James Collett, Gloucestershire Socialist Party
Anticipating the King’s speech, in which Labour’s agenda for government will be outlined, the BBC said: “Do not expect Labour’s plans to include fireworks – no rabbits out of fancy hats”. So radical measures to meet the needs of the working class are fantastical and absurd – but a man sitting on a golden throne wearing a fancy hat decreeing what ‘his’ government will enact, while children go to school hungry, is presumably a state of affairs we should accept as unremarkable!
Keir Starmer has announced that a £7.3 billion National Wealth Fund to invest in infrastructure will be included in the speech. We desperately need investment in our crumbling infrastructure with schools, hospitals and roads literally falling apart. £7.3 billion is a pitifully small amount compared to what’s needed. Even so, where will that money go, and who will decide?
The National Wealth Fund taskforce includes the CEO of Barclays (on a yearly salary of £4.6 million), the CEO of Aviva (£5.5 million) and the former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney – all trustworthy people in the eyes of workers, I’m sure, despite never having been elected!
They’ve marked £2.5 billion to invest in clean steel, yet there is no guarantee that Tata Steel workers, facing devastating redundancy in Port Talbot, will keep their jobs, let alone have a say in how the money is spent. The fund also plans to invest in ports, ‘gigafactories’, green hydrogen and carbon capture.
The stated aim of the National Wealth Fund is to use public money to boost investment from the private sector – to ‘share the risk’ with the capitalists. Why should we subsidise the bosses so we have to pay when they make risky decisions, while the bosses skim off the profits? If the bosses aren’t investing in the infrastructure we need, why do we need them?
We could nationalise Tata Steel, along with the fossil fuel and energy companies and other key parts of the economy, with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need, so that workers could democratically plan the economy to provide good jobs and build the infrastructure we need.
