With 2 weeks to go until the UK general election, I’m permitting myself a political rant. I am a staunch leftie and would normally vote Labour, but I’m not able to in good conscience this time around. In trying to woo an electorate that has lurched to the right, Labour is declaring the UK’s immigration “problem” to be top of its agenda. Well, it’s not at the top of mine. Mainly because it doesn’t exist. A party with the courage to denounce austerity, to renationalise our failed railway system, a party that sees past pandering to the UKIP vote – that’s what I believe in and, and that’s why I am voting Green.
But, if it comes down to a choice of a compromised Labour party or 5 more years of Tory rule, I know what I would rather see. So for my political rant, I am going to defend Labour and address the biggest lie told about them by the current government.
It is 7 years on and the effects of the global financial crisis are still being felt everywhere. The economy will be a defining issue of this election. That it was Labour who caused the financial crash is now an accepted truth. And like many accepted truths, it’s also utter crap.
Backed up by a right-wing media, the Tories have spent 5 years blaming Labour for the crash, relentlessly painting the party as economically irresponsible. A majority of Britons see the Conservatives as a safer economic bet than Labour, and this is largely due to perceptions of the 2008 crash. “Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”.
It is called a financial crisis for a good reason: it was caused by banks. The crash was the result of an industry out of control: a combination of greed and lack of regulatory oversight. Financial practitioners and regulators believed that the old days of boom and bust were finished, so recklessness and risk-taking became the norm. And then the whole house of cards collapsed. And because Labour was in power at the time, the Tories say, it was their lax regulation that allowed this to happen.
If you take a step back, there’s something fundamentally stupid about this argument. Labour is (ostensibly) a leftwing party. The philosophy of the left is a belief in a large state, in government intervention, and in tight controls over the private sector. The philosophy of the right is a belief in a small state, minimal private sector intervention and letting markets regulate themselves.
It’s obvious which one of these two philosophies is more likely to allow markets to run rampant. Not only should we not blame Labour, we should be glad we weren’t under right wing rule at the time. (As an aside, how did we come back from the brink after the crash? Through massive state intervention in the form of bailouts, and even renationalisation. It doesn’t get much more left-wing than that!)
The then UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority, was created by Labour in 2001. It was, globally speaking, an unusually large and powerful regulator. The UK finance industry has (well, had) a global reputation for the highest ethical standards, and its powerful regulator underpinned this reputation. Obviously, the FSA failed to act in time to foresee or avert the crisis – but then so did regulators and governments the whole world over.
To me, the idea that a party ideologically opposed to government intervention would somehow have discouraged the rampant greed that led to the crash – that such a party might have averted rather than exacerbated the crisis – is just laughable. This is a party that would happily risk expulsion from the EU in order to protect the City of London from the kind of regulation that a majority of Britons and Europeans views as not only fair, but necessary.
Here are the real economic issues to focus on come voting time. Since the Tories took over in 2010, over 1,000,000 people now depend on food banks to eat: a 700% increase. 3.5 million children are growing up in poverty. Over 1,000,000 people are on unpaid “0 hours” contracts. Royal Mail was privatised for 50% less than its current value. Wage growth, at 0.7%, is well below inflation. There are now 1.8 million people earning less than the minimum wage. Devastatingly, there have also been 50 cases of suicides that were a direct result of benefits cuts. There have likely been many more too, but the Department for Work and Pensions stopped collecting the data after a Freedom of Information request forced them to reveal the existence of that many. That this should be a statistic at all is the saddest and most frightening legacy of this government.
And even after five long years of austerity and draconian cutbacks, the Tories still haven’t even cleared the deficit – the stated aim of their austerity programme. And they have the gall to call Labour fiscally irresponsible…