion of others? Predistribution requires containing the free
market in the public interest.
Labour also needs the courage to take on excessive profiteering, like that seen from
the energy companies and rail franchises. Over two-thirds of people (including over
50 percent of Tory voters) back public ownership of the energy and rail industries. We
are knocking on an open door here – as the positive reaction to Ed's proposal to
freeze energy bills for two years indicated.
The welfare state was founded on the principle of full employment, but for the last 35
years governments have left industrial strategy to the free market. Our country
severely lags behind our international competitors in transport, housing and
renewable energy infrastructure. The jobs and economic returns that could be
created through targeted capital investment are huge. These would also relieve the
South’s transport congestion, housing crisis and the threat of more of the countryside
being scarred by fracking. We should also consider more radical solutions, like
barring profitable companies from making compulsory redundancies.
And then there is childcare. The last Labour government made some positive
headway with Sure Start, wrap-around childcare in primary schools, and the weekly
15 free hours of care for three and four year olds. The pledge to extend the latter to
25 hours will help more people to find work – and others to increase their hours.
But just as importantly as all the structural issues, we must end the divisive language
that labels people as scroungers, skivers or feckless. A One Nation social security
system must start with universal respect. The current government's vindictive
sanctions regime has trebled the number of unemployed people penalised, and has
brutally extended the sanctions regime to disabled people.
“Worker morale is actually higher in countries with more generous
welfare states”
Research shows that worker morale is actually higher in countries with more
generous welfare states. This is hardly surprising - a system that fails to alleviate
poverty and that demonises those claiming will actually reduce motivation. As
Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level said: “We all want to feel
valued and appreciated, but a society which makes large numbers of people feel they
are looked down on, regarded as inferior, stupid and failures, not only causes suffering
and wastage, but also incurs the costs of anti-social reactions to the structures which
demean them.”
The human side of welfare is often overlooked. In recent times, welfare has felt like
something done to people, rather than with them. The unemployed are forced to
revolutionise.it
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